[EL] Informational benefit outweighed by cost?

[Mark Schmitt]

That's an interesting hypothetical scenario, but "government-on-citizen 
intimidation" has no relation to what's described in the Strassel 
article, which is that some guy, possibly working for a private research 
firm, requested some legal records that he apparently didn't get...

But here's a very real scenario: As you note, VanderSloot runs a company 
that makes dietary supplements.  (And sells them via a pyramid scheme.)  
>From a look at Open Secrets, his second favorite politician after Mitt 
Romney is Orrin Hatch. Orrin Hatch is the author of the 1994 law that 
sharply limits the FDA's ability to regulate companies like 
VanderSkloot's Melaleuca. It allows nutritional supplement marketers to 
make health claims and bring their products to market without the same 
FDA review that is done on other drugs.// The FDA can regulate and fine 
Melaleuca after the fact, and they have done so, but they can't prevent 
them from bringing dangerous products to market.

Which of these scenarios seems more likely: That the Obama 
administration will order the FDA to go after Melaleuca because 
VanderSkloot was a known Romney contributor? (Note that he's been a 
known and very big-dollar Republican contributor for years, so none of 
this is news.) Or that the Romney administration will make sure that the 
FDA continues to go easy on the nutritional supplement makers, even as 
they market dangerous products with untested health claims?

If you simply think government shouldn't have the power to do things 
like regulate dangerous drugs and nutritional supplements, you should 
say that. But it has nothing to do with disclosure.


Mark Schmitt
Senior Fellow, The Roosevelt Institute <http://www.newdeal20.org>
202/246-2350
gchat or Skype: schmitt.mark
@mschmitt9 <https://twitter.com/#%21/mschmitt9>
On 5/11/2012 5:29 PM, Steve Hoersting wrote:
> Was VanderSloot intimidated?  I don't know.  Possibly not, see this 
> excerpt.
>
>     Mr. VanderSloot acknowledges that "when I first learned that
>     President Obama's campaign had singled me out on his 'enemies
>     list,' I knew it was like taping a target on my back." But the
>     more he's thought it through, "the public beatings and false
>     accusations that followed are no deterrent. These tactics will not
>     work in America." He's [that is, VanderSloot's] even
>     "contemplating a second donation."
>
> But if he is not intimidated, he would be a rare breed.  The point I 
> keep raising is that we no longer are seeing only citizen-on-citizen 
> retribution a la /Doe v. Reed./ Rather, we may be seeing 
> government-on-citizen retribution. After all, the man who coined the 
> phrase, "The deterrent effect of campaign disclosure should not be 
> underestimated" is a sitting Senator, not a researcher at Media Matters.
> This is interesting stuff to discuss on the list, and I continue to 
> think that if, as it appears, we have officials entering the 
> intimidation fray it marks a difference in kind (from the discussion 
> in, say, /Doe v. Reed/).  No need to remind me that the intimidator in 
> /McIntyre/ was, technically, a government official.  The malefactor in 
> /McIntyre/ was small potatoes.  Here is what I mean:
> VanderSloot is CEO of company making dietary products.  I wonder 
> if businessmen less brave than he have calculated how much relief 
> they will be able to obtain from courts or Congress if their medical 
> products are disallowed by the IPAB soon-to-be-selected by the next 
> administration, whoever that administration may be.  The relief 
> available in Court or Congress is nil, not least because the 
> discretion the agency has is vast that nearly any decision is 
> "defensible."
> Given New Deal jurisprudence, the time for concerned businessmen to 
> protect their economic interests is in the political process now, not 
> in courts later.
> What I want people to consider is that as we approach a state of 
> affairs where regulatory agencies increasingly are given powers so 
> vast that they effectively possess the /means/ of retaliation, and 
> where officials seeking re-election are displaying the /motive/ to 
> retaliate against businessmen, the informational interest permitting 
> compelled disclosure of independent and non-corrupting political 
> speech is not the slam dunk it used to be -- not if the /Socialist 
> Workers/ exemption to compelled disclosure continues to prove a hollow 
> remedy.
> Good weekend, Mark,
> Steve
> On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 4:29 PM, Mark Schmitt <schmitt.mark at gmail.com 
> <mailto:schmitt.mark at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Wait, /Vandersloot/ was intimidated?? You do realize that the guy
>     has a long history of attacking and intimidating any and all
>     critics, including Forbes, which first put up an article about
>     "Four Romney donors he doesn't want you to know about," by a
>     Republican operative, and then pulled the article after
>     Vandersloot's legal threats. He placed a full page newspaper ad,
>     signed in his own name, attacking a reporter as "a homosexual." He
>     put anti-gay billboards all over the state of Idaho. He's a
>     totally public figure, not, as Strassel pretends, just a quiet
>     citizen who wanted to make a contribution.
>
>     I don't think divorce records should be made public, and they're
>     usually not (and there's also no indication in Strassel's article
>     that the clerk actually complied with the request for the
>     records). But certainly if corporations are going to be major
>     players in electoral politics, that activity should be open to
>     public scrutiny, and the only way for that information to be
>     useful is if we can also know the corporation's regulatory
>     interests and legal issues. For example, Don Blankenship didn't
>     give $3 million to replace a W. Virginia Supreme Court justice
>     just to express his political views. It would have been useful for
>     voters to know about the expenditure, and also about the
>     legal/regulatory issues that motivated Blankenship and Massey Coal.
>
>
>
>     Mark Schmitt
>     Senior Fellow, The Roosevelt Institute <http://www.newdeal20.org>
>     202/246-2350 <tel:202%2F246-2350>
>     gchat or Skype: schmitt.mark
>     @mschmitt9 <https://twitter.com/#%21/mschmitt9>
>     On 5/11/2012 2:45 PM, Steve Hoersting wrote:
>>     Kim Strassel has another piece in today's /WSJ/ intimating that
>>     the compelled disclosure of independent, non-corrupting speech
>>     poses too high a cost on speech rights for too little benefit in
>>     voter information -- especially absent a meaningful exemption
>>     available not just to Vandersloot, for whom it is too late, but
>>     to other would-be funders noticing this treatment, and eager to
>>     seek an exemption as John Doe or Jane Doe.
>>     http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304070304577396412560038208.html
>>
>>     -- 
>>     Stephen M. Hoersting
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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>
> -- 
> Stephen M. Hoersting
>


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