Meat Packers we love them – well maybe

In 1906, Upton Sinclair released his classic muckraking novel The Jungle. It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. According to Sinclair’s novel, the packing industry was run in an utter condition of squalor, where packers frequently sold rancid and diseased meat to the public in order to cut costs.

Those of you who were educated in public schools are probably familiar with this myth, since this is what you were told was the truth by your teachers. Many of you may have even been forced to choke down the lies Sinclair spewed forth in this novel by having it included in your education as mandatory reading.

A note on Sinclair himself, he was a dedicated socialist who actually ran for Congress on the Socialist Party ticket. The guy was a complete mental case. I’m sure that wasn’t mentioned though in your history classes, where he is typically presented as a simple man who only wanted the best for America.

The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were HEAVILY lobbied for by the large meat packing producers over the course of several decades. There was very little diseased meat being processed, and Sinclair’s novel is nothing but a bunch of total baloney. The mega meat packing corporations took advantage of the hype Sinclair had created with his novel of lies and finally rammed through a bill they had been trying to pass for decades.

The large meat packing corporations wanted this regulation for several reasons.

a) Government inspections added a large fixed operating cost to producers due to the administrative overhead. While this may sound counter-intuitive, this effectively serves as a large barrier to entry into the meat packing business. The smaller packers do not have the economy of scale to be able to absorb this fixed cost so they end up being run out of business by the large producers because the small guys necessarily need to raise the price of their meat higher to account for the additional cost.

b) The Europeans at the time had begun barring meat imports to protect their own meat producer’s profits under the guise of “diseased meat” being imported. So the Europeans were requiring that imported meats undergo an inspection process. Thus, the US meat packers had to have their meat inspected anyways by private inspectors if they wanted to be able to export their meat. By lobbying the US government to inspect their meat, the large US meat packers could pass the cost of this inspection process that had to happen anyways, on to US tax payers. This served to socialize inspection costs for the large US meat exporters.

Since the smaller producers did not generally engage in export, they didn’t bother to have their meat inspected – thus, the smaller producers were able to compete with large producers in local markets. By forcing all meat packers to undergo inspection, the government basically ran the small meat packing operations out of business.

c) The inspection seal effectively serves as a fantastic marketing gimmick. It provides a false sense of security to US consumers and legitimizes the meat processed as being approved by the US government.

Jonathan Ogden Armour, President of Armour and Company, one of the largest meat packing corporations in America, wrote the following in a March 1906 Saturday Evening Post article:

“To attempt to evade government inspection with beef from a purely commercial viewpoint is suicidal. No packer can do an interstate or export business without government inspection. Self-interest forces him to make use of it. Self-interest likewise demands he shall not receive meats or byproducts from any small packer either for export or other use unless that small packer is also official (under government inspection.) This government inspection thus becomes an important adjunct of the packer business from two view points. It puts the stamp of legitimacy and honesty the packer’s product, and so is to him a necessity, and to the public as an assurance against diseased meats.”

Folks we have to wake up… The government can’t keep you safe from anything and is ALWAYS used by big business as a tool to suppress competition, enact monopoly privileges, and otherwise loot the public to no end. It should be blatantly obvious to anyone with half a brain that as government has grown, so has the wealth disparity. There is a clear reason for this. Government creates the wealth disparity by granting monopoly privileges to corporations through contracts and patents, by subsidizing industry and bailing them out, and by enacting regulations which serve as barriers to entry.

Go TO: Toxin

Philistines Strike Again

The litigation currently going on in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy case reveals just how uninformed the risk managers at Lehman were on the eve of the firm blowing up. Bloomberg says 

"Lehman’s books were in such a mess that I don’t think they knew where they were,” Elizabeth James, a director of Barclays’s futures business, testified in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. James worked on Barclays’s purchase of Lehman’s brokerage during the 2008 financial crisis. 

And the dog ate my homework - all bullshit!

No Anonymity in the future of the INTERNET says Google CEO

Schmidt's message at the Techonomy Conference was that anonymity is a dangerous thing and governments will demand an end to it. No anonymity is the future of web in the opinion of Google's CEO Eric Schmidt. He said many creepy things about privacy at the Techonomy Conference. The focus of the conference was how technology is changing and can change society. Schmidt's message was that anonymity is a dangerous thing and governments will demand an end to it. GO TO Techonomy Conference

Google CEO is cleverly passing the blame on Government while pushing for no anonymity on the interwebs. Who has to gain more from no anonymity? It's companies like Google who uses personal information to horde ads on your face. I don't like where this is going. I love how he tries to make the distinction between anonymity and privacy. I'm very certain that they will be the ones to decide which is which and what it entails and not us the average internet users.

Furthermore Eric Schmidt says privacy isn't important, and if you want to keep something private, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" in other words, innocent people have nothing to hide. I hate that type of thinking! Someone tell this idiot that nobody likes a nosy neighbor.  

Greed Is Good from the Wall Street movuie

Iraq War Fraud Grosses $100 Million More

Even though another $100 million is "missing" in so-called "reconstruction" funds, it may never be known how much Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) actually skimmed in Iraq War Fraud. An audit by Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stewart Bowen found that officers "cannot properly account for or support $96.6 million in cash and receipts." "There was no assurance that fraud, waste, and abuse did not occur in the management and administration of cash assets," the May 2005 audit concludes. The latest black hole of Iraq War fraud is the Rapid Reconstruction Response Program (R3P) which let the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Paul Bremer, dispense cash with little or no oversight. Indeed the audit concluded that RSP officials did not "properly document transfers of cash," or reconcile the amount disbursed and the amount received by its agents. These monies were part of "Development Fund of Iraq," (DFI), entrusted to the CPA by the United Nations. 

I find it disturbing to see videos of Donald Rumsfield shaking hands with Saddam Hussein 20 years ago. It just goes to show you how you cannot trust anybody. If that can happen then anything is possible. It just goes to show how the leaders of our countries today that make out they are there to care and to protect us could also change and in the future become our enemies. I believe that the whole American Government is a fuck up. Democrats and Republicans don't seem to know what they are doing. America has been in debt for well over 20 years. Of course, I am not a conservative nor am I a liberal. I just want to preserve our constitutional rights.

My two cents worth

Does the lust of money make people deceitful?

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. - George Orwell

It seems like the most deceitful people are those who have money or those who covet money. I have tried to pinpoint the demographics of this group. But they seem to cut across all religious beliefs, sexes, sexual preference, ages, race, and economic spectrum of society. I have noticed that the more money someone has the less value they seem to place upon other people who are judged to be inferior to them. This seems to hold especially true if those people did not earn their money, but in fact had it given to them. Criminals seem to be less conflicted about their deceit and do not seem to deny their deceit. The world is a very deceitful place. At times it seems as if everything is a lie and everyone is a liar. Even those who have no money are deceitful; they are just not capable of hiding their deceit, because they tend to be dense.

Everyone lies when it comes to money. Some lie to keep it, some lie to get it, and others pretend to be impartial in an attempt to get and/or keep it. In most cases those who rule, only rule by deceit and treachery.

Money is pretty amazing. It has the power to corrupt one group of people into wanting to do anything to acquire it. At the same time it has the power to enslave another group of people who will voluntarily submit themselves into slavery in order to maintain their access to it.