Should Companies Write Their Own Safety Standards ???

With bill S.697, the chemical industry is about to be given free reign to write their own safety standards. Unless, they are willing to drink their own glyphosate to prove it is “completely safe” as one Patrick Moore recently refused to do, then it hardly makes sense for them to decide if their own products meet safety requirements for the public.

Congress hasn’t passed a chemical control bill since 1976, with the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). But this was even ‘broken from the start,” according to the Environmental Working Group (EWG).

The TSCA grandfathered in thousands of chemicals that were already on the market at the time, even though most of them were extremely hazardous to human health. That act didn’t even allow the EPA to ban asbestos, which is a known cause of cancer.

This new bill would essentially give companies like Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and Syngenta the authority to call their own toxic chemicals ‘safe’ when regulatory bodies elsewhere have called them carcinogenic, and even deadly.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-chemical-companies-to-write-own-chemical-safety-standards-with-bill-s-697/5453071

The author makes some good points, but that's not the whole story.

I once worked for a large state environmental agency. My assignments included researching and drafting new rules of the type the author discusses above.

One of the problems I encountered was a shortage of expertise on the government side of the fence. Typically state government employees are grossly underpaid, and many leave government service at the first opportunity to work for the people they once regulated. Like everyone else, they have to pay the bills and often this is the only way they can.

So what to do if private industry employs most of the experts? What the author implies is that instead of working with them to write valid rules, government should consider all corporations to be liars and cheaters who cannot be trusted. If that's what we want, fine. But keep in mind that means that many new rules will be written by people with absolutely no education or experience in the industries they are trying to regulate. What kind of rules do you suppose they will write?