We need rules and regulations to protect workers, consumers, and the public. However, opposition to regulations comes from organizations and individuals that have strong self-interests at stake and often lots of resources. Typically, it’s large corporate employers and producers of goods and services that oppose regulation. They use campaign spending and lobbying to persuade public officials to side with them. They use public relations campaigns to try to win support from voters and the public, often using deceptive messages. They claim that the costs of regulation are too high, but they almost never discuss the benefits.
My previous two posts described the war being waged on regulation by the Trump administration and some Members of Congress, particularly Republicans. (You can read them here and here.) My last post highlighted examples of rules and regulations that have been repealed or delayed. Every one benefits corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, or the public.
How does this happen in a democracy? There are several factors, but ultimately it comes down to the concentrated self-interests of large corporations and their political power.
Regulation typically has immediate and sometimes significant costs that are concentrated on a small group of organizations or individuals. The benefits typically are spread over a much broader group of people and often over a longer time period. The costs are typically easy to identify and measure in dollars, while the benefits are often much more difficult to monetize and some are even hard to identify.
As a result, those bearing the costs of regulation have strong self-interests in opposing and stopping or weakening regulation. When they are large corporations, they have tremendous resources to use in their opposition (e.g., money, people [including lobbyists], and the ability to sustain efforts over time).
Those who benefit (i.e., workers, consumers, and the public) have a self-interest in regulation. However, the impact is much smaller at the individual level and often gets lost among the many demands of every-day life. Furthermore, individuals’ resources (e.g., time, energy, and attention span) to use in supporting regulation are generally quite limited. Although the aggregate benefit may be huge, it is often very diffuse – spread over millions of people and across many years.
Therefore, the politics of regulation tend to favor weak or no regulation and even de-regulation. It typically takes political leadership that stands up for the broader public interest to push through (and maintain) strong regulation. With our corporations growing larger and more powerful all the time, the ability to stand up to them has become more difficult.
Let’s look at a specific, current example of regulation that is being considered.
Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other agencies, along with advocates for public health and the environment, are urging that certain pesticides need to be regulated. However, to-date, the Trump administration has failed to act on findings that the pesticide chlorpyrifos (for example), a Dow Chemical product, can cause significant harm. (By the way, Dow Chemical contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration activities and its chairman heads a White House working group on manufacturing.)
Chlorpyrifos has been widely used on fruit crops since the 1960s. Dow Chemical sold 5 million pounds of it in the US last year. Traces of it are commonly found in drinking water and umbilical cord blood, which is the blood a mother provides to her baby while pregnant. It can harm children’s brain development at very low exposure levels. Scientists have also compiled over 10,000 pages of evidence that chlorpyrifos harms animals, presenting a risk to 1,778 out of the 1,835 animals and plants that were studied, including endangered species of frogs, fish, birds, and mammals. [1]
The costs of the regulation of chlorpyrifos, i.e., a reduction in its use, fall immediately and directly on Dow Chemical, an $8 billion corporation (that is about to merge with DuPont and get even bigger). The benefits of regulating chlorpyrifos are clear but are hard to monetize. They occur over time to a broad range of people and to animals and our ecosystem.
Dow Chemical has strong political connections and lobbying capacity. It has spent about $12 million per year on lobbying in each of the last 5 years. [2] The political resources and clout of the beneficiaries of regulating chlorpyrifos are nowhere near as great as those of Dow Chemical.
Unless there is strong political leadership on behalf of the public and the environment, regulation of chlorpyrifos probably won’t happen or will be very weak. Given the current political environment in Washington, D.C., I’d bet that Dow Chemical corporation’s efforts to block regulation of chlorpyrifos will succeed.
This is a classic example of why democracy won’t succeed if the public and voters treat it as a spectator sport. We need to be informed, sometimes down to the level of detail of this example, and engaged. We must insist that our elected officials – and candidates during elections – are committed to standing up for the public interest despite the power and resources that large corporations can bring to bear on our political system.
We need to join and support advocacy groups that will act on our behalf on issues such as these, and that will let us know when there are opportunities for us to act and have an impact. We need to support the regulatory agencies (more on them in a future post) that are working to protect us. Many of them are under attack by President Trump, corporations, their lobbyists, and some of our other elected officials. And finally, we need to pay attention to and support information sources that will cover these issues.
We certainly can’t do all of these things all the time. But each of us, as a voter and citizen in a democracy, needs to be an active participant in our political system, and to do what we can to ensure that government works for us, not for the big corporations.
[1] Biesecker, M., 4/21/17, “Dow wants Trump to set aside report on pesticide risks,” Associated Press in The Boston Globe
[2] OpenSecrets.org, retrieved from the Internet on 5/27/17, “Dow Chemical,” Center for Responsive Politics (https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000000188&year=2016)
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