About Caroline Ristaino

Posts by Caroline Ristaino:

beef-1884301_1280

How the Sausage Gets Made

,

Summer is right around the corner and with it comes barbeques full of hot dogs and pulled pork sandwiches. When enjoying these summer favorites, no one wants to be thinking about the possibility that the pork they are consuming may not have been properly tested for fecal matter or that the employees who processed the pork are now suffering from health problems. Yet, if the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is allowed to pass the New Swine Slaughter Inspection System (NSIS), these dark possibilities will become a sobering reality.

The Trump administration’s new proposed rule would cut back on the number of government inspectors at pork processing plants and lift limits on the speed at which processing lines are allowed to operate. The National Chicken Council  proposed a similar plan for poultry in 2017, but thanks to over 100,000 public comments, including those from Public Citizen, its members, and partner organizations, the USDA denied the petition. We’ve seen the power that the public can have, and once again we called on our members to speak out against this new system. More than 1,000 members used their voice to oppose this dangerous proposal here.

The USDA has made many claims about how their proposed rule will be beneficial, but many of these claims do not tell the full story. Here is the breakdown for some of these alleged improvements, and the truth behind them.

  • Improve effectiveness of market hog slaughter inspection. While efficiency sounds good, it is really just a way of increasing profits for the pork industry. The proposal states that increasing speeds could increase the surplus of large establishments by $2.04 million and that moving USDA inspectors to offline jobs will reduce labor costs by $6.67 million annually. Increased efficiency is directly tied to increased profits and shows the true motivation behind this new rule.
  • Make better use of Agency resources. This better use entails shifting USDA resources from online to offline positions, meaning that more of the inspection process will be the responsibility of the plant employees. Less government regulation and oversight heightens the chance that the production process will result in public safety risks. The government should not be allowing the pork industry to police itself.
  • Remove unnecessary regulatory obstacles to innovation by revoking maximum line speeds and allowing establishments flexibility to reconfigure evisceration lines. The USDA characterizes speed limits on production lines as an obstacle to innovation. In reality, they ensure that there is time for proper inspection to occur and they protect employees from developing carpal tunnel syndrome or other debilitating disorders.

The meat industry is already extremely dangerous. According to a report by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, meatpacking workers suffer work-related injuries at twice the rate of other workers. As the report says, the dangers that are already present should be enough to make it clear to the USDA that increasing production line speeds will further put employees at risk. The approval of this rule would be a blatant way of putting profits before safety.

We can even look to the meat industry for proof that this proposed rule would increase dangers to employees. A North American Meat Institute fact sheet, intended to show the safety of line speeds at meat plants, cites the existence of maximum line speeds and the inspections done by USDA inspectors as sources of safety. These elements, however, would be either removed or reduced by the proposed rule. If these are the regulations that the meat industry relies on for safety, then it makes no sense to eliminate them.

Additionally, the proposed rule is largely based on the HACCP-Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP), which involved applying new procedures and responsibilities to five market hog establishments. While these establishments would, in theory, serve as a test-run for the new proposal, in reality the Food Safety and Inspection Service did not adequately oversee the program, according to a report from the Office of the Inspector General. The lack of oversight for the first 15 years of the project throws into question any proof of efficacy that the USDA may claim to have on the basis of HIMP.

Ultimately, it is a matter of common sense to see that increasing line speeds and decreasing the amount of government inspectors will also increase the chances of improper inspection, food contamination, and workplace injuries. If the USDA saw that such measures were unfit to be applied at poultry plants, there is no reason why pork plants should be any different. We must continue to remind the USDA that consumer safety and worker safety need to be of higher priority than profits. Public Citizen has submitted a comment to the USDA urging them to withdraw the proposal. By making our voices heard, we can once again stop these harmful measures from being approved.

mulvaney

Mulvaney Sinks in the Swamp

,

“There’s plenty to be upset about when it comes to Mick Mulvaney’s attempts to roll back consumer financial protections: from his appointment as Acting Director to his plan to dismantle the agency as we know it. Unfortunately, he continues to say outrageous and appalling things.”But it seems he is not yet done making distressing headlines.

Mulvaney was in the news once again this week when he rightly drew flak for comments he made during a speech at an American Bankers Association conference happening in Washington, DC. Addressing the crowd of lawyers and bankers, Mulvaney said, “We had a hierarchy in my office, in Congress. If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you were a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

This statement has drawn attention not so much because the information in it is surprising, but because we are not used to hearing our politicians admit that they are so easily swayed by money. Most people would agree that lobbying is an essential way to provide information to legislators, but if information is being filtered so that it is only coming from those who are donating to politicians’ campaigns, then it is providing a skewed perspective on what is important to the public.

It’s true that Mulvaney went on to say that he would always meet with constituents, regardless of whether they had given him money. And, spokesperson for Mulvaney claimed that “he was making the point that hearing from people back home is vital to our democratic process.” While this may have been the intention, the message we all heard was that influence can be bought. It is essential that constituents are at the top of the hierarchy, but corporate money should not buy a lobbyist’s way to a close second.

News outlets were quick to pick up on the fact that Mulvaney’s comments went against the “drain the swamp” mantra of Trump’s campaign, and that the hierarchy he describes is the definition of pay-to-play. But, with all the backlash focused only on these few sentences, the rest of Mulvaney’s speech has largely fallen under the radar. Which is probably exactly what Mulvaney would hope for.

Most of Mulvaney’s speech focused on his plans for the future of the CFPB. He assured the audience that he would not, in fact, be burning the Bureau down (“If you’ve seen the building, the building, you couldn’t burn the building down if you tried.”) He also said that he wanted to start referring to the Bureau by its proper name, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. This seems like a petty point but, as the New York Times speculated, it could help make the Bureau’s profile less public. Mulvaney also announced his intention to remove public access to the Bureau’s consumer complaints database, a move clearly intended to make the Bureau’s profile less public. The consumer complaint database allows the public to make informed decisions about where to place their trust in the financial industry. Taking that away leaves people more susceptible to illegal practices, thereby undermining the very purpose of the Bureau.

The CFPB (or BCFP, if Mulvaney gets his way) was established in order to ensure that banks, lenders, and other financial companies would be held accountable and treat citizens fairly. Having Mulvaney speak to a crowd of bankers and lenders about his plans to make the Bureau less accessible to the average citizen is blatantly antithetical to the Bureau’s mission.

We’ve suspected for quite some time that Mulvaney practices pay-to-pay. It’s no coincidence that Mulvaney has been giving a helping hand to payday lenders by stopping a rule that would tighten regulations on the loans and ending investigations into multiple lenders. After all, Mulvaney has received almost $63,000 in campaign contributions from payday lenders over the years. It should come as no surprise that the swamp is not being drained, but it is still outrageous to hear the people in charge announce that fact with no sense of shame. Mulvaney has made it clearer than ever that he is not fit to run the CFPB, and that it has fallen on the public to protect the agency that was established to protect us.

eye-3245902_1280

Zuckerberg’s Testimony: Has Anything Changed?

,

The publicized scandals at Facebook involving Russian ads meant to interfere with the 2016 election and the obtainment of user data by Cambridge Analytica have left many Americans wondering whether the ability to share pictures and life updates with their friends was really worth the price of unfair elections and security breaches. Going into Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in front of House and Senate committees, we had hoped that the Facebook CEO would commit to supporting regulation and transparency for his site.

In terms of a commitment to passing legislation, there is reason to be hopeful, at least with regards to the attitudes of members of the House and Senate. Multiple different proposed bills were brought up during the hearings including:

  • The Honest Ads Act – This bipartisan bill proposed by Senator Mark Warner aims at applying the same rules to internet ads that already apply to ads on television, radio, and satellite.
  • The CONSENT Act – Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal aim their bill at “affirmative informed consent,” also focusing on the inclusion of an opt-in feature to give users the choice to share their data.

Support for regulation that crosses partisan lines is heartening, but it remains unlikely that the Zuckerberg hearings will act as a catalyst to get such legislation passed quickly. And, Zuckerberg himself seemed reluctant to pledge his support to any specific legislation. Apart from the Honest Ads Act, for which Zuckerberg affirmed his support in his published testimony, the CEO often repeated that he supported the “principles” involved in proposed legislation, but was reluctant to commit to any “details.” With it being unlikely that legislation will be passed soon, it is worrying that Zuckerberg did not show an eagerness to implement the proposed regulations at his company without the legal motivation to do so. He has committed to changes being made at Facebook, but his follow through remains doubtful.

At the end of the day, Zuckerberg is running a company at Facebook. He affirmed this many times throughout the hearing, referring to Facebook as a “technology company” in response to questions of whether Facebook had veered into the domain of media. Whatever way the company is characterized, however, the fact remains that its responsibility to protect its customers should be a larger concern than its profit margin.

In his testimony, Zuckerberg made sure to point out that Facebook’s increased investment in security would “impact our profitability going forward.” He also repeated many times throughout the hearing that they were working to expand their security team during the course of the year. These words come across as a forced effort on Zuckerberg’s part to show the public that he was willing to take a hit to profits and to spend money on increased security. Yet it seems unlikely that profitability will ever truly be secondary at such a large and rich company. Case in point: after the public spectacle of Tuesday’s trial, Facebook’s stock rose to finish the day at 4.5%.

In terms of economics, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is in a unique position of being able to hold Facebook accountable. The FTC is already investigating whether or not Facebook’s data collection and the Cambridge Analytica event are in violation of their consent decree. If it is found that Facebook did violate the decree, former FTC officials have predicted that Facebook could be looking at fines of upwards of $1 billion. If the FTC follows through on its investigation and penalty, perhaps the economic hit could act as the motivation for Zuckerberg to take privacy seriously and double down on his recent commitments.

Meanwhile, as Zuckerberg faced his interrogation, President Trump turned his attention to the conflict in Syria and stated that the relationship between the U.S. and Russia is “worse now than it has ever been.” Trump’s ever-escalating rhetoric does not inspire confidence that Russian interference with U.S. elections is a thing of the past, yet Russia largely took a back seat to more general privacy concerns during the Zuckerberg hearings. Apart from a thorough questioning by Senator Dianne Feinstein, most of the Senators and Representatives seemed content to take Zuckerberg at his word that steps had been taken to prevent Russian political ads from reaching viewers.

Outside of the House and Senate, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) voted unanimously to move forward with new rules that would require online ads to identify their sponsors. Unfortunately, the FEC only has authority over advertisements that are aimed specifically at getting people to vote for or against a certain candidate, meaning that the Russian ads during the 2016 elections that targeted social issues, rather than candidates, would not fall under the FEC’s jurisdiction. It seems Zuckerberg’s own commitments are once again the best chance for avoiding a repeat of this incident and so, once again, our hope rests in Zuckerberg’s ability to follow through.

With the hearings having concluded, we are left in much the same position as we were when they began. The hearings were largely treated as public spectacle, with some coverage focused solely on Zuckerberg’s attire or the technological illiteracy of older Senators. The public was left with little more knowledge of whether Zuckerberg will follow through on his commitments to transparency and privacy. While we must continue to push for regulatory legislation, we are also still forced to put our faith in the fact that Zuckerberg will put protection before profit and stand up for Facebook’s users.