Mulling over our reversion to Sinclair's "Jungle," Paul Krugman says, "It’s time to get back to the business of ensuring that American food is safe"

August 29, 2005, as New Orleans was dying: Yes, we've seen this
photo, but let's never forget the Movement Conservative philosophy
of government preparedness and response -- "Oh boy, cake!"

"The moral of this story is that failure to regulate effectively isn’t just bad for consumers, it’s bad for business."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column yesterday, "Bad Cow Disease"

"The late Milton Friedman [called] for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. It was unnecessary, he argued: private companies would avoid taking risks with public health to safeguard their reputations and to avoid damaging class-action lawsuits."

-- from the same source, just to give you the general idea

No, the "story" Paul Krugman was writing about yesterday wasn't about Hurricane Katrina. Well, not directly. In the end, though, it turns out to be pretty much the same thing, doesn't it?

At some point I think Democratic strategists will have to face up to the danger of thinking voters can be persuaded that Young Johnny McCranky is "just the same" as Chimpy the Prez. Since voters vote based far more on "feelings" about candidates than on specific issues (with the exception of the "hot button" issues beloved of right-wing strategists, which are designed to circumvent reason), this is a dangerous strategy simply because voters know that McCranky isn't Chimpy. Really and truly, he isn't.

Once upon a time -- and it wasn't that long a time ago -- blocs of voters supported Chimpy precisely because they felt good about him. Those blocs seem to be reduced now to the utterly unshakable hard-core 28 to 30 percent. Of course there used to be a lot more of them. I'm not sure the fallers-away from the bygone "Bush coalition" realize (or maybe acknowledge?) how much their attitude toward their Chimpy has evolved, but they really don't seem ready any longer to follow wherever the First Simian leads them.

Now, unquestionably Young Johnny McCranky has done his darnedest to position himself as the heir to Chimpy, maybe even to "Chimpyism" as a make-believe "movement." Watching him prostrate, even prostitute himself to the Republican "base" has been one of the uglier spectacles of recent American political history.

Still, no one knows better than the Bush Faithful (and Erstwhile Faithful) that McCranky isn't the New Chimpy. And the evidence is strong that an awful lot of Americans who no longer trust Chimpy do seem to trust McCranky. I don't know exactly how numerous they are, or exactly how worrying their trust in McCranky may prove come November. But it's crazy to fail to notice that, however wrong they may be, an awful lot of them do seem to respond to him still as Authentic Old Johnny, the voice of experience, straight talk, and hard-earned wisdom. (Can you imagine even die-hard Chimpy supporters imagining that their hero had experience -- or much of anything that could be called hard-earned?)

However, there are areas -- really, really important areas -- in which McCranky has indeed positioned himself as the New Chimpy, and I think they're fair campaign game. No, more than fair game: I think the hell should be promoted out of the areas of continuity between Young Johnny and Bush regime policy.

Most immediately and obviously, there's Iraq. As usual with McCranky, when you look at his record, even here, despite his history of cheerleading for this dreadful misadventure, the reality is more ambiguous, even contradictory. There were expressions of healthy skepticism from Young Johnny regarding the Iraq war effort. But since YJM doesn't want us messing around with stuff he's said in the past (meaning, often, anything that goes back more than 15 seconds), at least in this one case let's honor his wishes. And there's no question about now: Young Johnny could hardly be less equivocal in declaring himself gung-ho, hell-bent to win Chimpy's War.

I say: Make sure every man, woman, and child in the republic knows it, and understands the consequences.

Another area in which McCranky is currently aligning himself as the New Chimpy, as carefully contrasted with the Democratic candidate, Senator Obama, is the very role of government in our lives. Already he is deriding his opponent as believing that "government is the solution to all our problems." And I say again, bombs away!

To return to reality for a moment, no one claims that government is the solution to all our problems. But as poor Newt Gingrich discovered when he thought the American people would cheer him for shutting down the hated American government, people not only expect but take for granted that government should play a major role in almost every walk of American life. Even people who thought, and possibly still think, they are philosophically opposed to infamous "Big Government," were shocked, and not in a good way, when they were suddenly deprived of their expected government services. You know, stuff like national parks.

One of the greatest mind-altering jobs done by Movement Conservatism has been the assault on "government regulation." Oh, it made a pathetically easy target. With people looking for a scapegoat for all their woes and frustrations, it was practically a sitting duck.

Bureaucracy! Red tape! Gummint inefficiency! Communism!

And so important areas of important government regulation were simply hacked off, and the rest became show-no-mercy targets for right-wing assault. Didn't the sainted Ronald Reagan himself tell us that government was the enemy? That the government spending our money was what stood between us and paradise -- even while the sainted Ronnie was outspending any president in history.

Ironically, hardly anybody made the opposite case, the case for government regulation, more regularly than Tom Friedman. Yes, that Tom Friedman, the one who is the incarnation of evil punditry to all faithful progressives. How often has our Tom explained that the American system of government regulation is, or at any rate used to be, the envy of the would-be civilized world? That it's what stands between us and the unchecked reign of the rich and powerful.

One person who has taken up the theme with gusto is Paul Krugman. I don't know of anyone who understood sooner, or who laid out more cogently, how the Bush regime was determined, as a matter of philosophy and policy, to drive home the message that government cannot do anything right. It wasn't just a matter of looking in the mirror and seeing that we the Bush regimistas can't do anything right -- true as that would have been. No, Krugman made the connection, offering us Bush regime chapter and verse, showing that regime incompetence is a matter of deliberate policy, designed to teach the lesson that government can't help you, don't even ask.

Emergency preparedness? Don't be silly! Not our federal government! And so it wasn't by chance that FEMA, which had been rebuilt in the Clinton years (after the desolate Reagan and Bush I era) to real effectiveness, was turned over to a dribbling nitwit like Heckuva Job Brownie. Dribbling nitwittitude was administration policy.

(Of course the special touch of these conservatives was that dribbling nitwittitude was frequently accompanied by spectacular greed and corruption. Not necessarily in Brownie's case; his corruption seems to have been confined to the act of accepting a government paycheck. But rampant corruption has been a daily fact of life under the Bush regime. It turned out that government does have one "legitimate" function: to enrich, or further enrich, the cronies of the rich and powerful.)

The one thing the regimistas didn't count on, perhaps because it's truly not part of their intellectual cosmos, was that their fellow Americans would get the graphic lesson we witnessed live on our TVs as the regimistas applied their "philosophy" of governance to the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina -- after ignoring all the warnings and failing to do all the things that should have been done, idling on the sidelines as if it was somebody else's problem. Incredibly, it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that the American people would be horrified by the spectacle of fellow Americans (yes, even Americans of color!) being left to suffer and die, horrified in a way that we perhaps hadn't been since the years when all those American boys streamed home from Vietnam in body bags.

(Oh, the regimistas learned the lesson of the body bags, all right: Don't let people see them! If'n ya just gotta fight a war, and sometimes ya know ya just gotta: First, don't make it the kind where that many Americans die, and second, for those who do die, for neocons' sake don't let anybody see the remains. Make it illegal! And it should go without saying that you don't let your Chump-in-Chief be caught anywhere near, God forbid, a military funeral. We support our troops, we honor our troops, and we do it by looking the other way! The same policy, by the way, applies to those who come back alive but maimed in body or soul, and for that matter to those who simply want to pick up the lives shattered by their sacrifice. Good luck, Charlie -- and Charlotte.)

Okay, I see I'm slipping into high-italic mode, which isn't good for any of us -- my blood pressure or your Saturday-morning relaxation. So let's turn the floor over to Professor Krugman. As usual when he's in good form, it's folly to try to paraphrase. He's made the case just the way it should be made. So let's let him make the case, and then be prepared to get out the tools to nail it to Young Johnny McCranky.

June 13, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

Bad Cow Disease
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Mary had a little lamb
And when she saw it sicken,
She shipped it off to Packingtown
And now it’s labeled chicken.

That little ditty famously summarized the message of "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of conditions in America’s meat-packing industry. Sinclair’s muckraking helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act -- and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.

Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines -- tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes. The declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a foreign-policy crisis: there have been mass demonstrations in South Korea protesting the pro-American prime minister’s decision to allow imports of U.S. beef, banned after mad cow disease was detected in 2003.

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

It started with ideology. Hard-core American conservatives have long idealized the Gilded Age, regarding everything that followed -- not just the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era -- as a great diversion from the true path of capitalism.

Thus, when Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate, was asked about his ultimate goal, he replied that he wanted a restoration of the way America was "up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that."

The late Milton Friedman agreed, calling for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. It was unnecessary, he argued: private companies would avoid taking risks with public health to safeguard their reputations and to avoid damaging class-action lawsuits. (Friedman, unlike almost every other conservative I can think of, viewed lawyers as the guardians of free-market capitalism.)

Such hard-core opponents of regulation were once part of the political fringe, but with the rise of modern movement conservatism they moved into the corridors of power. They never had enough votes to abolish the F.D.A. or eliminate meat inspections, but they could and did set about making the agencies charged with ensuring food safety ineffective.

They did this in part by simply denying these agencies enough resources to do the job. For example, the work of the F.D.A. has become vastly more complex over time thanks to the combination of scientific advances and globalization. Yet the agency has a substantially smaller work force now than it did in 1994, the year Republicans took over Congress.

Perhaps even more important, however, was the systematic appointment of foxes to guard henhouses.

Thus, when mad cow disease was detected in the U.S. in 2003, the Department of Agriculture was headed by Ann M. Veneman, a former food-industry lobbyist. And the department’s response to the crisis -- which amounted to consistently downplaying the threat and rejecting calls for more extensive testing -- seemed driven by the industry’s agenda.

One amazing decision came in 2004, when a Kansas producer asked for permission to test its own cows, so that it could resume exports to Japan. You might have expected the Bush administration to applaud this example of self-regulation. But permission was denied, because other beef producers feared consumer demands that they follow suit.

When push comes to shove, it seems, the imperatives of crony capitalism trump professed faith in free markets.

Eventually, the department did expand its testing, and at this point most countries that initially banned U.S. beef have allowed it back into their markets. But the South Koreans still don’t trust us. And while some of that distrust may be irrational -- the beef issue has become entangled with questions of Korean national pride, which has been insulted by clumsy American diplomacy -- it’s hard to blame them.

The ironic thing is that the Agriculture Department’s deference to the beef industry actually ended up backfiring: because potential foreign buyers didn’t trust our safety measures, beef producers spent years excluded from their most important overseas markets.

But then, the same thing can be said of other cases in which the administration stood in the way of effective regulation. Most notably, the administration’s refusal to countenance any restraints on predatory lending helped prepare the ground for the subprime crisis, which has cost the financial industry far more than it ever made on overpriced loans.

The moral of this story is that failure to regulate effectively isn’t just bad for consumers, it’s bad for business.

And in the case of food, what we need to do now -- for the sake of both our health and our export markets -- is to go back to the way it was after Teddy Roosevelt, when the Socialists took over. It’s time to get back to the business of ensuring that American food is safe.

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