“We lost a decade”: More Bush Administration Deregulation Disasters
Written by barb howe Monday, 29 December 2008 11:22
As political pundits and news junkies analyze Bush's legacy during his final days in office, the public is learning more about the scope and depth of the damage this Administration has done on multiple fronts.
From the environment to worker protection laws and safety standards, the grim tallies of the wounded paint a pretty dismal picture for everyone and everything from people to polar bears. When asked about what progress had or had not been made on climate change during the past eight years, one guest on a Sunday talk show yesterday summed it up perfectly: "we lost a decade".
In some cases we've lost more than a decade, as we've explained about the new regulations changes to the H-2A agricultural guestworker program that will affect tens of thousands of our nation's farmworkers. Important protections for workers were gradually built into the law, as the result of lessons learned from notoriously abusive guestworker programs of the past. These will be swept away when the new rules take effect January 17th.
The Washington Post this morning carried another story on the Bush legacy of endangering workers: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been "mired in inaction" over the past eight years. The agency charged with enforcing important safety standards in the work place has been weighed down by political appointees who bend to pressure from employers, jeopardizing the lives and safety of workers in the U.S.
From the article,
"[P]olitical appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.
"The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton's tenure, according to White House lists.
"The legacy of the Bush administration has been one of dismal inaction," said Robert Harrison, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco and chairman of the occupational health section of the American Public Health Association. It has been "like turning a ketchup bottle upside down, banging the bottom of the container, and nothing comes out. You shake and shake and nothing comes out," Harrison said.
The next Administration has a lot of work to do to make up for this lost decade.
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