The Regulation Killers

31.12.69

Super-cedes their oath to enforce laws that save lives in hazardous workplaces. Nearly 60,000 workers lose their lives to workplace-related diseases and trauma every year. That is equivalent to nineteen 9/11 casualty tolls every year.

Tell that to a strapped Environmental Protection Agency that at long last was trying to reduce the toxic materials in your air and water. President Obama personally intervened on two of their forthcoming regulations to stop them.

Tell that to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that was the subject of a front page New York Times article on April 3, 2012 titled “White House and the F.D.A. Often at Odds.” It seems that President Obama’s deputy chief of staff, Nancy-Ann DeParle, has been leaning on FDA Commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg to drop proposed rules requiring labeling of calories for foods served on airplanes and movie theaters, as well as regulation of sunscreen and asthma inhalers.

The Obamabush White House objected to what the Times said was “the enforcement of an agency decision on a drug to prevent premature births.”

The FDA believed that the Obama “hope and change” campaign in 2008 would start a new day from the years of George W. Bush who believed, for example, that the agency should not issue rules preventing contamination of eggs and other produce. Alas, said a top FDA official to the Times: “Employees here waited eight long years for deliverance that didn’t come.”

Mr. Obama, as with his other choices of White House staff, set himself up by choosing the “regulation czar,” Cass R. Sunstein who can give thumbs down on agency safety proposals. Professor Sunstein, who thinks harder than he feels the pain of victims of non-regulation (or law and order) has a philosophy known as “libertarian paternalism”. (Google it if you wish to discover its meaning.)

FDA scientists sadly recall Mr. Obama’s White House ceremony to sign a memorandum in 2009 to replace Mr. Bush’s politicization of science in government with scientific integrity and to listen to scientists “even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it is inconvenient.” Once again, words, words, words, succumb to the power of corporatism.

Source: CounterPunch