March 9, 2009
Every so often, conservative columnist (and baseball fan) George Will hits one out of the park. He did so again in Sunday’s Washington Post. While other conservative columnists busied themselves by blaming Barack Obama for our current recession (after all, he’s been in office for 48 whole days!) Mr. Will found something more important to discuss. In an article called “Where the Obesity Grows“, Mr. Will addressed America’s diet problem. The undercurrent of Will’s article focused on the fact that our new Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, is the former Governor of Iowa (a state which obtains a large amount of revenue from corn production). Nevertheless, it is doubtful that Vilsack will embark on some sort of “corn agenda”, especially since Iowa produces a number of other crops, including the increasingly-popular soybean. Besides, Nebraska is widely accepted as America’s greatest corn-producing state.
Consider these points discussed in George Will’s article and be sure to remind yourself that these aren’t the rantings of some “lefty”:
A quarter of the 45,000 items in the average supermarket contain processed corn. Fossil fuels are involved in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting and processing the corn. America’s food industry uses about as much petroleum as America’s automobiles do.
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Corn, which covers 125,000 square miles of America — about the size of New Mexico — fattens 100 million beef cattle and at least that many bipeds. Much of the river of cheap corn becomes an ocean of high-fructose corn syrup, which by 1984 was sweetening Coke and Pepsi. Disposing of the corn also requires passing it through animals’ stomachs. Corn, together with pharmaceuticals and other chemicals … has made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots rather than grass, cutting by up to 75 percent the time from birth to slaughter. Eating corn nourished by petroleum-based fertilizers, a beef cow consumes almost a barrel of oil in its lifetime.
Although Tom Vilsack received some attention in Will’s article, the star character was a man named Michael Pollan. Pollan is a professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. Last year, David Laskin of The Seattle Times reviewed Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto:
Pollan’s bugbear this time is the so-called science of nutrition. Back in the good old days, people ate plants and animals raised (or foraged) close to (or at) home and prepared accordingly to age-old traditions. But once nutritionists started isolating the chemical components of what we ate and putting them back to together in “new, improved” and highly processed ways, Americans began growing steadily more obese, more prone to diabetes, cancer and heart disease, and more stressed about our dietary options. These days our food is cheap, convenient and increasingly plastered with health claims–but it’s making us and everyone else who eats it fat and sick.
More importantly, Mr. Laskin’s review of Michael Pollan’s new book made a point that was (surprisingly) not included in George Will’s article:
As the Senate’s recent rubber-stamping of yet another pork-filled farm bill demonstrates, America still lacks the political will to reform the agricultural practices at the root of our dietary woes. But to Pollan, that’s no reason why enlightened eaters can’t rise up and start changing the Western diet one meal, one garden, one family farm at time.
On December 17, the more left-leaning Irregular Times website pointed out that the Organic Consumers Association had specifically asked that Vilsack not be appointed as Agriculture Secretary and that within one week, 10,000 people signed a petition opposing that appointment. The Irregular Times piece gave us this appraisal of the Vilsack appointment:
Significant food reform is not what we can expect from a Secretary Vilsack. As the Governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack defended the interests of industrial agriculture, and did plenty of favors for giant agricultural corporations like Monsanto. Iowa agriculture is no longer typified by small family farms, but by gigantic fields of genetically engineered corn and soybeans, interspersed with concentrated feeding lots in which cattle and pigs pumped full of antibiotics stand in their own filth all day long.
Agricultural pollution from Iowa is so bad that it significantly contributes to dead zones all the way down in the Gulf of Mexico. It contributes to global warming too, with methane oozing out of manure lagoons near livestock factory farms adding significantly to the concentration of greenhouse gases in our planet’s atmosphere.
None of these problems got better when Tom Vilsack was Governor of Iowa. Vilsack has seemed more interested in promoting big agribusiness as it is than in reforming it.
On that same day, Gabriel Winant of Salon.com asked Michael Pollan for his reaction to the selection of Vilsack. Pollan replied that Vilsack’s record in Iowa “does not give one much reason to believe he’s going to bring a reformist agenda to the Department of Agriculture.” Pollan went on to explain:
He was biotech governor of the year. And he has very close relations to Monsanto. As with every other pick, the focus is on the Nixon-in-China scenario, the hopeful fantasy, which is that these people will be able to drive reform in their bureaucracies — that’s the story of this Cabinet. Whether that comes true or not, we’re just going to have to wait and see.
By making Michael Pollan the subject of his article, perhaps George Will’s hidden message was: Don’t expect too much Change from this administration or you will be sadly disappointed.
Maria Cantwell In The Spotlight
November 9, 2009
Meghan McCain’s recent lament in The Daily Beast struck me as rather strange. She really should know better. Ms. McCain expressed her frustration over mainstream media treatment of “two of the most prominent women in politics — Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin”. Ms. McCain felt the coverage received by those two politicians has been so misogynistic that she has nearly given up on the possibility that she may ever see a woman get elected to the Presidency:
Of course, if one can see no further than Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin when seeking female Presidential candidates, then despair is inevitable. In the summer of 2008, after Ms.Clinton faced up to the reality that Barack Obama had won the Democratic nomination, we heard similar doubts expressed by many despondent female supporters of Hillary Clinton — that they would never see a female elected President within their own lifetimes. At that point, I wrote apiece entitled “Women To Watch”, reminding readers that “there are a number of women presently in the Senate, who got there without having been married to a former President (whose surname could be relied upon for recognition purposes).” One of those women, whom I discussed at that time, was Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington. Maria Cantwell has been in the news quite a bit recently and the coverage has been favorable. As I said in June of 2008, those holding out hope for a female Presidential candidate should keep an eye on her.
In our highly-partisan political climate, one rarely hears a national politician break from “party line” rhetoric and talking points while being interviewed by the news media or when writing commentary pieces for news publications and blogs. Nevertheless, Senator Cantwell has taken the bold step of criticizing, not only the administration’s handling of the economic crisis, but the K Street payoff culture enlisting her fellow Democrats as enablers of the status quo.
On October 30, Senator Cantwell wrote a piece for The Huffington Post, decrying the fact that those financial institutions benefiting from the massive bailouts from TARP and the Federal Reserve “have resumed their old habit of using other people’s money to gamble with the same risky unregulated derivatives that led us into this crisis.” The reason for the failure at every level of the federal government to even consider appropriate legislation or regulations to rein-in continuing irresponsible behavior by those institutions was candidly discussed by the Senator:
Senator Cantwell’s essay is essential reading, coming on the heels of a rebuke, by her fellow Democrats, against efforts at requiring transparency in the trading of credit default swaps:
On November 2, Senator Cantwell appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan. At that time, Mr. Ratigan had just written a piece for The Business Insider, expressing his outrage about recent statements by Treasury Secretary “Turbo” Tim Geithner, supporting House bank reform legislation allowing credit default swaps to continue being traded in secret. Since Senator Cantwell had previously discussed that subject with him on October 16, Mr. Ratigan focused on Geithner. Ratigan noted Geithner’s endorsement of the proposed House “banking reform” legislation on the previous day’s broadcast of Meet The Press — despite the bill’s “massive exemptions” allowing opacity in the trading of credit default swaps. Ratigan then asked Senator Cantwell why Tim Geithner still has a job, to which she replied:
Senator Cantwell sure isn’t dodging any issues. Beyond that, she is demonstrating that she has more cajones than any of her male counterparts in the Senate. So far, all of the publicity concerning her position on financial reform has been favorable. After all, she is boldly standing up to the lobbyists, the Congress they own and a White House that received nearly a million dollars in campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs.
Back in Senator Cantwell’s home state of Washington, The Seattle Times praised her co-sponsorship of Senate Bill 823, the Net Operating Loss Carryback Act, which has already been passed by both houses of Congress. This bill increases the corporate income tax refunds for businesses that were making money during the pre-2008 era but now operate at a loss. As the Seattle Times editorial explained:
Congratulations, Senator Cantwell!
To Meghan McCain and other women remaining in doubt as to whether they will ever see a female sworn in as President: Just keep watching Maria Cantwell as she continues to earn well-deserved respect.