Jackson Free Press

A movement has been afoot for sometime to roll back government regulations and oversight at every level, the argument being that any amount of government mucks up the words for free-wheeling capitalists to create jobs and make everybody gobs of money.

Federally, agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are frequent footballs in the fight over deregulation. The recent rulings at the U.S. Supreme Court opening up elections to more and more money while granting more and more secrecy to donations is another form of deregulation. 
 The result of years of gutting the federal oversight (President Barack Obama reversed this trend at EPA) and free-for-all elections have, arguably, had disastrous results for our environment, our political process—just look at the mess money made of this year's U.S. Senate race—and, indeed, our national economy.

States have gotten in on the act as well. In Mississippi, those pushing for so-called tort reform argued that businesses could not be profitable unless caps on legal damages were removed; in other words, businesses needed the flexibility to operate with near-impunity. Gov. Phil Bryant, after replacing Haley Barbour—tort reform's biggest champion—as governor in 2012, instructed state agencies under his direction to complete reports on the possible effects to businesses before making administrative rule changes.

Another common practice of policymakers has been removing agencies from the protection of the state personnel review board, an important workers' rights watchdog agency within state government itself, to allow department heads to fire large numbers of workers without cause. It doesn't help that the Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review, which, by all accounts, does an excellent job rooting out questionable spending practices, lacks the teeth to enforce its findings. That job is up to the lawmakers who are often connected to the very powerful political and business interests that are the source of alleged corruption.

Thanks to the increasing parceling out of various government functions to well-funded politically connected private companies, ostensibly to save taxpayers money, the temptation for agency personnel to abandon their scruples becomes hard to resist.

A close read of the federal charges against former Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps and Cecil McCrory, a former businessman and holder of various public offices, affirms the dangers of mixing deregulation with privatization. PEER had been sounding the alarm about no-bid contracts at Epps' MDOC for years with no action from state officials in either political party.

We applaud statements from Gov. Bryant ordering a review of MDOC contracts as well as calls from Democratic state Rep. David Baria (see page 11) to hold legislative hearings on statewide corruption. With the MDOC scandal and the Senate race that was laced with allegations of corruption, this is one problem where failure to build bipartisanship consensus, and increased oversight would be inexcusable.