Washington Post, 13 Oct. 2009:
The Obama administration is taking on Cheerios. And popular cold remedies and swimming pool drains and rhinestones on children's clothing.
With much of Washington focused on efforts to revamp the health-care system and address climate change, a handful of Obama appointees have been quietly exercising their power over the trappings of daily life. They are awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products, and most items found in kitchen pantries and medicine cabinets.
What kind of a corporate shill of a "journalist" looks at any attempt to fix our broken consumer product regulatory system and proclaims it to be part of a scary Big Gubmint conspiracy to control our lives. For the love of God, why didn't the WaPo feel obliged to include this little factoid: "Every year, contaminated food sickens 76 million people, resulting in 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
There is an enormous amount of context being ignored here. The Bush largely decimated our regulatory regime for keeping both consumers and workers safe from corporate neglect and malfeasance.
How did they completely forget about stories like this:
The nation's top official for consumer product safety has asked Congress in recent days to reject legislation intended to strengthen the agency that polices thousands of consumer goods, from toys to tools.
On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency's authority, double its budget, and sharply increase its dwindling staff.
Nord opposes provisions that would increase the maximum penalties for safety violations and make it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products, protect industry whistle-blowers, and prosecute executives of companies that willfully violate laws.
The measure is an effort to buttress an agency that has been under siege because of a raft of tainted and dangerous products.
Or this:
Since the Bush administration took office in 2001, it has been more lenient than its predecessors toward mining companies facing serious safety violations, issuing fewer and smaller major fines and collecting less than half of the money that violators owed, a Knight Ridder investigation has found.
At one point last year, the Mine Safety and Health Administration fined a coal company $440 for a "significant and substantial" violation that ended in the death of a Kentucky man. The firm, International Coal Group Inc., is the same company that owns the Sago mine in West Virginia, where 12 workers died last week.
The $440 fine remains unpaid.
Relaxed mine-safety enforcement is widespread, according to a Knight Ridder analysis of federal records and interviews with former and current federal safety officials, while deaths and injuries from mining accidents have hovered near record-low levels in the last few years.
Or this:
Michael Baroody, President Bush’s nominee to chair the nation’s consumer safety watchdog agency, was the top lobbyist for the country’s most powerful industry trade association when the group supported weakening guidelines for reporting information about dangerous products.
According to a report released today by Public Citizen, the requirements that the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and its allies sought to weaken had been responsible for more than 80 percent of the fines issued by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) over the past decade. NAM’s members and its coalition partners were responsible for paying more than half of those fines. The report’s findings underscore the inappropriateness of Bush’s choice of Baroody, a career lobbyist for the manufacturing industry, to chair the agency that is charged with protecting consumers from unsafe products.
The CPSC is tasked with protecting the public – and especially children – from serious injury or death and monitors more than 15,000 types of consumer products. Reports about product hazards are mandated by the Consumer Product Safety Act, one of the key laws governing the CPSC’s role in protecting consumer safety. With Baroody serving as its executive director for lobbying efforts, NAM supported a move to weaken agency protocols that dictate when companies – including NAM members – must immediately report information about potentially hazardous product defects. The changes NAM successfully pressed for could affect the agency’s ability to issue timely decisions to recall dangerous products.
Below are some more articles on Bush's deregulatory binge:
"Bush trims restrictions on truckers" (LA Times, 20 Aug. 2005)
"In Bush Administration, Science and Safety Are Less Important Than Politics and Lobbyists" (Center for Food Safety, 28 Dec 2006)
"Food safety on back burner" (McClatchy, 11 Jul. 2008)
"Under Bush, OSHA Mired in Inaction" (Washington Post, 29 Dec. 2008)
People literally died because of Bush's lax standards for consumer and worker protection. The WaPo should be ashamed of itself for publishing an article that portrays attempts to undo the vast damage to our safety standards as authoritarian measures by a power-hungry administration. The article couldn't be more distortive than it is now than if it used idiotic libertarian terminology such as "nanny state" or whatever.
Also, if anyone has any other good articles that document the harm Bush did to our regulatory infrastructure please post them in the comments.