I want to begin today with a problem of the American capitalist system. It is the
capture by business of the government agencies that are supposed to regulate
them. The term in economics is called "regulatory capture," when an industry or
an enterprise that's supposed to be supervised and controlled by the
government (usually because of past bad behavior by that industry or enterprise),
instead what happens is the company either bribes, or donates to the campaign
of, or finds a way to capture and control the very regulation that was supposed to
control it. It's a serious problem in the United States, bad or worse that in most
other advanced industrial capitalist economies. And I want to give you some
dimensions of this problem because it is becoming more, not less, severe under the
Trump administration. I'm gonna begin with random examples. The cosmetics
industry. Because cosmetics are something that people put on their body on their
skin, and do so literally every day, it is something that Europe (and the
European Union) has been very concerned about, what those chemicals that are in
those products can do. And therefore over recent years, in the European Union, they
have banned or restricted 1,300 chemicals in the cosmetics industry. By
contrast, the United States over the same period of time has outlawed or curbed
eleven. That's right, 1,300 chemicals limited in Europe. 11 limited here.
Think about it. Well, it led a Connecticut State Senator last year to
think about it. [She]'s a doctor but [she] also serves in the state Senate of that state.
[Her] name is Alex Bergstein and [she] proposed a law in Connecticut that the
United States, or at least the state of Connecticut,
would use the same standards in banning chemicals that are in existence in
Europe. Just catch up with the Europeans. When asked about [her] law [she] said to
given the power of the chemical industry and the power of the cosmetics industry
[she] didn't think [her] bill would likely pass, but I thought it was an interesting
piece of information. Here's another place where dyes, that are basically
chemicals, are used in the production of cheese, chocolates, and juice. There, in
Europe, a lot of the chemicals are banned again because they have been found
(particularly the chemicals and artificial colors and preservatives)
they are linked to hyperactivity and children and for that
reason they were banned, but not in the United States. The most widely used
herbicide (plant killer) in the United States is called Atrazine. It has been
banned in Europe since 2003 because it pollutes water supplies. Lead-based
paints (you know about them, lead-based paints), they were banned in much of
Europe before the Second World War. But it took the United States until 1978 to
ban lead-based paints in this country. Why do I talk about this? Well, once upon
a time liberals, socialists, and others look to the government as a way to
control, to limit the damage that is done by enterprises for whom profit is the
bottom line and who don't care therefore about these other consequences.
But the problem is you can't go that way anymore because the government has been
captured by those it is supposed to control. It won't work, that old plan, of
giving the power to the government. At least not until we have very different
governments from those that we have had, and more and more of which we have had
in recent decades.