The economic meltdown of 2007-08, the tragic deaths at the
Massey mine in West Virginia and the gusher off the Louisiana coast are each
and all the direct result of the deregulation orgy that began in the Reagan era
and continues even unto the second year of the administration of Barack Obama.

You have to absorb the kind of information and its interpretation
gathered, for example, in Thomas Franks’ 2008 book The Wrecking Crewor any
publication covering the same ground to get your mind wrapped around the whys
and the wherefores of the disappearance of meaningful regulation in America.
It isn’t because the high priests of corporate industry are
oppositional and unruly kids (which they are). The single cause is money. The
aforesaid pooh-bahs want more of it than ever and will not be satisfied until
they have all of it. Regulation almost always lowers the profit margin for companies
that must operate under it. The less regulation, the more profit. The more
profit, the higher the stock value. The stronger the stock value, the higher the
executive compensation.
Regulation was given a bad name by Ronald Reagan. It was the
target of his infamous line: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government
is the problem.” That
argument, off-base as it was and is, has come part of the Rightist jihad’s
catechism. The catechists have
drilled into the American psyche the idea that regulation is a sin against the
Holy Ghost.

Like most
catechetical assertions, that one has no relationship to reality. As a child,
my behavior was regulated, mostly by positive reinforcement, but regulated
nevertheless. The same went for the children I helped raise. All of us have met
and endured children who were raised without attention to the boundaries of
regulation. You hate to be around them.

The Right has
managed to connect “regulation” with communism and socialism and therefore to
cast it as un-American.
The little
village in which I grew up (until age 15) had a population then of about 150,
not counting stray dogs and feral cats. A railroad was built through it at the
end of the 19th Century and, until October 1963, one could still board a
passenger train at the depot and travel to almost anywhere in the continental
United States.

The mail came in
and went out by train six days a week — seven days a week during much of World
War II. Freight and express packages came and went on the same trains.
Once a larger
railroad had succeeded in swallowing up the original line, its corporate
executives never ceased petitioning what was then known as the Interstate
Commerce Commission for permission to take off the passenger and mail trains, as
they were deemed unprofitable. The ICC held out for almost a decade, citing the
railroad’s implied responsibility to serve the people who had come to depend on
it for commercial and personnel transportation.
At one hearing,
an attorney for the commission made the point that the residents along the
225-mile line in western Michigan from Grand Rapids to Petoskey had helped make
the railroad rich with their patronage for, by then, more than three-quarters
of a century, and that the state had made an outright grant of the right of way
to the railroad in the first place. That was the source of the implied
responsibility to serve the people.
The railroad did
everything it could to make its trains uncomfortable, inconvenient and late in
arrivals and departures. All the while the trucking industry was outbidding
railroads for postal contracts.

Finally the
railroad convinced the ICC that its ability to maximize profits and stock value
should take preference over service to the public. That was almost 50 years
ago. The dismantlement of regulation and therefore of public service has
declined precipitously since to pre-1900 levels. It’s happened in the airline
industry as well, just as it has happened on Wall Street and in the oil and gas
industries.

The winners are
the favored few whose pockets are lined with pelf at the expense those who have
been made to feel that the idea of public service belongs to the discredited
economic analysis of socialistic communism.
How long will it be before we begin to hear
again that baleful question: “Are you now or have you ever been . . .?”