http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/business/us-regulators-declined-full-inquiry-into-gm-ignition-flaws-memo-shows.html
“Federal
regulators decided not to open an inquiry on the ignitions of Chevrolet Cobalts
and other cars even after their own investigators reported in 2007” knowing
about fatal crashes, complaints and reports of a defect in the autos, said the article.
It continued that in 2010 the agency “came to the same decision”—not to do
anything—“after receiving more reports” about the fatal problem.
A separate
article on the front-page of the Times’ business
section, “Carmakers’ Close Ties to Regulator Scrutinized,” reported on “former
top N.H.T.S.A. officials who now represent companies they were once responsible
for regulating, part of a well-established migration from regulator to the
regulated in Washington.” The “revolving door between the agency and the
automotive industry is once again coming under scrutiny as lawmakers
investigate the decade-long failure by General Motors and safety regulators to
act more aggressively.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/business/carmakers-close-ties-to-regulator-scrutinized.html
In fact, the
words “G.M. Flaw” could be substituted for by “G.E. Flaw” in its nuclear
plants—like the G.E. plants at Fukushima and the dozens of the same fault-plagued
model that are still operating in the U.S., or the words could be replaced by
“Pollution Caused by Fracking” or “Poisons in Food.”
From national
administration to administration, corporations have run roughshod and those who
are supposed to protect us from the danger and death these industries cause
have regularly not done their jobs. Sometimes the situation is more pronounced
as during the Reagan administration—a thoroughly obvious time of foxes guarding
henhouses.
I wrote a book
about this extreme situation. The book jacket highlighted some of the Reagan
foxes: Rita LaValle, a PR person for Aerojet General Corp. involved in
hazardous waste-dumping and water pollution, who became director of the
“Superfund” program; John Todhunter, an opponent of restrictions on pesticides
with the chemical industry-financed American Council on Science and Health, who
became assistant administrator for pesticides and toxic substances at EPA;
Kathleen Bennett, who as a lobbyist for the paper industry fought the Clean Air
Act, named assistant EPA administrator for air pollution control programs and supervisor of the Clean Air Act; and on and
on.
This sort of
thing has an early history. In a chapter titled “Why the Supposed Protectors
Don’t Protect,” I related the story of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a physician
who came to Washington in 1882 to become chief chemist for the Department of
Agriculture. The U.S. was undergoing a transition from a rural country to an
increasingly industrial society with industries arising that processed
food—food commonly doused with dangerous chemicals. Wiley endeavored to do
something about this. He was a leader in working for pure food legislation and between his efforts and those of Progressive
Era reformers and the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle came passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act of
1906.
The act, signed
into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, defined as adulterated foods those
containing “any added poisonous or other added deleterious ingredient which may
render such article injurious to health.”
Wiley, who the U.S. government honored in 1956 with a postage stamp
picturing him and has described as the “father of food and drug regulation,”
tried to enforce the law as head of the Bureau of Chemistry of the Department
of Agriculture, predecessor agency to the Food and Drug Administration, but
found that all but impossible.
As a matter of
conscience, Wiley resigned from the U.S. government in 1912 and wrote a book, The History of a Crime Against the Food
Law.” The law intended to protect the health of people was “perverted to
protect adulteration of food,” he wrote.
“There is a
distinct tendency to put regulations and rules for the enforcement of the law
into the hands of industries engaged in food and drug activities,” declared
Wiley. “I consider this one of the most pernicious threats to pure food and
drugs. Business is making rapid strides in the control of all our affairs. When
we permit business in general to regulate the quality and character of our food
and drug supplies, we are treading upon very dangerous ground. It is always
advisable to consult businessmen and take such advice as they give that is
unbiased, because of the intimate knowledge they have of the processes
involved. It is never advisable to surrender entirely food and drug control to
business interests.”
Throughout the
many decades since, government control, regulation, has been surrendered, in
part and sometimes entirely, to business interests. This includes not only the
food and drug industries but the auto industry, the nuclear industry, now the
gas industry for the toxic process called hydraulic fracturing or fracking, and
on and on.
I titled my 1983
book The Poison Conspiracy and began
it by writing about how “the world is being poisoned,” lives are being lost and
protection “by government is a sham.” Those in government who are “supposed to
protect us...do not because of the power of the industries” they are supposed
to regulate. “These corporations have been able to warp, distort and neutralize
those social mechanisms of protection.”
For example, regarding
nuclear power and Fukushima, Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission when the catastrophe began in 2011, was forced out in
2012 because of nuclear industry pressure after calling for the NRC to apply the
“lessons learned” from the disaster. “I cannot support issuing this license as
if Fukushima had never happened.” Jaczko stated as the other four NRC
commissioners rubber-stamped the construction in Georgia in 2012 of two new
nuclear plants. Jaczko, said U.S. Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, “led”
a “fight” against those in the nuclear industry opposed to “strong, lasting
safety regulations.” And he paid the price.http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/0521/NRC-chairman-resigns-amid-battle-over-lessons-from-Fukushima
And
so do we—whether we drive a G.M. Cobalt car or are impacted by the permitted
radioactive emissions or accidental discharges from nuclear power plants or
water contaminated by the fracking process or food loaded with genetically
modified organisms, GMOs, and chemical poisons.
What’s
to be done? Our elected representatives aren’t innocent in this. There are a
few good ones, like Senator Markey, but overall those who on the elective level
are supposed to watchdog the lame would-be regulators of the bureaucracies have
in large measure been captured themselves by the monied corporate interests.
“There is a deeply entrenched network” and the challenge to it “will not be
easy,” I conclude in The Poison
Conspiracy. Most importantly, there needs to be intense grassroots activism
to deal with, to remake, a system of government regulation long broken that
needs to be, at long last, truly and fundamentally reformed.
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