The Safety Dance

Mom has been asking me for months to dive into the omnipresent announcements of defective Chinese goods winding up in stores - dangerous toys, flammable things... all of that.  I've resisted because I didn't really have a way into the story that made sense to me (I'm not thrilled about these reports, but I'm not exactly surprised, either)... until now.

As litbrit mentions, yesterday brought a defensive head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission in front of a Senate committee to explain, well, why, you know, people aren't safe.  Nancy Nord, the Acting Head of the CPSC, reported that the Commission lacks the resources to test toys, has outdated facilities and has generally been starved of the funds needed to do its work.

Litbrit, rightly, is appalled, as am I.  But I also wondered... who is Nancy Nord?

Well, Nancy Nord is the Acting Head of the CPSC because the head of the CPSC resigned rather abruptly summer a year ago and Bush has done nothing to replace him (the CPSC has a three person directorate; with the party of the President essentially controlling the majority) since March, when he tried to  appoint the former head of The National Association of Manufacturers (you know, people who might not like the CPSC) in his place. And why did the last guy resign, you ask?  Oh, you know... to go work for a law firm that advises clients on how to... you know, avoid having to deal with the CPSC.

Yes, it would seem that Consumer Product Safety is yet another area like... oh, I don't know, let's say FEMA... where the Bush Administration has allowed benign neglect to substitute for policy.  Bush has appointed,er, cronies, to this commission (see #9 of the last link), good Republican doo-bees, and now here's Nancy Nord to tell us, gosh, the CPSC is underfunded. Now there's a surprise.

When people complain about the mainstream media, I generally don't give it much weight - MSM bashing is all too common these days, if you ask me, and way too broad.  But if there's something the press does terribly lately, it's having the institutional memory to give the backstory on, say the CPSC and why, say, it would be a toothless tiger with a lovely figurehead GOP hack as its head who could before a committee and say she just realized they lack lab equipment.

Which is why I don't think China's the problem, I suddenly realized - when you manufacture goods as cheaply as possible, people will try to cut corners in every possible way, consumer safety be damned.  Our protection against such bad business practices was creating the Consumer Product Safety Commission.  And guess what Bush has managed to do in 6 years?  Make it worthless. Blame China? I'm thinking no.

Comments

[litbrit]

Blame China? I'm thinking no.

EXACTLY!

China is simply giving us what we want, or at least, what we tell them we want when we buy all the El Cheapo stuff over and over and over, looking the other way and trying not to think about sweatshops and prison labor and ground-up melamine going into our food.

It's the same thing with the FDA, which I've written about extensively. Despite a less-than-1% inspection rate of food imports, the agency has been quietly closing labs and cutting staff--key staff, too, the very scientists and analysts we need on the front lines to protect our food supply.

It's easy to blame a faceless entity half a globe away. But the real blame belongs right here, where we're allowing the systematic defunding and Norquistian drowning of the agencies that are (or at least were) created to protest the American consumer.

And so, we get what we pay for: poisonous crap. Until we, as a nation, realize that certain government functions are so important, they cannot be handed off to private interests without compromising, if not making a complete mockery of, their very raisons d'etre, we will continue to see lead-laden toys, pathogen-choked produce, and chemical-laced food imports pouring into our unprotected ports. God help us.

[litbrit]

(that should have been protect, not protest, the American consumer! Kind of a backwards Freudian slip, heh heh.)