Restitutor Orbis

Deregulation was an important cause in the Bush Administration. Deregulation and the safety of the environment and of the public be damned. It cost the big businesses a lot of money to actually have to worry about what they put into circulation, after all, and nobody was a friend to the wealthy big business owners like Dubya. Obama is changing that.

On Saturday, according to Reuters, President Barack Obama chose public health and biological threat expert Dr. Margaret Hamburg to run the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "He also announced a Cabinet-level food safety group. He selected Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Joshua Sharfstein to serve as Hamburg's principal deputy."

Obama also outlined measures to keep diseased cows from entering the food supply and promised to increase the number of FDA food inspectors and modernize food safety labs.

This is an important move and I am certain it is something many people are happy to see. The news of the day remains the economy, but there are many other problems that need to be addressed, many areas in which Bush's attack on the American people need to be turned back. As Reuters reports,

If confirmed by the Senate, Hamburg will take over an agency battered by a string of often deadly food poisoning and drug safety issues, including an ongoing outbreak of salmonella in peanut products that forced the largest food recall in U.S. history.

The choice signals the FDA's priority under the Obama administration will be safety and not necessarily speeding through drug approvals.

The salmonella outbreak has made 683 people in 46 states sick, killed as many as nine and forced the recall of more than 3,000 products.

Obama said outdated food safety laws were in part to blame. "Inspection and enforcement is spread out so widely among so many people that it's difficult for different parts of our government to share information, work together, and solve problems," he said.

The FDA "has been underfunded and understaffed in recent years, leaving the agency with the resources to inspect just 7,000 of our 150,000 food-processing plants and warehouses each year. That means roughly 95 percent of them go uninspected."

On an unrelated note, Obama expressed outrage at the use of stimulus funds by AIG to provide bonuses:

"This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed," Obama told politicians and reporters in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where he and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were unveiling a package to aid the nation's small businesses.

The president expressed dismay and anger over the bonuses to executives at AIG, which has received $173 billion in U.S. government bailouts over the past six months.

"Under these circumstances, it's hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay. I mean, how do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?"

Great news, obviously. AIG doesn't get it. They seem unaware that the mob is preparing to storm the Bastille. "Let them eat cake" doesn't come close to describing their arrogance. But Obama, fortunately, does. He has asked Geithner to "pursue every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole." He also said he would work with Congress to change the laws so that such a situation cannot recur.