Democracy Theme Park

Regulatory Agencies

  • About that “Seat at the Table”…

    You want a Seat at the Table. You fight for it. You get it. Yippee. Let’s consider it. (Welcome back to the DTP Blog. I’ve been absent from this table because, among other things, May is a huge month for gardening in Wisconsin and mine needed lots of TLC so I could put food on…

  • Corporate Law Secrets Exposed By Anthropologist (1998/2015)

    A Short Preface: The View from 2015… The piece below, once available as a pamphlet, was written in 1998 to try to induce “activists” to pierce the invisible force field that seems to keep them from reading the history of corporate law. Whether or not it succeeds in that sense, it offers a perspective on…

  • Knowledge is Power! (The Strategy-Optional Approach)

    Wow, I feel more powerful already.

  • Why There Aren’t Any Jokes About Regulatory Agencies

    OK, here’s a joke about a regulatory agency, as told by the corporate manager of a big polluting factory. He says… So, I’m in my office one day and the Man from EPA comes in and slams down a huge stack of papers, saying—You’ve got 22,221 violations, and you better do something about them by…

  • Frackin’ Keystone

    Gotcha. There, I did it. Used two of the hottest current keywords to draw you in, and here you are. Thanks for visiting, I’ll make it worth your while. They’re but two buzz words in a long line — longer than the trains stretching to the horizon, carrying crude (very crude) oil, frack sand, and…

  • Help, I’ve Been Colonized and I Can’t Get Up (1998) (Take a lawyer and an expert to a hearing and call me in a decade…)

    A third of your friends are locked down in an old growth grove or at a corporate headquarters, with law enforcement officers rubbing pepper spray in their eyes. Another third are preparing testimony so you can be persuasive at a generic regulatory agency while you’re begging them to enforce a tiny portion of our laws.…

  • Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing (1998)

    If you’re having trouble getting to sleep, you can count sheep, or read a book about the history of regulatory agencies. It may turn out to be the same thing. The nation’s first federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), was established in 1887. Concerned citizens, having failed to solve their difficulties in more…

  • Regulatory Agencies Have Failed Us–Let’s Fail Them: Out of the Agencies and Into the Legislatures (2010)

    Too Big to Fail? Regulatory agencies are not, and never were, the Great Protectors of the public interest that hazy origin myths suggest. Understanding regulatory failure entails accepting this inconvenient truth and then moving on. Are we ready to go beyond the usual ritualistic laments about how darned ineffective our “watchdog” agencies are? As the…

  • Fukushima: A “Normal Accident” (2012)

    In retrospect (that is, after an accident has occurred), it is often easy to look back at a situation and describe it as an accident waiting to happen. Too often we just leave it at that, perhaps hoping that someone else will figure out how we could have foreseen it. Somebody has.

  • Try This At Home (2004)

    1: The Ambassador The ambassador’s entourage—two edgy men with ear wires down their backs, and a few hangers-on—formed an irregular security perimeter. Handlers steered her around to avoid ambassadorial stumbles over uneven footing in the cramped space. It was Colómbian Independence Day, so I suppose I should have expected to bump into the U.S. ambassador…

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Jane Anne Morris