The President has appointed two new members to the CPSC Commission. Here's what I could discover about them:
In a November '08 60 MInutes interview, Obama was asked what he was reading, and he replied "briefing papers." One of those position papers was by Bob Adler and it was about the CPSIA and the CPSC. And you thought the president was listening to you? Politicians don't listen to people anymore. They listen only to advocacy groups and their reps.
Adler was a lawyer for the commission from 1973 — when it was created — until 1984. Then he worked for the congressional committee in charge of CPSC oversight before joining UNC’s faculty. In October 2008 former CPSC executive director Pamela Gilbert, a longtime colleague of Adler’s, asked him to help review the hurting agency for Obama.
Here's how he went about it:
He spent several days interviewing commission employees, members of Congress, industry people, and consumer groups. Over Thanksgiving and Christmas and in between classes, Adler read volumes of CPSC reports and other articles about the agency. Then he helped Gilbert write the briefing paper for Tom Perez, the director of Obama’s health and human services transition team.Absent from the list of people he interviewed? People like us. Small crafters, used booksellers, parents, people outside of D.C.
Bob Adler:
Adler joined Obama’s team in October, and after the election, was one of two people asked to review the Consumer Product Safety Commission. (January)
He has been elected six times to the board of directors of Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine.
Bias, much? The Consumers Union is one of the lobbying agencies for this law, and they have stooped to blatant lies about those who are opposed to it. They are also the folks who are opposed to parents sleeping with their babies and wearing them in a sling because regulation makes cribs ever so much safer.
So here's an Obama appointee to the CPSC:
President Barack Obama will name former South Carolina schools chief Inez Moore Tenenbaum, an early political supporter, as head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and plans to boost the panel’s funding.
Tenenbaum ran an unsuccessful campaign against Jim DeMint in 2004- DeMint is the author of the best bill to amend the CPSIA. I don't see much chance of it passing. And Obama owes her some political plums. Last December Howard Fineman wrote:
It was a lucky day for Barack Obama when, two years ago, Tenenbaum became the first major Democrat in South Carolina to endorse him for president. She was taking a big risk at the time.
While Fineman and others credit Tenenbaum with improving South Carolina schools, John Stossel found otherwise (see the 22.55 mark on that video) and according to Wikipedia she served as state Superintendent of Education from 1998 to 2007, before test scores rose:She, as much as anyone else, insured that he won the South Carolina primary against the formidable Sen. Hillary Clinton—a victory that, as much as anything else, got him the party nomination.
When he climbed down off the stage on primary night in Columbia, the first person he embraced (after his wife, Michelle) was Tenenbaum.
If Obama owes anybody, he owes Inez.
Tenenbaum was featured in an interview by John Stossel for a 20/20 Special Edition about public schools in the United States and around the world, called "Stupid in America,"[3] which originally aired on the ABC News network on January 13, 2006, at which time she was South Carolina's Superintendent of Education. She was criticized by Stossel for South Carolina's low average in SAT scores among high-school students. South Carolina was tied for 50th place with Georgia among the US states at the time, with an average score of 993 out of a combined 1600 possible. Tenenbaum defended South Carolina's schools, noting that South Carolina was poised for vast improvements in the next few years.[citation needed] She was replaced as Superintendent of Education by Democrat Jim Rex on January 10, 2007.In 2005, South Caroline ranked dead last. Fineman and others credit Tenenbaum with making South Caroline the 'most improved' in SAT scores. When I read that, I thought, "Yeah, and I was the most improved player in my college volleyball class because I started out as the absolute worst the teacher had ever seen. I had nowhere to go but up." Turns out, that's the case here, too.
This bit of self-serving hubris ought to make his supporters who have been following the CPSIA debacle blink a bit:
Obama is promising to revitalize the agency by increasing its budget to $107 million next year and expanding the commission to five members from three, according to a statement from the administration.
Um.... Obama did not do that. Congress (under the Bush administration) already passed the legislation expanding the commission to five members and increasing the budget 105 million next year. And while Congress wrote into the law a requirement that the Commission would increase from three to five this year, these two Obama appointees bring the Commission only up to four members- we still need a fifth. And if, as expected, Nord resigns, then the Commission will be back down to three again. I don't have a guess as to who the fifth member will be, but I'm not sanguine about it.
Guess who the fourth member of the Commission is?
Obama also will nominate Robert Adler, a professor of legal studies at the University of North Carolina, to fill one of the new CPSC posts. Adler, who served on Obama’s presidential transition team, co-authored a CPSC agency review for the new administration. His research and teaching focus on consumer protection, product liability, ethics, regulation and negotiation, the White House said.
Rick Woldenberg wrote last February:
When considering the impact of the new Chairman, he noted that not only must the new Chairman hit the ground running in his/her administration of the agency, but must also be a master of managing expectations on the Hill and with consumer groups. He specifically noted the importance of catering to Congressional staffers (in case you thought your elected officials were running the government). The new Chairman must be able to talk some of these folks into a more reasonable, realistic position. He indicated that he was aware of the problems implicit in the retroactive effect of the standards. Let's hope the new Chairman can do something about retroactivity QUICKLY.The editorial comments in brackets are Rick's. I would only add that of course he says he believes consumer groups are more reasonable than they are perceived to be- he worked for years with CR!
He had some optimistic thoughts as well. He has a vision of a more modern agency that uses electronic media to improve communication with consumers. He also noted that the clutter of warnings could be cleaned up in this new paradigm. He believes that consumer groups are more reasonable than they are perceived to be, and can be a constructive partner on safety. [We'll see.] Adler had similarly nice things to say about industry. He noted that safety is a non-partisan issue. [Could have fooled me.]
Alder was then pushing for Pamela Gilbert to be made the new agency chairman. I wrote about Gilbert then- she is a Washington insider, a lobbyist, a founding member of PIRG, and also worked for Public Citizen. These 'consumer interest' groups really do have the same names popping up again and again, and their members appear to be incestuously interchangeable. So far as I could find, she has never worked in the private sector in any capacity. She lives in the insular, incestuous world of D.C. lobbying and special interests. Good Lord. I hope Gilbert doesn't become the fifth member of the Commission.
Adler also, ominously, has close ties to Waxman:
Before joining the UNC faculty, Adler served as Counsel on the Committee on Energy and Commerce where he advised on CPSC legislative and oversight issues under the leadership of Henry Waxman.It's probably ridiculously naive to hope he'll use that relationship to get Waxman to keep his promise and allow the committee to revisit the CPSIA once a new Commission Chairman has been appointed to the CPSIA.
Obama's press release does not acknowledge that it was Congress who increased the agency to five Commissioners (long before Obama was elected) and Congress who increased agency funding, nor does he acknowledge any of the flaws with the CPSIA that people have been writing to him about:
President Obama said, "It is a top priority of my administration to ensure that the products the American people depend on are safe. We must do more to protect the American public – especially our nation’s children – from being harmed by unsafe products. I am confident that Inez and Bob have the commitment and expertise necessary to fill these roles and raise the standard of safety. To ensure these goals are met, I will also increase the number of Commissioners at the CPSC. I am confident this new leadership at the CPSC will revitalize the agency and achieve the high standard of product safety that the American people deserve."
Public Citizen continues to believe it knows better than you, you poor benighted fools. Let's look at just one example:
Flammable Fabrics Act of 1953 (FFA) authorizes CPSC to establish flammability standards to protect the public against the unreasonable risk of injury from fire. The FFA does not address the concepts of consumer use and misuse; it simply addresses product flammability regardless of how products are used -- or misused.
Were consumers not sometimes irresponsible, these standards would be unnecessary. For example, if consumers did not smoke in bed, there would be a substantially reduced need for a flammability standard for mattresses. Similarly, if children did not play with matches or climb on stoves, there would be little need for a flammability standard for children's sleepwear. The focus of the standards is on the level of flammability of the consumer products, not on the degree of culpability of the consumers who ignited them.
Raise your hand if you bought sleepwear one or two sizes bigger than your child's normal size because pajamas are too small, tight, and uncomfortable in the regular size. Have you washed them using soap instead of detergent? Used fabric softener?
And I don't know about you, but I find it wildly ironic that the same people concerned about the possible toxins in flame retardants in their baby's clothes are among the loyal supporters of the sorts of groups who lobbied for those flame retardants in the first place.
What does this Public Citizen post have to do with the new appointees to the CPSIA?
See the footnotes:
Based in part on an article by Robert Adler, “Addressing Product Misuse at the Consumer Product Safety Commission: Redesigning People Versus Redesigning Products,” Vol. XI, n1 University of Virginia Journal of Law & Politics 79 (Winter 1995).I expect Nord will be leaving soon, and then we'll see whether Waxman et all quit being obstructive and start being productive.
But here's what I think: those fighting the CPSIA- Obama never was your friend. Duped again, my dears. Duped again.
Politicians do not care about you. They care about their constituents, and that is not the peons they are elected to represent, but the special interest groups who help them get elected.
Thanks to Kathleen Fasanella, whose tweets provided most of the above links. Pin It
