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Cheap food + football

by Mark Gisleson

First US News, now the Washington Post: the major media players are facing up to the fact that they’ve let the Bush administration reverse engineer a Romulan cloaking device that shrouds their actions from scrutiny. Except this isn’t Star Trek, and it took the complicity of thousands of very lazy “top” political and investigative reporters to let this veil of secrecy descend over our government.

Via Atrios, the Gropinator has a chilling story about a Fox News crew in action.

Progress in the Plame investigation? Mike Allen and Dana Milbank seem to think so, but I'll believe when I see some findings before November 2.

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Rummy and Saddam in the ‘80s: a good story just keeps getting better.

Missed this WaPost story on ret. Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, who’s almost always worth reading about, especially when he’s talking about Iraq.

Watch Salon's commercial so you can read Ruben Bolling's new cartoon on war profiteering. Not exactly subtle, but then again, neither is this administration.

An unusually large number of Washington Post links today. This one isn't exactly fresh, but it showed up in my RSS aggregator list for some reason, and it's very timely: Mary McGrory on the unsubtle nature of "DeLay Diplomacy."

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Tuesdays and Fridays. Those are the days that Paul Krugman appears in the New York Times. If there is such a thing as a must-read columnist, Krugman's it. No one else pisses off the right like PK.

NYTimes stablemate Bob Herbert writes about more jobs being shipped overseas. Unlike NPR, which practically ran a love letter to the practice of exporting Michigan jobs to Mexico this morning (that was after their suck-up interview with Republican AARP leader William Novelli), Bob Herbert is pissed. We all should be. Maybe the global workplace is unavoidable and even desirable, but since when do you effect change by brutalizing your workforce? Well, since always, but it would be nice to see some more humane transitional programs put into effect.

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Atrios has a sad item about some domestic terrorism in Atlanta, as well as a good lead in to Eric Alterman's new Nation article on Democrat-hating political reporters, and Sean Wilentz on Snitchens. Also, a good link on Congress successfully undermining food safety yet again this year.

On my way back from Iowa last night, I stopped in to see an old high school buddy who runs a butcher shop in my home town. Kent's "beef sticks" and sausage are more wholesome than the steaks you get in your average char house, and frankly, I'd rather eat his dried beef than some of the overpriced tenderloin steaks I've been served in the past.

You don't have to be Upton Sinclair to know what's wrong with the American meat industry. Congress gives them whatever they want, i.e. lax regulation. There is a 1:1 relationship between the new Mad Cow stories and the deregulation of the meat industry, but the mistake is in thinking that this is a new story. It's not. It's a Reagan story. After Ronnie's coronation in 1981, the meat industry went on a productivity rampage, closing older unionized plants and opening nightmarishly "efficient" packing houses, usually scoring huge tax breaks in the process. In the '80s Iowa's Terry Branstad (affectionately known as Gov. Braindead), effectively allowed meat packers to eliminate old jobs statewide, and replace them with low-paying jobs in new plants with horrendous safety records. It got so bad that state Attorney General Tom Miller sent a letter to leaders of the Southeast Asian community warning them that the new meat packing plant jobs were 1) so low paying their families would remain on welfare, and 2) extremely dangerous.

Safe meat is easy. All you have to do is follow some simple rules. Sadly, we live in an era where rules that interfere with profit are verboten. The fact is that cheap food is the "bread" half of the old Roman equation for controlling the masses. This Sunday's football games are the other half.

I realize cheap food is also a goal of many consumer advocates, but any system that screws workers is a bad system. Screwing farmers, packing plant workers and grocery store employees is a bad way to get cheap food, but then again, cheap food and clothes are built-in features for a system designed to underpay workers.

More humbug tomorrow.

Posted by Steve Perry at December 26, 2003 11:09 AM

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