Time for Another New Deal

I've said it once and I'll say it over and over and we all should until the rightwing backs down. Laissez faire = poisoned food.

We find out that the "get government off our backs" Bush administration has screwed us once again, this time by allowing chickens that American children eat regularly to feed on contaminated chicken feed. CNN reports:

People have eaten millions of chickens that were given feed tainted with recalled pet food, federal officials said Tuesday, though they said the threat to human health is minimal.

Minimal? Minimal??? Tell that to the people who die in third world countries because they don't even have a USDA to protect them!!

Now for a little history lesson for a change. During the 1930s, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was doing all he can to bring America out of the poverty that the laissez faire Republicans had been responsible for, there was a Supreme Court case very relevant to our present discussion. The federal government wanted to protect people from eating sick chickens back then, too, but the conservatives said that the Interstate Commerice Clause only applied to trade between states!! This narrow, strict constructionist social Darwinian attitude was that Americans shouldn't need protection from eating sick chicken meat because they could just trust big businesses to feed them clean meat. The Supreme Court, in the worst decision since the one that said African Americans had no rights, also went along with this, and let the company keep selling sick chicken meats! Roosevelt responded by trying to get more progressives on the Supreme Court. As he understood, the Constitution was a living, breathing document with its own heart and soul, which would, like all of us, have to adapt and progress with the times.

There are still naive rightwingers who say we can trust corporate America not to poison their customers. Yeah, right. We see what this means -- sick chickens and pretty soon sick kids and dead fish like with DDT and E Coli, too. The Bird Flu only makes this case all the more pressing and urgent. We need a real USDA, with a fully funded budget for a change! (Let's not forget, though, that these public servants brought this to the attention of the people, not the corporate media, so they deserve our thanks and more support!)

Support the troops on the front lines of the meat inspection war!

From the looks of where our food industry is going, getting worse and worse, it sounds like we need another New Deal, to finally put the sick chickens to rest, as it were.