You're Not the Regulator of Me: How BUSHCO Made America Safe for Dangerous Toys (Mother Jones)

You're Not the Regulator of Me: How the Bush Administration Made America Safe for Dangerous Toys

Commentary: China gets the blame for this year's wave of recalls—but American industry has been working for years to gut government safety standards.

By Marla Felcher

November/December 2007 Issue

.............

But it was under Hal Stratton, George W. Bush's commission chairman (and former New Mexico attorney general, as well as Lawyers for Bush cochair), that the commission turned from paper tiger to industry lapdog. Stratton cut back on investigations while taking full advantage of the perks of his office—he turned the agency into "a little travel bureau," according to a longtime staffer. When a coalition of doctors and safety advocates asked him to look into the problem of adult-sized all-terrain vehicles marketed to kids, Stratton said he'd do a study. Three years (and more than 400 atv-related deaths of kids under 16) later, he released the results of fact-finding trips to West Virginia, New Mexico, and Alaska, where he'd met with safety advocates as well as various atv enthusiast groups. The upshot: a proposal to let kids ride even bigger, more powerful atvs.

Stratton's departure in 2006 left the agency with a grim record—product-related deaths were up from 22,000 in 1998 to 27,000—and only two commissioners, one from each side of the aisle. Lacking a quorum, much of the commission's work came to a halt. After waiting more than seven months to pick a new chairman, President Bush nominated a senior lobbyist for the very industry the commission regulates: Michael Baroody, of the National Association of Manufacturers. In May, Bush withdrew the nomination after it was disclosed that the association planned to give Baroody a $150,000 severance package when he took his new job. That left the cpsc's Republican commissioner, Nancy Nord—the former director of consumer affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—in place as acting chairman; she had earlier shown her bona fides by turning down Senate Democrats who wanted to increase the commission's budget. "I'm not trying to fight with you," Senator Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) exasperatedly told her during hearings this spring. "I'm trying to get you more money!"

Shortly thereafter, the Chicago Tribune reported on a Seattle toddler who had died on Thanksgiving Day, 2005, after swallowing tiny magnets that had spilled from a broken Magnetix building set. The commission had been warned about the hazard of magnetic toys years earlier and failed to act: Just six months before the toddler's death, an Indiana preschool teacher had called to report that one of her students had nearly died when the Magnetix bits he swallowed perforated his bowels.

It wasn't until the following year that cpsc finally recalled the Magnetix sets; its press release reassured consumers that only old sets were problematic, when in fact the hazardous sets were still being sold (and stayed on shelves for another year). This past April the commission—having now received reports of 29 Magnetix-related injuries, all but one of which had required surgery—expanded the recall to include 4 million more units. (The recall press release, negotiated with the company's lawyers, was so vague, the cpsc had to issue a separate fact sheet later to tell parents which sets were safe to buy and which were not.) Asked by Illinois lawmakers what she planned to do about all this, Nord said her agency needed more money after all.

more at:
http://motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2007/11/youre-not-the-regulator-of-me.html