REPORT: UNREGULATED IMPORTS THREATEN CONSUMER SAFETY

WASHINGTON (PAI)--Unregulated imports of everything from toothpaste to toys threaten consumer safety, says a new study by the Campaign for America’s Future.

Toxic Trade: Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer also points out that while trade has increased almost five-fold since 1974, the main agency charged with protecting us, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has seen its staffing fall from 786 at its 1974 start and almost 1,000 at its 1980 peak to just over 400 today. Its $62 million budget is approximately 43% of its 1974 budget, adjusted for inflation.

“Americans have come to depend on the CPSC and other regulatory authorities to ensure the safety and quality of the products they buy and the food they eat,” write the report’s authors, Robert L. Borosage, Eric Lotke, Christopher Rasmussen and Alex Carter. But due to lack of funding under both GOP and Democratic regimes since 1980, the agency can’t do its job, they added.

Investigative reporter Marla Felcher made the same point to a meeting of Wal-Mart Watch activists at SEIU headquarters on Oct. 30. She specifically discussed the agency’s inaction against hazardous baby cribs, including those that stayed on the market, and killed toddlers, even after CPSC recalls. The crib case is “the canary in the coal mine” about CPSC’s failings, Felcher added.

While CPSC can recall dangerous products, including the cribs, she said, it rarely uses it. And when it does, it often issues the recall only after long negotiations with the product maker’s or distributor’s lawyers, who go to great lengths to minimize publicity and financial damage to their clients.

As a result, for example, of all the defective cribs on the market, fewer than 12% of those that should have been returned after recalls actually came back. The cribs kill toddlers by being constructed in such a way that they easily collapse on the children.

One crib, the Simplicity Crib, killed a Chicago suburban toddler whose parents were friends of Felcher’s. That started her on the investigation and crusade. The toddler was the seventh child to die in just three years from that crib.

But it’s not just baby cribs and it’s not just a case of faulty products getting through U.S. inspection, the report says. Instead, it notes CPSC and similar agencies are so understaffed and hamstrung they don’t have the people or money to do their jobs in the first place.

“The understaffing and the increasing imports create a toxic combination,” the Campaign for America’s Future report says. “Lead-based paint in toys from China is a case in point. The Toy Industry Association claims 80% of the toys Americans buy are Chinese imports”--a figure it later says is uncheckable due to no accurate records.

“Yet CPSC reports more than half of its product recalls are of products originating in China….Over the summer, more than 20 million toys manufacture in China were recalled because of lead-based paint and other hazards, despite the fact that lead paint was banned in toys in the U.S. 30 years ago,” the report notes.

Just in the first two weeks of October, CPSC recalled 290,100 toys of various types for high levels of lead--along with 350,000 bookmarks and journals, 2,400 Christmas ornaments, 1.6 million Cub Scout totem badges, 192,000 key chains and 11,200 water bottles.

“The very reason a domestic consumer protection agency was created was because companies, facing fierce competition, simply could not be trusted to police themselves,” the report declares. “Now global outsourcing is putting people at risk.”

Besides giving CPSC the budget and staff it needs to adequately inspect toys and other consumer products, the report also advocates huge penalties--$100 million per violation--against companies that put toxic and dangerous goods on the market. That way “penalties are an actual deterrent, not just a cost of doing business,” the report says. It also favors creating tracking labels on children’s products to ease recalls, tighter standards for lead-based paint in those products, and terminating import licenses for firms that repeatedly bring in hazardous goods.

Those measures are in legislation--opposed by Bush regime CPSC chairman Nancy Nord, a former Kodak lobbyist and U.S. Chamber of Commerce official--sponsored by Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.).