Time to overhaul the regulators.

[dsrtao]

So. The SEC had reliable allegations that Madoff was committing fraud back in 1999, and did not investigate.

The FCC likes to censor television and limit competition in every industry it covers. Mmm, tasty duopoly.

The FDA can't approve a new drug, nor can it order fraudulent drugs off the market (as long as the advertising says "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to treat or cure any medical condition." in very small print.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission doesn't inspect any consumer products for safety.

FEMA can't manage any emergencies.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission stresses competition as the key safeguard for consumers. How many suppliers do you have for your electricity?

The EPA is powerless and occasionally unwilling to do anything to protect the environment.

How many of these are fixable?

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

How many of these are fixable?

All of them.

Note that you can't just shut them down and throw them out. The raft of regulatory legislation they are supposed to enforce is largely established by international trade treaties: bail on them and automatic trade sanctions come into play from the other treaty signatories. (And that balance of payments deficit gets a whole lot worse.)

What's caused most of the damage is eight years of crony-ism, patronage, ideology-based policy making that wilfully flies in the face of evidence, personal empire-building, and revolving-door regulatory capture. The goals the institutions serve aren't unattainable, but the people running the organizations are currently incompetent to do the job. The rest of the damage is down to bad practices that have accreted around the original mission.

On the subject of those bad practices, other countries are able to address the issues these bodies cover; not all of them, not all the time, but there's an overlapping mosaic of responses that broadly work (although the systemic "not invented here" syndrome embedded in US politics by way of its founding mythology means that adopting successful solutions from overseas will be very difficult).

I think you guys may have lucked out in electing Barack Obama; so far his transition team choices have mostly been spot-on -- precisely the mixture of highly competent outsiders and heavyweight insiders you'd expect if his objective is to conduct a root-and-branch purge of the federal agencies prior to building them back up to their former state.

A time of crisis makes it possible to cut through short term objections based on self-interest -- much as described by Naomi Klein in "The Shock Doctrine", but in this case for reasons other than the propagation of Friedmanite dogma for kleptocratic ends. And I think Obama will use the perceived emergency generated by the recession to go through the agency undergrowth with fire and the sword.

Whether this is enough to save the Roman American empire in the long run is, of course, an open question. We've just seen how much damage a bad president can rack up in the space of eight years (and that's without giving him the credit for Depression 2.0 -- the roots of that particular fiasco predate Bush's tenure); my bet is that it'll take significantly longer than eight years to undo the damage he inflicted on civic institutions. On the other hand, there's a very good chance now that Obama will start down that road, and it's hard to see Obama's successor being remotely as bad as Bush (whatever the "Palin in 2016" crowd might want to see).

[mangosteen]

mmm... eight years of "starve the beast" politics. Tasty.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

[sarcasm]It'll work! Give it time! What are you, some kind of anti-Capitalist?[/sarcasm]

FDA

[sareena99.livejournal.com]

The FDA have just *partnered* with WEBMD, a commercial enterprise.
The reason given is to increase their visibility and credibility.

'Nuff said.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

FEMA _used_ to work, during Clinton at least…