Low Cut Connie “Brand New Cadillac”
Then They Went for the Pigs
Just when you thought the market for controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) was completely saturated, a new study published in the Journal of Organic Systems finds that pigs raised on a mixed diet of GM corn and GM soy had higher rates of intestinal problems, “including inflammation of the stomach and small intestine, stomach ulcers, a thinning of intestinal walls and an increase in haemorrhagic bowel disease, where a pig can rapidly ‘bleed-out’ from their bowel and die.” Both male and female pigs reared on the GM diet were more likely to have severe stomach inflammation, at a rate of four times and 2.2 times the control group, respectively. There were also reproductive effects: the uteri of female pigs raised on GM feed were 25 percent larger (in proportion to body size) than those of control sows. (All male pigs were neutered, so scientists were unable to study any effects on the male reproductive systems.)
“Damning New Study Demonstrates Harm to Animals Raised on GMO Feed” Leslie Hatfield
This one cuts several ways. We don’t have nearly enough funding going for objective research into the impact of genetically modified foods. Why? Corporate interests harmonize nicely with right-wing fantasies about the all-powerful federal government and debt and so on. If you can shrink the government, then on one will be looking when you introduce dangerous foods into the system. We are all guinea pigs for corporate profit.
Damming research, of course, isn’t yet a solid case. It does suggest the need for a very healthy skepticism about corporate safety assurances, to say the very least. What would be the harm, Hatfield asks, in a precautionary principle? Only corporate profits and common sense. The fact is that we don’t need these modified foods; I suspect that every problem they purport to solve either isn’t important or can be solved in other ways.
First They Came for the Federal Banking Regulations…
The thing about right wing rhetoric is that it is upside down, a kind of unconscious irony that lacks all insight. Individual liberty means the freedom to carry a gun and to believe that climate change is a hoax and evolution a thinly supported theory. Never mind food and housing and health care and good wages and a pension. That’s not liberty; liberty is being able to carry a concealed weapon. Individual liberty also means freedom from government regulation.
Never mind that we are only now emerging from a world-wide economic collapse rooted in a wildly unregulated, often illegal, financial sector. Never mind that bridges are collapsing or that we are all growing poorer while the rich get richer. Never mind. We need to be free. I’ve often wondered how far this will go, if unchecked. Would the right-wing advocate, say, deregulating the food industry even in the fact of an outbreak of salmonella?
It’s not an outrageous idea. After all, they were arguing for less gun control– and they prevented some very minor measures– right in the middle of another set of mass murders. Liberty is apparently the liberty to get shot at school or at work or at the library. Liberty is the fantasy that, one day, someone somehow will be there to shoot back at the bad man, thanks to our newly liberalized concealed weapons laws. It’s never happened yet, but still.
Now, apparently, in their ongoing campaign for liberty, the right-wing has put libraries in their cross-hairs. I don’t mean the Santa Monica shootings, I mean the libraries in Kentucky which are now under threat of closure thanks to lawsuits against the property tax they rely on for funding. These are not moribund institutions, either, according to the president of the American Library Association, Maureen Sullivan:
More than 1 million Kentuckians depend on their libraries for job searching, Internet access, small-business development, after-school homework help for students and other essential services. In libraries throughout Kentucky and in more than 16,000 public libraries across the U.S., people find a lifeline to technology training and online resources for employment, access to government resources, continuing education, retooling for new careers and starting a small business.
“NKY needs its libraries” Maureen Sullivan
The list of things lost to right-wing anti-government / market fanaticism seems endless. Once the post offices and the highways and bridges and the libraries and the public schools are all gone or sold off, what will be left for us?
Dawes “My Way Back Home”