Did You Vote For Obama (Or Romney)? Yes?-- Well Eat Your Dog And Cat Meat Burger And Shut Up

Liberty-- though not for Fido, obviously

Michael Brenner wrote a powerful piece for AlterNet a few days ago, America Is Ruled By Billionaires, And They Are Coming After The Last Shred Of Our Democracy. Like most Americans-- I'd like to say 99% of Americans but I know that would be wishful thinking-- Brenner is instinctually repulsed by plutocracy. He defines it succinctly in opening his essay and points out that aside from owning everything, the plutocrats have had their political handmaidens take significant actions that "directly favor the moneyed interests."

The latter include the dismantling of the apparatus to regulate financial activities specifically and big business generally. Runaway exploitation of the system by predatory banks was made possible by the Clinton “reforms” of the 1990s and the lax application of those rules that still prevailed. Attorney General Eric Holder just a few weeks ago went so far as to admit that the Department of Justice’s decisions on when to bring criminal charges against the biggest financial institutions will depend not on the question of legal violations alone but would include the hypothetical effects on economic stability of their prosecution. Earlier, Holder had extended blanket immunity to Bank of America and other mortgage lenders for their apparent criminality in forging, robo-signing, foreclosure documents on millions of home owners. In brief, equal protection and application of the law has been suspended. That is plutocracy.

...There are myriad other examples of complicity between legislators or regulators, on the one hand, and special business interests on the other. EPA judgments that are reversed under the combined pressure of the commercial interests affected and beholden politicians is one. The government’s decision not to seek the power to bargain with pharmaceutical companies over the price of drugs paid for with public funds is another. Tolerance for the concealment of offshore profits in the tens of billions is a third. Relaxed interpretations of the tax laws by the IRS to the advantage of high income persons can be added to the list. So, too, can the give-away to sole source contractors of the tens of billions squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan. The number of such direct assists to big business and the wealthy is endless. The point is that government, at all levels, serves particular selfish interests no matter who holds high positions. While there is some difference between Republicans and Democrats on this score, it has narrowed on most major items to the point that the fundamental properties of the biased system are so entrenched as to be impervious to electoral outcomes. The most revealing experience that we have of that harsh reality is the Obama administration’s strategic decision to allow Wall Street to determine how and by whom the financial crisis would be handled.

...Systemic biases are the most crucial factor is creating and maintaining plutocratic orientations of government. They are confirmed, and reinforced, by the identities and identifications of the persons who actually hold high elected office. Our leaders are nearly all rich by any reasonable standard. Most are very rich. Those who weren’t have aspired to become so and have succeeded. The Clintons are the striking case in point. That aspiration is evinced in how they conduct themselves in office. Congress, for its part, is composed of two rich men/women’s clubs. In many cases, personal wealth helped win them their offices. In many others, they knit ties with lobbies that provided the necessary funds. Whether they are “bought off” in some sense or other, they surely are often coopted. The most insidious aspect of cooptation is to see the world from the vantage point of the advantaged and special economic interests.

The devolution of the Democratic Party from being the representative of ordinary people to being just “another bunch of guys” is a telling commentary on how American politics has degenerated into a plutocracy. The party’s rolling over to accommodate the interests of the wealthy has been a theme of the past four years. From the Obama White House to the halls of Congress, party leaders (and most followers) have conceded the dominance of conservative ideas about macro-economic strategy (the austerity dogma), about retaining largely untouched the for-profit health care “non-system,” about bailing out the big financial players as the expense of everyone else and the economy’s stability, about degrading Social Security and Medicare. The last item is the most egregious-- and revealing-- of our plutocratic ways and means. For it entails a combination of intellectual deceit, blatant massaging of the numbers, and disregard for the human consequences in a time of growing distress for tens of millions. In other words, there is no way to conceal or spin the trade-offs made, who was being hurt and who would continue to enjoy the advantages of skewed fiscal policies.

The American version of plutocracy is noteworthy for its crassness. Subtlety, discretion and restraint are foreign to it. It has a buccaneering quality. That style has roots in the country’s history and culture. Much of the behavior is impulsive, grasping. Individuals are greedy for vivid displays that they are top dog, of what they can get away with, as well as the riches themselves. There is little interest in building anything that might endure-- no ‘new order,’ no new party, no new institutions. Not even physical monuments to themselves. Why bother when the existing set-up works so well to your advantage, to that of your like-minded and like-interested associates-- when you can turn ideas, policies and money in your direction with ease. And while the public is blind to how they are being deluded and abused. After all, the more things appear to stay the same, the more they can change in a country whose civic ideology imbues everyone with the firm belief that its principles and institutions embody a unique virtue. To challenge any of that would be to run the risk of raising consciousness-- which is the last thing that the plutocrats want.

Brenner's essay gets better and better. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. I'm heading off in a slightly different, though related, direction. Recall how early on Brenner alluded to plutocracy's infatuation with a kind of fake "liberty," much ballyhooed by brain-dead teabaggers and well-paid media and political shills as deregulation. Liberty to a rightist isn't just about owning popguns you can use to kill each other with but also making sure the government can't intervene on behalf of society against plutocratic financial interests-- whether causing toxic tar sands oil spills in Arkansas or feeding unsuspecting people-- moronic teabaggers more likely than anyone else, of course-- dog and cat meat gussied up to look like beef.

Dutch officials said they suspect dog meat was used in meatballs produced in Spain and sold in Amsterdam.

The investigation began 18 months ago when the owner of an animal shelter reported to authorities she suspected a company that disposes of animal remains was instead using the carcasses for meat.

Think Spain said the woman, Olga Costa, of Ponteverda, Spain, said she heard from a woman whose pet was put to sleep that she went to the company's headquarters in an attempt to say a final goodbye to her pet and found workers deboning dog carcasses.

Dutch officials said the investigation traced the dog meat to a distributor in Amsterdam. The suspected tainted meat has been sent for DNA samples to confirm its origin.

Oh, please... don't just single out the Dutch. Wherever Austerity has allowed conservatives to cut back on the "evils of government spending" (shorthand, among other things to do with the good of society in general, for regulatory activities). Like Conservative-ruled England, where it's an open secret that dog and cat meat is served "secretly" to the proles all the time.

An unnamed Indian takeaway has been found serving wrongly labelled meat by BBC researchers. Food experts working for a BBC3 programme had ordered an Indian lamb curry from the London restaurant but found that the meat in the curry had no trace of lamb.

Further DNA tests concluded that the meat chunks were not beef, chicken, pork, goat, horse or even human flesh, leading to speculation that the "lamb" curry contained dog or cat meat.

...Nutritionist Surinder Phull said: "It's absolutely terrifying because if it isn't any of the meats we know, what is it? Where has it come from? Where was it slaughtered? Was it hygienic? Was it covered in bacteria?"

...The restaurant in the programme was not the only one found to be serving suspicious meat. The young diners also had doubts about food they obtained from Chinese takeaways and fast food outlets in the capital.

The beef in Chinese black bean sauce consisted largely of chicken blood and contained only tiny amounts of beef.

And a beefburger bought from a local fast food shop was analyzed in the laboratory to reveal that it consisted of bovine blood, chicken scraps and a high level of chicken blood.

The only takeaway restaurant to serve authentic meat was a doner kebab shop. The lamb kebab purchased by the research team contained no trace of any other meat mixed with it.

Since the horsemeat scandal broke, the Food Standards Agency has ordered more than 5,000 tests and returned 44 positive results showing equine contents in meals.

Some might say the Dutch deserve to have to worry if the meatballs they've been eating were made of Fido and Tiger. It was after all, a greedy Dutch criminal job creator who was buying the Romanian horsemeat and selling it to the French as beef earlier this year, actually something he's been doing-- and getting away with because of lax regulations and enforcement-- for some time. Go, Austerity! He had already been sentenced in January 2012 for deliberately marketing South American horsemeat as halal-slaughtered Dutch beef and falsifying documents. Some of this found its way into British lasagna.

The scandal has focused attention on the murky pan-European supply chain for meat products, which stretches from abattoirs to supermarkets via mysterious offshore companies.

An investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed yesterday that that Draap Trading Ltd was registered in 2008 in Limassol, Cyprus. Its sole shareholder is Hermes Guardian Ltd, an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands. A Draap representative, Andreas Mercruri, refused to disclose the beneficial ownership of the company.

Speaking from Cyprus, he told OCCRP: "I'm sorry but with everything that is going on at the moment we are not able to comment on anything at this time." Mercruri answered from the offices of Trident Trust, a Cyprus firm that provides company formation and incorporation services on the island. Trident Trust mentions on its website that beneficial ownership information of the companies it incorporates is not disclosed to any regulatory authority.

The same Hermes Guardian company is a shareholder in at least a dozen other Cyprus, Panamanian and Russian based companies.

Cyprus company records indicate a Trident Trust company as a secretary of Draap Trading while its director is another Cyprus company by the name of Guardstand Limited. The latter's paperwork points to a link with Russian business.

Authorities in Romania have suggested that international criminal networks may be involved in the opaque meat trading business. Sorin Minea, head of Romalimenta, the Romanian food industry federation, described France's consumer affairs minister, Benoît Hamon, as an "idiot" after he suggested Romanians may have been responsible for "a case of fraud."

Minea told the Guardian: "There is an international mafia ring behind this problem. I don't know who they may be, or whether any Romanians are involved. But if you think about it, there were five intermediaries so I'm sure that an international network is involved."

This is disgusting. We must stop talking about it at once. Besides, it's all so far away. (I asked my very practical Dutch friend Nicky what he knows about this and he said the Dutch, who have now been looking for horse meat in their butcher shops, agree that "we eat what we have enough of but dog is a step too far. It is one of the only things differing us from the North Koreans.") 

So my friend R gets a distressed call from his friend F the other day. F is a male nurse who had already negligently murdered one of his elderly patients by giving him the wrong medicine and now... damn, it happened again. He was worried he'd wind up in prison so he was going back to his home country. He asked R to come over and pick through his things and see if he wanted anything. [R wound up getting me a brand new jacket.] Anyway, the day before F was flying off to his native land, everything calmed down. He would have to pay back the money he had misappropriated from murder victim #2 and he was fired by the private, high-end nursing firm, of course, but no charges would be pressed. After all, who wanted that kind of publicity? I didn't even have to give back the jacket-- although R didn't get to keep the Mercedes SLS-class roadster convertible. Because F already has a new agency and a new job being the nurse for a rich old white guy... who probably won't live much longer. I would have thought private nursing firms would be regulated. But... liberty.