Tuesday, October 04, 2005
THE ONGOING MADNESS OF MAD COW DISEASE
by Jim Hightower
You've probably never heard of Mike Johanns – but he could make you deathly sick.
Johanns was a Nebraska politico who was plucked from obscurity by corporate agribusiness early this year to be George W's secretary of agriculture. His chief duty there is to serve the corporate interests – and he's proven to be slavishly devoted to that duty.
Take mad cow disease. Anyone who gets the human form of this plague by unwittingly eating diseased beef gets a gruesome death sentence. Yet, the big beef processors and their political puppets keep pretending it's no problem – first they denied that the cow disease existed, then denied that humans could get it, then denied the disease could ever exist in America, then – when all of the above miraculously turned out to be wrong – insisted that our ag officials were protecting us.
Some protection.
Mad cow disease exists because, in order to fatten cattle quickly, industry turns these natural vegetarians into cannibals, feeding them the tissue, bones, brains, blood, spinal cords, and whatnot from other cows. It messes them up something awful. OK, sighed our so-called protectors, we'll stop allowing certain cow parts to be fed to cows. But they still allow cattle blood to be fed to calves as a milk substitute, and industrial cattle still are fed chicken-coop waste which includes cow materials.
In addition to these "legal" loopholes, USDA inspects only about one percent of the cattle slaughtered all across America, leaving plenty of room for profiteers to violate the agency's loose ban on feeding beef to beef. Yet, rather than plugging the loopholes, Johanns mindlessly plugs beef. When a mad cow case was found in June, he announced at a press conference that he'd just had beef for lunch, so... see... all okay.
This is Jim Hightower saying... Apparently, not all of the madness is in the cows. To fight the madness, contact the Organic Consumers Association at www.organicconsumers.org.
"Safer Beef," The New York Times, August 14, 2005.
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by Jim Hightower
You've probably never heard of Mike Johanns – but he could make you deathly sick.
Johanns was a Nebraska politico who was plucked from obscurity by corporate agribusiness early this year to be George W's secretary of agriculture. His chief duty there is to serve the corporate interests – and he's proven to be slavishly devoted to that duty.
Take mad cow disease. Anyone who gets the human form of this plague by unwittingly eating diseased beef gets a gruesome death sentence. Yet, the big beef processors and their political puppets keep pretending it's no problem – first they denied that the cow disease existed, then denied that humans could get it, then denied the disease could ever exist in America, then – when all of the above miraculously turned out to be wrong – insisted that our ag officials were protecting us.
Some protection.
Mad cow disease exists because, in order to fatten cattle quickly, industry turns these natural vegetarians into cannibals, feeding them the tissue, bones, brains, blood, spinal cords, and whatnot from other cows. It messes them up something awful. OK, sighed our so-called protectors, we'll stop allowing certain cow parts to be fed to cows. But they still allow cattle blood to be fed to calves as a milk substitute, and industrial cattle still are fed chicken-coop waste which includes cow materials.
In addition to these "legal" loopholes, USDA inspects only about one percent of the cattle slaughtered all across America, leaving plenty of room for profiteers to violate the agency's loose ban on feeding beef to beef. Yet, rather than plugging the loopholes, Johanns mindlessly plugs beef. When a mad cow case was found in June, he announced at a press conference that he'd just had beef for lunch, so... see... all okay.
This is Jim Hightower saying... Apparently, not all of the madness is in the cows. To fight the madness, contact the Organic Consumers Association at www.organicconsumers.org.
"Safer Beef," The New York Times, August 14, 2005.
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