House leader invites corporate criminals to submit regulatory wish lists

Cross-posted from a Facing South article by Sue Sturgis.

The new chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been sending letters to various companies and industry groups asking business leaders what regulations they think should be stricken -- and among those whose ideas he solicited are companies with a history of serious wrongdoing.

Politico reports that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) sent more than 150 queries last month to companies, industry associations and anti-regulatory think tanks. While the effort has sparked criticism that the Republican leadership is too cozy with big business, new House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has promised that lifting "job-killing regulations" will be a top priority in the new Congress.

However, some of the companies that Issa has reached out to appear to be most in need of strict regulatory oversight, as they have a track record of illegal actions that have jeopardized the public's safety and health. They include:

* Duke Energy. In 2009, the North Carolina-based power company agreed to pay $93 million to resolve Clean Air Act violations at an Indiana power plant. The company broke the law by failing to obtain required permits and pollution controls before making modifications at the plant that significant increased air emissions. Duke is also currently embroiled in a controversy over possible ethics violations involving its executives and Indiana regulators.

* Toyota. The Japanese auto maker, whose North American manufacturing headquarters are located in Hebron, Ky., was fined over $48 million last year by the U.S. government for failing to report known safety problems in a timely manner as required by law.

* Bayer. The German chemical conglomerate was fined $460,000 for various safety violations by West Virginia regulators after a 2008 explosion at its Bayer CropScience plant in Institute, W.Va. killed two workers. The violations involved the storage of methyl isocyanate, the deadly chemical that was involved in the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India that killed more than 3,700 people. Bayer has also been embroiled in lawsuits over its contamination of the U.S. rice crop with an unapproved genetically modified strain.

* FMC Corp. The Pennsylvania-based chemical company has paid fines for air pollution violations in Maryland, Delaware and Idaho, with some incidents injuring nearby residents and killing wildlife. The company was also fined 14.4 million euros last year for its involvement in an illegal scheme to fix prices of an animal-feed chemical in Europe.

Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, blasted Issa's effort as "inviting businesses to tell us what they want us to do as opposed to protecting the American people."

UPDATE: For a full list of organizations that Issa sent letters to, check out this report from The Hill. For more details on the criminal history of FMC Corp., see this story by Dirt Diggers Digest.