regulation
sb admin | November 17, 2008The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) is under a congressional deadline to complete final rules by December 31 on safety refuges and on conveyor belt flammability and ventilation practices. MSHA sent those documents to OMB on Friday, Nov 14 for final White House review.  Deaths of underground coal miners in 2006 led Congress to pass the MINER Act which included provisions "to study" safety refuges and so-called belt-air practices, and subsequent congressional directives ordered MSHA to complete these two rules by Dec 31, 2008.Â
For more information on the Safety…
revere | November 17, 2008The team of investigative reporting team of Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel just keeps rolling along, this time with an amazing story about how microwave safe plastics are leaching bisphenol-A (BPA) at potentially unsafe levels. We are saying potentially unsafe because we really know little about the effects of hormone mimics like BPA except that at levels currently found in BPA containing plastics in contact with food and liquids produce biological effects in test systems and a recent analysis of a representative survey of US adults showed an association…
revere | November 15, 2008You probably never heard of the EPA Appeals Board, but they have just handed down a ruling that will affect scores of power plants using coal. Affect them how? Not clear at the moment:
The uncertainty resulted when an Environmental Protection Agency appeals panel on Thursday rejected a federal permit for a Utah plant, leaving the issue for the Obama administration to resolve.
The panel said the EPA's Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide, the leading pollutant linked to global warming.
The…
sb admin | November 13, 2008Last night, I read a bunch of posts in the blogosphere and then watched a segment on MSNBC's Keith Olberman talking about the Congressional Review Act of 1996 (CRA) and how it could be used to undue regulations issued in these final weeks of the Bush Administration. Some people seem to be chomping at the bit thinking that the CRA is the answer to their disdain for Bush's policies. In the short term, they may be satisfied, but in the long term, the CRA is bad public policy. That's the debate that I wish was taking place.Â
Back to Basic Civics 101. The Congressional Branch…
sb admin | November 11, 2008A wrongful-death lawsuit related to Massey Energy's Aracoma Alma coal mine commenced yesterday in West Virginia courthouse. Mr. Donald Bragg, 33, and Mr. Elvis Hatfield, 46, died in a mine fire on January 19, 2006. According to an Associated Press account (here) the widows' attorney Bruce Stanley told the jury that Massey Energy's CEO, Don Blankenship urged the mine's managers to focus on production, instead of maintenance, dust control or other non-production matters.
"They died over money," Stanley said.
Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette reports here that the company's…
sb admin | November 10, 2008OSHA's Asst. Secretary Edwin G. Foulke Jr sent a farewell letter to the staff, dated Election Day Nov 7, recounting his goal on taking the job in March 2006:
"I just want OSHA to be the best Agency it can be"
Reading his 4-page farewell letter, he thinks he accomplished it. He asserts:
"without a doubt, we should all be proud of the fact that American workplaces are safer and more healthful today than ever before."
Somehow I doubt that workers who developed bronchiolitis obliterans from exposure to the buttery-flavoring agent diacetyl, burned to death in the Imperial Sugar combustible…
sb admin | November 10, 2008A former Department of Labor career employee who is expert in administrative law offers three simple steps for the Obama Administration to revitalize the federal rulemaking system. Pete Galvin's open letter to President-elect Obama provides thoughtful insight and recommendations that, if implemented, would go a long way to get our public health agencies (OSHA, MSHA, EPA) back on track for the common good. One in particular might be most difficult for the Obama team to swallow is:
"...trust your appointees to do their jobs without direct oversight by the White House staff.  …
sb admin | November 7, 2008by Bob Snashall, retired Labor Dept employee (Op-Ed Charleston Gazette, Nov 7, 2008)
George W. Bush & Company did one thing well - it bagged a lot of public information and taxidermied it into secrets. The shroud of secrecy even spread over mine safety. Mine safety? The law envisions everybody chipping in to protect miners from the perils of fire, water, gas and roof falls. So it helps the public to know what is going on. My federal legal career spanning 30 years embraced both mine safety and freedom of information.
In a democracy - you know, in a government of, by and for the…
sb admin | November 6, 2008In "DuPont finds high levels of C8 in Chinese workers," Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette writes that workers at the Changshu, China plant had average blood concentration of about 2,250 ppb of perfluorooctanoate (PFOA), an agent used to make the non-stick compound Teflon. Ward writes:
"DuPont Co. has found high levels of the toxic chemical C8 in the blood of workers at a new Teflon plant in China, despite company promises to greatly reduce exposures and emissions.  ...DuPont installed its new Echelon technology. DuPont says this technology allows it to make 'low-PFOA' products. The…
sb admin | November 6, 2008In 1966 when the original Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) became law, President Lyndon B. Johnson said he "signed this measure with a deep sense of pride that the U.S. is an open society in which the peopleâs right to know is cherished and guarded.â The law's purpose is âto establish a general philosophy of full agency disclosure," and records will only be withheld unless they fall into narrow categories, such as national security (i.e., FOIA exemptions).
In my own personal experience with the G.W. Bush Administration, principles of openness and the people's right-to-know have been…
revere | November 4, 2008The tort system is the favorite whipping boy of the anti-regulation crowd. That's because once you remove regulation, something the Bush administration has championed and done effectively, the only recourse someone injured by the fraud or negligence of a product or drug manufacturer is through a lawsuit for damages. Since the anti-regulation crowd serves Big Pharma and their cronies, this is the perfect solution: no constraints. The propaganda machine, aided an abetter by a compliant congress and a business dominated media, has been extremely successful in promoting the idea that tort suits…
sb admin | November 3, 2008Only 14 days after Gloria McInnis died in an explosion at a Goodyear plan in Houston, her husband Raymond McInnis testified before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security. At the June 25, 2008 hearing, Mr. McInnis explained why he was present and sharing his grief and pain in such a public forum:
"It is not easy for me but I came here today to talk about what happened to Gloria, but I don't want this to happen to anyone else. Neither would Gloria."
The McInnis family's nightmare was made particularly unbearable because they were originally told by a Goodyear…
sb admin | November 3, 2008On the eve of the election, The Nation reminds us that the next president will play a crucial role in determining the makeup of the Supreme Court. Herman Schwartz describes the Court's current makeup and rattles off current rulings that would be threatened by the appointment of another conserviative justice. Then, other contributors explain how the Court has shaped the legal landscape on workers' rights, healthcare, and consumer safety.
Eric Schnapper, a law professor at the University of Washington School of Law, looks at Supreme Court decisions that he says allow employers to violate…
revere | November 3, 2008There are only 77 days left in the Bush administration. Hallelujah. Finally an end to the carnage, right? Not so fast! Unless you think it's not doing any damage to: remove animals from the endangered species list without adequate public participation, putting power plants near national parks, making it easier to blow the tops of mountains off so coal operators can get to dirty coal or loosening regulations on disposal of factory farm wastes. If that's your idea of good environmental stewardship and "no more carnage," you'll be delighted to hear that the Bushies are making haste to ramrod…
revere | November 1, 2008Blogging can vary in spontaneity. Some bloggers spend a lot of effort honing individual posts, while some do a lot of "one offs" in response to rapidly changing events. A limiting form of the latter is "live blogging," essentially reporting in real time during a meeting, demonstration or particular event. In this sense blogging isn't very different than print journalism. There are stories that are quickies, just reporting some facts or acting as a stenographer for the government, a political campaign or commercial press release. Then there are the more in-depth analytical and investigative…
sb admin | October 31, 2008Celeste and other bloggers have noted that the Bush administration seems to be ignoring the Bolten memo, which told agency heads not to engage in the traditional end-of-administration rush to regulate. Now, a front-page story in todayâs Washington Post confirms that this administration is racing to enact several new regulations before Bushâs term ends â and, as you might expect, the list includes multiple changes that will weaken consumer and environmental protections. The Washington Postâs R. Jeffrey Smith explains:
The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of…
revere | October 30, 2008We've been keeping an eye out for the FDA's expert task force review of their own draft report on bisphenol-A (BPA; for more posts see here, here, here, here, here for other BPA posts). We previously reported to you the concern that the (outside) chair of that expert panel had a risk assessment institute at the University of Michigan that was the recipient of a large gift from one of the most vociferous proponents of BPA's safety and an ardent anti-regulatory ideologue. Whether it was a result of "working the refs" or a straightforward judgment, the panel has returned its report, concurring…
sb admin | October 27, 2008Remember back in early May, when White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten sent a memorandum to all agency heads warning them:
"to resist the historical tendency of administrations to increase regulatory activity in their final months" and
directed, except in extraordinary circumstances, that regulations needed to be proposed by 6/1/08. Well it seems that pretty much everybody in the Administration is ignoring the Bolten memo, with both bad rules (MSHA's mandatory worker drug-testing proposal) and good ones (OSHA's crane safety standard).
Scholars at NYU's Institute for Policy Integrity…
revere | October 24, 2008Everyone knows newspapers are struggling, which means cutting back on everything, including investigative reporting. So it is nice to acknowledge that there is still some wonderful reporting going on. A particular standout has been Susanne Rust, Meg Kissinger and their colleagues at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, whose investigation of FDA's handling of the bispheonal A (BPA) episode has been superlative. Yesterday they hit paydirt again. The FDA is currently considering an August draft report of a task force convened last April to re-examine the safety of BPA. The draft report says BPA is…
sb admin | October 20, 2008A long awaited OSHA proposed rule on crane safety was published in the Federal Register on Oct 9. The current OSHA safety standards on cranes and derricks dates back to at least 1971, and these proposed changes have been in the works for 10 years. I've criticized OSHA's Asst. Secretary for the deadly delay in proposing this rule, and it is indeed good news that the proposal is now in the public comment phase of the rulemaking process. The comment period ends on December 8.
I noticed something strange, however, in OSHA's news release about the proposal. There was not a peep …