U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog

• CPSC proposes variety of lead exceptions for comment
  

  The Bush Administration has become notorious for issuing rules and releases late on Fridays, hoping to miss the news cycles. The CPSC may have reached a new nadir when it issued several proposals for comment late Wednesday, December 24th, or Christmas Eve.

  The proposals address various testing requirements and possible exceptions to the 2008 Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act's limits on lead in toys and children's products. (One more on lead was added today.) With the filing of a multi-association petition to the CPSC seeking lead rule delays and exceptions, along with the appearance on the scene of a grassroots effort by "small" toy companies, attacking the new act's tough limits on toxic lead seems to be at the center of industry's strategy to gut the new law's protections. Washington Post last week. CQ story today.

• Will computerized health records protect privacy?
  

  Today's New York Times story by Steve Lohr Health Care That Puts a Computer on the Team extols all of the purported virtues of health information technology and some of the challenges in making it work. Incredibly, the story fails to discuss its biggest challenge--privacy. The phalanx of powerful special interests and beltway bandits sweeping along well-intentioned medical and research organizations to help them push Congress to spend big on computerized health records has so far failed to ensure adequate privacy guarantees. When consent is granted virtually automatically, as it will be in these systems, privacy is at risk. Congress must go further to ensure that computerization of health records doesn't represent the death of privacy protection. For more information worldprivacyforum.org

• Noted: Bush pardons real estate scammer NOT
  

  UPDATE: More from the NYTimes story on Christmas Day. From the New York Times City Room blog: Updated, 6:27 p.m. In an unusual move, President Bush on Wednesday reversed his decision, announced a day earlier, to pardon Isaac R. Toussie, a Brooklyn developer who pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining federally insured mortgages and to defrauding Suffolk County, N.Y., by selling it overpriced land.

  Original post: From Newsday: Bush pardons man involved in Suffolk real estate scam. Isaac Robert Toussie, the Brooklyn developer who served time in prison for masterminding a massive Suffolk real estate scam, was pardoned Tuesday by President George W. Bush, effectively wiping his criminal record clean. [...] Toussie pleaded guilty to charges in two separate cases. In one, he admitted in 2001 that he had made false statements to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, pleading guilty to a count of falsifying loan documents that illegally qualified about 100 home buyers for the HUD-backed mortgages.

• Release: Criticizes midnight regulation on toll roads
  

  U.S. PIRG's senior tax and budget analyst Phineas Baxandall, Ph.D., has issued a release harshly critical of the Bush administration's latest midnight regulation: New Federal Rule Requires Public Toll Roads to Mimic Profit Motives of Private Companies. Excerpt: Last week a little-noticed action was published in the Federal Register that will make it difficult over time for states to keep their toll roads public or to operate them differently from private toll roads.[...] “This is a truly radical rule that sets a dangerous precedent,” said Baxandall. Full release follows after the jump:

• Release on new Fed overdraft proposal
  

  As part of their new credit card rules approved last week making certain unfair practices illegal, the regulators had also intended to finalize an additional -- quite weak -- rule regulating the lucrative "bounce protection" programs that banks have used to collect billions in overdraft fees. While the regulators did at the same time as they approved the credit card rules, withdraw their mediocre overdraft rule, what they ended up doing is weak also. We joined other leading groups in a news release explaining the problems with what the Fed ending up doing-- proposing two alternatives instead. The Fed's new proposal is based on two supposed alternatives. The first, an opt-out, is unacceptable; the second, an opt-in, is marginally acceptable, although the remainder of the new rule proposal simply fails to address all of the other inherent problems with overdraft loan programs. The Fed should have simply immediately required that no consumer could be enrolled automatically in one of these programs without an affirmative opt-in (e.g., without a comment period), and then proposed rules only to address the other problems with these bounce protection programs. Instead, the Fed proposed an opt-in to address some of the problems, but inanely asked for comment as to how it compared with an opt-out (duh) and ignored the myriad other problems with bounce protection in its proposal. How bad are overdraft programs? One study by our colleagues at the Center for Responsible Lending found that "the typical overdraft loan triggered by a debit card, incurring a $34 fee, is only $17." Excerpts from our joint news release explaining that:

• Lessig in Newsweek: Reboot the FCC
  

  Internet guru Larry Lessig has an interesting op-ed in Newsweek: Reboot the FCC:
  We'll stifle the Skypes and YouTubes of the future if we don't demolish the regulators that oversee our digital pipelines.[...] President Obama should get Congress to shut down the FCC and similar vestigial regulators, which put stability and special interests above the public good. In their place, Congress should create something we could call the Innovation Environment Protection Agency (iEPA), charged with a simple founding mission: "minimal intervention to maximize innovation." The iEPA's core purpose would be to protect innovation from its two historical enemies—excessive government favors, and excessive private monopoly power.

• FTC issues report on credit bureau accuracy, orders insurers to provide scoring data
  

  Today the FTC issued a Congressionally-mandated interim study on the accuracy of credit reports.

  The FTC also ordered nine large insurance companies "to produce information for a study on the use and effect of credit-based insurance scores on consumers of homeowners insurance." Our previous blog on issues related to use of credit reports to determine insurance eligibility. Blog excerpt: Should your car insurance bill be based on how many claims, accidents and speeding tickets you have? Makes sense to us but not to the insurance industry. They want to base your rates on whether you paid your Mastercard on time last month and whether your credit score is high enough. There are also major questions as to whether credit scoring illegally discriminates, since otherwise similar applicants who are white have higher scores than persons of color.

• States: Laboratories of Democracy
  

  Two important new reports opposing state consumer health and safety law preemption:

• From the scholars at the Center for Progressive Reform: