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Monday, June 20, 2005

Mad about mad cow
The USDA promised 18 months ago to close a loophole in current policy that could let mad cow disease sneak through. To prevent mad cow, we must stop feeding cows tissue and blood from other cows; the loophole is that cattle are fed chicken litter (from chickens that, in turn, have been fed cow blood and other cattle proteins), cattle blood, and restaurant leftovers, all of which could transmit the deformed protein (or prion) that causes mad cow disease.

The loophole has not yet been closed. "Once the cameras were turned off and the media coverage dissipated, then it's been business as usual, no real reform, just keep feeding slaughterhouse waste," said John Stauber, an activist and co-author of Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, to the Associated Press. Stauber adds, "The entire U.S. policy is designed to protect the livestock industry's access to slaughterhouse waste as cheap feed."

Given that we may have a second case of mad cow in the U.S., the issue deserves more than what Rep. Rosa DeLauro describes as "a lot of talk, a lot of press releases, and no action."

Government inaction on mad cow may well stretch back to the early to mid 1990s. Federal investigators have been probing allegations from a former USDA veterinarian that the USDA was covering up concnerns about mad cow from the very beginning of USDA's mad cow surveillance program in 1990. Moreover, Canadian news uncovered recently that the USDA may have mishandled two 1997 tests of suspected mad cow. In one, an independent university lab concluded that the cow "had a rare brain disorder never reported in that breed of cattle either before or since – not the dreaded bovine spongiform encephalopathy." CBC discovered, however, that "key areas of the brain where signs of BSE would be most noticeable were never tested. The most important samples somehow went missing."

Posted by Robert Shull, 01:15:47 PM

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Some climates never change
So, the White House politico who was discovered to have doctored a climate change report -- even though he has no scientific training -- and then left (coincidentally, ahem) his job when the news broke has just days later taken a job at ExxonMobil. No wonder he went to ExxonMobil in particular: as the Wall Street Journal points out, "Openly and unapologetically, the world's No. 1 oil company disputes the notion that fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming. Along with the Bush administration, Exxon opposes the Kyoto accord and the very idea of capping global-warming emissions.... Exxon publicly predicts that solar and wind energy will continue to provide less than 1% of the world's energy supply in 2025, a subject that others shy away from. Even if fossil fuels are the chief global-warming culprit, Exxon argues, the sensible response is to figure out how to burn them more efficiently."

Posted by Robert Shull, 06:16:58 PM

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Washington: Open for business
The Christian Science Monitor has nice coverage of what we have been reporting for some time now: that the Bush administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are making Washington “more open to business than usual.” The article takes a big picture approach:

In what could be the most business-friendly climate since the days of President McKinley, President Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress are moving to extend corporate tax breaks, pass pension reforms, allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and limit lawsuits — including a settlement of asbestos litigation that has driven 70 companies into bankruptcy.
Most encouraging to business lobbyists are prospects for a less visible agenda: a lighter hand on regulation well into the future. The resignation of William Donaldson as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, effective June 30, sent a signal to Wall Street that the post-Enron crackdown on corporate accounting tricks may be winding down. His proposed replacement, Rep. Christopher Cox (R) of California, is expected to be open to business concerns.
”On balance, this is as good as it gets for business,” says John Pitney, a political scientist at the Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

Good stuff. There is one argument worth quibbling about: Pitney’s argument that one factor making the pro-business, anti-public interest climate possible is widespread ownership of stock. Says Pitney, “A majority of Americans now own stock either directly or through pension funds. If you look at the electorate, it’s more than two-thirds. That’s much higher than it was a couple of decades ago. Increasingly, people don’t see a business agenda as separate from their own well being. They see it as part of their own.”

The truth is, for most Americans stock ownership has not really democratized business matters or closed the gap between the public interest and the business agenda. In a larger shift away from pensions and defined benefits for retirement, most of us have been given really only one option for retirement planning: the 401(k) and its equivalents. In those 401(k)s, we are given a menu of investment options, which boil down to mutual funds with varying degrees of risk in their investment patterns. Unlike wealthy Americans with their financial advisors and brokerage accounts, the rest of us have no real say in our investment portfolios: we have a more alienated relationship to the business agenda, that is, than the wealthy. We experience the consequences, however, as we receive our periodic statements and see our wealth declining or just beginning to return to 1990s levels. And we are not dumb: we know from the recent mutual fund scandals, as we all suspected without that empirical evidence, that the wealthy and privileged few have received special advantages that were not given to the rest of us (and that actually disadvantage us). The business agenda is quite hostile to the public interest; now, not only the air we breathe and the food we eat are at risk from the business agenda, but our retirement savings are as well.

Posted by Robert Shull, 12:23:44 PM

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

NAS suppresses science paper at admin's request
The Associated Press is reporting that the National Academy of Sciences has suppressed a scientific assessment of the dairy industry's vulnerability to bioterror, after the administration requested the paper be delayed. The authors have argued elsewhere that these vulnerabilities demand government action to make us safer. It is only the latest example of the many ways that the homeland remains unsecured long after 9/11, because the Bush administration refuses to regulate the industries whose campaign funding propelled it into office.

This case is not the first time the NAS has been willing to be subservient to the Bush administration, even when the administration is subordinating science to politics. For example, the NY Times revealed last year that the NAS allowed the White House to edit an NAS scientific report on the health effects of mercury, with changes that downplayed the risks of mercury, replaced specific enumerations of mercury-related harms with bland, general references, and introduced additional emphasis on uncertainty to make the science of mercury's neurotoxic effects seem less reliable. The NAS has also, on several occasions, stacked its scientific advisory panels with industry hires.

Posted by Robert Shull, 05:59:33 PM

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