Bush Increases Regulation

You know there has to be a catch right ? We’re talking about the free market’s number one cheerleader. Why in the world would his administration increase regulation ?

Because it weakens unions -- that’s why. It’s okay for a hedge fund manager to make a billion dollars a year and screw up the economy with sub prime mortgages. We don’t need to regulate that. But let a bunch of working folks get together to try and improve their lot ? We can’t have that.

Kudos to Elizabeth Williamson of The Washington Post for the story. I’m sorry it’s behind the firewall. You’ll have to register to get to it.

” Political operatives in the Department of Labor are using federal reporting requirements to undermine trade unions and conduct a "political misinformation campaign" against them, a report released yesterday charges.”

As an alternative, the story refers to the report from the Center for American Progress.

”Rather than relax these regulatory responsibilities, the Bush administration shoveled significantly more federal tax dollars into the department’s Office of Labor-Management Services so that key political operatives in OLMS could expand and exercise regulatory authority to:

* Impose costly and confusing new reporting requirements

* Attempt to increase the number of criminal prosecutions

*Disclose the results to the public in seriously misleading ways

*Mischaracterize the published data through a variety of false analyses

The underlying purpose, of course, is to undermine the reputation of the labor union movement through a classic political misinformation campaign—all under the supervision of a lifelong partisan political operative whose career has been dedicated to the destruction of his political opponents.

I’ve had several instances this last week where I’ve been talking to people whose professions have taken huge pay cuts. People that made the sacrifices to get into a career that promised them a ticket to the upper-middle class are now stuck in the lower-middle class -- or lower. Wage cuts, out-sourced jobs, stolen pensions, etc., etc.

It disgusts me.

Don Brown
December 12, 2007