Did Reagan give the incompetent, corrupt motherfuckers in the Interior the gifts, lunches, or sport tickets? His ghost must have turned their computers to porn. And he personally instructed them to allow the drilling companies to fill out their inspection reports themselves.
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What you’re doing instead is trying to pin the blame on a minority party for dubiously-documented “systematic weakening” based on a nebulous “anti-government right” with no cited paper trail of cause-inducing failure.
What color is the sky in your world? Two seconds worth of cursory googling:
And, in this instance, Cheney directly contributed to, and arguably caused this accident by determining that acoustic switches for blowout preventers would be an undue burden on the industry:
In secret meetings with the oil company officials in 2001, incoming Vice President Cheney set the foundation for a permissive, welcome mat with the oil industry.
After stocking the Federal government’s Material Management Service with his cronies, this agency reversed an earlier 2000 decision requiring a mandatory accusatorial regulator, allowing BP and others not to install a $500,000 acoustic switch to automatically shut down oil gushers.
Reversed the decision that would have prevented this accident. But, yeah, the take-home lesson here is that sensible regulatory agencies just won’t work. Ever. Nothing whatsoever can be done about it. The market will do all the regulating anyone could ever want. Best thing to do is pretend that no empirical data on the capability of regulation to sensibly manage industry exists and that nothing useful could be drawn from such information anyway. Keep walking. Some things in life are meant to be mysterious.
Lemkin 