It appears Obama is gearing up for 2012 fundraising in earnest, offering a triple-threat of proposals favored by big business: first by promoting attacks on the social safety net, then by hiring two Wall Street mugs as chief-of-staff and economic adviser, and now by comprehensively reviewing and slashing federal regulatory “burdens” on business.
Please note Obama’s hack-kneed genuflection to the free market’s virtuous fountains of “dazzling ideas,” “path-breaking products,” and “vibrant entrepreneurialism,” as he simultaneously derides “outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive” with “undue interference,” from a “patchwork of over-lapping rules” and legislative “tinkering,” that need to be “rooted out” when they “conflict,” “are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb.” These are standard right-wing talking points.
However, the cognitive friction generated between Obama’s obtuse insistence that “one of the reasons the free market has worked…” and his acknowledgement of the collapse of the financial markets in the next breath, while forgetting about the BP blow-out of the entire Gulf of Mexico, body-checked the entire order of the universe light years to the right and vastly closer to heat death.
Listen to Obama’s disingenuous logic to get a taste of the crap he plans on feeding us in the State of the Union:
For instance, the FDA has long considered saccharin, the artificial sweetener, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat saccharin like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your coffee, it is not hazardous waste. The EPA wisely eliminated this rule last month.
Let’s change a few words, while retaining the core, business-friendly “logic:”
The FDA has long considered thimerosal, the mercury-based vaccine preservative, safe for people to consume. Yet for years, the EPA made companies treat mercury like other dangerous chemicals. Well, if it goes in your bloodstream, it is not hazardous waste.
So, yeah, by all means, feed all the mercury you want to your daughters, because if you inject it into your butt-cheeks (under doctor’s orders, no less!), then it cannot be hazardous. Amirite?
Similarly, the use of radioactive isotopes in medicine to improve health outcomes, or ionizing radiation used in airports to improve “homeland security,” proves that radiation is not hazardous. In fact, it is beneficial! It’s “dumb” to regulate something beneficial. The president’s argument is simply stupid, if not devious, and indicates how cunning and deceitful the regulatory review will be.
When the president says he wants “a more affordable, less intrusive means to the same [regulatory] ends,” he is simply indicating what neoliberal deregulatory yahoos and cowboys have meant since time immemorial: The federal regulatory environment will become “leaner and meaner,” for businesses and consumers, respectively, until “nothing stands in their way.”
