A recent study found that when pharmaceutical companies fund reports about drug trials, the medicine in question is more often given a high rating than when the reports are funded by government or nonprofit sources.... In an analysis of reports about hypertension medication conducted from 1996 to 2002, University of Washington at Seattle medical resident Veronica Yank found that drug-company-sponsored studies reported a 93 percent approval rate. Government- and academic-funded studies reported a success rates hovering around 79 percent.

Bush Nominates Partner in Union-Busting Law Firm and Big Contributor to Head OSHA

Edwin Foulke was nominated last week to become the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Foulke’s main qualifications for the job are that he is a labor lawyer and was chair of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) for five years in the early 1990s.

Foulke’s career as a labor lawyer has been with Jackson-Lewis, a national law firm that prides itself as being "management’s #1 choice for union avoidance training for the past 10 years. . . ."

When Foulke served on OSHRC, which is a quasi-judicial body that hears employer appeals of OSHA citations, he led a successful effort to reduce OSHA’s enforcement capabilities. One of his most controversial decisions reversed years of precedent and seriously weakened OSHA enforcement. Foulke found that OSHA could not assess multiple penalties for violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s "general duty clause" that exposed more than one employee to the same hazard. To justify that decision, Foulke endorsed an opinion that had to discredit the law’s reference "to each of his employees" by characterizing it a merely a "rhetorical nicety. . . ."

Foulke’s resume includes his status as a "Bush Pioneer" in 2004, meaning that he was responsible for raising at least $100,000 for Bush’s campaign. Last year when Foulke ran an unsuccessful campaign to become a Republican National Committeeman, he posted this autobiographical sketch on his website, www.foulke4rnc.com: "I am a life long pro-life, pro-family, social and fiscal conservative Republican. ... As a Reagan Republican, I firmly believe in less government, a strong national defense, lower taxes and personal responsibility and I have the record to prove it. . . ."

In other words, corporations have now succeeded in getting themselves "regulated" by a set of laws and rules that effectively paralyze government regulators. Regulation of chemicals has effectively ended. The regulatory system now regulates not industry but environmentalists, in the sense that it narrowly defines and restricts the responses that they can make to corporate harms. By channeling environmentalist responses into industry-defined activities, the regulatory system makes environmentalists entirely predictable and therefore manageable.

But all is not lost. Industry's strategy for ending government regulation has an Achilles' heel. The whole strategy rests on the assumption that, when the science is uncertain, we should proceed with "business as usual" until harm can be proven to a scientific certainty. The precautionary principle turns this assumption on its head, saying, "When the science is uncertain, but there is evidence of harm, we have a duty to take precautionary action to prevent harm." If the precautionary principle were adopted, industry's elaborate strategy for paralyzing government would crumble.

Could this be why the chemical industry and the Bush administration have mounted a coordinated campaign to discredit, demonize, and derail the precautionary principle? You think?

Writing the precautionary principle into local laws -- and perhaps more importantly into corporate charters -- would fundamentally change the balance of power between people and money. What a worthy fight this is!