time for revolution

[Batboy2/75]

Interesting that some blame regulatory capture on the FDA/EPA/etc. itself, rather than the (subsidized) industries that sought capture in the first place.

They are one and the same. Regulations & subsidies are the twin rewards for the political connected and those handing out political favors. The losers are politically unconnected businesses (almost always small or medium sized businesses) and the consumer.

Politicians love regulations, because they then can sell relief from the same regulations. Crony Capitalists (Big Business and Big Labor) also love regulations, because it keeps out completion, keeps prices high and profits stable.

Politicians love subsidies, because it allows them to buy votes, makes them rich and allows them to pick winners and losers. Crony capitalist love subsidies because they are easily purchased from politicians, it takes away any incentive to make any real profit, eliminate the need to deliver better goods or services, gives them an advantage over competitors or competing industries/technology and they can be purchased from politicians to offset regulations.

Regulations are not bad in and of themselves. It's the absence of rule of law and equality before the law that is the problem. Politicians enact regulations and then almost immediately carve out exceptions for themselves, their allies and those willing to buy relief. If you aren't in the elite inner circle, politically connected, or able to pay off government; you are fucked.

[DrDonkeyLove]

City Journal
Our friends at AFSCME, public servants hard at work for the people (the people they want elected that is). Correction office friendly aided and abetted by his political lap dogs.

Crime and corruption are nothing new in Baltimore, as any viewer of The Wire can attest. But even for Maryland’s largest city, the April 2013 federal indictment charging 25 people with drug dealing, prostitution, and violence was a shocker: all of the alleged crimes occurred inside the city’s biggest jail. Worse, 13 of the accused were guards, who conspired with a violent prison gang to smuggle in contraband, ranging from cell phones to prescription pain pills. Female correctional officers took payoffs to have sex with gang members, including the gang leader, Tavon White, who fathered children with four guards. “This is my jail,” White declared in a January 2013 call, secretly recorded by the FBI. “I am dead serious. I make every final call . . . and nothing go past me, everything come to me.”

The lurid details drew national attention, embarrassing Governor Martin O’Malley, a Democrat with presidential ambitions, and causing a shakeup in the state correctional bureaucracy. Yet within Maryland, what really provoked an uproar was the federal authorities’ assertion that a three-year-old state law known as the Correctional Officers Bill of Rights (COBR) was partly to blame for the scandal. According to the indictment, the law’s procedural protections for guards facing administrative discipline tied supervisors’ hands so tightly that punishment was only a “very remote” possibility. An accompanying FBI affidavit noted that “the internal review process set up by COBR” was “ineffective as a deterrent to [correctional officers] smuggling contraband or getting sexually involved with . . . gang members.”

O’Malley, lawmakers of both parties, and the correctional officers’ union—the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)—had all backed COBR. In the wake of the scandal, all insisted that federal authorities’ harsh view of the law was unfounded. But the story of the law is, if anything, more damning than the feds could say directly.

COBR was a recipe for trouble from the start. It grew out of an AFSCME campaign to defend correctional officers in western Maryland who, prior to the Baltimore scandal, had been punished for gross misconduct—not for sleeping with inmates or bringing them illegal drugs but for savagely beating them. The union portrayed that appropriate crackdown as a typical vendetta by state prison officials against hardworking C.O.s. Maryland’s politicians, eager to please AFSCME in an election year—but indifferent or oblivious to the facts—went along. Far from a triumph for fairness and due process, COBR was a case study in the distortion of state government by public-sector union power.