Dear Leader must be reading the polls. And the polls are telling him it’s time to become the conservative, pro-business Dear Leader. WSJ:
The Obama administration will release final plans Tuesday for ending or cutting back hundreds of regulations, an effort to reduce the burden on business and counter criticism that the White House is tone-deaf to business concerns.
Certain railroad cars won’t have to install expensive technology, hospitals will be able to skip a round of federal paperwork and low-risk travelers to the U.S. will enjoy expedited entry, officials said. Some businesses will be allowed to file federal forms electronically.
The administration estimates that about a dozen of the changes will save businesses some $10 billion over five years, with other smaller initiatives adding to the total.
But the changes don’t affect the broad thrust of major administration initiatives that have drawn criticism from businesses, such as proposed rules to reduce carbon emissions and laws passed last year that aim to protect consumers from financial and health-insurance abuses.
The White House said it sought to eliminate “dumb” rules without undermining the underlying goals. “We are going to implement statutes that have been enacted in the last few years, but we’re trying to do it in a way that is as careful with respect to cost and as attuned with the economic situation as possible,” said Cass Sunstein, administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, who oversaw the regulatory review.
Let me add this reminder here: Cass Sunstein, Obama’s regulations Czar, is a proponent of the absurdly framed “libertarian paternalism” theory, whereby government proposals are meant to “nudge” us into doing what he and his kind have themselves determined is “good and right” — albeit without coming across as authoritarian. In other words, Liberal fascism — only framed in such a way that we’re to believe that we still have free will and individual autonomy.
Filtered through that context, Sunstein’s desire to “eliminate ‘dumb’ rules without undermining the underlying goals” is simply a desire to do away with those rules whose framing as unobtrusive and somehow spontaneously ordered by the very forces of civic conscience hasn’t really taken; that is, their authoritarian brush strokes are showing. Eliminating them, then, becomes a token gesture meant to protect the larger plan — the “underlying goals” — which are to order society in the way Sunstein and those like him have determined it needs to be ordered, and in so doing, to forge the kind of population those of high culture like Sunstein or Obama or others in the Faculty Lounge Administration won’t be so loath to find themselves among.
— And also, for the children. Naturally.
The changes are welcome, but don’t appear to go far enough, said Bill Kovacs, a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Each of the proposals seems to be efficient, technical changes, but it doesn’t make any impact on the overall regulatory burdens that exist on the business community,” he said.
Mr. Kovacs said he’d like to make it easier for businesses to obtain environmental clearances and harder for environmental lawsuits to delay projects. But he praised the administration for encouraging more electronic filing of official paperwork, and for doing the review in the first place. Congress directed successive administrations to review regulations on the books since 1980, but this is the first White House to do it, he said.
President Barack Obama encountered frustration about federal regulations at two town-hall meetings last week in Illinois, with questioners expressing concern about farming rules.
Mr. Sunstein said the administration is also applying a stricter standard for new regulations. He pointed to a rule governing noise in the workplace that the Labor Department is revising after concerns were raised about its costs exceeding the benefits, and a similar move by the Environmental Protection Agency to set a national construction site standard for sediment emissions.
The announcement was the culmination of a process begun in January with an executive order calling for the review by federal agencies. In May, agencies released preliminary plans. On Tuesday, they are putting forth final plans.
Last month, White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley instructed Cabinet secretaries to be sensitive to the cost of new regulations given the bad economy.
Many of the proposed changes will still need to go through a formal review, but that process is expected to be quick because many ideas have been discussed publicly for months.
Question: does anyone believe this is being done to help businesses? Or is it as obvious to everyone else as it is to me that this is being done specifically so that this kind of story can be written — in which Obama and his regulatory agencies can be framed as pro-business, and in fact, practically Reaganesque in their desire to see government get out of the way of the private sector?
The cynicism is astounding. And the willingness of the press to lap it up, staggering. After all, this is the same Administration whose regulatory agencies have blocked oil drilling, stopped coal mining, and — just recently — had to pull back on its plans to require farmers to obtain commercial drivers licenses to drive tractors. The same Administration whose NLRB is trying to tell Boeing in which states it can and cannot set up its factories, and who it must and must not hire. The same Administration who has decided it is the role of the federal government to decide on your health care choices — and the role of a kind of politburo to determine who gets to live and who must, for the greater good, “take a pill” and just go ahead and die. The same Administration that gave us Dodd-Frank, the same Administration that has determined that pizza and bake sales and lemonade stands need them some serious governmental oversight, the same Administration who fucked the bond holders of car companies, the same Administration that nationalized all the lending for student loans.
But if, as Terry H put it in an email to me, “a token reduction in the size of the deficit is allowed to pass for reducing the debt then I guess it naturally follows that token reductions in regulation negate massive increases in regulation.
“Up is down.”
— black is white. Josie is the Pussycats.
I guess it matters how we allow our opponents to frame issues — and that guarding against a usurpation of language by those bent creating an epistemic paradigm shift away from individual liberty and personal autonomy toward a collectivist sense of “shared sacrifice” and identity politics, isn’t a “fundamentally unserious” exercise after all.
Which, I told you so.
smells like fascism
Beautifully written, Jeff. You’re such a pleasure to read.
24 years later
Link
Estimated savings of $10 billion over five years? From a regulatory regime estimated at $2 trillion per year? Let’s see: $10 billion over five years would be…$2 billion. Out of $2 trillion. Meaning a reduction of…let’s see…cross out some zeroes…shift the decimal for percentages…
Aha! The Administration is reducing our regulatory burden by 0.1%! Meaning, literally, that 99.9% of the government’s job-killing red tape is fully operational!
God bless America!
I’m going to go with specifically so that this kind of story can be written. Because they’re not actually lifting existing regulatory burdens; they are cancelling (more likely postponing) new regulatory burdens.
What happened?
Philosophy was made to appear to be unserious over three centuries ago. This construction culminated in the work of Comte, the founder of positivism — positivistic social science or sociology — who dismissed as fantastic both the age of theology and the age of metaphysics, as he termed them. These epochs of human history were merely unscientific story-tellings, fantasies of the human mind and thus useless to progress.
Ours was to be a scientific age, an age of knowledge and certainty in political things. But there came a bump in that road. Science was forced to admit it had no knowledge of “value judgments” and saw no way to obtain any such knowledge. Science could not determine good and evil. So it attempted to restrict itself to “value-free judgments”, or so it thought it would do. Ha! It turned out, so little did science know of “value judgments” that it did not realize there was no such thing as a “value-free judgment”.
J’accuse! Science had been making shit up! Fucking fantasists.
[…] “White House to Scale Back Regulations on Businesses” The Obama administration will release final plans Tuesday for ending or cutting back hundreds of regulations… […]
I can haz offshore oil drillingz?
Keystone pipeline?
cheap electricity from clean burning American coal?
nuclear power plants from drawing board to online in under 20 years?
a full sized automobile that I can get my 2.1+ kids and a weeks’ worth of groceries into?
No?
“done specifically so that this kind of story can be written — in —-”
Of course . That’s why the story is being written before any of these things have become reality. Notice the repeated reference to these proposals being ready to be announced. They’re still only propsLs for f- s sake.
Maybe when Cass reaches Hell, he will get some devils to “nudge” him into his torments…you know, rather than be brutally crude about inflicting his eternal suffering.
Policies made possible by the same a*holes who equate milk spills with oil spills.
Like “savings” on future, estimated, not yet spent, not yet appropriated, but seen as realer than real, spending.
Terry H beat me to everything I thought while reading that piece.
I’m going to be interested in seeing what twist of fantasy will be used to have these “reductions” serve as a reason to raise taxes. It will be coming. Everything that happens or is seen to happen must serve as an excuse to raise taxes.
oh lookee baracky’s going to redefine “employer”
Link
And the willingness of the press to lap it up, staggering.
Only if you posit a press that’s intent on exposing abuses of power.
Which, I don’t know where you got THAT idea.
shared sacrifice
I thought everyone knew that any politician or equivalent who uses this phrase is up to no good, i.e., “you sacrifice; me and mine share your looted goods.”
Guess I was wrong.
I’m holding out for the metric on regulations created or saved they’ll tell the true believers.
But seriously, that read like something from someone with no pride in or respect for his academic reputation, someone who has sold his soul to walk the halls of power. Certainly no rigor as he throws out absurd estimates of savings for small businesses, and no mention of the volumes of additional regulations caused by Obamadoesnotcare.
LTC John, does that mean anything more than saving the spiked strap-on for the second session? I hope not.
I’ve been trying to get people to pick up “Kneepad Media” to refer to their ilk, but so far it’s just a few people on Facebook.
Jeff,
As a Jewish American, you have some explaining to do given the oppression paradigms visited upon you (collectively.) This woman–whose countenance inspires me so–says so. Somewhere, Liberace is hollering, “You go girl.”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/08/23/dem_congresswoman_blames_black_unemployment_on_racism.html
Thanks to Roddy’s link more videos.
Democrats, when they are at their most dangerous and insane they are also at their most hilarious and ridiculous.
Dude, I just as I read the headline my Twitter feed starts going nuts about an honest to God earthquake in Washington DC. Maybe it is true that Obama is becoming pro-business.
(apologies in advance if there have been serious injuries.)
Yeah, it happened here in coastal NC too, which is unfortunate, since I am likely to die in this looming Cat 4 hurricane that will make landfall in my nice new backyard.
Earthquake (*) in Philly, too — presumably the same one.
—
* I suspect it measured approximately a nothing on the Richter scale; didn’t even rattle the dishes. Freaked the cat out, though. Still noteworthy: I don’t recall there being one here of any sort in the last 40 years.
It’s truly unprecedented, and is no doubt a natural consequence of increasing CO2 levels… SCIENCE! – Don’t question it!
From 8 years ago.
We should probably shut down and ban all nuclear reactors on the east coast, just to be safe. We certainly wouldn’t want Japanese-style RADIOACTIVE DEATH!… err, you know, killing us and shit.
For the children.
You know that Alaskan-Canadian gas pipeline that Sarah Palin worked so hard to get passed? The WhiteHouse has held up permitting for the past 2 1/2 years.
Oh joy. The federal government doesn’t do much of anything very well, but their computer skilz are particularly bad. I do file a variety of federal forms electronically. Put one “x” in the wrong box and the whole damn works comes flying back in your face. But often as not you can’t just edit the form, you’ve got to comletely fill it in again. Then when it does go through it just gives them the opportunity to do a totally ‘not touched by human hands’ audit which can cause you even more grief. Believe me, it was better when I filled out the forms on paper and they just filed them because they were too lazy to actually look at them. To the feds computers are just another way to waste even more of our time. Morons.
So ‘low-risk’ travelers can enter the country more easily, while senior citizens in wheelchairs have their Depends probed on the way out, and some businesses will be allowed to file electronically while the FTC retains jurisdiction over neighborhood yard sales.
Is he _that_fucking_stoopid?
#30
Yep.
Even worse.
He thinks You’re that fucking stupid too.
This fucking national nightmare can’t end soon enough.
Also this.
http://www.wbez.org/story/illinois-firm-leaving-indiana-90934#
Bad moneypolicy drives out good.
[…] that “common sense” deregulation will be coming (though libertarian paternalism will of course remain); that the Fairness Doctrine is dead (though […]
Obamagabe is an asshole – beholden to his handlers, who are even bigger asholes.
Hunker down, brothers and sisters. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet…
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