The CPSC’s searchable data base regarding dangerous products

Here's an idea that is so obvious and so important that we can expect to see great political pressure to dismantle it. In accordance with the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), the Consumer Product Safety Comission (CPSC) is assembling its public database which will be a central location:

[W]here consumers can go to report product safety incidents, and to search for prior incidents and recalls on products they own, or may be thinking about buying. In conjunction with the web site launch, CPSC will also conduct a public awareness campaign to raise awareness of SaferProducts.gov.

The reason for the database is to "Protect and Inform the Public," according to the CPSC's recent report, which further provides that the database information:

• provides more timely dissemination of alerts and other information to the public and industry, • increases public access to product incident and recall data by making consumer product safety information available more rapidly, and • provides a publicly available, searchable, and easy-to-use database for use by consumers, industry, and CPSC staff. This CPSC database is not yet operational, but by March 11, 2011 (according to the current CPSC report), any consumer will be able to post complaints regarding dangerous products on this national database. The CPSC will review these complaints for accuracy. According to the CPSC,

All incident data submitted via SaferProducts.gov will be subject to CPSC review to verify its authenticity – that the submitters are who they say they are. Any data or incident reports found to be materially inaccurate will either be corrected or will not be published. Furthermore, CPSC will have the ability to remove or correct incident data that has already been published should it determine that the data is materially inaccurate.

This all sounds like a good idea, right? I think so. I would make this prediction, though. There is going to be a massive outcry from the Chamber of Commerce regarding this database and huge push in Congress to make the database less useful. Admittedly, such a database will embarrass and damage manufacturers of dangerous products. If misused, it could damage compliant manufacturers, and that would be a bad thing too. The focus should be on protecting consumers from dangerous products, though. If I'm sounding overly-concerned that the Chamber will try to bring down the database, it's because I just read an article called "The CPSC's Searchable Consumer Product Incident Database," in October 2009 issue of For the Defense, a publication of the Defense Lawyer Institute. The article repeatedly takes the position that consumers will be irresponsibly reporting incidents of dangerous products. Here's an excerpt:

Under the plan as currently proposed, the consumer submitting an incident report is not required to provide any proof or evidence to support the alleged incident. Instead, the consumer is only required to "click" on an electronic button next to an existing webpage statement that indicates that the consumer verifies "that the information is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge."

Horrors! Consumers will merely report what they think happened without any "'proof or evidence"! I suppose that the manufacturers will insist that nothing should go on the database unless either A) there is already a trial where the widow of the guy who was electrocuted by the toaster prevails or B) where the manufacturer and the consumer agree to the facts. Here's another excerpt from the lawyers representing the manufacturers (from the same DRI article):

Without procedures to prevent the disclosure of inaccurate reports pertaining to a company's products, the Internet publication of inaccurate, accessible, anonymous consumer product incident reports will be inevitable.

Anonymous? See the above portion of the CPSC report requiring the CPSC to verify "that the submitters are who they say they are." Inaccurate? See the above portion of the CPSC report: "Any data or incident reports found to be materially inaccurate will either be corrected or will not be published." So what would the manufacturers propose to protect consumers from products that explode, cut or burn consumers? Here's what I suspect: that there would be no publicly accessible CPSC database, and that most consumers would remain as they are today--in the dark.

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Amazon Accidentally Increases Internet Disinformation

We have previously posted regarding the latest reprint of Darwin's "The Origin of Species", by Ray Comfort. If you don't know about it, it has a 50 page forward full of untruths, confusion, and misdirection in an attempt to discredit the original text that follows. Yes, he's trying to use Darwin to discredit 200 years of thoroughly tested evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, Amazon.com reviews and ratings confuse it with another (reputable) reprint by the same name, as discussed in detail here:

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Rage and Injustice

When people ask why laws must be changed to protect behavior that seems "outside" social norms, it can sometimes be difficult to make the point that rights must accrue to individuals and their choices or they mean nothing. So when a woman is stoned in some backwater country for adultery (whether she is in fact married or not) or a young girl has her clitoris snipped off without having any say in the matter or when a child is allowed to die from a treatable illness because his or her parents believe that only prayer can save them or when people are denied basic civil rights because they don't play the social game the same way as everyone else or--- If this were an issue of a racially mixed marriage, everyone would be aware and outraged. In this case it is not, it is a lesbian couple with children, who suffered a dual outrage---the first being denial of partner's rights at the hospital where one perished and the second being the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by the survivor against those who callously disregarded their basic humanity. The assumption by strangers that because they didn't fit some cookie-cutter definition of Normal that their fundamental humanity could be abridged in a life and death situation is not something that is redressable other than by law, because without a law people will make up any old justification to be assholes. And without a law, the rest of us will let them get away with it. Read the story. Be outraged. But do not be silent.

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Conservative Rewrites the Bible

We've featured Andy, son of Phyllis Schafly and his anti-reason heavily monitored blog site, Conservapedia before. His latest project is to create an edited version of the Bible better suited to American Reactionary philosophy. Yes, he is removing all those Liberal parts where the inerrant Word of God must be wrong. Mark C. Chu-Carroll (Good Math blog) wrote The Conservative Rewrite of the Bible where he gives specific examples of what is being edited and why. Like removing any mention of "government", and merging all the names of God to avoid confusion. Even God, in his 10 Commandments, says to forsake all those other Gods over which he has no control and only worship him. Schlafly represents this as a new, better translation. But he is using the KJV as his primary source. The English translation with the most known inconsistencies from original source material is his best version from which to start. Well, might as well. After all, he will be "fixing" God's Word. Even conservative Christians that I know think that this is a crazy project.

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Matt Taibbi on economic death by short-selling

In this month's Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi once again takes on Wall Street with an article entitled "Wall Street's Naked Swindle." This article is not yet available online. Taibbi's focus this time is naked short selling. Taibbi has proven to be an excellent teacher of abstruse financial concepts, including the concept of short selling, and also including the insidious practice of naked short selling. With this technique (and others) Wall Street has turned the economy into "a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck up the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class." Taibbi's article is an excellent read, which is not at all surprising given Taibbi's track record. The bottom line is that naked short selling is a "flat-out counterfeiting scheme." How bad is the widespread use of this technique?

That this particular scam played such a prominent role in the demise of [Bear and Lehman] was supremely ironic. After all, the boom that had ballooned both companies to fantastic heights was basically a counterfeit economy, a mountain of paste that Wall Street had built to replace the legitimate business it no longer had. By the middle of the Bush years, the great investment banks like Bear and Lehman no longer made their money financing real businesses and creating jobs.

As Taibbi then reminds us, there is more than one way to counterfeit. Consider credit default swaps:

If you squint hard enough, you can see that the derivative-driven economy of the past decade has always, in a way, been about counterfeiting. At their most basic level, innovations like the ones that triggered the global collapse-credit default swaps and the collateralized debt obligations-were employed for the primary purpose of synthesizing out of thin air those revenue flows that are dying industrial economy was no longer pumping into the financial bloodstream. The basic concept in almost every case with the same: replacing hard assets with complex formulas that, once unwound, would prove to be backed by promises and IOUs instead of real stuff.

In this related piece, Taibbi further discusses "naked short selling":

Again, a lot of this stuff is complicated and not only hard for people outside the finance world to follow, but kind of, well, boring as well. But it’s through these tiny regulatory loopholes, these little nooks and crannies, that the economy gets manipulated. The effect of all of these regulatory gaps has been to transform Wall Street from a means of connecting capital to good business ideas into a giant casino, where the object of the game is shaving little slices off the great flows of money as you push them back and forth using a great big toolbox of manipulative techniques. This is one of the tools.

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