I proudly keep a box of Buckyballs on my desk to express solidarity with yet one more victim of the Obama administration’s regulatory overreach and vindictiveness.
Buckyballs are small, round, magnetic balls that can be used to make various shapes, the kind of thing adults tinker with when they’re stuck on a boring conference call.
But Buckyballs are also small enough to be swallowed by children, and a few dozen have. USA Today relates the case of a 12-year-old California girl who was trying to simulate a tongue piercing to her friends by putting a Buckyball on her tongue. She ended up swallowing four of the balls and needed two surgeries to remove them.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission, run by an Obama appointee, filed suit in July 2012 to stop the sale of Buckyballs, claiming the product posed a “substantial product hazard.” CPSC claimed that several warnings on the package were ineffective—How many warnings does it take to stop carelessness or stupidity?—and asked stores to pull it from their shelves.
But Craig Zucker, CEO of the company that made Buckyballs, decided to exercise his First Amendment rights to criticize the administration’s actions. That may cost him.
CPSC is ignoring the fact that Zucker ran a limited-liability corporation, and is seeking $57 million from him personally to cover liability costs. It’s a very odd legal theory.
Zucker thinks it’s a vendetta because although he jumped through initial hoops to ensure the product was only being sold to adults, he didn’t bow and go away quietly—to say the least. He points out that it is not illegal to sell Buckyball-type products even now, and says there are other similar products (e.g., Nano Balls) still on department store shelves.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen over and over from the Obama administration. Companies and individuals unwilling to kowtow to the administration’s diktats, regardless of how unreasonable they may be, will be punished.
Whether it’s individuals refusing to buy approved health insurance, refiners’ unable to buy millions of gallons of cellulosic ethanol to mix in gasoline because none exists, conservative groups seeking a tax-exempt status, or a Washington reporter talking to administration leakers, Team Obama penalizes and may try to crush vocal dissenters.
As CNN news anchor Carol Costello recently admitted, “President Obama’s people can be quite nasty. They don’t like you to say anything bad about their boss, and they’re not afraid to use whatever means they have at hand to stop you from doing that, including threatening your job.”
Or shaking you down for $57 million.
October 29, 2013