The Bush administration has done its utmost to butcher regulations that were in place to protect people and/or the environment.
Regulatory bodies, such as the EPA and FEMA have been stripped of competence and budgets. Instead, management positions are filled with incompetent cronies (brownies anyone?), while internal and external oversight are made perfunctory tasks.
But this administration will never cease to amaze in finding new ways of gutting corporate and public responsibility and accountability at the cost of the common man.
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Did I say at the cost of the common man?
It turns out it is quite literally so. You and I and everyone else have actually depreciated in value. How so?
AP IMPACT: An American life worth less today
WASHINGTON – It’s not just the American dollar that’s losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn’t worth what it used to be.
The “value of a statistical life” is $6.9 million in today’s dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May — a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.
[…]
Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.
[…]
Some environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of changing the value to avoid tougher rules — a charge the EPA denies.“It appears that they’re cooking the books in regards to the value of life,” said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local air pollution regulators. “Those decisions are literally a matter of life and death.”
Dan Esty, a senior EPA policy official in the administration of the first President Bush and now director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, said: “It’s hard to imagine that it has other than a political motivation.”
So there you have it. The Bush administration has now officially devalued the worth of your life and at the same time it has generated huge savings for some corporations.
These people really are evil.
