Exposed, The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products...

The main treatise of this book is not so much about what's poisoning us in our everyday lives, although that is mentioned, it is that the US no longer controls industry standards because the EU has taken the lead in banishing toxins from multiple industries including electronics, cosmetics, and children's toys as well as banning genetically engineered foods. It has also led the way in demanding that manufacturers take back products at the end of its lifecycle. All this is significant because the EU is also influencing China and India and other emerging economies. This sidestepping of the Bush administration's resistance to change has caused us to remain the guinea pigs for not only our own industry, but also serving as a dumping ground for products that cannot be sold in the EU and other regulated countries.

The book describes the historical precedence that has laid the way for this parting of the ways with the EU. The US chose to monitor dangerous products by allowing citizens to sue for damages when they are hurt by products. This litigious climate of consumer protection is a process that industry has, of course, worked to erode. Meanwhile in Europe, lawsuits were not much tolerated and settlements were small, but citizens had a political climate that demanded that the government protect them from dangerous products in the first place, thus was born the precautionary principle. The difference between the two is that, with the cautionary principle, the burden of proof is on the manufacturer to prove that their product is safe while our approach puts the burden of proof on the consumer to prove that a product is unsafe. In other words our brand of capitalism allowed business to flourish at the risk of consumers while their democracy put citizen safety first and let industry operate within those parameters. (In reality they fight over this just as much as we do, but the base from which they begin is different.)

I also took note that the generic brands are the most likely to fall to the bottom of the regulations heirarchy since the "white box" stores that sell these products always seek the path of least resistance, ie cheapest, easiest to make and least likely to object customer. This is politically interesting because activists are always going after the name brands, but nothing is ever done about the off off off Broadway brands.

The most interesting implication of this shift in power towards the EU is that it has reversed the "race to the bottom" that globalization forced upon us and has used it to leverage up the lax standards of US industry. If this writer had used more inflammatory language such as "race to the bottom" this book would have been much more exciting to read instead of the dry as dust slog it was. I might also add that the implications of this shift points to how free market capitalism is trumped by heavily regulated capitalism (formally socialized democracy). So there.