Tomatoes, Peppers and the Reagan/Bush Plutocracy

The right-wing, anti-government nature of Republican politics during the last 25 or 30 years has had a massive negative impact on the very fabric of our American democracy. You know, the idea embedded in Ronnie’s oft repeated little ditty, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” Well that’s the sort of sophisticated thinking that’s got us hurtin’ today. Indeed, I've been longing for the emergence of a Theodore Roosevelt who will pull us back from the precipice and, as he so valiantly did earlier in the last century, restore this democracy. But no, there are no white knights off on the horizon, none in sight.

During the Reagan years financial deregulation of the savings and loan industry brought us a devastating financial crisis that exceeded in costs all of the American wars form the Revolutionary War through the war in Viet Nam. And of course, we're currently engaged in a costly boondoggle in Iraq that will make that last financial black hole seem small. All the while our infrastructure here at home continues to crumble. Parenthetically it does seem to me that if we keep creating these economic black holes, we’re going to have to add a course or two in astronomy to our economics curriculum just so that we can keep up with these buzzards.

We are also reminded on a daily basis that the unfettered, under regulated banking industry, headed by the new Robber Barons, just as greedy as ever, are marching this nation's economy towards the cliff's edge. Given the historical record etched in time, none of these disasters represents anything new. No, we've OD on so much Enron type news of malfeasance and miss management and gross incompetence; we've become inured to the financial news of the day. (I'm being kind, of course, who can admit the stupid factor as the cause of public inaction, as the reason we keep electing the Reagan/Bush boobs rather than booting their greedy assess out the door).

The anti-government attitudes influencing the right-wing Bush plutocrats running things in Washington, are not just being reflected in matters related to banking and/or the savings and loan industry. No. Just a few weeks ago a Congressional Investigation establish what Monica Goodling had already told us when she offered testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. While she was in charge of hiring at Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department, she only hired right-wing party hacks. So, it certainly came as no big surprise when that conclusion came out of a recently released Congressional investigation. The Reagan/Bush sycophants heading our government agencies don't seem to know that they are in fact working for the American people; that it really wasn’t Alberto’s Justice Department but ours, it belongs to the American people and should be serving their interests.

But let’s not get side tracked with a painful detail from Alberto’s past tenure at “Justice.” During the Christmas shoppin’ season this past year, numerous stories appeared in the news, almost daily, about the lead tainted toys being brought into our big discount stores from China by the nations biggest retailers, the Wal-Mart types. The sorry response given by those retail spokesman brave enough to face the cameras in each instance was, "We do the best we can under the circumstance."

What were those circumstances? Our government protective agencies were and are so understaffed they can't begin to keep with the business of enforcing our consumer product safety laws. And during the height of the controversy the head of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission appeared on Capital Hill to offer testimony against legislation that would have added the money and resources necessary for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to do its job. Why did she do that? Because, though Bush appointed her to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission , she didn't agree with the Commission's basic mission. She came from the private sector; the sector that had been under the jurisdiction of the Consumer Regulatory agency she now heads.

Time and again the Reagan/Bush anti-government strategy has involved putting someone diametrically opposed to a regulatory agencies function in charge of that agency. We've seen that at the Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, the Food and Drug Administration, The Federal Aviation Agency (Remember all those uninspected South West and American Planes that got grounded because inspectors but their ass on the line and blew the whistle?).

And of course, we are all aware that the safety of our food supply SUCKS! For several weeks we’ve been inundated by stories of salmonella tainted tomatoes on our supermarket shelves from no one knew quite where. Ah, but have no fear, the super sleuths from the FDA were on the job, about to break the case. In the meantime we were advised not to eat those red garden beauties as they might just kill us.

Well, several weeks passed, people were still being taken to hospitals (close to 1500 in all) and still the Sherlocks from the FDA couldn’t provide any answers with certitude. Heck, they said, maybe it wasn’t the tomatoes after all, might just be onions from Florida, or cucumbers from Oregon. Hell, who knows, might even be a rotten sardine or two from Alaska. Apparently the FDA Sherlocks didn’t have their Dr. Watson to keep them focused..

Anyway somebody at the FDA either woke up, or came in off vacation, and pointed the finger at the rotten peppers coming across our southern border from Mexico. Yesterday, 18 August 2008, Garance Burke from the Associated Press wrote:


“Mexican peppers posed problem long before outbreak. Federal inspectors at U.S. border crossings repeatedly turned back filthy, disease-ridden shipments of peppers from Mexico in the months before a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,400 people was finally traced to Mexican chilies.

Yet no larger action was taken. Food and Drug Administration officials insisted as recently as last week that they were surprised by the outbreak because Mexican peppers had not been spotted as a problem before.

But an Associated Press analysis of FDA records found that peppers and chilies were consistently the top Mexican crop rejected by border inspectors for the last year.

Since January alone, 88 shipments of fresh and dried chilies were turned away. Ten percent were contaminated with salmonella. In the last year, 8 percent of the 158 intercepted shipments of fresh and dried chilies had salmonella.”

With truth revealed, peppers identified as the salmonella carrier, did the officials at the FDA breathe a sigh of relief and issue appropriate announcements? Hell No! Instead, in typical fashion, it was cover your ass time. As the AP’s Burke wrote:

“On Friday, Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's food safety chief, told reporters peppers were not a cause for concern before they were implicated in the salmonella outbreak.

‘We have not typically seen problems with peppers," Acheson said. "Our import sampling is typically focused on areas where we know we've got problems or we've seen problems in the past, which is why we're now increasing our sampling for peppers.’ “

Theodore Roosevelt’s dead! We can’t depend on a savior to come riding across the North Dakota plains headed to Washington to fix our floundering democracy. We’re going to have to roll up our sleeves and do the heavy lifting ourselves. As a starter it would be well to expect our political candidates to honestly address the pressing issues of the day. In a 21 Century complex world, simple minded notions propounded by the Right won’t get the job done. Government can be the answer if we put wise, intelligent people in its service. Enough with the Reagan/Bush morons and their tomato scams!

Hey, while were at it, would somebody tell candidates McCain and Obama to stay away from the Mega Churches. . .those 17th and 18th Century issues, decided so clearly by the Enlightenment thinkers, should not be dominating a 21st Century political campaign. And as far as I'm concerned, Pastor Rick can take his mega church along with his bag of conservative theological bugaboo and take a hike. Jesus hit the nail on the head when he held up a coin and said to the Pharisees, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto the Lord what is the Lord's." The Bushies, for obvious political reasons, have so blurred the issues evolving around Church/State separation that it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between politicians and preachers; essentially it has become a distinction without a difference.

Still tryin' to figure things out for ya,

Davy Crockett