Beware the history books.

Dear Senators and Representatives:

You are urging a reduction of law and order for corporate fraud, crime, and other damage to the health and safety of the American people. By thwarting law enforcement in these critical areas, you are inviting the comment, "There they go again."

"They" are the political corporatists in your midst, such as the Heritage and Cato groups and the trade associations and corporate law firms filled with well-paid persons, who concoct schemes designed to leave Americans defenseless against hazards to their safety and their family budgets.

These same interests held sway with the Reagan and Bush Administrations. You'll remember some of their "achievements": stalling and weakening the lead-abatement standards; delaying the lifesaving warning label on aspirin products regarding Reye's syndrome and the deaths of children; rescinding the rule commonly known as the "air-bag" standard for years, which cost tens of thousands of American lives and still more injuries; refusing to issue health standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act until Congress compelled them to start doing so.

Notwithstanding your misguided zeal to undermine the government's police powers to safeguard domestic health and safety and prevent future forms of toxic and product-defect violence, you may yet wish to learn from recent Reagan-era history.

Early in 1983, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Frank Young announced a cut of 50 percent in the number of the agency's blood-industry quality-control inspections. As the National Hemophilia Foundation can inform you, that decision and the powerful influence of the blood industry led to years of delay in the use of the hepatitis test to screen out possible carriers of AIDS. As detailed in the new book The Coming Plague, "most of the world's blood and plasma supply, therefore, went unsterilized and untested for the first four years of the epidemic." Can we assume that you have seen or read about the tragedies that terminally afflicted thousands of Americans with hemophilia as a result of not wanting to "burden" the blood industry?

The Reagan Administration similarly rejected a request for several millions of dollars by government physicians to conduct an early regulation of tuberculosis. Now it will cost many multiples of that early budget request to control spreading tuberculosis, and a new drug-resistant strain that worries public-health officials.

The basic issue that should concern your consciences is how to protect the health, safety, and economic well-being of 261 million Americans. Instead, all we hear are misleading statistics, phony anecdotes, and the flashing of the small-business card to camouflage your real parties of interest--big business. Your objective is to attack and block areas of need where too little enforcement and too few standards are already common problems.

In your haste to cut regulations, you need to answer the following questions:

1. You support a very specific analysis of the social costs and

benefits of regulation. Just what is the dollar value you are prepared to accord to an American life and various serious injuries or diseases? The public would be most interested in these figures.

2. It is not clear how you are defining "rules and regulations." Are you including the rules and regulations that deal with exposing and limiting economic crimes and fraud against consumers, workers, investors, and taxpayers? For instance, the Department of Health and Human Services has the legal obligation to root out and stop hospital, physician, and clinic-promoted fraud on Medicare, Medicaid, and other payment or reimbursement systems. More than two years ago, the General Accounting Office reported that billing fraud and abuse in the health-care industry alone cost this country $70 billion a year. Do you want to call a regulatory moratorium--which in common terms is a police holiday--in this underactive and understaffed law-enforcement arena?

And, how about all those corporate welfare regulations that fill the Federal Register? Much of the Executive Branch deals with the distribution of subsidies, giveaways, bargain-basement leaseholds, bailouts, guarantees, and monopolies. Hundreds of corporate welfare programs and hundreds of billions of dollars are involved in the matrices of rules and the rabbit warrens of regulations that reallocate taxpayer dollars to corporate coffers. Will these be part of your drive to cut taxpayer spending and scale back on government?

There are also many rules and regulations protecting small business from big-business predations. Government contracting procedures and defense of franchising rights by franchisees are some that come to mind. Are these rules and regulations to be included?

3. From now on, will you reveal the empirical or analytic basis and the sources for your "factual" assertions? For example, what is the detailed basis for your claim that the cost of compliance with federal regulations is over $500 billion a year? Let's have the data.

Since government and private studies have shown how new companies and industries arise from the response to regulatory markets, as in the environmental-equipment area, and since studies have shown how innovation is stimulated by workplace and environmental-safety standards, what is your basis for asserting that jobs are lost or that consumers are paying higher prices for no value added, say, to their health, safety, and their ability to avoid deception in the marketplace and to benefit from a higher quality of competition?

Further, will you release your own estimates as to how much considering and issuing new rules will cost the government (i.e., the taxpayers)? It seems that you have begun creating a field day for the K-Street corporate law firms and their billing bonanzas.

Also, what is Project Relief? Who are the groups (Representative Delay says they number around 200) that belong? Where does its funding come from? How appropriate is it for public servants in Congress to be working so very closely with what amounts to a private business lobby?

Finally, it would be interesting to hear you explain why you believe this country needs more of the non-enforcement, the non-inspection, and the non-funding that brought us the enormously expensive bank debacles, the corporate looting of shareholders and pensioners and other investors, the growing concern over the safety of the meat and poultry food supply, the precipitous decline of the ocean-fish catch, and the recurring damage and death to children from lead and other toxic exposures--to name a few examples.

You are now in positions of power. Especially in the House, the risk of being inebriated with that power carries grave political peril. Preventable disasters, epidemics, and the casualties of more silent forms of industrial violence must be avoided. That is your responsibility, and you will be held to that standard should your decisions be connected to such human casualties and anguish.

I call on you to lift your horizons, meet with the families of the victims of preventable tragedies, go into the factories and mines and hospitals and speak with those who are suffering from the neglect of law enforcement or the absence of any law whatsoever. Your consciences need to be ever reinvigorated because of your isolation from these Americans who have much to tell you.

You may also meet the relatives of Americans who lost their lives in vehicle frontal crashes during the delay of the air-bag standard for so many years by both Representative John Dingell and corporate pressure from the auto industry. Now, of course, these same companies are boasting about the availability of air bags in their advertisements every day. That is an important lesson in life-saving, job-creating, and dollar-saving regulation that might give you the frame of reference to solve these avoidable forms of violence and to be proud years later that you did just that.

History does not treat pandering kindly.

I look forward to your responses.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader 

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate. He sent a version of this letter on January 6, 1995. He has not received a response from any of the Senators or Representatives.