Salmonella Nation

Remember when President Obama assured us that no Americans would ever be placed on his Targeted Kill List? Well... not so fast. If he has his way, thousands of us will get sick, even die, from eating tainted eggs, meat and poultry. Michelle Obama's Let's Move program touting healthy diets will morph into Let's Move to get to the bathroom on time.

Even though studies show that at least two-thirds of the chicken sold in this country carry bacteria, President Obama's budget is calling for an unbelievably drastic reduction in USDA poultry inspectors. He apparently thinks that the Wall Street method of self-regulation, which has obviously worked out just fine for defrauded homeowners and looted pension plans, will work just as well for factory farms. He apparently thinks that thousands or millions of  new cases of salmonella a year are the price we must pay in order to have a thriving free market. He apparently has learned no lessons from the hundreds of cases of fungal meningitis caused by that self-regulating compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts. 

It's the usual blatant pro-corporate rationale behind most of this administration's deregulatory actions. Firing federal poultry inspectors who protect the public health would actually save only a paltry amount of taxpayer money. But firing poultry inspectors who protect the public health will greatly enhance the bank accounts of the factory farms. Their profits will bloat even faster than a salmonella-infested oven stuffer roaster. The fox-guarding-the-henhouse way of doing business will be taken to a whole new literal level.

Under current procedures, teams of USDA inspectors working at America's poultry plants are now able to examine about 35 chickens a minute as they come flying down the assembly lines. Under Obama's proposal, the reduction in staff would result in a lone token inspector having to examine 175 birds in the same time frame -- a physical impossibility. As a result, the rate of production could potentially increase by five-fold.

Tony Corbo, of the public policy group Food and Water Watch, notes that a pilot program replacing government Agriculture inspectors with self-policing industry employees has already been proven dangerous. Salmonella cases actually increased, and even carcasses bearing obvious fecal contamination were being missed. In an interview with the Real News Network, Corbo said the Obama Administration is well aware of these dire statistics, but is playing fast and loose with the public health anyway:  

I mean, when the administration proposed their regulation, they had a report doing an evaluation of these pilot plants. And it showed the last two years of data that they collected, that the pilot plants had actually higher salmonella rates than the conventionally inspected plants. And lo and behold, just this past month--USDA does a monthly report on the testing that the government does in these plants to test to see if the salmonella rates are either high or low, and two of the pilot plants showed up as failing the salmonella test.

So here's the ultimate irony. The administration keeps on going around and saying that this new model, this new inspection model is going to be able to reduce salmonella, and yet all of the evidence points the other way.
 

And just as an aside: the Office of Management and Budget, largely responsible for the relentless deregulation frenzy in the Obama Administration, will now be headed by Walmart executive Sylvia Mathews Burwell. Walmart sells a whole lot of chicken. Just sayin'. 

And here we thought Chained CPI represented the ultimate in  cruelty. Not only will we be forced to eat cat food, we'll be forced to eat tainted Walmart cat food.
 
 

Being Margaret Thatcher

Barack Obama opened his oversized vintage 80s handbag this morning and dumped the entire contents on a sleepy unsuspecting public. No cash -- just a pile of IOUs payable to the Wall Street elites, to be drawn from our Social Security trust fund to go straight to their trillion-dollar tax-free offshore bank accounts and CEO pay packages.

The only shocker is that there are still a few hold-outs who are still shocked by the Great Betrayal. Happily, most New York Times reader-commenters are up in arms, with one woman (Renee of Manhattan) even suggesting that Barack be dragged bodily from the White House. I hope she does not receive a visit from the Secret Soyvice! Here is my comment:

Mr. Obama will dine with a dozen Republicans tonight, feasting on gourmet goodies as they discuss imposing a diet of cat food on a nation of struggling retirees, veterans, widowed parents and orphans, and the disabled.

Despite what the president says, his is not a balanced approach. Economist Dean Baker has crunched the numbers, and the upshot of Chained CPI will be that poorer people will be contributing at three times the rate as those making over $450,000. And those pesky tax loopholes? They'll be closed temporarily, and then lobbyists bearing scissors will descend upon Congress to let the snipping open begin anew.

But the cuts to our safety net would be permanent, and Obama's proposals represent a sneaky backdoor way to eventual privatization.

More than 80% of Americans polled do not want Social Security, which has added not one dime to the deficit, touched. If anything, we should scrap the cap on FICA contributions to ensure the program's solvency into perpetuity. In this time of chronic unemployment and underemployment, with one in five Americans living in poverty, we should actually be lowering the retirement age and raising benefits.

That a Democratic president is doing the cruel bidding of Wall Street and the deficit hawks instead of doing the bidding of the people who re-elected him is proof positive that lesser evilism is still pretty darned rotten. I hope he's ready for a fight -- because he'll be getting a big one.
 

I usually don't sign petitions, (they're just hooks for endless fund-raising appeals) but I made an exception this week, and for the hell of it added my name to 2 million other signatures delivered yesterday to the White House by Sen. Bernie Sanders and a while contingent of demonstrators. As you can tell by the contents spewing out of his Thatcher carry-all today, Obama must have cackled gleefully if he even deigned to give it a glance. Of course, when people like Sanders and the other sundry inhabitants of the veal pen preface their protests with "I am a big supporter of the president, but....", who wouldn't burst out guffawing? Also humorous are the hordes who continue to insist that the president is being "forced" to cut the safety net by all those nasty Republicans. 

But if you like gallows humor as I do, what could be more laugh-out-loud hilarious than Obama sending his new Treasury Secretary to Europe to lecture them on the dangers of austerity?  As Yves Smith writes today, it must be getting awfully hard out there for an Obamabot.

Maundering Monday (Links, Chains & Threads)

The Iron Lady: rust to dust.  

Eleven dead Afghan children are just a thorny issue in the American side. But a couple of Americans killed during the endless aggressive American occupation of their country? A deplorable humanitarian tragedy of epic proportions. Dead Muslim babies are a sticky wicket, having the nerve to get themselves murdered in the middle of a valiant American effort to protect American lives during American airstrikes in which Americans shockingly also get killed anyway, when they're only there to help Afghan children learn to read American books. (NY Times.)

President Obama is running out of legacy-burnishing time, probably because the American corporate media are wasting their rags and apple polish on the rotten little crab The One. He's only got 10 days to close the deal on guns, 'gration, and gutting (the safety net.)

According to Obama's former bankster-budget director-turned bankster pal Peter Orszag, chained CPI won't even save much money as it condemns millions of Americans to needless suffering and early deaths. So, sez Pete, the fact that Obama is pushing for it anyway makes him one brave crusading asshole.

The president is having second thoughts (or pretending to) on his Terror Tuesday baseball card collection. The likely scenario, of course, is that he's just resorting to more liar's poker, gushing anonymously to NY Times reporters in yet another bout of legacy-burnishing propaganda, preparatory to his much-anticipated burble to the American people on Drones. Having killed thousands of people "over there", he could well be running out of victims. Maybe the killing game is boring him. Plus, killing people is not who he is as a country. Plus, the ends don't necessarily justify the means, especially when there's plenty of domestic means-testing on his plate already.

Apparently feeling no tinglings of cognitive dissonance, let alone irony, the president is traveling to Connecticut today to shed more glycerine tears for dead American children and to deplore the civilian use of American-manufactured terrorist weapons and ammo.

When the town of Mayflower turns into the town of Oilslick, the real government of Exxon-Mobil takes over -- the water, the land and even the skies are off-limits to reporters. Deja Deepwater Horizon vu all over again. It even looks like they're cleaning up their mess with cheap Oil Baron Koch Brothers Bounty paper towels:  

The Quicker Slicker Picker-Upper

 

Asses and Asteroids

Included in Barack's Budget is $100 million for NASA to go into space and lasso a 500-ton asteroid to bring back to earth. Maybe he can use his space junk to beat the old, the young, the sick and the poor to death quickly instead of imposing slow starvation upon them through his austerity manifesto. Or else, he can pay a few McWorkers $7.50 an hour to have them sledge-hammer it into a million tiny pieces, sell them in the online Obama Store, and use the proceeds for construction of his billion-dollar Presidential Cathedral. On second thought, he'll use unpaid interns, call them grass-roots activists, and hit them up for a $5 donation.

But it gets even weirder. For some reason, Obama also wants to put an astronaut on an asteroid by 2025. I think he might be suffering from a case of arrested development, thinking that  Antoine de St-Exupéry's fable of a young prince is all about himself -- similar to Paul Ryan thinking Ayn Rand was an actual economist. Maybe Obama can find an asteroid named B-612, that has volcanoes, a baobab tree and a sexy rose. And he can go himself, right now. Because although he may not really be a prince, his deficit-cutting ideas that stick it to ordinary people are definitely on the petty side.



Sharez la Sacrifice, S'il Vous Plait

Meanwhile, back on earth, while the Obamian imposition of chained CPI for Social Security recipients amounts to snatching several meals a month from the mouths of the old, the surviving, the sick and the disabled, our government is ironically force-feeding Gitmo prisoners who are currently conducting a hunger strike. The inmates, many of whom have been ordered released, are protesting the utter and cruel illegality of being kept behind bars. They have reached the point where they just want to die. Our leaders don't want to let them go, however,  for fear that they might fall in with a bad crowd, especially in places like Yemen where the bad crowds are growing every day due to their friends and families being bugsplatted by American drones. Of course, the Obama Administration is shoving feeding tubes into them out of sincere concern for their well-being. The Obama Administration needs a kick in its ass-teroid. 

 

In other news, the esteemed sycophants of the corporate journalistic class are keeping secret the name of a CIA operative up for promotion to a top spot in the agency because she was supposedly instrumental in the destruction of evidence showing that the United States tortured prisoners at Gitmo and elsewhere. The NY Times and the Washington Post are therefore awarded this week's Ass-teroid Prize for excellence in media malpractice.

Murder, Inc.

The overseas victims of President Obama's drone attacks no longer need feel so all alone. That's because Barack has just added 330 million Americans to his Kill List. 

Make no mistake. Coupled with the festering Sequester Sasquatch, his proposed budget will cause people to die. Not only is he forging ahead with his Chained CPI formula for cutting lifetime Social Security benefits, he wants to reduce disability payments, Medicare payments, veterans' benefits and unemployment assistance. He even wants to hasten the demise of the United States Postal Service, perhaps to cut down on the well-deserved hate mail that will be flooding his corporate board offices, mansions, and billion-dollar cathedral of a presidential library for the rest of his misbegotten life.

I guess the only things more infuriating than President Obama are those few diehard loyalists who think we should cheer for the man just because he'll make the Republicans look stupid as he starves, sickens and kills us. Or pundits like Ezra Klein who labor under the theory that Obama is still playing a cute game of 11-dimensional chess. Writes Klein:

The upside of this strategy is clear: Obama gets “caught trying” on a budget compromise. House Republicans have put forward a series of extremely conservative budget proposals that show no interest in a compromise. Senate Democrats have a more modest plan, but one that doesn’t include any notable concessions to Republicans. Obama will position himself in the middle. He will include, in public, high-profile concessions to Republicans — though he will emphasize that he’ll only accept those concessions if they come with significant new revenues. No one will be able to say he isn’t trying to reach a deal, and the cries from liberals will prove that he’s forcing his base to accept very tough medicine.
 

Readers' comments to the New York Times's piece on the Obama slash-o-rama were almost universally scathing. But this example of good, slavering, dutiful citizenship is what the paper's Obama-friendly sycophantic team of moderators chose to showcase on the homepage:

Maybe he's making this compromise because he thinks it's better for ordinary Americans on net, or maybe he's bluffing as part of a political strategy to box in the other side. Either way, I won't pretend to know better.

One consolatory bit of news today -- a federal court has just overruled his paternalistic, misogynistic and "bad faith" ban on over-the-counter sales of the morning-after contraceptive pill to teenage girls, including to his precious Sasha and Malia.

If Obama cared anything about struggling people, he'd call for an immediate ban on the sale of over-the-counter rat poison. Some people, facing a lifetime diet of Walmart cat food, eviction from rental properties owned by vulture capitalists, bankruptcy from medical bills unassuaged by ObamaCare, will no doubt choose to take the quicker way out than suffering his death by a thousand cuts. 

House of Pain

Here's my problem with much of the media coverage of the gratuitous and cruel imposition of national austerity known as Sequestration -- or if you will, "The Sequester." No human faces or names are even being appended to it anymore. The generic Congress Critters gave birth in their laboratory, and abandoned the baby. And we, to paraphrase a line in H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, have become the bubbles blown by the baby.

So, instead of "President Obama and hundreds of bought-and-paid-for politicians in Congress are cutting thousands of poor children from Head Start", we're being told that the Sequester Did It.

Today's Washington Post headline blares "Cancer Clinics Are Turning Away Thousands of Medicare Patients. Blame the Sequester."

The Huffington Post is running a shocking piece that lists 100 agencies already feeling the "stinging cuts" of the Sequester. Wow. That Sequester sure is one sharp-nailed beast, huh? We certainly didn't see that one coming out of the torture chamber known as Washington. And Congress is still on vacation, raising all that campaign cash.  

Words matter. Semantics matter. Media should be naming and shaming. Instead, they're allowing the politicians to not only disown responsibility for the monster they created, but to act as though there is no way to just kill the damn thing.

"They had certain Fixed Ideas implanted (by Moreau... Pete Peterson?)  in their minds which absolutely bounded their imaginations. They really were hypnotized, had been told certain things were impossible, and certain things were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute." (H.G. Wells)

Chillingly, our elected officials are now actually celebrating and embracing austerity by ostentatiously giving up some of their own perks and pennies to appease their vile creation. They pretend to suffer in order to make us feel like whiners if we're not enjoying our own suffering. 

President Obama, leading from behind even as he kicks the public in its collective behind, is playing Austerity Catch-up by relinquishing a paltry portion of his own paycheck to the Treasury in order to show "solidarity" with federal workers victimized by the Frankenstein Furlough. Instead of demanding Death to Sequester, he is helping to push austerity normalization right along. The politicians who have now disowned their monster will be falling all over themselves to Give Back in a massive outbreak of noblesse oblige. The Huffington Post will no doubt start running a tally of all the political holdouts who are selfishly withholding their paychecks from the Share the Sacrifice Cause -- much as they are doing now for the pols who are still refusing to jump on the Gay Marriage bandwagon.

And as far as sending a check to the Treasury is concerned, Obama might as well be writing a check to Goldman Sachs, Exxon-Mobil, G.E. or any number of tax-exempt, tax-evading corporate welfare queens who treat our national community chest as their own personal piggy bank. His gesture would mean more if he contributed to one of those community cancer centers turning away chemo patients, or to a local subsidized day nursery having to lay off its minimum-wage child care providers. 

Instead of calling for shared prosperity, the president is holding himself up as a paragon of shared austerity. For a guy who just issued a clarion call to map the human brain, he is not demonstrating too much in the way of either brains or empathy. Then again, he is more Reagan than Johnson, more Hoover than FDR, more Dr. Moreau than Dr. Schweitzer.

And his 5% contribution is not even particularly generous, let alone original. The LA Times provides some history:

Herbert Hoover put his salary in a separate account, then divvied it up, giving part to charity and part to employees he felt were underpaid, according to an interview he gave in 1937. John F. Kennedy donated his presidential salary to various charities, according to Stacey Chandler, an archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

George Washington refused pay during the latter part of his military career, according to researchers at Mount Vernon. He tried to refuse a presidential salary, but Congress required that the position pay $25,000.

Next up -- privatized soup kitchens, since the Sequester Creature is eating up all the goodies in the subsidized food banks and nutrition programs. Maybe they can even be funded by mobsters and drug cartels. Maybe there's a 21st century Al Capone waiting in the wings to feed hungry children. Maybe the Walmart heirs can share the sacrifice and clean up their own grisly image by volunteering to man the IV drips in the community cancer clinics.

Nah, scrub that idea. There have already been too many cheesy remakes of The Island of Dr. Moreau. 

 

Paranoia Runs Deep

I can hardly wait to see what the official Map of the Brain will look like. Because judging from the results of the most recent Public Policy Poll, the cartography of many a mind will reveal that the synapses are flashing with shreds of tinfoil along with the usual microbursts of electricity. 

The Truthers, Birthers, Preppers, Sovereign Citizens, Michele Bachmanns and Rick Santorums of the world are not so fringe-y as you might think. (Either that, or the poll is fatally flawed because a fifth of the respondents coincidentally reside in Gooberville, Florida. Or that the people who dreamed up these wacko questions reside in Gooberville, Florida) Some of the findings: 

 Twenty-eight percent of voters believe that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order. 34% of Republicans and 35% of independents believe in the New World Order threat compared to just 15% of Democrats.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans agree that climate change  is a conspiracy, while 77% of Democrats disagree.

Twenty percent of Republicans believe that President Obama is the Anti-Christ, compared to 13% of independents and 6% of Democrats who agree.

Twenty-nine percent believe aliens exist, and 21% believe the government is covering up an alien spaceship crash in Roswell, New Mexico.

But there is hope. Only 4% of us believe in shape-shifting lizard people and a mere 5% think that Paul McCartney was killed in a car crash in 1966 and then secretly replaced by a look-alike so the Beatles could continue. Similar segments of the population think the government is controlling them through their TV sets and that the white jet exhaust you see in the sky is actually a chemical the government is spraying to poison people. These poor souls probably had the bad luck to be contacted by this psycho-baiter of a polling company the same day they forgot to take their meds. They probably also believe that the polling people who always call at the dinner hour are annoying evil pod people -- and they would be right.

On the other hand, some of the answers to the questions were way too naive for my taste.  For example, only 15% of respondents believe that pharmaceutical companies would be so psychopathic as to invent diseases in order to sell their drugs. How about that sudden unexplained epidemic of ADHD currently plaguing our nation, necessitating billions of dollars in sales of Ritalin and Adderall?

And while it is probably true, as 86% of us believe, that the CIA never distributed crack cocaine to inner city youth, how about those LSD experiments conducted by the Army and the Public Health Service's infamous syphilis experiment on black men in Tuskegee? There is a history here.

The paradox to be gleaned from the polling is that while we are afraid of nonexistent threats, we tend to scoff at the real deal. We are both too skeptical, and not skeptical enough.

Sometimes, they really are out to get you.