The daily newspaper is now always loaded with Dickensian characters.
The country has a class of people, a club that hated the last two thirds of A Christmas Carol.
Often they have truly negative security implications for the general welfare.
Take Austin “Jack” DeCoster, the man behind the biggest egg recall in US history, profiled in the Los Angeles Times last week.
As the head of Wright County Egg Farms in Iowa, the paper couldn’t have painted him more poorly. If there was something evil Decoster hadn’t done in food production in the last few years, one can’t imagine what it might have been.
Decoster caused child labor laws to be rewritten in Maine, was sued by neighbors for “beetle infestation,” had eggs his company produced banned in New York, and was declared a “habitual violator” of environmental regulations in Iowa for “mishandling of hog waste.”
And in 1997 he was fined by the feds for “numerous egregious safety and health violations” in Maine.
But the US system just can’t get a guy like this off the street, even after he’s directly responsible for sickening 1,500 with Salmonella enteritidis.
In the predator state, the bad company led by bad men will literally poison the public. And they won’t stop until people are killed. In the predator state system, still that’s not even enough to get them [dragged off].
A year ago Baxter International and another US company it did business with killed people by selling tainted heparin. Heparin is a necessary drug in US medicine and it used to be made here. But in the rush for profits, like many other US businesses, both companies subcontracted their formerly in-house work to China, where there were people willing and malicious enough to deliver a cheaper counterfeit substance, a derivative of chondroitin sulfate, used to mimic heparin. The counterfeit material sickened hundreds and killed a number of people outright. There were news stories and vows of reform. And then nothing happened; it was back to business as usual in the predator state. It was no time to get in the way of commerce!
Today readers have the spectacle of the house hearings in which Peanut Corporation of America’s CEO, Stewart Parnell, is seen as willfully urging his employees to get his salmonella-laced peanuts out the door.
“[Parnell] gave instructions to nonetheless ‘turn them loose’ … ” reports the Atlanta Journal & Constitution. At the time, Parnell was engaged in finding a laboratory that wouldn’t return a positive salmonella test, kind of like fishing through a high school bundle of failed exams, looking for the lone good one, the coincidental exception, that could be waved around to show what a diligent student you were.
However, despite making hundreds ill and killing a handful, Parnell’s still on the street and the bulldozers haven’t been called. Literally, months go by — sometimes years — and the US government just will not remove such people.
In the predator state, this is the way things work, or — don’t work.
In the predator state, it is important to look the other way, to pretend to be concerned, but to actually remain indifferent to such things as long as humanly possible. Because to take action would be to interfere with the business of predators, the making of profit at everyone else’s expense.
Two years later, and despite lots of noise from the Obama administration about making regulation stronger and revamping the FDA with someone named Margaret Hamburg — someone at the time of appointment alleged to be great — it’s the same old story.
Not enough regulations, or regulations put in place too late, or ignored, or any other miscellaneous excuse from a bottomless grab-bag to explain why we have the trouble we do.
The Los Angeles Times profile of DeCoster had someone attesting he was at least good for local tax revenues. This because in desperate times people will accept anything really bad as long as there’s a bit of money that comes with it.
And one of his old attorney’s added: “I know Jack pushes the envelope because he’s growth oriented.”
Growth-oriented and envelope-pushing to the extent that today newspapers read:
Federal investigators found piles of manure up to eight feet tall, live mice, pigeons and other birds inside the hen houses at two egg farms suspected of causing a nationwide outbreak of salmonella illness, officials said Monday.
Investigators made public their observations of Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, two massive egg producers who have recalled nearly 500 million eggs since Aug. 13.
===
FDA officials said Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms appeared to violate federal regulations for egg safety that took effect July 9, as well as voluntary industry standards for sanitation. Company officials have said they were in compliance. – the WaPost
On its blog, the LA Times explained salmonella had been virtually eliminated from state egg production by institution of a rigorous program of sanitation.
The program, which includes vaccinating hens and testing barns regularly for bacteria, has essentially wiped out salmonella on California farms, industry officials say. Yet only nine other states have enacted similar government-sponsored efforts.
In other words, protecting the public has impacted business and that we cannot abide:
One reason, the Armstrongs and other California farmers contend, is cost. Injecting chickens and swabbing cages takes money — not a fortune, but enough to send egg distributors searching for lower-cost sources.
“We have lost contracts over pennies a dozen,” Ryan Armstrong said. “They want cheap eggs.”
One obvious answer to this is for the US government to regularly destroy a business and ban its bosses for causing mass illness through negligence and cost-cutting. And to do it swiftly.
Sadly, I doubt this will ever happen in what’s left of our lifetimes. You’re going to regularly see more and more of this type of thing.
Hand in hand with it — almost unnoticed, however — will go regular increases in expenditure to increasing food security against attack from terrorists.
The article from old DD blog continued:
In the predator state, it is critical that attention be diverted from real liabilities to the external menace, potential threats which can even be trumped up in the absence of proof that such things exist in a practical sense. In the case of tainted food and drugs, it has been the radical Islamists under Osama bin Laden who have been passed around as those who would easily poison and contaminate American food and drugs.
Terrorists might put botulism in milk, killing hundreds of thousands.
Terrorists might put anthrax in beef, rice or orange juice. (It was an American, an insider, working from a biodefense lab, who put anthrax in the mail, killing five. But only recently has research on dangerous agents been suspended at the lab where the insider, Bruce Ivins, worked so that the military-run disease house can be internally put in order.)
Osama bin Laden might even poison meals at school!
In fact, one famous example always used to squeal about what terrorists can do to food was also an American example, the work of the Rajneeshee cult in The Dalles, Oregon. And while it was intentional, it still was not as effective at creating illness, monetary loss and disruption as the recent egg recall.
Bioterrorist attacks could be covert or announced and could be caused by virtually any pathogenic microorganism. The case of the Rajneeshee religious cult in The Dalles, Oregon, is an example (1). The cult planned to infect residents with Salmonella on election day to influence the results of county elections. To practice for the attack, they contaminated salad bars at 10 restaurants with S. Typhimurium on several occasions before the election. A communitywide outbreak of salmonellosis resulted; at least 751 cases were documented in a county that typically reports fewer than five cases per year. Although bioterrorism was considered a possibility when the outbreak was being investigated by public health officials, it was considered unlikely. The source of the outbreak became known only when FBI investigated the cult for other criminal violations. A vial of S. Typhimurium identical to the outbreak strain was found in a clinical laboratory on the cult’s compound, and members of the cult subsequently admitted to contaminating the salad bars and putting Salmonella into a city water supply tank. This incident, among other recent events, underscores the importance of improving preparedness at all levels.
There’s a way of logically looking at these problems. But the US government doesn’t do it and corporate interests work to discourage it.
History shows that bioterrorism as a mechanism for causing illness and disruption is not nearly as frequent, effective, or motivating as the combination of greed, lack of regulation, and an utter disregard for the public welfare.
If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off [the prospect of GOP control in Congress], offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.
Imagine! It takes s summer of columns in the New York Times, written by a Nobel laureate, to get the guy to do something, anything — almost nothing.
And over the weekend, the smartest response he can come up with over the Fox News Network’s building him up as an illegitimate president until a quarter of the electorate believes he’s Muslim is that it doesn’t worry him?
What?
It’ll work him over good when all the junior league Ted Nugents get put in charge of Congress.
I was a little bitty baby
I was rocked in the cradle
In an old Middle Class-style home
Now that I’m old and broke
I wanna give the rich a poke
In those big places they call home
We’re gonna invite ourselves to dinner
And shoot ‘em in the kisser
And raze their ritzy mansions to the ground
It won’t be very hard
To piss in the front yards
Of all the shiny houses they called homes
We’re gonna pull ‘em out of cars
And dip ‘em in some tar
Then throw ‘em in a hole and have a laugh
We’re gonna find a big ol’ oak
Hang ‘em all ’til they croak
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call …
One imagines very few sane US military leaders would want to see their careers incinerated upon publicized or leaked news on use of the wonderful pain ray on civilians in Afghanistan.
However, the ADS redeployment to a Los Angeles jail, where it can be used on prisoners who can’t launch a counterattack against it, is an industry thing.
Specifically, Ratheon’s, which has long wanted to peddle a commercial version of the ADS into US prisons and police forces. Where, presumably, it can argue behind closed doors that the American public won’t care if prisoners are burned with it. And so they won’t step up suicide attacks and miscellaneous bombings in retaliation for employing it.
Although the Fox News segments on the thing — renamed the AID (you just have to laugh at the cartoonish evil of it) for Assault Intervention Device — participated in the usual stunt, sending a reporter out to be burned, the bloom is well off the weed.
Even Megyn Kelly had to admit the pain ray was a publicity disaster for the US military. And now only a moron, or someone paid to stand still and get burned, thinks getting shot by the pain ray while Raytheon’s technicians perform the test, is great stuff.
So what’s the connection with the Los Angeles jail?
Probably Sid Heal, although the stories didn’t mention him.
For longer than DD can remember, Sid Heal — who retired from the LA County’s Sheriff Department in 2008, has been trying to pitch the pain ray in Los Angeles.
In January, Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Dept. on March 31st. At that point, he had received at least sixteen job offers. The offer he finds most interesting involves consulting with Raytheon on the Active Denial System — the pain ray.
Raytheon desperately wants to peddle the pain ray into the US correctional system, a task they’ve been at for at least half a decade.
And while the US can’t use the blighted thing overseas for obvious reasons — the reputation for torturing the unarmed being one, the corporation presumably feels there is no such squeamishness in prisons. Where shooting penned up out-of-sight undesirables means out-of-mind undesirables.
Just picture it: Prison guards — big guys, often obese and/or hyper-muscular from a mixed regimen of weight-lifting and steroids, working in a jail — Pitchess — notorious for its bad conditions, and the pain ray.
I just can’t think of a more humane and reasonable combination, can you?
You see the mainstreamed face of extremism, those who hold the central belief that it’s the others — the lazy poor who will take your money, the enemy within which hates the soldiers, those who don’t pray in public — pitted against all the good people, now in rebellion, who believe in guns and the bible.
Skynyrd’s profile now, beyond the Nugent bottom-out-of-sight casino circuit, is boosted only by classic rock radio oldies programming and the involvement of Fox News, in this case — Sean Hannity.
Ironically, it’s their only leg up in the music world. Although revered by every act on country music television, the industry will never play this Lynyrd Skynyrd. With an eye to building a younger audience, one that likes Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum way more than Toby Keith, they’re atavistic bad news. (Even despite Van Zant’s hit, “Get Right With the Man,” from a few years back.)
Consider the title of the band’s latest album, “God & Guns.” Besides being one word away from being U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe’s platform since 1994, the song contains the following lines:
“There ain’t nobody safe no more
So you say your prayers and you thank the Lord
For that peace maker in the dresser drawer
God and guns keep us strong
That’s what this country was founded on
Well we might as well give up and run
If we let them take our God and guns.”
It’s a long way from the sentiments expressed in the band’s 1975 song, “Saturday Night Special,” which includes the lines “Hand guns are made for killin’/Ain’t no good for nothin’ else.”
A little more than the reporter lets on.
Most of Lynyrd Skynyrd is long dead.
Half of the band was wiped out in the famous plane crash of 1977, one which ended its recording career. Almost all the rest — gone from hard-living and the disease and misadventure associated with it since. The only surviving member actually in the band now is guitarist Gary Rossington.
One could make a discussion about how this band’s writing differs from the subtlety of “Sweet Home Alabama” and the mythology that evolved from the song over the years:
“In Birmingham they love the governor/Boo boo boo”
But it’s probably more logical to attribute the loss in intellect and spirit to the fact that 90 percent of the act is dead. And now they do what they can do for the Nugent circuit. Boo boo boo.
Like so many others, it’s quite something to make the mass delusion — “they’re gonna take my guns and my bible” — your defining world view as well as the backbone of a record by a band with a famous name.
Mass delusion, in fact, may be a little too mild a term.
Shared psychosis is more accurate, a sickness built on group fear in a hard time, nourished and stimulated by cynical and very real villainy, Fox News’ broadcast of barely veiled intolerance, always directed at the others. It’s a search for scapegoats and backstabbers. You’ve tuned into Glenn Beck and one day he’s jabbering about the Weimar Republic and how a video snip of Liza Minelli in Cabaret is sexually decadent, the next — how the country was founded to be a theocracy and that this has been expunged from history books.
It may be cause for alarm in other western nations. Observers can’t help but see that a noticeable portion of the country appears incapable of rational thought, unreachable through reasoned argument.
Ignorance and Fox News alone, for example, do not precisely explain why one in five people believe the president is Muslim, today’s big news.
What’s certain is that this won’t turn around anytime soon. The old journalist structures left in the mainstream media aren’t up to the task. To them, the one-in-five story is just another news item, one to be leavened with a paragraph saying the president does go to church and pray. (Or worse, finding a semi-egghead in 30 minutes to provide a few quotes for something that takes on an air of refinement and reason, blithely putting most of it away to human nature.)
You think the Skynyrd 2.0 or 3.0 guys believe what they read in newspapers? Rhetorical question.
Those who pay attention to these things may have noticed that a good number of modern country artists scurry sub rosa to Fox News when presented with the opportunity. For example, the musically apolitical Trace Adkins — his new album, Cowboy’s Back in Town, is actually quite good — is the latest example.
Another mental inconsistency in the white man’s country music is how so many of the manly guy artists make a big deal out of supporting the troops. They do it in song. They blabber it in interview. God bless ‘em, they even play overseas and publicize it as much as they can. But for all the public devotion to the honor of service, not one single man among them, strapping men of action as they are portrayed by Nashville, took the example of Pat Tillman and ran with it.
DD has it figured this way: It’s overcompensation. As committed as they are to the mythology of their music and reverence to Uncle Sam, they’re subconsciously feeling guilty as hell over not stepping up to be in the war. So they feel they can work it off with penance.
Good news, lads! Good news! The Tea Party does really bad hard rock, too.
I was gonna get into the genre of white folk music “Obama anthems” with Photoshopped Obama Hitlers and ObamaSatans but there were way too many. Your browsers would crash.
When not in superhero costume, these men, like Iron Man, exploit women, flaunt bling, and convey their manhood with high-powered guns.
Well — not precisely. It’s repulsors and fists. At least in the comic book that was my favorite, now decades past.
Tony Stark was a pretty good man. And Marvel gave him a drinking problem.
He was a standard good guy, fighting bad guys — many of them ludicrous — like the Mandarin.
And there was a departure into Cold War rivalry, Iron Man in an extended story battling the Titanium Man, the Soviet Union’s much bigger, stronger, clumsier and more stupid fellow in an armor suit.
Stark constantly battled tragedy in his personal and business life, like most Marvel heroes. But he was always left with hope and he always had a heart.
Robert Downey did a fairly good job, along with the movie scripts, in getting at least half the essence of that. He plays Stark as more self-centered and narcissistic than he was in the early comic book. But he still throws himself into harm’s way for his friends and people on the street without a moment of hesitation.
Worse, it is said:
Boys are told, ‘if you can’t be a superhero, you can always be a slacker.’ Slackers are funny, but slackers are not what boys should strive to be; slackers don’t like school and they shirk responsibility. We wonder if the messages boys get about saving face through glorified slacking could be affecting their performance in school.
Given what everyone sees they’re facing as a future in this country, being slack is a natural, even logical, response. We can’t all be Elon Musk. And, face it, there are already way too many Elons for the maintenance of good national mental health.
So, good heavens, don’t shirk responsibility. Be a young lickspittle now. Put your nose to the grindstone in school and march resolutely and with great vigor toward your multiple minimum wage job future. You may not even be able to afford a decent comic book.
It won’t come as a shock to anyone that lots of country music artists and their fans don’t like the president.
However, the country charts have largely shied away from this type of inflammation if we don’t include the short period after 9/11 when it granted a dispensation for those who liked the idea of getting our war on. (Chuck, you can correct me if I’m way off.)
These days there’s no political challenge in Country Music TV’s Top Twenty. And while any analysis of the country audience would come away with the idea that a profoundly anti-Obama song might move significant units, no one with a big reputation has tried to test it.
Until now.
Darryl Worley’s “Keep the Change” is just such a song, one the singer obviously hopes will set his career on fire. For those unfamiliar with him, Worley’s highest-charting number, the jingo and manipulative “Have You Forgotten,” benefited from the brief country music get-out-of-jail-free card given out after 9/11 to all redneck boors with hearts of gold.
The rest of the time Worley has been a nice-looking mild and well-mannered second-tier country artist, a philanthropic and genuinely decent man who gives money to cancer treatment.
Issued at mid-Summer in advance of an EP yet to be released, “Keep the Change” charted only briefly before being yanked at country radio.
In response, Worley has tried to mount a press campaign in protest of being shut out.
But first, it’s probably good to have a look at the song’s highest exposure on the Internet, at YouTube, where it was attached to an anti-Obama video.
It’s here and since embedding was disabled you’ll need to go out and view it to follow what a bit of this post is about.
It puts all the right red meat — Obama as “joker” taking half of your pile, your guns, smirking as he burns the Constitution, he’s not an American citizen, he’s like Hitler, worship the founding fathers, etc.
Set to what is a frankly great melody, it’s painfully offensive and bigoted in the way of the Tea Party.”This video is for every American who were [sic] doing fine without the change,” reads the intro.
It has also had its audio disarmed by YouTube at least once, perhaps reinstated by being able to just upload new copy of the thing, overwriting any neutered file.
When Worley released it, he and his record company surely knew it would immediately be put to such use. In fact, DD bets they were banking on it.
However, Worley took another step, mounting a futile press campaign to insist his song wasn’t about the president.
Here’s one example, from an on-line country music publication:
“I have gotten into some pretty heated debates already with this song,” Darryl tells The Boot. “Before God, I swear to you, I believe this is a patriotic song. And it’s a patriotic song coming from, I started to say one guy’s perspective, but there were three of us. We all just happened to sit down and come from the same place for this particular song. I might go back and rethink it if I had to do it over again and change the title to something else, because they hear the song title, and they immediately think that we’re ripping and tearing into Obama’s campaign slogans (”Change We Can Believe In” and “Change We Need”). I’ve got tons of friends that voted for Obama, President Obama, and I say that respectively (sic). I went and sat with them and played them the song and asked them how they felt. And 90 percent of them said, ‘The bottom line is the nation is really angry right now, and we don’t think there could ever be a better time in history for your song.’”
“I may be stupid to think I can write and record a song that might be a wake-up call to people and just have people reevaluate,” Worley added, also telling the interviewer the song has been getting a great reception.
Except at country radio.
Another Worley observation:
“One of the things that the country-music industry and radio watches very closely is how something’s selling. And this is the kind of song that will sell some product.”
Indeed.
One of the interesting things about this, besides Worley’s nonsensical and not a little disingenuous insistence that the song is not about the president, is that he’s also protesting not being played on the radio. Of being stiffed by a broadcast industry which destroyed the career of the Dixie Chicks, not for any political song, but for just voicing an opinion and going negative on the President before an audience in England.
And so Worley rather calculatingly seems to believe, perhaps with justification, that if “Keep the Change” — because of its opposite political polarity — sells enough to white and worked up rural people who buy it because it massages their fear and loathing, country music will eventually be forced to play it, anyway.
For a Kalamazoo newspaper, Worley — it is told — “[is] concerned about the state of the nation and the overall emotional well-being of its people.” And that the song “transcends political ties” — which must surely be one of the biggest crocks you’ll read today.
“We (co-writers Jim ‘Moose’ Brown and Phil O’Donnell) pick song titles because we know they’ll stir up a stink,” Worley told the newspaper.
In the few articles Worley has been in the singer has also been careful to mention the honor of playing for the troops and that he’s patriotic.
This may very well be so but it’s also a common sound: The sincere whine of the Tea Party he’s-gonna-take-my-pile type who always sees him or herself as a patriot. And who also feels the compulsion to tell you, or anyone in listening distance, that they are.
Besides, have you ever actually met anyone who tells you straight off they’re unpatriotic and don’t support the troops?
Blocked at radio so far, Worley has taken it to Fox News, appearing on Hannity and Huckabee.
Here’s a video of Worley performing “Keep the Change” on the latter:
Memo to Darryl Worley:
The story that your song is not about the president makes you out to be a bad liar when you appear on Fox News to push it, the network owning the patent on pandering to the anti-Obama crowd.
And no one with any sense believes the crap about Uncle Sam taking fifty percent of Darryl’s money given one look at the website.
“Keep the Change,” in fact, has been an anti-Obama country song title of choice, of sorts, well before Darryl Worley thought of it.
Here are a couple selections from YouTube. Can you list the common characteristics and themes?
Here. Wait for your WM Player to come up. QuickTime version here.
This country doesn’t make stuff for everyone anymore. No jobs. It’s kaput.
Now — if you can qualify for a gig designing electric cars or high-end custom shop guitars for the super rich (or 3-D blockbuster movies or flying robots for assassinating people in other countries), we can really get somewhere.
This morning’s post by Digby was depressing but spot on, particularly if you grew up where DD did:
Maybe we need to realize that our old arguments about how Americans are so accustomed to living the good life that they would resist the natural consequence of this new feudalism aren’t going to work. This anti-tax fervor has passed out of the political realm and into the religious. When people would rather that their kids choke on dirt than pay taxes, I’m guessing that pointing out that their unwillingness to pay taxes will result in tainted meat and dangerous drugs won’t convince them. Living in a primitive state is a sign of their devotion.
For a hard core in Pine Grove, Pennsyltucky, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, this was exactly how they thought. However, better minds generally prevailed in the running of the state.
That’s not so any longer and it’s why the peoples of other western nations now laugh at the idea of America. They know that come the November elections, the United States government will — after a mercilessly brief period — go back to fast-tracking the less-than-half- of-the-country-delusion that being the biggest banana republic, ever, is great.
All because the president wasn’t quite strong enough.
