Via Tengrain, we have the Republican Freedom Caucus 100 day wishlist, a whirlwind deregulation tour which has some pretty repellent provisions. The Freedom Caucus wants to remove burdensome regulations which keep downer cattle out of the food processing stream, and regulate development in national forests. It wants to repeal USDA inspection of catfish and the labeling of meats by country of origin.
Perhaps my favorite is a change in regulations of student loan applications:
Requiring the new form and financial documentation to be provided upfront will delay the process of helping the borrower toward financial success. Completing lengthy forms which often require multiple conversations and then requesting financial documents when the borrower may not be in hardship burdens the process, creates confusion, and invades the privacy of the borrower.
Can't burden the process of keeping some poor kid in debt for decades with some upfront documentation!
Any conservation-minded energy-efficiency standards are dismissed with a boilerplate cut-and-paste:
These energy conservation standards are burdensome, costly, and implausible to comply with.
In the case of ceiling fans, energy conservation standards are a leftist plot:
The conservation rules are a part of the green agenda being pushed by the left: they are costly and benefit only certain providers, and dramatically effect markets like real estate and construction.
Saul Alinsky has been reincarnated as a green dragon, seeking to bring down 'Murka by regulating ceiling fans. Maybe the Freedom Caucus will make Human Enterprise Day a national holiday, and force people to leave their refrigerator doors open all day long.
Other solutions to problems which don't exist are ensuring that cigars aren't regulated like cigarettes are, and making sure the employer-provided health insurance doesn't have to provide hormonal birth control to slutty-slut-sluts.
How about this gem about removing the Mitigation Strategies To Protect Food Against Intentional Adulteration regulations?
The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) final rule is aimed at preventing intentional adulteration from acts intended to cause wide-scale harm to public health, including acts of terrorism targeting the food supply.” And total costs ranging
between $280-$490 million annually.
We might be fighting terrorism overseas, but it's took expensive to fight terrorism in our kitchens.
The whole document is an interesting, by which I mean appalling, read. With both chambers of Congress and the Presidency in Republican hands, we will see a wholesale giveaway to the worst of corporate actors- the fossil fuel industry will get renewed leases on public lands, bad players in agribusiness and the Processed Food Industrial Complex will see a loosening of safety standards, and poor people will see all of their protections stripped away. It's a twenty-three page horror story, one authored not by Stephen King, but by Steve King.
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3 comments:
Hey, it's the old libertarian gem: No company would purposely poison us, because if they did, it would hurt their business. No need to inspect because we can trust their interest in a profit to take care of that for us.
If your kid dies from a poison-laced teething ring, you can just sue the company. Oh, by the way, we want tort reform...
We certainly need a stronger opposition to Republicanism.
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