Tired Of Losing Yet?

As we pointed out this morning, the U.S. economy grew just 0.7 percent since Señor Trumpanzee's kleptocracy took over the Oval Office, the weakest showing in 3 years. And when he whined that the job-- of president-- was harder than he had ever imagined, former Mexican President Vicente Fox trolled him on twitter: "Being president ain’t easy... just go back to golfing."

But Trump did accomplish one thing that is sure to tickle the heart and soul of his base-- or at least will on Monday. The clownish new Secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue will promulgate a new rule to make sure the kiddies in Trump counties as obese as their parents who voted Trump into the White House. Outsider Southern blackbelts the most obese counties in each state didn't just vote for Trump, they voted for Trump as though their next meal depended on it. I promise to come back to Perdue's "Let's Make America Fat Again" plan in a minute, but let's look at the obese counties full of Trump voters. Florida's most obese county is Calhoun, where 40.7% of the people are clinically obese. 76.6% of the voters there went for Trump. Breathitt is the most obese county in Kentucky (42.9%) and 69.6% of them voted for Trump. 41.4% of the folks in Washita Co., Oklahoma are obese and they went for Trump massively-- 83.2%. Campbell Co., Wyoming is the Trumpiest obese county in America. 33.6% over-do the eating thing and 88.0% voted for Trump. Logan County played a similar role in West Virginia, where 41.2% of the folks are obese and 80.1% voted for Trump. Thurston County, Nebraska has an obesity rate of 40,8% and 60.3% voted for Trump. Caldwell County, Missouri has an obesity rate of 39.2% and 75.0% went Trump. Similar story in Indiana's most obese county, Jackson (39.3%), where 73.3% went Trump You get the picture, right? Let me add Kansas in here. The most obese county is Cherokee County (38.7%), significantly higher than the state's overall obesity level (30.2%). Statewide, Kansas went for Trump 57.2% to 36.2% for Hillary. Cherokee County was far Trumpier-- 71.8% to 23.4%. I'm not sure if that's where Perdue is hooking up with Kansas Senator Pat Roberts Monday but the two of them will be announcing another Trump era WIN!

Republicans have long been trying to dial back the standards that became a pillar of former first lady Michelle Obama’s initiative to curb childhood obesity in the U.S.

Roberts introduced legislation with Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) last year to give schools two more years to meet new reductions on sodium, but the bill never passed.

Renewed efforts to ease the federal standards came as disappointing news to some advocates.

The American Heart Association was quick to push back. In a statement, the group’s CEO, Nancy Brown, said the current standards are already working and that 99 percent of schools are in compliance.

“Improving children’s health should be a top priority for the USDA, and serving more nutritious foods in schools is a clear-cut way to accomplish this goal,” she said.

“Rather than altering the current path forward, we hope the agency focuses more on providing technical assistance that can help schools get across the finish line, if they haven’t done so already.”

What more could anyone want from their president-- more diabetes and heart disease in their childrens' future-- coupled with less and less healthcare. That's winning in Trump's America!

If We Really Are What We Eat, It's Only A Matter Of Time Before We're All Mutants

Yummy American farm girl

Historically, George W. Bush had 3 of the most brazen shills of AgriBusiness as consecutive Secretaries of Agriculture: Ann Veneman, Mike Johanns and Ed Schafer. Each was charged with doing everything Big Ag Business wanted that would keep the money flowing GOP-wise. [Since 1990 Agribusiness has "donated" $350,366,008 in federal elections, almost twice as much to Republicans as to Democrats.] Obama's Agriculture Secretary, conservative former DLC chair and former Iowa governor, Tom Vilsack, seems to be driven by almost identical instincts. If you were concerned about the radiation reported in Tokyo's drinking water, you might also be concerned about the dangers of genetically engineered crops inexorably taking over American agriculture-- and the role of the USDA in this tragedy. Organic farmers and consumers have fought back but, except for a little window dressing here and there, Vilsack rules his fiefdom the same way Veneman, Johanns and Schafer did. Biotech triumphant in the march towards turning the human race into mutants for the sake of short term corporate profits-- kind of like the nuclear energy industry.

Vilsack has been making promises-- with fingers crossed behind his back-- to protect the interests of farmers and consumers who aren't interested in being part of a species-wide genetic experiment and prefer eating real food, "promising something revolutionary: finding a way for organic farms to coexist alongside the modified plants."

But in recent weeks, the administration has announced a trio of decisions that have clouded the future of organics and boosted the position of genetically engineered (GE) crops. Vilsack approved genetically modified alfalfa and a modified corn to be made into ethanol, and he gave limited approval to GE sugar beets.

The announcements were applauded by GE industry executives, who describe their genetically modified organisms as the farming of the future. But organics supporters were furious, saying their hopes that the Obama administration would protect their interests were dashed.

“It was boom, boom boom,” said Walter Robb, co-chief executive of Whole Foods Markets, a major player in organics. “These were deeply disappointing. They were such one-sided decisions.”

To a growing cadre of consumers who pay attention to how their food is produced, the agriculture wars are nothing short of operatic, pitting technology against tradition in a struggle underscored by politics and profits.

“Each side is so passionate,” Vilsack said in a recent interview. “And each side is convinced that it’s right.”

The two sides are not clashing over the ethics or safety of genetic engineering, in which plants are modified in the laboratory with genes from another organism to make them more pest-resistant or to produce other traits. Instead, the argument is over the potential for contamination: pollen and seeds from GE crops can drift across fields to nearby organic plants. That has triggered fears that organic crops could be overtaken by modified crops. Contamination can cost organic growers-- some overseas markets, for example, have rejected organic products when tests showed they carried even trace amounts of GE material.

Organics supporters also say that, as the number of genetically engineered crops grows, so does the risk. And some conventional farmers who don’t use GE seeds are also concerned about their crops. USDA has approved 81 GE crops-- it has never denied a proposal-- and 22 applications are pending.

“It’s really about the right to farm and the right to choose,” Robb said. “You shouldn’t farm in a way that affects the way others farm.”

Vilsack tried bribing the organic industry with a promise that it wouldn't "count" against them being able to call their produce "organic" if it was polluted by genetically engineered crap and he held out the promise of buffer zones between the freak food and the real food. But AgriBusiness and their Republican and Blue Dog allies freaked out and threw tantrums that there would be any restrictions whatsoever of Big Business. Regardless of which party controls Congress, Agribusiness controls the House Agriculture Committee and they weren't having any of this organic bullshit. They told Vilsack in no uncertain terms and he acquiesced.

With Republicans and Blue Dogs howling on behalf of the Big Business Farming Industry-- and with a White House on the defensive and trying to bend over backwards to prove how pro-business it is-- it was "screw the dirty hippies" (again); Vilsack announced approval of GE alfalfa, sugar beets and corn. No limitations.



Or if cutting edge music isn't your thing... how about Lee Camp's cutting edge stand-up?

"Please, no pig graphics!" Then how're you gonna illustrate stories about swine flu . . . er, about H1N1? We've got just the answer!

The new poster boy for H1N1?

In another Loop scoop, Al Kamen has the story in today's Washington Post of how "House Agriculture Committee communications director April Slayton sent an e-mail late Wednesday to all 'Democratic press secretaries'":

"If I could make a request, please avoid using a pig in any graphics for the current flu outbreak that you are creating for your website and other media," she wrote, noting that the current flu outbreak is most properly called "H1N1 flu." The moniker swine flu "suggests that people are getting sick through consumption of pork products, which is not correct." She attached [Agriculture Secretary Tom] Vilsack's statement.

"If you could please try to refrain from using 'swine flu' to refer to the outbreak (and please no pig graphics), this would be extremely helpful as the U.S. tries to maintain international trade and consumer confidence in our nation's swine industry," Slayton urged.

Good luck with that.

So, you need a graphic stand-in for swine? Don't even give it a second thought. (See above... or for those with less imagination, this.) -- Ken


UPDATE

Well, well... look what Ken (and George Harrison) inspired:

We Are What We Eat-- And So Is Our Society, Of Course

yum yum?

My friend Phil asked me to join him and Go Vegan radio host Bob Linden for dinner last night. I never get out so, of course, I jumped at the chance. We decided on a suitable vegan-ish restaurant in the area, Cafe Alf on Sunset Blvd in Echo Park. As I was leaving my home, a blogger buddy, Hekebolos, called and told me another blogger friend, OrangeClouds, was visiting L.A. and why don't we go for dinner. I explained that I was walking out the door to meet some other friends and why not join us. So we all got together and it turns out OrangeClouds is the foremost food policy blogger I know and Bob Linden can take any problem-- the mortgage crisis, a passing fire engine, the high cost of energy, the problems with the Bible-- and explain it in terms of the propensity of society's toleration of meat and dairy consumption. It was a lovely evening.

My friend Phil promised to write a post for DWT and he even finished a few fabulous sentences: "Medieval Christians killed off the entire wolf population in Europe. The same mentality exists here in a remote 15th century part of America today. Why? Because of a brain defect passed down through generations of witchburners, animal slaughterers and ... because the bible has a scary story about wolves."

Meanwhile I did get a thought provoking e-mail from OrangeClouds-- let's call her Jill-- that included a link to her blog, La Vida Locavore, on which I found a question far more important, in every way, than what the margin of victory Obama is likely to have in North Carolina: Can Organics Save Us From Global Warming. She asked me what I knew about the members of the House Agriculture Committee and sent me their names. I was appalled when I went through it.

My first thought was, no wonder we have mucked up the food industry even worse than the banking industry. Then I thought that no one could even find a committee this bad unless they actually set out to do so. There are 25 Democrats and 21 Republicans, most of whom are unspeakably in the pocket of the big-- and destructive-- corporate farming industry. Most of the Democrats on the Committee are in that pocket too. In fact, you couldn't find a worse bunch of Democrats. There is exactly one who I would trust, Wisconsin freshman Steve Kagen. The rest are a bunch of reactionaries, mostly Blue Dogs and worse. I know most people don't know one of these monstrosities from another, but people who pay close attention at DWT are sure to recognize some names of tried and true villains:

- Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN)
- Tim Holden (D-PA)
- Joe Baca (D-CA)
- John Barrow (D-GA)
- Leonard Boswell (D-IA)
- Nancy Boyda (D-KS)
- Dennis Cardoza (D-CA)
- Travis Childers (D-MS)
- Jim Costa (D-CA)
- Henry Cuellar (D-TX)
- Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
- Brad Ellsworth (D-IN)
- Bob Etheridge (D-NC)
- Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
- Steve Kagen (D-WI)
- Nick Lampson (D-TX)
- Tim Mahoney (D-FL)
- Jim Marshall (D-GA)
- Mike McIntyre (D-NC)
- Earl Pomeroy (D-ND)
- John Salazar (D-CO)
- Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-SD)
- David Scott (D-GA)
- Zachary Space (D-OH)
- Timothy Walz (D-MN)
- Bob Goodlatte (R-VA)
- Charles Boustany, Jr. (R-LA)
- K. Michael Conaway (R-TX)
- Terry Everett (R-AL)
- Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE)
- Virginia Foxx (R-NC)
- Sam Graves (R-MO)
- Robin Hayes (R-NC)
- Timothy Johnson (R-IL)
- Steve King (R-IA)
- Randy Kuhl (R-NY)
- Robert Latta (R-OH)
- Frank Lucas (R-OK)
- Jerry Moran (R-KS)
- Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO)
- Randy Neugebauer (R-TX)
- Mike Rogers (R-AL)
- Jean Schmidt (R-OH)
- Adrian Smith (R-NE)
- Tim Walberg (R-MI)

I guess the best thing a wag might say about this list is that at least it keeps these people and their atrocious instincts and corporatist attitudes off committees where they could do the nation grievous harm. But that wag would be dead wrong. They are on a committee where their atrocious instincts and corporatist attitudes are doing this nation-- all of us-- grievous harm. A feature in today's NY Times (linked above) by Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto gets right to the point of linking the health care crisis, energy independence, climate change and... how we grow, process and eat our food-- is this a coincidence or what?

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy-- 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do-- as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis-- a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount-- from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

It's worth reading Pollan's whole feature, which is in the form of an open letter to Barack Obama. After all he wants change, right? And there is no more fundamental change than re-examining our eating habits. And like our financial system and economy, our food policies aren't fundamentally sound, or even sustainable, either.

Safeguard the American food supply? Support free-market-style competition? Who, the Bush regime? What are you, some kinda stinkin' Commie?

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for [mad cow] disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Arkansas City-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows.

"Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too."

Oops, I seem to have left out the opening paragraph of this news dispatch. That's right, comedy fans, it so happens that in this case the punch line comes first:

"The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease."

That's right, ladies and germs, the administration is going back to court to prevent a company that wants to bear the cost of testing all its cows from doing so, even after a U.S. district judge has ruled that the government has no authority to stop the company from using the very same test the Agriculture Dept. uses for that one percent of beef it tests.

I'm delighted to own up that I first heard about this delicious story via columnist Rick Perlstein, who seems to have been kind of dumbfounded by it. It falls right on his turf, since he's now devoting his major columnizing attention to food-supply issues.

It takes a lot to render our Rick speechless, and in the end this story didn't quite, but it came close:

E. coli conservatism (19): the ne plus ultra

By Rick Perlstein on May 30, 2007 - 2:33pm.

Offered without comment. What is there possibly to say?

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Arkansas City-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too.

A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. The ruling was to take effect Friday, but the Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal -- effectively delaying the testing until the court challenge plays out.

Mad cow disease is linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain.

There have been three cases of mad cow disease identified in cattle in the U.S. The first, in December 2003 in Washington state, was in a cow that had been imported from Canada. The second, in 2005, was in a Texas-born cow. The third was confirmed last year in an Alabama cow.

The Agriculture Department argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry. U.S. District Judge James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the government relies on and said the government didn't have the authority to restrict it.

Oh, all right. One small comment. First, observe the contempt for liberty. When E. coli conservatives say self-regulation is preferable to government, they're even lying about that. Second, observe the contempt for small business. When a small company want to - voluntarily! - hold its product to a higher standard, the government blocks it, in part because bigger companies have to be protected from the competition, in part because a theoretical threat to the bottom line (false positives) trumps protection against a deadly disease.

There's your conservatism, America: not extremism in defense of liberty. State socialism in defense of Mad Cow.

As a number of online commenters have already pointed out, so much for the mystical conservative faith in the omniscient guiding hand of the free market, not to mention the miraculous power of competition. If you have the kind of bucks to get the attention of the Bush regime ("Our Motto: Your Government for Sale, or Maybe Rent"), you don't have to worry about no stinkin' competition.

As for guarding the safety of the American food supply . . . uh, well, you're welcome to leave your name and number, and maybe your gov't will get back to you. And while you're waiting, would you like to make a modestly whopping contribution in support of the Republican agenda?


UPDATE, COURTESY OF HOWIE: IT'S NOT JUST THE EATS... THE DRUGS PART OF "F.D.A." IS SCREWED UP TOO

Either the Bush Regime wants to prove government is incapable of doing anything right, which is what Republicans always say, or they really and truly are the most incompetent bunch that have ever gotten their paws on the levers of power. It doesn't matter which is true; the case has been made to separate the GOP and the U.S. government for a good long time. Tomorrow's NY Times calls the F.D.A. "still unsettled"-- and they're not even going near anything to do with beef.

When Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach took over the Food and Drug Administration in 2005, the agency had a crisis over drug approvals that had missed or ignored dangerous side effects in Vioxx, antidepressants and other prominent medications.

Dr. von Eschenbach promised improvements, and agency officials said they would no longer be caught flatfooted on drug safety.

But this month, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study suggesting that a major diabetes pill, Avandia, might increase the risk of heart attacks.

Again, incompetent or... something worse? Congress will start investigating June 6. I hope they talk to Dr. Curt Furberg, a professor of public health sciences at Wake Forest and a co-author of the New England Journal of Medicine’s editorial on Avandia. He says the F.D.A. is broken and that "safety is just not a high priority for them."