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To the editor:
What do the mad cow/ beef industry crisis, the airline crisis after 9/11, the Enron and Worldcom, etc. financial scandals, the mutual fund scams, the Savings and Loan disasters, and so forth have in common? Deregulation, in a nutshell. How many more hits to the public and self-inflicted damages to industries like the meat industry will it take to skunk-slap some recognition into the minds of the “smaller government is always better” conservatives? More and better-trained USDA inspectors who cannot be threatened and bullied by the meat packing plants where they work or the compromised USDA itself would have prevented this sorry mess. BSE is not the only, but the latest sign of a severely debilitated food inspection safety net that includes regular cases of food poisoning.
Conservatives pontificate that government should be shrunk to the size that it could be drowned in a bathtub. These crises are what we get for indulging their mindless prattle. When government is shrunk, corporate rule and abuse grows like a cancer, and the public good becomes subservient (if considered at all) to the dictatorial “bottom line.” The real irony is that under the neoconservative misrule of Bush/Cheney/Rove, government power and spending have grown like a bloated beached whale. They have slathered on layer after layer of new ways to regulate the average citizen, while removing what little regulation still remained from earlier corporate depredations. Hey Bush and supporters, it’s We the People, not We the Corporations!
(Axel)
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