May 21, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

TOXIC FOOD

In the past several months it's gotten scarier to eat. We had contaminated spinach. We had killer pet food. We know there is a danger of mad cow disease getting into our food supply. But right-wingers will smugly proclaim the virtues of the "free market." The "market" will police itself, they tell us, even though a few people might get really sick or die thanks to the rapaciousness of the "market." Government has some vital and necessary functions to perform. Insuring the safety of the food supply is one of those functions. This column by Paul Krugman is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:

These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.

Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.

Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. U.S. officials can’t inspect overseas food-processing plants without the permission of foreign governments — and since the Food and Drug Administration has limited funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And that’s not a healthy place to be, especially when it comes to imports from China, where the state of food safety is roughly what it was in this country before the Progressive movement.

BENDING THE ANALYSES

Mark Twain wrote about lies, damned lies, and statistics. So it goes with right-wingers. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, we were told that the Reagan era tax cuts were a bonanza for the economy, creating new jobs and tax revenues. Those nasty deficits, they said, were just due to too much Congressional spending. We got twisted "facts" and statistics to support the attack on Iraq. We've gotten twisted "facts" to support the concept of globalization. It's time to push aside the statistics and look at reality. This editorial by Dean Baker is linked at www.truthout.org:

Unfortunately, the Iraq war is not the only example of experts bending their analysis to suit those in power. This is the standard methodology of modern economics.

For example, when President Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, his economists used projections that assumed that stock prices would continue to soar for decades, even as they projected that the economy - and corporate profits - would stagnate. While the inconsistency of these assumptions could be shown with simple arithmetic, even most critics of Social Security privatization were too polite to point out that President Bush's numbers didn't add up.

Until the mid-nineties, mainstream economists held it as an absolute article of faith that the unemployment rate could not fall below six percent without triggering explosive inflation. Because of his quirky background, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan chose to ignore the consensus view, and pursued an interest rate policy that allowed the unemployment rate to fall to four percent. As a result, millions of additional workers were able to get jobs, and there was the first period of broadly based wage growth in a quarter century. And there was no inflationary spike. Yet, there was no serious effort to re-examine the consensus view in economics that had said such prosperity was impossible.

As yet another example, economists tell the public that the upward redistribution of wage income of the last quarter-century was simply the result of changes in technology that favor more educated workers. This argument means that the upward redistribution is a sort of natural phenomenon. According to the mainstream of the economics profession, it has nothing to do with trade and immigration policies that are designed to put less- educated workers in competition with people in the developing world, or [with] anti-union policies that undermine the ability of workers to bargain collectively.

April 23, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


WE'RE EXPENDABLE

Conservative politicians hate regulation. They think it just stifles the ability for businesses to make money when they have to consider little things like public health and safety. Corporations, for their part, like to do cost-benefit analyses. Will lawsuits be more expensive than cutting corners here and there? How will a few deaths affect our bottom line? We learn now that the Food and Drug Administration knew about contaminated food going into the food supply, but relied on producers to "police themselves." Yeah, that's going to happen. This story by Elizabeth Williamson is at www.washingtonpost.com:

The Food and Drug Administration has known for years about contamination problems at a Georgia peanut butter plant and on California spinach farms that led to disease outbreaks that killed three people, sickened hundreds, and forced one of the biggest product recalls in U.S. history, documents and interviews show.

Overwhelmed by huge growth in the number of food processors and imports, however, the agency took only limited steps to address the problems and relied on producers to police themselves, according to agency documents.

Congressional critics and consumer advocates said both episodes show that the agency is incapable of adequately protecting the safety of the food supply.

FDA officials conceded that the agency's system needs to be overhauled to meet today's demands, but contended that the agency could not have done anything to prevent either contamination episode.