REGULATORS NEED TO REGULATE

In my latest book, MURDER, INC.: HOW UNREGULATED INDUSTRY KILLS OR INJURES THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS EVERY YEAR....AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT, I propose a safety triad that, if all parties in the triad participated equally as to their proposed responsibilities, we might turn the tide from an unsafe country to a less unsafe country....initially. What do I mean by this? Think of a three-legged stool that distributes the weight of a person sitting on the stool, equally among the three legs. But what would happen if we leaned heavily to one side of the stool, essentially spreading the weight that was once borne by three legs to the two legs remaining braced to the floor. Unfortunately the third leg is no longer contributing to the stability of the stool, which may actually collapse because the two remaining legs may not be able to handle the amount of weight that was intended to be equally distributed among all three legs. In my book, I assign a name and specific responsibilities to each member of the safety triad (or, by analogy, to each leg of the stool): Manufacturers; Consumers; and Regulators. The main responsibility of the manufacturer (in the context of safety) is to design, manufacture and market a safe product and to communicate any potentially hazardous risks to their employees and/or customers so that they can avoid injury, or even death. Despite our expectations that manufacturers will understand and act in a positive manner to "warn" us about potential hazards, their consequences and steps we need to take to avoid being harmed by hazardous conditions designed into their product(s), the reality may not quite match our expectations.

Of course, not all manufacturers act or have acted in a moral and ethical manner and have consistently placed PROFIT OVER SAFETY, often resulting in unnecessary injuries and/or deaths, including even some catastrophic events. When this happens, this is where the second leg of the stool is supposed to kick in, namely the regulators whose main job is to regulate manufacturers by proposing rules that regulators believe will help reduce the likelihood of injury associated with a manufacturer's products. We see this interaction between regulators and manufacturers almost daily, for example, in the auto industry where manufacturers' claims of the best car since Swiss cheese often fall prey to the regulators...National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recalls defective cars OR when the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) bans all three wheel ATV's due to their dangerous instability OR the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules that a pharmaceutical company must add a black box warning on its drug so that the public will understand the possible side effects associated with their new miracle drug. In other words, we, the consuming public have come to expect that just as our parents protected us from all the harms and evils threatening a toddler or youth, so will the regulatory agencies responsible for the safety of the products, vehicles, food and drugs we buy and/or consume, protect us from all the evils or unexpected flaws in these products and their sometimes catastrophic consequences. But, what if these agencies don't do their job? Possibly they were too cozy with the manufacturers they were to regulate OR, possibly the regulators, ignoring their independent charge as neutral overseers of a greedy corporate environment only too eager to sacrifice safety for the profits resulting from such actions, received new marching orders, possibly from their boss in the White House.

Unless you have enjoyed a Rip Van Winkle nap for the last two years, that is exactly what you have seen happen here in our country under the leadership of a President who has systematically, mostly through executive orders, delayed, dismissed or rolled back several hundred, perhaps even a few thousand government regulations, many of which were intended to protect our safety, our homes, our transportation systems and our environment, resulting in the threat (and even the reality) of newly injured or killed American workers and consumers. With the assistance of a long-standing Washington, DC creation, The Revolving Door, which summons as new regulators to DC, the very people whom they are supposed to regulate. I did a study of ALL senior regulators installed since the creation of all safety-related agencies and found that 68% of all senior regulators had either come from or went to the same industry they were to regulate. Apparently, this is the one area where bipartisanship has not lost its way because over the decades, the votes to confirm almost all of these obviously conflicted (by the revolving door) regulators was consistently unanimous. This sounds to me like the "rigged system" that Donald Trump has been howling about for the last two years. In one of the most egregious examples of Trump's deregulatory frenzy, our President has tabled for more study the FDA's recent (after many years of research and comments) recommendations for changes to our food chains's labeling of nutritional ingredients. This callous act of ignoring the recommendations of dozens of experts, scientists and nutritionists will negatively affect millions of diabetics in the U.S. who applauded the FDA's recommendation to consolidate all added sugar in a food product and label it all as "added sugar" to replace the prior collection of technical/scientific terms such as "high fructose corn syrup" or my favorite, "Evaporated Cane Syrup."

The third leg of my safety triad is you, the worker and/or the consumer. who when faced with a greedy corporation and a totally conflicted regulator must take steps, mostly self-educational, to protect you and your family. That means going to the library, reading newspaper stories, making phone calls to regulators and manufacturers alike, reading warning and safety labels and instructions, joining consumer advocacy groups. In other words, if the people who make unsafe products and the government regulators can't or won't do their jobs, we the people must take charge of our own safety, gather as much information as possible, so that we can make informed choices for us and our loved ones. We have no other choice, especially under the current administration.