Another Congressional Sell Out

March 1, 2006 – ACCESS regularly makes note of proposed laws that subvert state regulatory authority. To date, most of these types of laws have had to do with matters of privacy and have specifically impacted the banking industry. For instance, FACTA makes it illegal for any state to place regulations on banks that prevent them from sharing your personal information with their affiliates. In passing FACTA, Congress sold out American voters in order to protect their campaign contributions. Well, Congress is about to sell us all down the river again and this time it has nothing to do with credit or privacy. But it has everything to do with the safety of the food you eat and it should make your VERY, VERY ANGRY!

 

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives is set to vote on the National Uniformity for Food Act (NUFA). While the bill has never been debated on the floor of the house, it has 216 co-sponsors. It will easily pass.

 

The bill was sponsored by Representatives Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Edolpus Towns (D-NY). Rogers refused calls for public hearings on the bill because, according to him, there “has already been a considerable amount of discussion and vetting in committee." The truth is that he wants the bill to be slipped into law below anybody’s radar screen.

 

Quite simply, NUFA makes it illegal for any state to regulate the information that is placed on food warning labels. The bill will render food labeling restrictions across the country invalid, in favor of much weaker federal standards.

 

NUFA has been lobbied for by a coalition of food companies and producer trade associations, ever since California voters passed proposition 65 in 1986. Prop 65 forced companies to clearly label products that contained cancer causing, or bird defect causing substances in them. The law has been a target of food producers ever since.

 

But NUFA goes much further than overruling just Prop 65. It will supersede a wide variety of state laws that regulate things like the amount of arsenic that can be present in bottled water, and the amount of lead that can be present in food or the dishes that that food is served on. The bill will outlaw certain food inspection standards that are used by states for dairy and farm products as well as food processing plants.

 

In short, the bill endangers the public to protect campaign contributions from food industry lobbying groups.

 

Roughly 80% of all food inspections conducted in the United States are at the state level. The bill is opposed by most states. The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture and the Association of Food and Drug Officials both consider NUFA to be a danger to public health. Both groups are bi-partisan.

 

Perhaps the California Attorney General, Bill Lockyer summed it up best when he said, “This is a total disgrace." He went on to accuse supporters of the bill of being a "rubber stamp for big business who, while claiming they need uniformity, are trying to invalidate consumer environmental and public health laws."

 

If you think it is odd that ACCESS is opposed to a law having to do with food regulation, we’re not. The issue is much bigger than that.

 

Since implementing the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), Congress has become very brazen in their attempts to circumvent and suppress state regulations on a variety of industries. FACTA usurped California’s privacy law that required banks to allow consumers to opt out of all sharing of their personal information; even with the banks affiliate companies.

 

And Congress is currently debating a wide variety of legislation on the regulation of data brokers and the banking and credit industries. Many of these bills would specifically outlaw state regulation of these industries. In most cases, federal regulations set a very “low bar” while the state laws that are usurped are significantly stronger.

 

The only reason that Congress makes these types of laws is because of campaign donations. In any other line of work, voting a certain way in return for monetary gain is called a bribe. But in Washington, it’s called “business as usual” and it needs to be stopped.

 

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