Third World America - Arianna Huffington [53]
That’s what happened when Bush put Edwin Foulke, a lawyer with a long history of open hostility to health and safety regulations, in charge of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency meant to oversee workplace safety.63 Earlier in his career, while serving as chairman of the federal agency that hears appeals from companies cited by OSHA, Foulke led a successful effort to weaken OSHA’s enforcement power.64 With Foulke in charge of his former target, OSHA, not surprisingly, issued fewer significant standards than at any time in its history.
Then there was Bush’s choice of Mary Sheila Gall to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission, despite her tendency to blame consumers rather than manufacturers when defective products injured or killed.65 In her ten years on the commission, Gall voted against regulating baby walkers, infant bath seats, flammable pajamas, and children’s bunk beds.66 She even adopted a “Let them eat marbles” stance on the need for toy labeling, voting against choke-hazard warnings on marbles, small balls, and balloons.67 Consumers, she argued, are aware of “the well-known hazard of very young children putting marbles in their mouths.”
In other words, if a kid chokes on a small toy, it’s because the parent is defective, not the product. And while I’m all for slapping warnings on defective parents, Gall’s attitude dishonors the lives of the twenty thousand people, many of them children, who are killed every year by defective products—to say nothing of the close to thirty million people a year who are injured by them.68 Thankfully, the Senate refused to confirm Gall.69 Undeterred, Bush filled the slot with Harold Stratton, a vocal opponent of states pursuing consumer protection cases.70
The Food and Drug Administration is another agency that has long had an overly cozy relationship with the very companies it is supposed to oversee—in this case, the pharmaceutical industry. This dysfunctional dynamic has proved especially deadly over the years, with numerous drugs pulled off the market after causing deaths and serious injuries to patients.
Following the money once again, we see that Big Pharma contributed more than $124 million to federal candidates between 2000 and 2008.71 In return, the Bush administration served up FDA commissioners such as Lester Crawford, who was forced to resign after failing to disclose that he owned stock in companies regulated by his agency.72
And, if you want to see “overly cozy” run amok, look no further than the Minerals Management Service, which, according to government watchdog reports, featured “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” wherein government employees did drugs and had sexual relationships with oil and gas industry officials.73 So not only is the fox guarding the henhouse, it’s doing blow and sleeping with the hens. But it’s middle-class Americans who are getting screwed.
We have a regulatory system in which corporate greed, political timidity, and a culture of cronyism have rendered the public good a quaint afterthought.
THEY’VE GOT LOW FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
The third leg in the Access Triple Crown is the way corporate America has used its economic clout to cultivate—okay, “buy”—friends in high places. It’s so much easier to get a politician to take your call when you have donated millions to him or used to work in the office next to him. Facebook is great, but the crony capitalism of Washington takes social networking to a whole different level.
We saw how all those former Senate and House staffers are making a buck by lobbying their former bosses and colleagues on behalf of the big banks looking to gut reform.74