PLENTY OF BLAME TO GO AROUND FOR POISONED FOOD SUPPLY: BUSH, McCONNELL, MILTON FRIEDMAN... MEAN JEAN SCHMIDT

In yesterday's NY Times, Paul Krugman addressed the poisoned food supply and tried to figure out who to blame.

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...

Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years. We don’t know how many times concerns raised by F.D.A. employees were ignored or soft-pedaled by their superiors. What we do know is that since 2001 the F.D.A. has introduced no significant new food safety regulations except those mandated by Congress.

This isn’t simply a matter of caving in to industry pressure. The Bush administration won’t issue food safety regulations even when the private sector wants them. The president of the United Fresh Produce Association says that the industry’s problems “can’t be solved without strong mandatory federal regulations”: without such regulations, scrupulous growers and processors risk being undercut by competitors more willing to cut corners on food safety. Yet the administration refuses to do more than issue nonbinding guidelines.

Why would the administration refuse to regulate an industry that actually wants to be regulated? Officials may fear that they would create a precedent for public-interest regulation of other industries. But they are also influenced by an ideology that says business should never be regulated, no matter what.

The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don’t know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it’s ideologically inconvenient.

That’s why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman, who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from dangerous or ineffective drugs? “It’s in the self-interest of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things,” he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust the private sector to police itself.

Two days ago I explained the role in all this of China's representative in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, ostensibly the senator from Kentucky, who blocks the importation of inexpensive drugs from Canada as "unsafe" while fighting tooth and nail for unlimited imports of poisoned food from China in the name of free trade (and unrestricted profits for himself and his so-called "wife.")

Sensing an issue that could make her popular, the distinctly unpopular congresswoman from southwest Ohio, Mean Jean Schmidt, waded into the food issue last week. Best known, at least recently, for having gotten drunk at a Capitol Hill party and slipping into a freshly deposited pile of Michele Bachmann's vomit, Mean Jean doesn't normally come to mind when someone is about to debate serious matters involved with the food supply. She only weighs 93 pounds and hardly ever thinks about food; crack will do that to you.


The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Schmidt is demanding to know if people on food stamps are using it to buy unhealthy snack food instead of apples and bananas. While many in her district consider her to be bananas, she was demanding another government study. "I was shocked to find out that the federal government has no data telling us what types of food are being purchased with food stamps" and more interference in peoples' lives.

And, yes, this Big Government throwback is indeed a Republican. Getting government off peoples' backs, to Mean Jean, just means low taxes for the wealthy-- and authoritarian government for the rest of us. She opposes rules that would regulate the safety of the food chain but will do anything to protect corporate profits, no matter how egregiously harmful their operations are to the public good. But families on welfare better hide the Frito Lays cause Mean Jean is sending the sheriff their way.


Republicans won't have much of a choice in their party's primary which will pit Mean Jean against an even more loathsome character, another far right goon, County Commissioner Phil Heimlich, son of the man who invented the Heimlich Maneuver. He's reported to be even more vicious and nasty than she is so this is likely to look like one of those fights between a crocodile and a python. In debates, he is known for his propensity for taking out a handkerchief and loudly blowing his nose when his opponent is speaking. He is the grandson of the TV dance instructors Arthur and Kathryn Murray. Heimlich is a right-wing Christian fundamentalist, having converted from Judaism a few years ago after getting a message while in a Bob's Big Boy (in Michigan). Our Mean Jean Department Head, Karen Allen, who gathered all the info in this report, is trying to track down the nature of the message. Was it like in a fortune cookie or was there a Saul on the Road to Damascus scene in the Bob's Big Boy or something of that nature? You want to get an idea of who Mean Jean's Republican opponent is, take a look at the video of him turning on a reporter who asked him about reports that he's been taking "commissions" (i.e.- bribes).



Fortunately Ohio's second congressional district has a sensible alternative in the general election, Dr. Victoria Wulsin. What a contrast between Dr. Wulsin and the two rightist imbeciles running as rubber stamp Republicans! In fact, if you're feeling a little flush today and you want to do something for a sane America, let me suggest a $5 or $10 contribution to Victoria Wulsin's campaign for Congress. Or you can pick either of the e coli conservatives.