Wonder How All Those Tainted Toys Could Get To Store Shelves So Easily?

It turns out that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has been playing a double role- one as advocate for protecting consumers, and another as more of a lobbyist for the industry that it is responsible for regulating.

It seems that one organization after another has, at the very least, a hint of corruption, malfeasance, or incompetence under the Bush Administration. The fraud of FEMA and its phony Bush appointed director Michael Brown was exposed for the World to see, as bodies floated through New Orleans. Then we find that the FDA is in bed with the drug industry. Then we learn more about MSHA and its phony director Richard Stickler (another political appointee), who was a former Coal industry executive. We also now know of the HUD Director Alphonso Jackson being under a Grand Jury Investigation for alleged corruption. We have also learned about all kinds of shenanigans at the Pentagon... including a recent report of an Air Force Officer killing himself because he was caught up in a web of fraud where he was probably just a pawn. And all of the fraud connected to the war in Iraq is of biblical proportions... something that we will be hearing about 30 years from now.

Now we have the Consumer Product Safety Commission to add the this list of Federal agencies involved in suspicious & very questionable conduct.

I often wonder when and where this train of corruption & questionable conduct will end?

The Washington Post was able to find all kinds of conflicts of interests with the Consumer Product Safety Commission and its relationship with the corporations that it is supposed to regulate, especially those in the Toy industry. Commission Chair Nancy Nord and former Chair Hal Stratton accepted lavish travel from Corporations, including a trip to a fancy Golf resort. Nord has been involved in damage control over the past week, trying to clean things up by describing the trips as necessary for her work (Oh Please!!!). The Washington Post was able to obtain records of the trips, often paid for by Lobbying groups and lawyers working for Companies linked to hazardous products.

A summary of the Washington Post's findings:

The records document nearly 30 trips since 2002 by the agency’s acting chairman, Nancy Nord, and the previous chairman, Hal Stratton, that were paid for in full or in part by trade associations or manufacturers of products ranging from space heaters to disinfectants. The airfares, hotels and meals totaled nearly $60,000, and the destinations included China, Spain, San Francisco, New Orleans, and a golf resort on Hilton Head Island, S.C.

Notable among the trips — commonly described by officials as “gift travel” — was an 11-day visit to China and Hong Kong in 2004 by Stratton, then chairman. The $11,000 trip was paid for by the American Fireworks Standards Laboratory, an industry group based in an office suite in Bethesda whose only laboratories are in Asia.

But CPSC officials defend the industry-paid trips as a way for the agency to be in contact with manufacturing officials and hear their concerns despite a limited travel budget. Commission spokeswoman Julie Vallese said the agency’s counsel and its ethics officers conducted “a full conflict-of-interest analysis” of the trips and stand behind their decisions.

Several ethics experts and lawyers say the two administrators’ travel records, some of which they reviewed at the request of The Post, suggest a conflict of interest.

“This is a blatant violation of the ethics code,” said Craig Holman, an expert on governmental ethics law for the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. The rules allow nonfederal sources to pay for trips, “but not if you’re a private party with business pending before the agency,” he said.

The records show that Nord and Stratton repeatedly accepted gift travel for events from industries subject to CPSC enforcement. In February 2006, the Toy Industry Association provided Nord with rail fare, two nights in a hotel, meals — and even $51 to pay her Union Station parking bill — to attend the American International Toy Fair in New York, one of the industry’s biggest product exhibitions.

Read the Full Report from the Washington Post.

Also see a report from the New York Times