From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/06-3
by Ralph Nader
Published on Saturday, April 6, 2013 by Common Dreams
It’s time to start paying close attention to the mechanisms of the deregulation machine. For the past 30 years, the business lobbies have pushed Congress and the executive branch to disassemble the regulatory system that has protected us from the worst excesses of Wall Street and Big Business. The catastrophic effects of this dismantling are well known — the misbehavior of Wall Street brought us the financial collapse, the global recession, and the dominance of the largest banks being both “Too Big to Fail” and their culpable executives “Too Big to Jail”.
Despite negative public sentiment and the rise of the Occupy movement, the avarice on Wall Street arrogantly continues on. The big banks are now even bigger and more powerful than they were in 2008 when they were bailed out by the U.S. taxpayers.
The effects of deregulation stretch to all walks of life. The profit-driven practices of big corporations have led to the deaths and preventable illnesses of thousands of Americans every year. Roughly 60,000 die from workplace related diseases and injuries, 200,000 from medical malpractice and hospital-induced infections, 70,000 from air pollution and 100,000 from side effects from dangerous pharmaceuticals.
Where are the regulators? Often, they are unable to assert their power over these wrongdoings due to small budgets or weakened authority. Others are simply unwilling to act thanks to the “revolving door” — imagine regulators being recruited from the very industries they are meant to police and having plans to someday return to those industries.
For all the talk of “hope and change”, little of note has happened under President Obama to properly regulate Big Business. See Lisa Heinzerling’s review of Simpler: The Future of Government by former Obama administration “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein for an enlightening look at how regulatory efforts are stagnant under the Obama Administration and a do-little Congress. Heinzerling writes: “If this is the future of government — legally suspect, politically unaccountable, preternaturally secretive — I’d like to think we can do better.”
Continue reading at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/06-3
