Last week, consumers were worried about salmonella in their fresh tomatoes. Before that, it was E. coli in their spinach. Something is wrong. Eating a salad is not supposed to be a high-risk activity
But the problem isn't so much farmers. It's ideology. Historian Rick Perlstein, author of "Nixonland," calls it "E. coli conservatism" -- government shrinks and shrinks until people get sick.
"Government is not the solution to our problem," President Reagan famously declared in his inaugural address in 1981. "Government is the problem."
Many conservatives have gone far beyond that. Their traditional embrace of small government has been replaced with outright disdain for it. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, doesn't just want to shrink government. To use his words, he wants government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
Once in power, E. coli conservatives shrink government by hamstringing it. They weaken rules that protect people, slash the budgets of consumer agencies and appoint industry friends to oversight commissions. The result: Some government regulatory agencies that we trust to protect us have shrunk to insignificance or serve private industry rather than consumers.
The Food and Drug Administration's seeming ineptness in finding the source of a salmonella outbreak, which has poisoned more than 1,200 people in 42 states, is case in point. What's especially troubling is that even before this episode, the Government Accountability Office had officially designated "federal oversight of food safety as a high-risk area."
The FDA first thought that tomatoes -- either grown in Florida or imported from Mexico -- were the culprit. After weeks of trying to trace the source of the salmonella, with domestic farmers bulldozing crops they weren't allowed to sell and taking a $100-million hit, the agency on Thursday ruled out tomatoes. It's now on the trail of jalapeno peppers.
What's clear, though, is that imports of agricultural products have increased by 78% since 1973, but inspections of those products have decreased by 78% over the same period, according to the Coalition for a Stronger FDA, whose membership includes former chiefs of the Department of Health and Human Services, of which the FDA is a part.That's a problem because the FDA itself says pesticide violations or infectious disease occur three times more often in imported foods than in domestic foods. In 1991, there were 1.5 inspections for each $1 million worth of imported agriculture commodities; in 2006 there were only 0.4.
In a 2007 interview in USA Today, William Hubbard, a former FDA associate commissioner, admitted that food safety had become a crap shoot: "The FDA has so few resources, all it can do is target high-risk things, give a pass to everything else and hope it is OK. ... The public probably has the perception ... that they're more protected than they really are."
The agency's decline started when Reagan was president. FDA food inspections plummeted from 29,355 in 1980 to 7,668 in 1989. They stayed flat during Bill Clinton's years in the White House, then jumped past 11,000 after 9/11, amid fears that the nation's food was vulnerable to terrorist attack. Food inspections have now, however, fallen to levels below that number.
But E. coli conservatism is not limited to the food supply. Before the salmonella outbreak, there were major recalls of pet food (contaminated by melamine) and toys (lead paint). The agency that's supposed to protect us from toxic toys is the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a job made tougher because its resources have been cut. The commission's 2007 budget was half its 1974 budget in real dollars. Staffing is in free fall, dropping from 978 in 1980 to 420 in 2007. The testing labs have not been modernized since 1975, and the 2008 budget request removed the reduction of childhood drowning deaths as a strategic goal because of "resource limitations." The agency's entire toy-testing department last year consisted of one man who dropped toys on his office floor to see if they broke.
People cannot test toys for lead on their own. That's why Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972 "to protect the public against unreasonable risks of injury associated with consumer products" by giving the agency the authority to set safety standards, require labeling, order recalls, ban dangerous products and collect death and injury data. People count on it to do its job.
In the era of globalization, the job is more important than ever. When the commission was created, toys were primarily manufactured in the U.S. under American-set safety standards. Now they are mostly imported from low-wage producers in countries not subject to U.S. rules. The Toy Industry Assn. estimates that 80% of the toys that Americans buy are made in China. Last year, more than 20 million of them were recalled because of lead paint or other hazards. The U.S. banned the use of lead paint 30 years ago.
After the 2006 election, the new Democratic Congress recognized the dangers and offered additional resources. The commission chair, Nancy Nord, resisted. The appointee of President Bush, said fears about not protecting consumers were overstated and that modest oversight plus commercial self-interest were sufficient to achieve the agency's goals.
There are many other examples of E. coli conservatism at work. In 2000-2001, energy deregulation in California opened the door for Enron and similar companies to artificially limit the supply of electricity to the state, driving up prices and creating rolling blackouts. Financial deregulation helped create the housing bubble by allowing companies to sell mortgages to people who couldn't afford the payments. The surging commodities markets and the swooning stock markets are in part caused by rule changes, made in the name of deregulation, that make it easier to speculate on price swings. It was recently learned that the three main credit-rating agencies -- Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings -- failed to rein in conflicts of interest in their ratings practices. Among the problems: Companies issuing securities were paying the ratings agencies for their rating.
Enough. Instead of talking about the size of government, we should be debating how to make our government more effective. How many more people have to get sick before the government reclaims its mission to serve the people?
Government, Regulations & Taxes are NOT the problem!
You can't have something for nothing. If you want safe food, water, air, products and financial services you have to have regulations, laws and agencies to enforce those laws and regulations. I as a taxpayer, am willing to pay for that. Most rational people believe and would say that. No one likes to pay taxes. What I want want is effective and efficient government that protects all of us and a fair tax structure to pay for it. I don't want rich people getting away with out paying their fair share and for companies like KBR not paying taxes and getting non-bid contracts to work for the government by moving their headquarters overseas. The problem is corporate control of the government and the two political parties. "The invisible hand" of the so called "self-regulating" "free market" will never protect us or "provide for the general welfare" of all of us citizens. Government, regulations and taxes are not inherently evil!
by
Trainer12 (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 52 comments)
on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 11:55:34 AM
Its nice to read an article that explains the role of our government and its agencies. For the past twenty years the only veiw that got any print was that government is bad and incompetent and must be drastically reduced. The private sector will create miracle after miracle if only the government would just get the heck out of the way. I believe now that people are seeing how mortgage lenders and credit card companies really do business and how government bails them out when they make mistakes they are begining to wonder who really needs to be drown in a bathtub.
Business leaders and corporate lobbyists need to be downsized enough to drown em all in a bathtub.
by
Gary Denson (2 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 247 comments)
on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 5:17:06 PM
Downsizing of Government - to Life for Individuals
The author and commenters (so far) all put forth the view that only by use of force - government - can an orderly society exist, one in which rampant poisoning and other examples of physical harm are not the common results of human exchanges. The fact that virtually all societies now and in the past have been ruled by some individual or group, does not logically imply that such rule is a necessity to maintain order - where physical harm is the rarity and restitution takes place in such an occurrence along with social preferencing.
The nature of human beings does not automatically lead to the conclusion that individuals must be ruled by others in order that there be orderly interactions between them. Society, just like any other natural system can be naturally self-regulating by means of interactions between its members, if only humans seeks to discover and are allowed to implement the methods by which such self-regulation can be effective, rather than continuing to embrace social systems that need to be constantly held in an unnatural (and very unoptimal) state of balance by the operations of their rulers and other influencers. Individual self-order without rule by others is the social system whose members are humans, who have become fully adult. Just as people can become physical adults, so can they become social adults - if only they are allowed (and even required in the sense that they will not achieve their desires unless they do) to socially mature sufficiently.
Understanding the social interaction methodology by which more individuals would progress to become fully socially mature adults requires a paradigm shift in thinking about human interactions. I invite - and even challenge - those who seek a society of individuals interacting to mutual benefit (or are maybe only curious at this point) to read "Social Meta-Needs: A New Basis for Optimal Human Interaction" and then review the twin frameworks of the Natural Social Contract and Social Preferencing, both of which flow from that basis.
In regards to the idea held by many that only the government can "protect the public against unreasonable risks of injury associated with consumer products", earlier this year I republished here an article by Tamzin A Rosenwasser (with her permission). It provided a well demonstrated strong comparison between the penchant by so many in the US population (as described by the mainstream media) for absolute safety/security provided by government to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many (author and commenters here included) appear to have never considered some of the points so well made.
**Kitty Antonik Wakfer
MoreLife for the rational - http://morelife.org Reality based tools for more life in quantity and quality Self-Sovereign Individual Project - http://selfsip.org Self-sovereignty, rational pursuit of optimal lifetime happiness, individual responsibility, social preferencing & social contracting
by
Kitty Antonik Wakfer (22 articles, 4 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 124 comments)
on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 9:08:58 PM
4 comments
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