Feeding the Fat Man


On MSNBC this morning, Presidential candidate Mike Gravel is urging people to join the National Initiative for Democracy, which is an attempt to restore legislative power to the people, and take it away from the the Fat Man. I signed up. It's certain that we have to save our country ourselves. The Fat Man isn't going to get drunk and give it back in an uncharacteristic gesture of generosity.
Let's see what's on CSPAN ...

Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, is speaking on the Senate floor. He relates that there is no labeling on meat in America because the Republicans have been in service to the big meat packers, who don't want labeling. They don't want consumers to know that cheap meat from Mexico or other places, with sometimes no inspection, and grossly unsanitary conditions, might be on their plate tonight.

That our pets have rat poison in their food supply should be a warning, like the canary in the coal mine. And the warning should be that when almost all the pet food is produced by one background manufacturer, the advertising and marketing is mostly designed to create need, not convey information. I remember my dad saying that "Ol Roy" dog food was some kind of special formula that Sam Walton fed his favorite hound. But the dog food turns out to be on recall, because Walton's formula of buying the cheapest possible crap in the world -- Walmart is a bigger trading partner with China than Germany or Russia -- drives out high quality products produced by people paid a living wage.

One of the dangers of giant corporate farming is that when something goes wrong, it isn't contained to a brand. You don't even know where things come from anymore. When you look at Kraft, or General Foods, or any of these big companies, you begin to see how centralized food production is, even as branding proliferates. And if you want to see how cheap they are, try to find a product with real cane sugar instead of corn syrup, or without partially hydrogenated, dirt cheap oils. Quality for the consumer isn't profitable for the Fat Man. And if you look at Archer Daniels Midland ... well, maybe you don't want to even look ... you're getting too close to the Fat Man himself.

I had to call dad -- who is almost 90 -- and tell him that Ol Roy has gone to heaven, as all dogs do. In the meantime, I warned, don't trust the recall lists; don't feed Sasha any food out of a pouch or can. Despite how much you pay because of packaging and marketing, Menu Foods, out of Canada, produces some 90 different brands of dog and cat foods. Like a lot of companies, if they want to sell to Walmart, they have to make the product cheaper and cheaper, so that the increasingly impoverished population can afford it. There is a constant sucking noise as even the little bit of wealth left in the public sector is sucked up by the Fat Man. Big deficits under Republicans are not a mistake. They are a way to kill any government program that can be taken over by private enterprise, be it health care, prisons, or even warfare.

They are a way to kill off the democracy, because the power of people's government is the only thing that can regulate the marketplace. Regulation is being killed off. Meat inspection is done by a shrinking number of inspectors, and meat from some places, like the slaughterhouse in Mexico Dorgan talked about, have never been seen by an inspector. They can literally shine shit and sell it as gold. Even the FDA is so involved with the drug manufacturers that they basically regulate themselves. That means they don't concentrate on disease, they concentrate on high profit, mass marketed drugs, like sexual enhancers.

The investigators find that the rat poison was banned by the E.P.A. in the United States, and of course in Europe and other industrialized nations. But like the steak Senator Dorgan recently held up on the Senate floor, challenging anybody to tell him where it was from, there are ingredients in the dog food from god knows where, because of the pressure to cheapen the prices and Feed the Fat Man.

Feeding the Fat Man has become what the right wing of the Republican Party thinks of as public service. They don't mind a trillion (or two) dollars for an occupation of Iraq, but when there are supplementals to try and maintain the infrastructure of the United States, or help the devastated city of New Orleans, or the farmers in California whose crops were wiped out by freezes, they cry "Pork."

That isn't pork. The Iraq war, that's Pork. I forget the source of the quote, but never the quote itself: "If they say it's not the money, it's the money." I think it was Oscar Wilde but I can't find it on the net. But I found another quote, apropos of the Iraq war: "One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing." Apparent kindness masking self-interest is too often the yeast of the Pharisees.

An aside: To the deep psyche, love and food are the same thing. In other words, if you dream about being at a banquet with lots of food, you are dreaming about having a lot of love. If you dream about your dog you might be dreaming about your instinctual body. One of the most interesting things to learn is how to see the dream in the waking world, when, for example, the food you give your dog kill him, or her.

It might be a good time to take action.

Posted: Wed - March 28, 2007 at 11:57 AM