[NYTr] Bush's destruction of OSHA: The Utah Mine Disaster

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Huffington Post via Alternet - Aug 23, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60589/

The Utah Mine Disaster: A Teachable Moment About Workplace Safety

By Arianna Huffington

Before the hordes of reporters move on from the Crandall Canyon Mine
disaster, taking their note pads, satellite trucks, and the nation's
attention with them, we should seize the opportunity to turn this
tragedy into a teachable moment -- one that will allow us to look
beyond the tragedy in Utah and the dreadful safety record of the mining
industry, and focus on the larger issue of worker safety.

During the Bush administration, the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA), the agency meant to oversee workplace safety,
has been more intent on providing protection to employers than workers
-- eliminating dozens of safety regulations since 2001.

"The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency,"
said Dr. David Michaels, a George Washington University expert on
workplace safety. "The concern about protecting workers has gone out
the window."

Peg Seminario, director of occupational safety and health at the
AFL-CIO, agrees: "They've simply gotten out of the standard-setting
business in favor of industry partnerships that have no teeth."

Indeed, over the six and a half years Bush has been president, OSHA has
imposed only one major safety rule, and has reduced the categories of
recognized workplace injuries. Nevertheless, in 2005, the last year
government statistics are available, 4.2 million workers were injured
or became ill from on the job causes. And more than 6,800 workers died
from workplace injuries.

Yet we rarely hear much about worker safety -- until high-profile
deaths like the ones in Utah put the well being of American workers
into the media spotlight. Why does it take a tragedy to grab our
attention -- and for our government to pass and enforce worker safety
laws?

The unsettling reason hangs over the Utah mine cave-in like a cloud of
coal dust: as I detailed on Monday, more and more frequently, federal
regulatory agencies are being used as a payback mechanism for rewarding
major political donors, with industry hacks given key government
positions not because they are the best people to protect the public
interest but because they are willing to protect the very industries
they are meant to supervise.

That's what has happened with OSHA, which is under the leadership of
Edwin Foulke, a lawyer with a long history of open hostility to health
and safety regulations. Earlier in his career, while serving as
chairman of the federal agency that hears appeals from companies cited
by OSHA, Foulke led a successful effort to weaken OSHA's enforcement
power. With Foulke now in charge of his former target, OSHA has, not
surprisingly, issued fewer significant standards than any time in its
history.

Foulke's agency is charged with overseeing regulation of the
transportation, agribusiness, and constructions industries -- powerful
interests that have together contributed more than $630 million since
2000, with over $450 million of that going to the GOP.

Foulke and Richard Stickler, the fox Bush has guarding the mining
industry henhouse, might as well have been presented to the GOP's big
money backers with a ribbon around their heads, like the proper gift
they were.

And in the Bush years you can find such overly cozy relationships
between regulators and those they regulate throughout the government.

The Food and Drug Administration, for example, has long been under the
thumb of the very pharmaceutical companies it is supposed to oversee.
This dysfunctional dynamic has proved especially deadly, with numerous
drugs being pulled off the market after causing multiple deaths and
serious injuries in patients.

Following the money once again, we see that Big Pharma spent over $170
million on lobbying in 2006, and has contributed over $66 million to
federal candidates since 2002, with over $46 million of it going to
Republicans.

In return, the Bush administration has served up FDA commissioners like
Lester Crawford who was forced to resign after failing to disclose that
he owned stock in companies regulated by his agency, and current FDA
commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach, a vocal supporter of faster drug
approvals.

The Bush administration has also given back to big business interests
by taking away: the FDA is conducting only half the food inspections it
was doing in 2003, and safety-testing of U.S.-produced food has dropped
nearly 75 percent since 2003. This despite an upswing in highly
publicized food recalls and outbreaks of food poisoning. And with more
and more of our food coming from other countries, how does it make you
feel to know that just 1.3 percent of food imports were physically
examined by FDA inspectors in 2006?

The bracing truth is that we now have a regulatory system in which
corporate greed, political timidity, and a culture of cronyism are the
order of the day.

It was announced today that after Labor Day, the Senate will hold
hearings on the Utah Mine disaster. And, in the House, Reps. Lynn
Woolsey and George Miller have promised a probe into the Utah disaster
and its aftermath. Such congressional investigations are essential. But
they need to focus on more than what happened at Crandall Canyon Mine
-- and even on more than just mine safety. They should also focus on
exposing all the reasons in our political system that make it so easy
for the health and safety of U.S. workers and consumers to be reduced
to an afterthought -- moved to the front burner only when tragedy
strikes. And then only for a short while.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.