Protecting Our Children Pt. 2

Surprise surprise:

The Bush administration and China have both undermined efforts to tighten rules designed to ensure that lead paint isn't used in toys, bibs, jewelry and other children’s products.

Both have fought efforts to better police imported toys from China.

So how did they fight these efforts to protect America's kids?

But as recently as last December, the Sierra Club sued the Bush administration after the Environmental Protection Agency rebuffed a petition to require health and safety studies for companies that use lead in children’s products. The EPA and Sierra Club settled out of court in April, with the administration agreeing to write a letter to the CPSC that expressed concern about insufficient quality control on products containing lead.

The Sierra Club’s interest in lead paint in children's products grew out of the largest-ever CPSC-conducted recall. That action on July 8, 2004, targeted 150 million pieces of Chinese-made children's jewelry sold in vending machines across the United States. Since 2003, the commission has conducted about 40 recalls of children’s jewelry because of high levels of lead.

In March 2006, a 4-year-old Minnesota boy died of lead poisoning after swallowing a metal charm that came with Reebok shoes. The charm was found to contain more than 90 percent lead.

Oh my God, why don't we just give Cheney, Bush and the rest of the ruling Republicans as many sledgehammers as they like and let them run around American bashing their country to pieces. It'd be a lot faster than the way they're going about it.

The most important point to make about all of this madness is that it isn't just Mister Bush, it isn't just President Cheney, it isn't just Karl Rove. It isn't just incompetence and cronyism.

It's a bankrupt governing philosophy.

Per the McClatchy article:

The Bush administration has hindered regulation on two fronts, consumer advocates say. It stalled efforts to press for greater inspections of imported children’s products, and it altered the focus of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), moving it from aggressive protection of consumers to a more manufacturer-friendly approach.

“The overall philosophy is regulations are bad and they are too large a cost for industry, and the market will take care of it,” said Rick Melberth, director of regulatory policy at OMBWatch, a government watchdog group formed in 1983. “That’s been the philosophy of the Bush administration.”

I used to think that the Conservatives had some points, that some sort of middle groups would be the "best" way. I no longer believe it. Now that there's a Netroots policing the Liberal or, as we seem to be hearing more and more, Progressive governing forces, it's a much safer America for liberal thought.

We have to catch this country up to the higher Western European standards of the 21st Century. No, it doesn't mean everything will always be perfect, that there won't be mistakes or this or that crooked guy caught.

What it means is that the starting point isn't greed, it's the common good, so that we can survive, thrive and prosper. This other way, this private-only way, unmitigated, is a disaster.

Back when I once read One Hundred Years of Solitude I remember understanding that if a family or, in our case, a country allows itself to become corrupt, to rot from the inside, then no matter the original good intentions or hearkened Golden Age, it'll be the unexpected act of nature for which that grand unit will be unprepared. There won't be any time to recover or rebuild, there will only be a vanquishing.

I pray it doesn't happen to America. I pray it isn't the melting of the Polar Ice Caps due to our hyper-industrial warming tendencies. I pray it isn't the death of the bee population and subsequent fractionating of our food supply. I pray it isn't a nuclear terrorist attack.

Time feels tight, like we need to act quickly to right our ways and establish real moral leadership in our country, our government policy, and in the world. So much so that even the 17 months left in the Cheney Administration seems like way way too much -- too much time to brand the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as terrorists to create a pretext for World War III.

I'll be interested to see who moves fast, who moves the fastest, as it could be as early as December, before the end of this year even, when the rubber hits the road.