DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

We have seen the future, and it sucks.

CPSC Sues Defiant CEO Individually in Buckyball Case

19th August 2013

Walter Olson blows the whistle, but probably won’t get the adulation that Manning and Snowden get.

A year ago I wrote: “It’s rare for a regulated company to mount open and disrespectful resistance to a federal regulatory agency, but that’s what the maker of BuckyBalls, the popular desktop magnetic toy, is doing in response to the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s effort to ban its product.” The maker in question had devised cheeky, sarcastic ads asking why other products with injurious potential (coconuts, hot dogs) weren’t banned on the CPSC’s logic.

One reason it’s rare to mount open and disrespectful resistance to a federal agency is that agencies have so many ways to make businesspeople’s lives unhappy. This spring, breaking new legal ground, the CPSC reached out and named CEO Craig Zucker personally as a respondent in its recall proceeding.

You make fun of the big boys, they punish you.

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