The other day Obama ventured onto the opinion page at The Wall Street Journal to, as the mainstream press put it, extend an olive branch to "the business community." He offered up this lecture about the need to adopt grown up approach to regulation. It never occurred to me that Obama needed to mend fences with business, in large measure because on virtually every issue he has been supine in that respect already. Think about how he approached health care reform by accommodating industry demands before the legislative process commenced. That is why we got an incoherent effort at health insurance reform instead of a reform of health care system. So, now what will happen is that administrative agencies will spend their time navel gazing (reassessing existing rules) instead of applying them. And industry lobbyists - and here is where the money really counts in politics - will spend their time and effort defining for regulators which rules are especially burdensome.Coincidentally, last night Susan and I watched Gasland a film that raises serious questions about the natural gas industry, their access to government officials, the ways they have been exempted from environmental regulations, and the consequences of all that for the lives of regular people. The tale is not a pretty one. And the problems the film documents are coming to a town or village near you as the industry aggressively pushes to deploy dangerous drilling techniques in more and more areas. Watching the film made me wonder why it was that the EPA, Bureau of Land Management and various State level agencies were not doing even a minimally good job at protecting us from industry. Obama has nothing to say about that.
