“Regulatory Czar” Wants Bloggers to Just Shut Up

“[Cass] Sunstein is an enemy to every news organization and blogger. We should return the favor and declare war on him.”–Kyle Smith, New York Post, 07/11.

Ok. That title might be a wee bit over the top — or not. You be the judge.

Kyle Smith wrote in his July 11 New York Post article, Gag the Internet! An Obama Official’s Frightening Book About Curbing Free Speech Online, about POTUS’s University of Chicago faculty pal and Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, Obama’s “Regulatory Czar”. Sunstein was chosen to reign supreme at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs within the White House Office of Management and Budget.

We’ll get around to the article in awhile.

Sunstein remains unconfirmed. The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reported June 28:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) has blocked President Obama’s candidate for regulation czar, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, because Sunstein has argued that animals should have the right to sue humans in court.

It’s a little more complicated than this. Read the rest of Bolton’s article for details.

However, it is a few key pieces of information that Smith left out of his article that should be of interest. The big one is that Sunstein is married to former Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor Samantha Power (right).

You may recall RBO’s November 2008 article about Power’s return from under the Obama bus. She had more or less been sent adrift the previous March after being “fired” for calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton a “monster” in an interview with The Scotsman. In November she was back working on the Obama transition team as if she’d never left.

Power’s name was listed as one of 14 members of the “Agency Review Team” for the State Department soon to be led by the woman she had maligned.

Smith also did not mention a Samantha Power-George Soros connection. Right off hand, we have the International Crisis Group connection. In particular, Soros is an ICG Executive Committee member and his Open Society Institute is a funder. Samantha Power is an ICG member.

Muckety Map has a great graphic that clearly details many connections for Power, Sunstein, and Soros. Cliff Kincaid at Accuracy in Media went into great detail in this January 11 article about them. Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky penned “Samantha Power and Obama’s Foreign Policy Team” February 19 at American Thinker.

Previously, on February 9, Ed Lasky wrote:

Also, Samantha Power has been appointed to an important post at the NSC; she will be in charge of working with multilateral organizations. Power is an advocate of working through multilateral organizations, and seems almost never to have come across one that she finds unworthy of praise and support. Power also has a very close relationship Obama, going back years. They are Blackberry and Basketball Friends Forever.

We can expect more “cooperation” with a wide range of multilateral organizations and non-governmental organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations and any number of groups sponsored if not controlled by George Soros (who has connections to both President Obama and Samantha Power).

The increased role of the National Security Council will only serve to enhance Power’s influence. Her recent marriage to Cass Sunstein, Barack Obama’s close friend from his University of Chicago days and now our nation’s regulatory czar, will yield ancillary benefits when it comes to the power-mapping in Washington.

Sunstein’s First Amendment

It is Sunstein’s “Global Chilling” position on the First Amendment about which Kyle Smith writes:

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who has been appointed to a shadowy post that will grant him powers that are merely mind-boggling, explicitly supports using the courts to impose a “chilling effect” on speech that might hurt someone’s feelings. He thinks that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them.

Advance copies of Sunstein’s new book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, have gone out to reviewers ahead of its September publication date, but considering the prominence with which Sunstein is about to be endowed, his worrying views are fair game now. Sunstein is President Obama’s choice to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It’s the bland titles that should scare you the most.

“Although obscure,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “the post wields outsize power. It oversees regulations throughout the government, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Obama aides have said the job will be crucial as the new administration overhauls financial-services regulations, attempts to pass universal health care and tries to forge a new approach to controlling emissions of greenhouse gases.”

Smith assumes Sunstein got his gig due his earlier book, Nudge, “which suggests that government ought to gently force people to be better human beings.”

Although that could be the reason, the fact that Sunstein is a long-time Obama fan — and married to Samantha Power, another Obama cheerleader — most likely weighed heavily in POTUS’s choice.

Bloggers beware. Smith informs:

Sunstein also believes that – whether you’re a blogger, The New York Times or a Web hosting service – you should be held responsible even for what your commenters say.

[...]

“As we have seen,” Sunstein writes, having shown us no such thing, “falsehoods can undermine democracy itself.” What Sunstein means by that sentence is pretty clear: He doesn’t like so-called false rumors about his longtime University of Chicago friend and colleague, Barack Obama.

RBO agrees with Smith, this sounds like a lot of stuff and nonsense:

Sunstein calls for a “notice and take down” law that would require bloggers and service providers to “take down falsehoods upon notice,” even those made by commenters – but without apparent penalty.

Consider how well this nudge would work. You blog about Obama-Ayers. You get a letter claiming that your facts are wrong so you should remove your post. You refuse. If, after a court proceeding proves simply that you are wrong (but not that you committed libel, which when a public figure is the target is almost impossible), you lose, the penalty is . . . you must take down your post.

How long would it take for a court to sort out the truth? Sasha and Malia will be running for president by then. Nobody will care anymore. But it will give politicians the ability to tie up their online critics in court.

Can you imagine this latter? Will the rule apply to Congress Critters who write their own versions of stuff and nonsense on their websites? In campaign speeches? In campaign literature posted online? The possiblities for insanity are endless.

The Wikipedia article on Cass Sunstein reports:

His 2001 book, Republic.com, argued that the Internet may weaken democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs, a phenomenon known as cyberbalkanization.

Obots anyone? The definition fits to a T.

Then we have the April 27 PolitiFact assessment of “Cass Sunstein once considered a ‘Fairness Doctrine’ of sorts for the Internet, but then thought better of it,” passed on via a chain of blogs and comments. PolitiFact determined the statement to be ‘Half True’.

To explore whether the claim is true, we went back to Sunstein’s 2002 book, Republic.com. In it, Sunstein discusses the drawbacks of limitless choices on the Internet that allow people to seek out only like-minded people and opinions that merely fortify their own views, creating an echo chamber that Sunstein argued is bad for democracy. In the book, Sunstein talks about the idea of the government requiring sites to link to opposing views.

In a later edition of the book released in 2007, Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein tempers that position, advocating instead for the creation of public spaces on the Internet where people with differing viewpoints could share their ideas with one another.

But in a video interview on the Web site Bloggerheads.tv on Feb. 29, 2008, Sunstein actually goes a little bit farther than that, calling it a “bad idea” he should never have ventured.

Asked to explain some of the differences between the first book, what Sunstein called “the initial inadequate edition,” and its successor, Sunstein said, “To me, the most important (difference) is that the first Republic.com was full of some bad policy recommendations and I was able to get rid of those. So I feel the book has been corrected.”

So, PolitiFact may think the issue is resolved when, in fact, it seems more unclear than ever in light of Sunstein’s soon-to-be-published book.

Too many unanswered questions. Very muddy waters. But isn’t that the point?

Sunstein: Second Bill of Rights

Stop us if this sounds like a conspiracy theory. It’s not. The Wikipedia, again, relates:

Sunstein’s 2004 book, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, advocates the Second Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Among these rights are a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care, and a right to protection against monopolies; Sunstein argues that the Second Bill of Rights has had a large international impact and should be revived in the United States.

Neil King Jr. wrote July 6 in the Wall Street Journal:

Sunstein supporters and foes say they see his fingerprints in administration policy — from details in the new law to rein in credit-card companies to interagency discussions about climate change.

[...]

The dizzying breadth of Mr. Sunstein’s opining — he has weighed in on everything from motorcycle helmets to ways to avoid “uncivil emails” — has made him a target for both the right and left. He has written hundreds of legal papers and over 15 books, including the recent best seller “Nudge,” which focuses on how policy makers could better steer people away from bad decisions.

Some conservatives bristle at what they see as Mr. Sunstein’s paternalism: that most people don’t know what’s best for them and need nudges from on high. Rural Republicans are alarmed over his statements on the wisdom of a hunting ban and his suggestion that animals may deserve more rights in court.

It is liberals who appear the most uneasy about Mr. Sunstein’s track record. He is a strong advocate for weighing the estimated costs against the benefits of regulation, a position that advocates fear could weaken efforts to strengthen federal rules on health and safety.

Sunstein: More on Regulatory Policy

In January, Rena Steinzor, the president of the Center for Progressive Reform, “added that the appointment ‘means that those of us expecting a revival of the protector agencies—EPA, FDA, OSHA, CPSC, and NHTSA—have reason to worry that ‘yes, we can’ will become ‘no, we won’t.’”

Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, wrote January 10 at the Center for American Progress’s Think Progress blog:

How would progressives respond if President Bush nominated as “regulatory czar” a person who:
– Once called for changing the Clean Air Act to require a balancing of costs and benefits in setting national clean air standards – a fundamental weakening long sought by big polluters who believe it would help them resist cleanup;

– Urged the federal government to devalue senior citizens in calculating the benefits of federal regulations because “A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.” This is a concept dubbed the “senior death discount,” and that environmentalists forced EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman to renounce in 2003;

– Argued that it “might be better” to help future generations deal with global warming by “including approaches that make posterity richer and better able to adapt” than by “reducing emissions.”

– Even raised questions about the value of cleaning up Love Canal, reducing arsenic in drinking water and using child restraints in automobiles?

Progressives would’ve screamed, of course. But what will they do now that President-elect Obama appears poised to nominate Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein to head the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)? For it’s actually Sunstein who has articulated the views noted above regarding clean air and the other issues involving costs, benefits and risk.

When President Bush nominated someone with similar anti-regulatory views, John Graham, to head OIRA, progressives and environmentalists strongly opposed his nomination.

Thirty-seven progressives, led by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and including Harry Reid (D-NV), unsuccessfully opposed the nomination of Graham, who was also opposed by the League of Conservation Voters because Graham “has a perspective on the use of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis that would greatly jeopardize the future of regulatory policies meant to protect average Americans. He advocates an analytical framework that systematically reinforces the worst tendencies of cost-benefit analysis to understate benefits and overstate costs.”

LCV even deemed the vote on the Graham nomination one of the eight most critical environmental votes of 2001.

John Carey wrote February 26 at BusinessWeek:

Yet the choice of Sunstein has drawn protests from environmentalists, health advocates, and many others, bringing some long-simmering academic debates into the open. While these battles aren’t likely to threaten his confirmation at an upcoming hearing, they may foreshadow a somewhat looser regulatory environment than Obama’s constituencies anticipated.

Even his detractors recognize Sunstein, 54, as an amazingly prolific legal scholar with a keen intellect. But they worry about his insistence on tying regulations to cost-benefit analysis, the bedrock principle of his Bush-era predecessor, John Graham. They’re also concerned about his prediction last year that Obama will be a deregulator. “He is off on the wrong track,” says Rena Steinzor, a progressive University of Maryland law professor.

Sunstein argues that “ordinary people” are confused about risks posed by toxic chemicals and other such hazards. They clamor for stronger regulation than is warranted “because of intense emotional reactions to particular incidents,” Sunstein wrote in a widely cited 2001 academic paper. So government must combat these misperceptions with rigorous analysis of costs and benefits.

[...]

And Sunstein himself is acutely aware of the problems with cost-benefit analysis. Writing about the impact of tougher regulations in his 2001 arsenic paper, he noted that “the annual monetized benefits…would be as high as $1.2 billion or as low $10 million!”

Why such a wide range? Because it’s usually impossible to pin down how many deaths or cases of illness may be prevented by regulations on a toxic substance, how much money that prevention is worth, or if it’s fair to say—as economists do—that a life saved 20 years down the road is worth a lot less than a life saved today.

Costs are also hard to predict. Retrospective studies show that the price tags for regulations usually are less than estimated, largely because the new rules stimulate innovations that often result in better and cheaper processes. “Regulation is about achieving transformation, which is not predictable, and therefore you can’t use a formula,” says Nicholas A. Ashford, a professor of policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chris Mooney, author and a contributing editor to Science Progress, wrote January 17 at Think Progress:

[...] a central focus of [Sunstein's] research has been on ways of making the government regulatory process more efficient and effective — and this has included the embrace of so-called “cost benefit analysis,” which many environmental advocates accuse of being a rigged methodology that always seems to favor doing less for public health and the environment.

Mooney continues:

Balanced against such concerns, however, is the fact that Sunstein believes cost-benefit analysis is a flawed but nevertheless useful methodology, leading to a better chance, over all, of making the wisest decisions in a context that always requires some balancing of competing values.

Still, in Sunstein’s writings there’s a troubling sense of what might be called, for lack of a better word, elitism. For example, Sunstein wrote in Risk and Reason, “when ordinary people disagree with experts, it is often because ordinary people are confused.” Sunstein even admits in the book that his approach is “highly technocratic.”

The problem is we also have very strong reasons to be very skeptical of so-called “experts” on science and risk. Anyone who has peered into these sorts of debates closely — over, say, the herbicide atrazine or arsenic in drinking water — knows not only that the issues are exceedingly complex but also that there is a lot of distortion of science by “experts” who are really ideological allies of special interests. If the choice is between such experts and the public, I’ll take the public every time.

Perhaps, then, the issue is not cost-benefit analysis itself, but what form of it you practice.

[...]

Let’s hope we hear at Sunstein’s confirmation hearing [held May 12] that he rejects the idea that his office should be in the business of questioning the scientific determinations made by expert agencies like the EPA; that he plans to use cost-benefit analysis to improve regulation, not stifle it; and that he’ll show some serious skepticism towards many of the “experts” who tout “science” in these areas, and not just towards the allegedly irrational public.

Carey’s optimistic future view of the Obama administration and “transparency” occurred a mere month after the Coronation, before the mirage of transparency began to dissipate. He was also much too optimistic when it comes to “Business” being relieved, cautiously or otherwise. Change is yet to come as Sunstein has not been confirmed. Carey wrote:

The likely upshot is that the regulatory gatekeeper will be different under Obama. The review of rules by OIRA will be more transparent, and all sides should have a chance to be heard. After eight years of being largely blocked, Environmental Protection Agency officials say they’ll have room to operate. Business is cautiously relieved that Sunstein gets its point of view, too.

Additionally, O’Donnell drew the correct conclusion: Sunstein “shouldn’t get a pass just because he was nominated by Obama.”

Indeed.

Power: Doing Away with the Electocracy (YOU)

We should also mention that RBO’s November 2008 article on Power proves that Power and Sunstein are kindred spirits when it comes to absurd thoughts about governing.

In a March 6, 2008, interview with the New Statesman, following her resignation, Power said:

“Obama has talked a lot about the importance of moving away from electocracy,” she says, trying to move on to more comfortable territory, and suggesting that the way people actually live is more important than the “reification of elections”.

“In terms of how radical the shift will be, I think it’s very hard. There’s going to be a huge foreign service and civil service that he will inherit, senators and congressmen who have already been elected. So I think he is one guy, trying to steer this ship of cacophonous agendas into a new place.”

In other words, promising to shut Guantanamo Bay, ban extraordinary rendition and pull troops out of Iraq within 18 months is fine. So is striking at al-Qaeda positions in Pakistan without the government’s consent, an Obama line widely thought of as a gaffe when he delivered it last August.

“There will be situations where the priority is self-defence,” she says, indicating that a preference for multilateralism only goes so far. “President Obama, like every other leader on earth, is still going to be looking out for national and economic interests. States don’t cease to be states overnight just because they get a great visionary as their new president.”

Read the rest of the article. There’s much, much more there to read on Power.

STOPSUNSTEIN.COM

The STOPSUNSTEIN.COM website banner reads “Stop the Sunstein Confirmation!” — “President Obama has nominated Cass Sunstein, a radical anti-hunting, anti-gun, animal rights law professor to be his ‘regulatory czar’,” then proceeds to back up its claims with Sunstein’s own words. The site also includes a link to a petition sponsored by the American Conservative Union.