Sunday 8 September 2013

I've Got Those Deregulation Blues



Who do you think has the best interests of society in mind through the work they do: public servants like teachers OR those who make the big decisions for private industry?

This would make for an interesting poll.

We live in an era where much of the effort done by people who work on behalf of the public good is denigrated. A focus on accountability has arisen mainly because public servants are paid from public monies, and we are living during a long tax-cut craze. (Indeed, it is sadly ironic that the politicians who put down public servants are also paid from our taxes.)

The end result is that public sector employees are now held accountable for all that they do. The work of healthcare workers, social workers, government employees and especially teachers have all been put under public scrutiny.

If regulating the public sector is what the public truly wants, I accept it. (I can certainly agree with regulating the spending habits of Harper’s Senate appointees!)

I want to make the case, however, that regardless of the extent to which we regulate the public sector, we must reverse the trend of deregulating the private sector.

This trend began about 30 years ago with the onset of an economic paradigm that began to replace the social welfare policies of Keynesian economics. What used to be called the corporate agenda, academics and some journalists now refer to as neoliberalism. (Neoliberalism, by contrast, is very similar to the laissez faire economics prevalent during the Industrial Revolution.)

On the domestic front, neoliberalism has four main tenets: corporate tax cuts, union-busting, privatizing the commons, and deregulating industry. All four are the antithesis of what constitutes a civil society, but it is the last point I want to discuss.

Let’s look at a few examples of what deregulation of the private sector, or its spin-off, self-regulation, has brought us.

In the 1980s, British Prime Minister and neoliberal cheerleader Maggie Thatcher pushed for the British meat industry to regulate itself. Not long afterward, self-regulation of the meat industry led to Mad Cow Disease, several deaths, and a near collapse of the British meat industry.

Getting rid of public meat inspectors has also caused much suffering in Canada in recent years. In 2008, the Listeriosis Outbreak at Maple Leaf Foods in Toronto led to the deaths of 20 people. Four years later, a serious E. Coli Outbreak occurred at XL Foods in Alberta.

In 1996, the Ontario Progressive Conservative government privatized the regulation of water quality. A few years later, an E. Coli outbreak caused the Walkerton Catastrophe – seven people died and approximately 5000 people became seriously ill. The subsequent inquiry blamed the Ontario government for abdicating the regulation of water quality.

Who would disagree that food-and-water safety is important enough for government regulations?

In April 2010, deregulation led to the deaths of 11 workers on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig. The Gulf of Mexico has still not recovered from the more than 200 million gallons of crude oil that leaked into it for 87 straight days.

This past July, 42 deaths resulted from a Train Derailment in Lac Megantic, Quebec. Half of the downtown was completely destroyed. Deregulation allowed the rail company MMA to employ only one worker to oversee the maneuvering and parking of a 74-car freight train carrying fracked crude oil from North Dakota. Rather than pay to help the townspeople, the US-based MMA declared bankruptcy.

The most egregious example of corporate greed, however, resulted from the decision of Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan to deregulate the American financial industry. This led to the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis of 2007-08, which, lest we forget, brought the world’s economy perilously close to complete collapse.


These are only a few of the many many examples of the chaos caused by deregulation of the private sector.

It does not make any sense to regulate the public sector while the private sector is deregulated. For the sake of public health and safety, it is at least as important to regulate the private sector.

6 comments:

  1. Regarding increased regulation of teachers: when considering how teachers are being cut off at the knees as the "long tax-cut craze" and ongoing decreasing funding result in sometimes almost-untenable conditions and lack of resources/support in the classroom, I would suggest the increased regulation for teachers is exactly the wrong thing to emphasize. More is demanded of teachers precisely as they try to manage with less.

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    1. Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I wholeheartedly agree with you. The vast majority of teachers I know are salt-of-the-Earth types who work exceptionally hard and who want the best for their students.

      Many teachers want to make a positive contribution to society. None of them have a profiteer motive.

      Now let's consider those traits and apply them to the corporate community. Some would "score" fine, but others?

      And neoliberal media pundits and politicians want to regulate teachers and deregulate corporations??

      It really does seem backwards to me. The mystery is how the corporate elites have managed to pull this off without very much resistance at all.

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  2. As long as corporate lobbyists continue to control Parliament Hill and as long as economic growth and short term gains are priority... as long as the media is corporate run ensuring that the sheep vote without awareness; we will continue to see the demise that we are seeing not just in Canada but internationally.

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    1. I agree! Two things we can do about that, as daunting a task as it is.

      First, help create an informed citizenry. Promote alternative media sources like TheTyee.ca and Rabble.ca in Canada, and in the US go to Alternet.org, Salon.com, and Truthout.com.

      Second, elect politicians not connected to mega-corporations. For instance, many Canadians know that the Harper Conservatives are intimately tied to Big Oil and have their shareholders first and foremost in mind when they create economic policy and gut environmental regulations. Not all of Canada's political parties, however, are connected to Big Oil (and Big Pharma like the Liberals are).

      Thank you for your comment.

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  3. Let me submit two relevant premises:

    (a) It isn't so much that the private sector is deregulated, for example copyright law remains strong, as reregulated. For example,
    new regulations permitting the private financial industry ever greater freedom to do what it wants. Regulations haven't been eliminated, just changed.

    (b) Neoliberalism includes more than four tenets, for example the creation of free trade zones being another.

    RH

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    1. Thank you for your thoughtful comments, RH. Here are my replies to your two points.

      a) I agree with you, but for your particular example, the "reregulations" are softer on industry. In the US, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 by the Clinton Administration gutted regulations of the banking industry, and led to the near collapse of the financial system in 2007-08.

      b) You are correct that neoliberalism also includes free trade zones, as well as free markets. Yet, what I said in the blog post is the following:

      On the DOMESTIC front, neoliberalism has four main tenets: corporate tax cuts, union-busting, privatizing the commons, and deregulating industry.

      Free trade and free markets have more to do with the foreign policy of nations that have neoliberal governments.

      Thank you for furthering the discussion.

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