Funeral

There was a sad funeral recently in Chicago, commemorating the tragic demise on April 18 of a long time friend of us all.  The event was first reported by the Chicago Tribune;  National Public Radio then brought the news to a wider public last Sunday, so many of you may have already learned the tragic news.[1]

Funeral for Facts

The funeral ceremony was to commemorate the death of Facts.

The deceased was ill for a very long time and on life support in recent years.  Death mercifully came about a week ago. The funeral was attended by reporters, bloggers, and news media of all kinds.

The final blow was when Florida Congressman Allen West declared that 78 to 81 members of the Democratic party were card carrying members of the Communist Party.  This was quickly established by fact checkers to be a total fabrication, but Congressman West continued to stand by his declaration.  West is the same congressman who claims that student loans are a socialist plot to educate voters.

Facts are survived by its brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and their sister Emphatic Assertion, according to the Chicago Tribune.[2]

Authorities say that facts, when they were alive, were “observable, concrete particulars in the real world,” things you can see, measure, and count; they first came into our modern consciousness at the time of Francis Bacon in the 17^th century.[3]

Bill Adair of Politifact.com spends all his time performing autopsies on the dead body of Facts. He has been unable to determine who the killer was. It appears from his initial findings that almost everyone in American politics has had a hand in the crime.

Photo from "You Are Not So Smart"

Adding to the carnage, political scientists, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reiflert, discovered the “backfire” effect, which is a name for the odd phenomenon now being studied by cognitive scientists. This is the phenomenon where a person who believes a false story is presented with incontrovertible facts contrary to his erroneous belief. The result is that the person will believe the false belief even more strongly!  In other words, facts have no effect whatsoever on false beliefs.

 Nyhan lists a number of these instances on his website[4] and in his fascinating book, “You  Are Not So Smart.”

One classic case of the backfire effect is the rise of the “Birthers.” 

Born in ?

This is a fast-growing group who believe that President Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia.  The President played along with this for a while, but finally revealed an authenticated birth certificate issued in Hawaii. As soon as he presented that factual evidence, the group exploded in size and became more convinced of his foreign birth.

Go figure.

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The Author on His Sailboat

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[1] The Death of Facts in an Age of Truthiness, All Things Considered April 29, 2012.

[2] Rex W. Huppke, Chicago Tribune reporter. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04-19/news/ct-talk-huppke-obit-facts-20120419_1_facts-philosopher-opinion.

[3] Mary Poovey of NYU, A History of the Modern Fact. http://english.fas.nyu.edu/object/MaryPoovey.html.  The author blames the demise of facts on economists who started using mathematical modeling to create a kind of “truth” that cannot be observed, and on the internet which allows anyone to make outrageous claims and gain at least a few believers. This blog is an excellent example. The reason I use endnotes in this blog is to give the illusion that facts, or at least some authority, underlies the outrageous claims made in the text. Of course, this is only a trick, used by virtually everyone these days.

[4] http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/. 

Help!

I heard recently that a group has formed to help protect dogs from dog-abusing Presidential candidates. It is called “Dogs Against Romney.”

According to the group’s blurb on Facebook. “we want a President who is nice to dogs”.  Readers should check out this group’s Facebook page; it has some really cute pictures of its members. This group is frightened that if Romney wins the election, dogs will be riding atop Air Force One.

  

The new Dog v. Romney group is part of a fad. Everyone who feels persecuted by Etch-a-Sketch is ganging up on the poor guy with other bleeding-heart job-killing over-regulating socialists types and making a huge fuss in the press and all over Facebook, You Tube, Twitter and all the other “new media.”.

There is even a group of weakling small businesses forming to fight against Etch-a-Sketch’s support for vulture capitalists.

As I reported in an earlier blog entitled “War,” women are uniting against Romney’s because of his war against them after he was pushed rightward and off the sexual cliff by Rick Sanctimonious’ support for vaginal ultrasound.

Immigrants from south of the border who tend lawns for the wealthy are forming another group “Hedge Clippers Against Romney” after he boasted about how he liked to fire people, especially immigrant garden help.   This group may offset the pro-Romney group “Hedge Fund Billionaires for Romney,” but there will be a huge big disparity in funding between one kind of hedge group and the other.

Inexplicably left out of all this is another group of victims who have been more viciously targeted by Etch-a-Sketch than any other minority. Addressing the National Rifle Association, Mitt proclaimed that he has all his life been hunting down and killing “small varmints.”

The first question this raises is: What exactly is a small varmint? 

Ed E. Lyne went into deep research mode to find for you the answer to this critical question.

According to Wikipedia (I am not lying; check it out yourself), the term "varmint" (or "varmit") is “an extremely pejorative” word used to describe “a particular class or group of people” considered to be inferior and subhuman, and often considered social parasites.”


Wikipedia goes on to say “application of the term can be wide, having been applied over the centuries in different languages to various groups, and its use is usually based on a perception that the target group's views are ‘disease-like,’ or that such groups exist out of sociological balance with the common society.”

"Inferior?" "Subhuman.?"Social parasite?" "Out of sociological blanace?"

Every one of these terms has been used—frequently-- to describe Ed E. Lyne, the author of this blog!!

It sent chills down my spine to realize that--most likely--I myself am a :small varmint."


This means that if Romney gets elected, I will be in the cross-hairs for sure. And he probably will get elected because, these days, you can pretty much predict who gets elected by how many billionaires he has in his stable, and Romney now has 12 billionaires, as opposed to Obama who only has George Soros.


It’s one thing to be taken over and fired by a vulture capitalist candidate and quite another to be the target of POTUS, with all the weapons he can bring to bear.

Vulture Capitalist

 It is one thing to have probes in your vagina, and quite another to have the entire US Armed Forces come down on you with shock and awe.


So, I say it’s time to forget all the other malicious low-life anti-Romney gangs and start a new one for the protection of small varmints.

My very existence on the planet is at stake and maybe yours too!!

I propose naming the new group “Small Varmints Against Romney.” If you are a varmint, big or small, this is a life or death issue.

Please support this group by sending cash to the new small Varmint Protection Superpac. Make the payments to “Save Our Small Varmints,” PO Box 69, Washington, DC 24156. Contributions of any size are accepted.

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Ed E. Lyne Attacked by Irate  Blog Reader

Obscenity

The Supreme Court has struggled mightily with the concept of obscenity. What is it, legally speaking?

In order to figure that out, the justices had to look at about 200 porno films and read every filthy magazine ever published.

For example, deciding if this scene pictured below is obscene or not is the kind of thing the Supremes had to wrestle with for weeks in their dark oak paneled chambers.

Finally, after all that exhausting research in private, one justice concluded that obscenity could not really be defined but “I know it when I see it.” [1]  Seems like he wanted to see a lot more of it in the future after his extensive introduction.

Judges may know it when they see it, but for a long time, corporate boards have not been able to recognize what was obscene and what was just a little bit naughty. The have continued to rubber-stamp mammoth paychecks for CEOs even while those same CEOs were busy driving their companies off the cliff, simultaneously trucking their own personal compensation home in gigantic armored vehicles.

The boards of directors of American companies may not know what is obscene and what is not, but some shareholders are starting to recognize it. The new definition of “obscene” is Vikram Pandit, the CEO of Citigroup.  Citigroup's shareholders voted down a $15-million pay package for Vikram, with one investment group saying “there is good pay and there is obscene pay.”[2]

This vote has been called “historic,”[3] “a milestone for corporate America” and “a wake-up call.”[4]


Corporate boards have been AWOL on the issue of corporate misbehavior, including excessive salaries for several decades. Arianna Huffington wrote about it in her book, "Pigs at the Trough" in 2003. Since then, the situation has only become more extreme. The Washington Post reported last week that Jamie Dimon was awarded compensation of $23,000,000 for managing J.P. Morgan Chase, 67 times the earnings of an average employee of the company.

The Bank of America awards millions to its CEO while the company is engaged in so much corrupt activity that it took Rolling Stone 6 pages of small print just to list crimes the company has been engaged in before and after the taxpayers bailed it out.

One of the most curious things about the Citigroup event is that—for the first time ever--some money managers took the side of investors instead of backing up Citigroup’s board. This is totally unheard of and unprecedented.

Money managers, especially the managers of mutual funds, have stayed away from the issue of corporate executive largesse, silently allowing those executives to pillage their companies-- even though those funds have a fiduciary obligation to their customers to protect the customers’ interests. As Vanguard founder John Bogle remarked, “The funds should demand with all their voting power that the companies they own are putting the interests of their shareholders first." (See the link to this study.)

Mutual fund silence on the issues of corporate malfeasance and bad governance, at shareholder expense, could come back to haunt them some day.  Being complicit in corporate greed and short-changing of shareholders on the part of companies they select to invest their customers’ money in destroys investor trust.  It shows zero integrity.

Mutual funds, with 21% of the shareholder votes, can block the door to shareholder efforts to fix the problem of obscene corporate executive pay and other corporate malfeasance. Or they can push that door open. Most funds have declined to use that power.  If 21% of the votes are going to either be silent or vote to rubber stamp bad corporate board decisions, shareholders have no hope of reforming corporate rip offs and misbehavior.

For a big list of the funds and ranking of how they vote on corporate governance, click here. Some of the biggest refuse to limit excessive executive compensation (the worst is Vanguard-ranked 26 out of 26 despite what its founder said, as quoted above). Some do try to limit excessive pay (like American Century, rank-1 and Dreyfus-rank 2), and some help once in a while, but not always (like T.Rowe Price-rank 9, and Fidelity-rank 15)

Why have so many mutual funds been so silent, letting their customers be taken to the cleaners by the executives of the companies the funds invest in? Who knows?  They won’t say, and speculation is rife.

The Harvard Business School has a technical explanation.  So does CBS News. And the University of Iowa has an explanation as well. The most plausible explanation appeared on Salon.

Mutual funds may be saying “What, me worry?”--but some other big investors are not playing dumb.  The CEO of the large retirement fund, Calpers (Phil Angelides,) has been voting against obscene corporate salaries. He said, “What we’ve tried to do is ask the question: How can we use our power to send a clear message to the market about the importance of corporate responsibility and conduct?” 

And Bill Gross, manager of Pimco, the world’s largest holder of corporate bonds takes another route. He outright dumps the bonds of corrupt companies who have crooked compensation committees and  pay their CEOs too much.

Mutual Fund Ties to Corporate Boards

The incentives on this issue are bass ackwards for mutual funds. (See the Note at the bottom of this blog.)  The big money made by mutual funds is in managing fat retirement accounts for the largest companies in America. There is far more money to be made managing those huge corporate retirement accounts than in managing puny IRAs and other small-time money for little grunts who only have small change invested with the funds.

So, mutual fund managers must ask themselves, “Why alienate the highly paid executives of the companies whose huge retirement funds we manage? If we do, they might take their retirement fund elsewhere, maybe to a more compliant mutual fund, one that will keep its mouth shut when the company CEO runs off with a few billion bucks in compensation, leaving the shareholders with nothing but the dregs.”

So in this bed of rattlesnakes, where can you feel safe hiding your puny little bag of shekels?

Beats me.

The Happy Blogger at Play 

"What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."--Woody Allen.

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[1] This is how Justice Potter Stewart described his threshold test for pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964). See Paul Gewirtz, "On 'I Know It When I See It'", Yale Law Journal, Vol. 105, pp. 1023–1047 (1996).

[2] Silver-Greenberg and Nelson Schwartz in “Citicorp’s Chief Rebuffed on Pay by Shareholders,” DealB%k, April 17, 2012, NY Times, quoting an investment advisory officer of a large Philadelphia money management company.

[3] Donal Griffin, “Investors Reject Citigroup’s Plan for Executive Pay,” Washington Post, April 17, 2012, p.A15.

[4] Silver-Greenberg and Schwartz, Ibid. The only reason this vote could ever happen is that Citigroup was a big benefactor of the bank bailout, and as a condition of being bailed out, they had to agree to allow a shareholder vote on executive compensation. More may be coming, however, because the Dodd-Frank legislation requires a much wider group of corporations to allow shareholders a say in executive compensation. Lobbyists are, of course, hard at work trying to get that onerous regulation repealed before it takes effect--or at least to riddle it with loopholes.

More Information: For more detail on mutual funds and executive compensation, click on this extensive study. For more on why mutual funds kowtow to excessive pay for executives in badly managed companies, see Gretchen Morgenson, “A Door Opens. The View is Ugly.” The New York Times, Sept. 12, 2004, and Gerald F. Davis & E. Han Kim, “Would Mutual Funds Bite the Hand that Feeds Them? Business Ties and Proxy Voting,” at 25(working paper 2005) (available at www.ssrn.com). Also see Gretchen Morgenson's expose in the NY Times.

For information on how a single executive pay consultant, Frederic W. Cook (whose company was named "Ratchet, Ratchet, and Bingo by Warren Buffet), has driven up corporate salaries, click on the link to this article.

For more information on whether the highly paid CEOs are really earning their huge salaries, see the new book "Pay Check" by David Bolchover.

The short answer is: "No."

Doggie Doo Doo

With Rick Sanctimonious broke and busted flat in Pennsylvania, the presidential election campaign has finally started to deal with real issues of importance to the American people.

The issue is---dogs--and how to treat (or eat) them.

Again, as always, the answer to the question of "who started this" or “who let the dogs out?”  is--- the biased elite media[1], of course. (Listen here.)

Poor (metaphorically speaking, of course) Etch-a-Sketch and Ann Romney are trying doggedly to disentangle themselves from Shamusgate. This is what the elite media establishment calls the trouble the Romneys got into when they joked about how their dog, Shamus, pooped and threw up all over the roof of their station wagon after being tied up there on a road trip. Ann made things worse when she told ABC News that Shamus actually liked it up there and rarely vomited or pooped up there during their trips.

Etch-a-Sketch tried making light of it, but he finally decided to change the subject after the first few weeks of Shamusgate. He did make some effort to clean up the mess by saying that he personally wiped off the car and let Shamus come inside for the rest of the trip. Finally shifting to the attack, he started claiming that he was a better dog person than Hopey-Changey because Obama was brought up eating dog meat in Kenya.or maybe it was Indonesia, whatever foreign country he was born in. Hopey Changey also ate grasshoppers according to his autobiography.

Whatever weird insects and animals Hopey ate as a kid, the big damage was done by Etch a Sketch's cartop doggie carrier. And by the fact that he admitted to Diane Sawyer that he got rid of the dog entirely when he realized that it was going to continue to shit on his car roof.

Can Etch-a-Sketch recover?

Very doubtful.

When vivid images such as an image of a freaked-out little doggie being tied up and driven on a station wagon roof rack at 65 miles an hour--and then abandoned--are implanted in the subconscious of the populace at large, it is damned hard to extract that and undo the damage.  It does not help that the cartoonists love the whole thing. Same with the late-night comedy shows.

Etch and the Family with Shamus Atop

It also does not help much when organizations like the ASPCA and the Humane Society and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are demanding an investigation, an apology, a mea culpa, and that Shamus be placed in foster care.

Another question also has not been answered by the Romney family: Do they leave Shamus on top of the car when the car is taken upstairs in their car elevator? This mystery--together with his secret Cayman and Swiss bank accounts and refusal to disclose his taxes--is raising enough issues to make a stinking stew of trouble for Etch-a-Sketch.

The animal rights folks are not a good group to piss off in election season. It could be as bad as pissing off the National Rifle Association—which is—as we all know—TERMINAL--for any politician.

Hopey-Changey may be the bail out king and a tool of Wall Street, but he is no slouch when it comes to down-and-dirty Chicago politics. He recovered the fumble by Etch-a-Sketch and is running down field with it, churning out picture after picture of his pooch, Bo, being lovingly caressed on the porch of the White House, in the White House yard, in his office, anywhere and everywhere.

Fox News and other right-wing media outlets know what to do when trouble like this arises: quickly shift the frame--focus on something else and go on the attack. Without much recent red dog meat in the news to use against Hoepy-Changey, they went back to the birth certificate scandal, running a long series of shows on how Obama forged his birth certificate to make it look like he was not really born in Kenya (or Indonesia or whatever foreign country he was in at that time.)

This birth certificate thing is a good move which will definitely work because polls show that 47.5% of American voters already believe that Obama was born in Kenya and is a hard core evangelical Muslim. The polls also show that this is exactly the same group that believes Elvis is still alive.  

So those foxy Foxers are onto a pretty darn good strategy there.

But it might not be enough. Dog lovers don’t forget doggie abuse quickly.
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[1] The "elite" media is large, widespread, powerful, and mostly owned by Rupert Murdoch. It includes people like Sean Hannity, Joe Scarborough, Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, G. Gordon Liddy, Laura Ingraham, Fred Hiatt, Matt Drudge, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Phyllis Schlafly, Brit Hume, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, George Will, Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, Tom Donahue, Ann Coulter, John Stossel, and many others, anyone in fact who follows the great American philosopher, Ayn Rand. 




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The author blogging away...

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Gridlock

Congress is gridlocked. Everyone knows it. The place is jammed up. According to a new book, 
Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking by Keith Krehbiel, it does not matter one little bit which party is in control--gridlock rules. But gridlock is not just about politics. In other contexts, it is known as constipation.

Curiously, it turns out that there is a relationship between the medical and political blockages.  I learned from a trusted Congressional insider that the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is building themselves a separate rest room so that they will not have to do their business in the same room as Democrats.

Evidently, some Rs get so tense and uptight in the presence of lefty pinko liberals (some of whom are even out-of-the-closet homosexuals) that they cannot make things move on through the system with a lefty in the same room.  This is partisanship gone amok.

Last week, Congressman Alan West, a Republican from Florida, announced that there were about 81 communists in the House of Representatives!  This frightening announcement is going to cause even more blockages of a dangerous nature. 

The American Communist Party was totally blindsided by West's shocking announcement. For a brief minute, they were hopeful, but after checking their roster, no congressmen turned up.

The House physician’s has been called in to address the legislative blockage in Congress.  His solution has not been disclosed, but could it be—the dreaded enema?

Maybe a good colon cleaning is what the Congress needs. If only the partisan politics could be flushed out with all the other c__p.

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War!

A new poll just came out indicating that women are losing interest in Romney.  This information has really massively pissed off Romney's campaign strategists.

So what did Romney do when he found out about all the female deserters and traitors?

He declared WAR!  A war on women.

No more contraception, no more birth control of any kind for sluts in law schools, break down the equal pay for women law (Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act) and impose mandatory vaginal ultrasound as a condition of medical care for women. And more. Check out this list.

This is not wise.  I know from personal experience that it is not a good strategic move to start any kind of war or other major or minor dispute with women--or even with an individual woman.

I personally have had numerous wars, battles, skirmishes, and other conflicts of many kinds with women. Two divorces and dozens of struggles on one kind or another with girlfriends. My experience is that women always win—and they win BIG.

Why start a war that you have a 100% chance of losing?

The Democrats started a War on Poverty.  We lost that one badly.

Then there was the War on Caterpillars.

We have a War on Drugs, a war in Afghanistan, and possible wars in North Korea and Iran. We just finished losing the war in Iraq.

Now women?

Some of my best friends are women. But I darn sure don’t want to get into an adversarial situation with them, in a political, legal, or physical context, much less a WAR.  Men need to learn this important fact: you can start it, but you cannot win a war against women.

Haven’t the Republicans studied the immortal zen question—"If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, is the man always wrong?"[i]

My advice to Mitt is: give peace a chance.

Don’t start a war with someone with this kind of firepower.

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[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest

Robbed!

My daughter was robbed.  Her vote was stolen.

She lives in an urban area and has no need for a driver’s license.  Hence, she has no voter identification. Under new State voter id laws, she will not be able to vote. Thirty-two States are now involved with voter id laws-- either enacted or pending.[i]

My daughter is not alone. More than five million urban residents (most of whom would vote Democratic) will not have driver’s licenses and will have great difficulty proving that they are eligible to vote in the next election. Most will be so discouraged that they will give up and just not vote at all.  25 percent of African Americans and 16 percent of Latinos do not have driver’s licenses.[ii]

And, as it turns out, disenfranchising these voters is precisely the intention of the new State voter id laws.[iii] The alleged problem being solved was voter fraud, but voter fraud is so miniscule that it can almost not be measured, down to 0.0004 percent in many cases (Ohio); the number is 0.009  percent in the State of Washington where my daughter lives.[iv]

It is not about voter fraud. So…what is it about, where did these laws come from, and who is behind them?

A little online research answers the question. The laws were drafted and promoted by a little-known group call the American Legislative Exchange Council,  ALEC for short. Its founder, Paul Weyrich, bluntly stated his objective when he said  “I don’t want everybody to vote…Our [Republicans] leverage in the elections, quite candidly,  goes up as the voting populace goes down.” [v]

And who is Paul Weyrich? Now deceased, he was one of the leading strategists of the far right. He founded the Heritage Foundation and is described by the mad dogs in the liberal press as one of the far right’s most “unbending ideologues."[vi]

Paul Weyrich

ALEC is now funded by the Koch brothers and the National Rifle Association, together with a long list of other corporate supporters[vii]. 

ALEC is not only engaged in stealing votes.  They have a bigger agenda, among them the “Shoot First and Ask Questions Later Law” now in force in 21 States.[viii] This is the law that may have contributed to the fact that the killer of Trayvon Martin in Florida was not arrested. Whether Trayvon or his killer was the guilty party in that particular event—and many others--may never be known because, under the Shoot First and Ask Questions Later law, the killers are often not arrested.  Their guilt depends only on their state of mind when they killed, and who knows what that was?

It is worth a minute to look at the list of supporters of ALEC.  While some have recently left the fold in the face of new information about what the organization has been up to, there is still a long list of ALEC supporters.  Many of them are companies that you and I have been buying things from or have another relationship with, such as Fidelity Investments, Turbo Tax (Intuit), Wendys, GEICO, Coors, Chrysler, and United Airlines.

Why do these companies want more people shot by vigilantes and more voters disenfranchised?

Who knows what goes on in the mind of a corporate CEO?  For my part, I plan to terminate my relationships with those companies as fast as I can, and to write very nasty letters to the ones I can’t easily.

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[i] The statistic comes from  this video.

[ii] Id.

[iii] Read more here at the Color of Change page.

[iv] See the video in endnote 1.

[v] Id.

[vi] Bruce Weber, "Paul Weyrich, 66, A Conservative Strategist, Dies,” New York Times, December 19, 2008.

[vii] See the list on ALEC watch at this website.

[viii] This law is also known as the Stand Your Ground Law.

Pink Slime

Yesterday I went to a soul food restaurant to get some meatloaf.  You can still get meat loaf at soul food joints, and I had a hankering for down home comfort food. 

Happily quaffing down some southern sweet tea and chomping away on a good slice of meatloaf, I suddenly thought—OH S__T....PINK SLIME![i]

Pink Slime

That was it for the meatloaf.  My comfort in the comfort food fell off the cliff.  I finished off my collard greens.  The meatloaf went into a doggie box.  Dogs don’t know pink slime from Alpo.[ii]

Pink slime has been in the news lately. Three factories that made only pink slime recently closed. All the workers were laid off.[iii]

Another case of “job-killing regulations”?

Pink slime is approved by the US Department of Agriculture.  70% of ground beef contains pink slime, according to ABC news.[iv]  It is even approved for your kids’ school lunches by the National School Lunch Program. (Next year schools can choose to refuse meat containing pink slime, but, for now, the regulation-crazy federal government says: no problem.)

The factories that went under were not closed by any regulatory authority for violating any food safety rules. What closed the factories and killed the jobs was a sudden and precipitous loss of faith by the American public in hamburger meat.

When the word began to get out through the internet and news media that hamburger meat, especially lean, low-fat hamburger meat, contained pink slime, the bottom began to drop out of the market for ground beef. Even McDonalds dropped pink slime.

To keep their market from imploding, ground beef processors stopped adding in the pink slime and—Bingo—no more market for the slime. 

Five Republican governors toured a pink slime factory and proclaimed:  "Dude, It's Beef!"  Willard Mitt Romney continued his tirades about Obama’s “job-killing regulations.”

But, pardon me Governor, what killed the jobs in this case, and in many others, was not regulations. Pink slime is so unregulated that beef processors don't even have to mention it on ground beef package  labels (if its less than 15% of the total product).

What killed this business was a job-killing loss of trust by the American public. People don't like surprises in their food. If you don't believe me, check out this You tube video.

The American food supply system is under-regulated to the point of being almost unregulated. The ammonia in pink slime is “harmless,” says the industry, and no regulator has the guts to cast any doubt on that assertion. Possible brain damage? Why worry?[v]

Consumption of processed food depends on trust.  The consumer has to trust that large multinational food-processing companies owned by billionaires are working to keep food safe and not worrying too much about making bigger profits.

Does the American consumer know what a colossal joke that is?

Our food-supply system from beginning to end is entirely dependent on a gullible public.  Regulatory authorities are either nonexistent or have been totally neutered by the food industry. The essential public trust can evaporate in a nanosecond when people start to learn what is really in their food.

The chicken industry is a good example. This is an industry dominated by a few huge international corporations. The farmers raising the chickens are basically no more than indentured servants who can only do what they are told.  If they don’t comply-- out of business. They are not even allowed to know what is in the feed that they feed the chickens.  If they don’t know, you and I sure aren’t going to know either. Mother Jones among others has been working on exposing this issue.

Every time you eat a piece of chicken, you are trusting Perdue or Tyson Food or another giant corporation to put your health ahead of their bottom line.

Hamburger or chicken tonight?

Either way, maybe you can console yourself that, whatever unlabeled noxious pink slime you are eating, at least no job-killing over-regulating federal bureaucrat was involved.

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[i] Pink slime comes consists of waste products of a slaughtered cow. The stuff is so heavily contaminated with bacteria that it has to be burned, made into for fertilizer, dumped in landfills, or used for dog food.  Recently, a company called Beef Products, Inc. started putting the waste through a centrifuge, compressing the ingredients, spraying them with ammonia gas to kill the pathogens, and flash freezing it. Presto, a new filler for ground beef. Ground beef can contain up to 15% pink slime without any label being required. The ammonia is excluded from the labeling process because it is considered a processing agent and not an ingredient. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime).

[ii] The use of pink slime in dog food declined when dog owners discovered it and started refusing to buy dog food with pink slime it in. (http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/is-it-wrong-to-feed-pink-slime-to-our-children-in-school-lunches/255320/)

[iii] The story of one company’s demise is told here.

[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime.

[v] Ammonia is capable of crossing the blood brain barrier. Elevated levels of ammonia can lead to impaired memory, shortened attention span, sleep disturbances, ataxia, seizures and coma. Untroubled by that inconvenient fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), always an ally of the American beef industry, has deemed the ammonia-treated waste product Lean Finely Textured Beef (LBTB), or pink slime, as “safe.”