Stealth Conservatism
Conservatives disillusioned with Republican unwillingness to cut government spending can at least take heart that the largesse is not being spent on enforcing laws that regulate the private sector. The latest bit of welcome news for the Right along those lines is Rep. Henry Waxman’s new report finding that warning letters issued by the FDA to drug companies, medical device makers and others dropped 54 percent from 2000 to 2005. Waxman’s study also found an especially steep 65 percent decline in enforcement action against medical device makers, despite widely publicized problems with devices like implantable defibrillators and pacemakers.
The story at the FDA is much the same at other agencies responsible for protecting public health, safety, and the environment. A number of earlier investigations found similar passive aggression at the EPA, for example.
The Environmental Integrity Project found a 75 percent decline in lawsuits filed against polluters – from 152 down to 36 -- comparing the first three years of Clinton’s presidency to the comparable period in Bush’s first term. Lawsuits against power plants dropped a full 90 percent, from 28 under Clinton to 3 under Bush. Similarly, an investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer found that the monthly average of violation notices against polluters – widely considered to be the most effective enforcement tool – plummeted by 58 percent under Bush compared to the Clinton administration.
An investigation by the Washington Post, subtitled “OSHA Made More Business Friendly,” likewise found evidence of weakened enforcement of job safety laws. The article noted that the agency now relies on fostering “trusting, cooperative arrangements” with groups of industries and professional societies to encourage compliance.
In its annual budget requests, the Bush administration habitually seeks significant funding cuts for agency enforcement departments. Democratic pushback has somewhat curtailed staffing reductions. But by casting its new approach as “smart enforcement” that ostensibly implements rules more cost-efficiently, the Right promotes the pretense that taking away parking tickets, cruisers, billy clubs, and pistols from police officers discourages lawlessness. Voila, compassionate conservatism!
It's odd that Republicans champion the right of corporations to run themselves free of government interference, when at the same time they deny individuals the right to run their personal lives free of government interference. Corporations, considered people under the law, have the right of self-determination, whereas people do not have the right of self-determination? Can anybody out there explain this to me? I suspect I am subjecting this apparent conundrum to the test of logic and since logic is consistently absent from Republican politics and policies, I'm not asking the right question.
June 27, 2006 10:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
The logic is Democrats like personal freedom, Republicans like business freedom.
When they said get the government off somebody's back they meant business, literally. And not the little ones, of course.
It's going to be a long, hard slog to root out the political loyalists. I just heard a howler from Rush, courtesy of the soundbite specialists on the Randi Rhodes show. While ranting about the "new" WMD find he had to acknowledge that the adminstration is not exercised over it. He explains that by invoking a "shadow government" of leftover "Clintonoids." If only.
June 27, 2006 5:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Corporations, considered people under the law, have the right of self-determination, whereas people do not have the right of self-determination?
For true conservatives, it's basically all about individual (property) rights that are wrapped in the moral superiority of businesses (capitalism). Business promotes the habits that lead to thrift, responsibility, moderation prudence, which are the necessary virtues of a healthy civil society and the foundations for freedom and democracy. Neither business nor democracy can survive "Without specific moral virtues and respect for moral law..." It is the job of government to protect civil society, from foreign threats of war and domestic disruptions within civil society.
Because conservatives view gay rights and abortion rights (for two examples) as immoral, they object to their legalization as attempts by the federal government to lessen their individual rights in favor of social rights that are seen as disruptions in the moral order of society.
Michael Novak lays out the 6 presuppositions that embrace this line of thought:
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June 27, 2006 9:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
The reduction in warning letters sent by the FDA is traceable to a policy decision that requires warning letters from each district to be reviewed by the appropriate center in Washington.
This has been an ongoing struggle inside FDA to achieve consistency. Formerly, each district was allowed to issue warning letters, and the criteria varied widely by district. While the net effect of centralized review has been to reduce the number of letters, that was expected.
Inspectors in each district are still allowed to excercise independent judgement in citing objectionable conditions (on form FD-483) during an inspection. Enough of these observations, and especially if they occur on successive inspections, triggers a warning letter.
During the inspection process, observations are discussed with the company being inspected and minor issues may be resolved without being noted on the form. The items that do get noted are supposed to be significant observations that must be addressed. The company has a specified amount of time to respond to the 483 and present a position. In the ensuing correspondence, the objections supposed to be discussed and resolved.
Warning letters are supposed to be an escalation preparatory to taking legal action, and are quite serious. While the centralized review process is indeed vulnerable to political tampering, a reduction in the number of warning letters does not explicitly mean that politics has been felt here. Warning letters are issued to a company but targeted at one or more manufacturing sites. If the number of total manufacturing sites in the US decreases, the number of potential targets for warning letters decreases. That's just one potential cause of reduction.
Here's an example more relevant to this site. Let's say that there's a significant change in party affiliation in Congress after the fall elections. Would we conclude that a corresponding reduction in grand jury indictments for bribery and corruption means that Grand Juries have been under political pressure not to indict anyone?
Simple statistics on easily identifiable benchmarks, such as FDA warning letters, can provide topics to investigate. They certainly do not 'prove' anything without further investigation.
June 28, 2006 5:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
JFP,
Ahh, yes, the ole "plausible deniability" gambit. Well, there's an awful lot of smoke beyond just the warning letter statistics to arouse suspicion that there's a genuine fire going on. If you read the entire Waxman report as well as the news media accounts, which include corroborating information from watchdog groups and supporting quotes from sources inside of the FDA, there are many reasons to believe enforcement has been significantly curtailed. For example, the number of seizures of mislabeled, defective, and dangerous products has declined by 44 percent. And this: "FDA headquarters officials have routinely rejected the enforcement recommendations of career field staff. Internal agency documents show that in at least 138 cases over the last five years involving drugs and biological products, FDA failed to take enforcement actions despite receiving recommendations from agency field inspectors describing violations of FDA requirements."
Beyond that, the FDA's approach to record-keeping has become so sloppy that there's little way for outsiders to discern whether the possibilities you are suggesting may or may not be explanations. Again, from Waxman: "Although the Federal Records Act and internal agency procedures require FDA to keep records that document agency enforcement decisions, FDA does not appear to comply with these requirements. FDA’s response to Committee requests for relevant enforcement documents was haphazard, incomplete, and untimely. FDA officials explained that FDA could not provide prompt and complete responses because the agency lacks a system that enables it to track enforcement recommendations from field offices."
Moreover, as my original post indicated, what's apparently going on at the FDA is entirely consistent with abundant evidence of enforcement cutbacks in other agencies. That includes crummy paperwork that gets in the way of finding out what's actually going on.
Your comment, with all due respect, is typical of the Right's modus operandi in that it concocts seemingly sensible explanations that run counter to all available evidence without providing any evidence at all that those explanations might be valid. --Greg
June 28, 2006 6:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, seashell. I now need a conservative's definition of 'moral,' 'practical wisdom,' 'moral virtues,' and 'moral law.' I have understood that property is the basis of English law which would seem to be the over-riding tenor of your post. Is that true? Another definition of the job (responsibility) of government is to protect us from each other and from ourselves. Does that agree with the conservative definition? The classical definition of wisdom is the ability to know what is right and to act and judge accordingly. Does that describe corporate wisdom? In the end I have to admit that I have never thought of corporations as having a leg-up on morality.
June 28, 2006 1:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Another definition of the job (responsibility) of government is to protect us from each other and from ourselves. Does that agree with the conservative definition?"
Protect us from each other, yes; protect us from outside threats, yes; protect us from ourselves, I'm not sure. Obviously libertarians would say no, that's not the role of government, and I often think they are the true conservatives. It might be a more case-by-case basis for conservatives. Obviously more of them support the drug war in practice than liberals. Same for things like assisted suicide.
That attempt by Novak to justify corporations in both moral and Christian (Jesus is my CEO!) terms seemed rather pointless. Was it a response to the documentary on Corporations that suggested that if a corporation was really a person, it would be a psychopath? I can't think of any other reason someone would bother to write it.
Also the idea that "Neither business nor democracy can survive 'Without specific moral virtues and respect for moral law...'" seems suspect. Maybe good democracies and good businesses don't violate moral law, but there's nothing intrinsic in either business or democracy that requires "moral virtures and respect for moral law."
June 28, 2006 3:23 PM | Reply | Permalink