Inspections Of Foreign Meat Decline After Budget Cuts To Food Safety Programs

By Travis Waldron on Nov 2, 2012 at 6:40 pm

The number of countries that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has visited for in-person inspections has plummeted over the last four years, as budget cuts have forced the agency to implement new inspection methods and rely on self-reporting by other nations. The number of countries the U.S. inspects in-person each year dropped to just three in 2011, and the average over the last four years has shrunk by 60 percent, Food Safety News reports:

Online documents show that from 2001 to 2008 FSIS inspectors were routinely evaluating, in-person, the foreign plants processing meat for American consumers. The number of countries audited annually, with only one exception (in 2006 there was a large drop in audits), was between 25 and 32, so FSIS was auditing an average of 26.4 countries per year. From 2009 to 2012, however, the number of countries audited annually dropped to between 3 and 20, so FSIS was auditing an average of 9.8 countries per year. [...]

By 2011, the number of countries audited by FSIS was down to just 3: Australia, New Zealand and Poland.

The Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) claims that its new system is a better way to evaluate food safety, but a source told Food Safety News that the changes came because of budget cuts. “The budget restrictions had pretty much forced the agency to re-evaluate the most cost-effective way to do audits,” the source said. Both President Obama and the GOP included cuts to FSIS in their budgets, and Republicans also included cuts to other food inspection agencies, like the Food and Drug Administration, even as E. Coli, salmonella, and other outbreaks have sickened thousands of Americans in recent years.

The number of audits in 2012 has increased to 11, according to Food Safety News, still far short of where it was during the Bush administration. If the reduction is indeed due to budget cuts, the savings aren’t likely to materialize: one out of six Americans suffer from a foodborne illness each year, with 128,000 resulting in hospitalization and 3,000 in death. Treating those illnesses costs the United States as $152 billion each year.

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Alyssa

Guest Post: Cloud Atlas’ Postmodern Take On Freedom

By Zack Beauchamp on Nov 2, 2012 at 6:04 pm

“All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended,” intones one of Cloud Atlas’ ubiquitous voiceovers. It sounds trite or, worse, meaningless, a point the film’s harsher critics have delighted in making. But for all of Cloud Atlas‘ bombastic presentation, its actual argument is a subtle meditation on the tortured relationship between power and emancipation, one that marries two seemingly inconsistent approaches to the world into a novel notion of human freedom. That the film dunks this argument in a vat of sentimentality obscures the point, but it’s there. And it’s entrancing.

The movie’s six interconnected stories, spanning the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future, all share a habit of conveying the movie’s basic moral point — everyone should help each other be free! — in the cinematic equivalent of all caps. I, for one, was delighted by this, but I can see why others might complain that this isn’t much intellectual heft for a movie purporting to be about ideas. But there’s a danger in assuming any movie’s most obvious message is the only thing has to say. Cloud Atlas is a case in point.

Take the plot centering on Adam Ewing, a pre-Civil War lawyer stuck on a merchant vessel in the Pacific Ocean. In a certain sense, it’s the bluntest moral arc in the film — through his friendship with escaped slave Autua, Ewing goes from chatting about racist theories of history at the dinner table to abandoning his father-in-law’s slavetrading business in favor of a life as an abolitionist activist. Your garden-variety contemporary American morality tale, right?

On the surface, yes, but the ways in which Autua’s struggle prompts Ewing’s evolution betrays a nuanced understanding of what it means to have power over another person and when it’s right to use it. Autua convinces Ewing to help him stow away on the ship not by a direct, simple appeal to their shared humanity — indeed, he tries that and it fails. Rather, Autua takes out a knife and puts it to his own throat, demanding Ewing slit it rather than leave him to the more terrible death that stowaways face after they are, inevitably, discovered. Forced to confront the fact that his inaction will kill Autua as surely, and more horribly, than murdering him, Ewing feels compelled to become Autua’s advocate. Autua survives not by killing Ewing or winning him over with words, but by embracing the desperation of his own situation. Autua found power in his own seeming powerlessness.

If this analysis of power sounds familiar, that’s because it’s straight out of influential social theorist Michel Foucault’s work. Foucault’s mantra is that “power is fluid,” by which he means that it’s a mistake to think that force, constraint, and privilege are the only avenues to change the world. In his view, the power to change the world can be found anywhere; those who seem beaten down often have unexpected and unpredictable ways to turn the tables. But there’s a dark side as well — because power (understood as the ability to direct the behavior of others) is everywhere in human interactions, it also can constrain those who believe themselves to be free. Methods of domination, for Foucault, can often be as unexpected and invisible as opportunities for freedom.

Foucault’s understanding of power is nearly omnipresent in Cloud Atlas; many of the stories critically involve finding power in unexpected places. Robert Frobisher, the brilliant gay composer, escapes his debts by becoming an assistant to the more famous Vyvyan Ayrs. The relationship appears to be mutually beneficial; a friendship built on deep intellectual appreciation of music. But that move ends up trapping Frobisher further, as Ayrs exploits Frobisher’s dependence on him to demand the younger composer credit Ayrs with his original work or else be ruined. Frobisher’s response, an escape to finish his work and then suicide, is the film’s only tragic ending, but nonetheless a small victory in the sense that we see in 1975 that Frobisher succeeded in claiming his masterpiece.

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Economy

81 Percent Of Moms Without High School Diplomas Also Have No Paid Maternity Leave

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Nov 2, 2012 at 5:30 pm

The average American woman who never got her high school diploma makes about $365 a week. That means, if she works every single week from January 1 through December 31, she’ll earn a total of $20,540 a year. But if that woman’s expecting a child, she is going to have to take some time off. And there’s a four in five chance that, here in the United States, she won’t get even a day’s worth of paid maternity leave to deliver her baby or be with her newborn.

The United States is one of the only developed countries that does not offer paid maternity leave. The Family and Medical Leave Act is supposed to provide protection for expecting mothers, but its stringent requirements exclude a lot of women, particularly low-income, low-education women of color. About half the workforce doesn’t qualify for FMLA.

But even if their jobs do fall under the requirements (they must have worked “for at least 12 months and have worked a minimum of 1,250 hours during that time for an employer with at least 50 employees within a 75-mile radius”), they aren’t guaranteed any income.

A new proposal from the Center for American Progress, however, is trying to remedy that. Its plan for Social Security Cares would require employers to give qualified employees up to 12 weeks of paid leave for certain life events that include “the birth of a newborn or the arrival of a newly adopted or fostered child; The serious illness of a spouse, domestic partner, parent, or child; The worker’s own serious illness that limits his or her ability to work.”

Women are growing to be a larger and larger percentage of the primary breadwinners in their homes. But for many, the joy of motherhood evaporates into a panic of trying make ends meet.

Paid maternity leave is a societal investment that would ultimately benefit everyone, including employers. Offering paid maternity leave allows employees to stay at their jobs who would otherwise be forced to quit, lowering training and start-up costs for employers. It also allows employers to recruit the best person for the job without the employee having to consider leave policy. When such a policy was implemented in California, 99 percent of employers found it had either no effect or a positive impact on employee morale; 91 percent said the same about profitability, and 89 percent said the same about productivity.

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Justice

State Marijuana Legalization Would Hobble Mexican Drug Cartels, Study Finds

By Nicole Flatow on Nov 2, 2012 at 5:20 pm

Passage of one of the three state ballot measures to legalize marijuana in Washington, Colorado or Oregon could significantly weaken Mexican drug cartels, according to a new study by a Mexican think tank. “It is estimated that around one-third of Mexican drug gangs’ income is from marijuana, surpassed only and narrowly by cocaine,” according to the LA Times.

Legalization in even one U.S. state would likely cut into cartels’ profits by 22 to 30 percent, based on estimates that U.S.-produced marijuana would retail at a little more than half the price of illegally produced Mexican pot, the study by the Mexican Competitiveness Institute concludes. However, the study assumes that marijuana producers in the state where it is legal will distribute to customers in other states where it is illegal, an action that would inherently create a different type of illicit market and be particularly susceptible to federal prosecution.

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Security

New Internet Monitoring Law In Russia Guised To Protect Children Could Lead To A New Surveillance State

By Andrea Peterson on Nov 2, 2012 at 5:00 pm

Internet freedom in Russia took a hit yesterday, as the Kremlin implemented new online filtering protocols that could result in widespread government monitoring of web traffic — all due to a measure purportedly aimed at protecting Russia’s youth.

This is far from the first time protecting children has been invoked in support of laws requiring a significant online surveillance, just last year the U.S. House considered the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, which would have mandated internet service providers (ISPs) to maintain records of everything you do on the Internet every year, and give the government access to the data without a warrant under the same pretenses.

The evolution of the Russian law should make American citizens thankful the U.S. legislation failed: While it originated as a blocking mechanism for obscene content, since passage, Russian courts have said the measure can be used to ban political extremism and critics of President Vladimir Putin’s regime and the Ministry of Communications concluded Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is the only way to implement it. DPI is a method of data processing involving looking at the details of the packets sent across networks to determine how to process or reroute the information. Logistically, this will require Russia’s ISPs to maintain detailed records of user traffic and would allow the Russian government a potential backdoor into the private lives of Russia’s internet users. As Eric King, head of research at Privacy International explained to Wired, this has some very troubling implications:

“No Western democracy has yet implemented a dragnet black-box DPI surveillance system due to the crushing effect it would have on free speech and privacy… DPI allows the state to peer into everyone’s internet traffic and read, copy or even modify e-mails and webpages: We now know that such techniques were deployed in pre-revolutionary Tunisia. It can also compromise critical circumvention tools, tools that help citizens evade authoritarian internet controls in countries like Iran and China.”

All of this makes DPI sound sinister, and it can be: the late Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi used DPI to track online dissent in Libya, and has proven a cost effective way for totalitarian regimes to censor and target political opposition. Although, there are legitimate uses — particularly in network protection — most internet freedom advocates are against large scale implementation due to the damage potential abuse would for freedom of speech and privacy rights, especially in nations with poor track records on human rights issues (such as Russia).

However, most ISPs are already keeping tabs on what their subscribers are generally up to online and have the ability to use DPI on case by case basis — and as with much of the technology interacting with personal details, the questions of who has access to what breakdown of information, under what conditions, and with what safeguards to prevent abuse are critical to their responsible use. Even in countries with more respectable track records on these issues than Russia, DPI can cause considerable controversy, such as when it was proposed as part of new cybersecurity protocols in the United Kingdom.

Depending on how Russia’s mandated DPI processing is implemented and utilized, it may serve as a cautionary tale not only about how the justifications for legislation don’t represent their actual applications, but how structured surveillance can stifle the free flow of ideas online.

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Election

The 5 Most Racist Ads Of 2012

By Igor Volsky on Nov 2, 2012 at 4:46 pm

Economic issues dominated the 2012 election season, with candidates from both parties vying to convince voters that they are more qualified to create jobs and help the economy recover. But unfortunately, some campaigns and third-party groups strayed from policy issues and relied on racism to win over voters. Below are the top 5 racist ads of the 2012:

1) In October, the Tea Party Victory Fund ran an ad suggesting that President Obama’s policies have “enslaved Americans” and showed an African American woman claiming that she received a free “Obamaphone” from the administration:

2) Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), who is challenging Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), ran a Super Bowl ad showing a woman in rural China speaking broken English and thanking Stabenow because “we take your jobs.” “Your economy get very weak, ours get very good,” the woman said:

3) In a stunning appeal to Islamaphobia, a group linked to former Swiftboater and birther conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi launched a smear attack ad on a Muslim-American Congressional candidate. The spot warns that Dr. Syed Taj, the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s 11th Congressional district, wants to “advance Muslim power in America“:

4) Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) is attacking Democratic challenger Raul Ruiz for participating in Native American protests during the 1990s. “Raul Ruiz attacked Thanksgiving and our American values,” the ad claimed:

5) A Super PAC ad targeting Rep. Allen West (R-FL) over his positions on women’s rights, portrayed the Tea Party Congressman in a boxing ring throwing punches at white women. The spot pictured West in boxing gloves and with a golden tooth:

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Election

Volunteers For Voter Suppression Group Installed As Election Officials In Ohio

By Aviva Shen on Nov 2, 2012 at 4:43 pm

A warning from the Ohio Voter Integrity Project's website

Conservative poll observers are gearing up for Election Day, when they will watch for possible instances of voter fraud and challenge voters they find suspicious. As ThinkProgress reported, many of these volunteers have been fed false or misleading information about voting rights by the Romney campaign and independent Tea Party groups like True the Vote. True the Vote encourages its poll watchers to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote.”

But one True the Vote affiliate, the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, is taking their election interference one step further. Ohio VIP has recruited and dispatched poll workers who will not be merely observing, but directly involved in the voting process in a crucial swing state. Hamilton County elections director Tim Burke told the Columbus Dispatch that VIP poll workers will represent the Republican Party:

We know that the Voter Integrity Project has recruited and through the (Hamilton) County Republican Party has placed some poll workers. I have discussed this with my Republican counterpart.

I accept the fact that he understands that the VIP pollworkers are working for the Board of Elections on Election Day and are subject to the board’s instructions, not the VIP instruction. Obviously both sides are going to have observers as well as poll workers. I, and others will spend the day responding to trouble calls.

Ohio VIP provides a 3 hour training for their poll workers, as required by the Board of Elections. The group is advertising these sessions, according to the Dispatch, “as going beyond what the secretary of state tells them.” Ohio VIP is one of the more zealous branches of the already extreme True the Vote national organization; Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) opened a criminal investigation into True the Vote due to the Ohio group’s attempts to purge thousands of students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans from the voting rolls.

While in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare, overzealous poll workers could jeopardize legitimate votes by forcing them to use provisional ballots, which cannot be counted until November 17. Ohio’s provisional ballot mess is already threatening to disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters — the bulk of whom live in urban, minority-heavy areas like Hamilton County, which contains Cincinnati. In 2004, Ohio tossed out thousands of provisional ballots, concentrated in Hamilton and the state’s four other urban counties. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) lost Ohio by a narrow margin in 2004, allowing George W. Bush to win a second term.

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Alyssa

The New York City Marathon And Sports As A Symbol Of Our Resilience

By Travis Waldron on Nov 2, 2012 at 4:34 pm

It has been less than a week since Hurricane Sandy slammed into the nation’s East Coast, flooding major parts of New York City and New Jersey, killing at least 54 in the area, and leaving thousands of residents without power or clean waters. And yet, in two days, the New York City Marathon will go on as planned, winding its way from Staten Island through Brooklyn to the Upper East Side and Queens before finally ending in Central Park.

Despite calls to cancel the marathon, it must go on, at least according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “I think it’ll be a great testament to the city’s resilience,” Latif Peracha, who will run in the marathon for the first time, told Fox News.

Sports have often been a symbol of our nation’s resilience. The continuance of the 1989 World Series, played between the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, 10 days after a massive earthquake shook the Bay Area showed that we could carry on through natural disasters; the return of sports in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the return of the New York Yankees to the World Series, showed the world we could carry on after devastating attacks on our own people.

The New York City Marathon continued in 2001 too, an allusion Bloomberg made in deciding not to cancel it. “If you remember going back to 9/11,” Bloomberg said, “I think Rudy (Giuliani) made the right decision running the marathon.”

But this isn’t 9/11, which occurred nearly two months before that year’s New York City marathon and 10 days before the next baseball game was played in the city, and this isn’t a situation in which sports should show the rest of the nation, or the world, how tough and resilient our biggest city is.

First responders in New York are still digging through the aftermath of Sandy to find bodies, and the death toll is rising by the day. Now, hundreds of police officers will be forced off that job to secure the marathon route. Thousands of the city’s residents are without power, but according reports, the generators that will be devoted to on-site tents throughout the marathon route could power 400 Staten Island homes. Thousands more in both New York and New Jersey lack clean water, but on Sunday, marathon runners will be tossing back quick swigs of water to stay hydrated, dumping water on their heads to stay cool, and tossing half-filled cups into the street below them.

Games across the city, from the NBA’s debut in Brooklyn to the MLS playoffs in northern Jersey, have been postponed or moved over the same concerns. Those are far smaller operations that require fewer security officials and less resources than the all-day marathon.

Sports have helped Americans cope with crises, providing an outlet to return to normalcy in the wake of disaster. They have demonstrated the resilience of our people and our values. But running the New York City Marathon this week, devoting attention and resources away from people who need them to carry on, isn’t resilient. It’s ridiculous.

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Justice

GOP Claims Voting Machines Are Stealing Elections For Obama

By Ian Millhiser on Nov 2, 2012 at 4:20 pm

In an apparent remake of a Simpsons sketch, Republican National Committee chief counsel John Phillippe sent a letter to the top elections officials in Nevada, Ohio, Colorado and three other states claiming that “in a significant number of cases, voting machines in your states have populated a vote for Barack Obama when a voter cast his or her ballot for Mitt Romney.” The letter does not provide any evidence that this is actually occurring. Nor does it name a single voter who experienced such an error.

Nevertheless, Fox News did not concern itself with this lack of evidence, instead running a interview this morning with top Republican voter suppression attorney Hans von Spakovsky about the “disturbing story” of early voters trying to vote for Mitt Romney “but the check went to Obama.” If anything, however, this segment did more to undermine Republican fears of machine-induced voter theft than to justify them. Despite host Eric Bolling’s repeated attempts to suggest that “deliberate” election fraud might be at work, even von Spakovsky was forced to admit that if any machine malfunctions are actually occurring “it’s probably a glitch.” Watch it:

This is not the first time the GOP raised these exact same allegations. In 2010, Republicans raised similar complains that voting machines were somehow stealing votes from Nevada GOP senate candidate Sharron Angle. In a letter responding to the GOP’s most recent allegations, Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller (D) explains that the Republican Party’s 2010 fears were entirely unwarranted:

[M]y office investigated similar complaints and rumors in 2010 with the assistance of the FBI and the Nevada Attorney General’s office and concluded that claims that our voting machines were pre-programmed, malfunctioning, or in any way preventing any voter from casting a ballot for the candidate of his or her choice were without merit. At the conclusion of that investigation, Nevada’s multi-jurisdictional Election Integrity Task Force concluded: . . .

My investigation reveals no evidence of voting machine tampering or voter fraud. It does reveal the presence of occasional human error in the election process, which cannot be avoided as long as humans are part of the process.

It should go without saying that if machines are actually malfunctioning, they should be fixed immediately. But claims of such malfunctions have been investigated before and found completely lacking. Indeed, Nevada already has numerous checks in place to prevent malfunctions from occurring. Many of the interventions the GOP requests to address so-called machine problems, such as recalibrations of the voting machines and a notice to voters to ensure their votes are being properly cast, are already policy in the state.

According to Nevada journalist Jon Ralston, there’s likely something other than real concerns about machine problems motivating the GOP’s complains — “I have no doubt the RNC is laying the groundwork for a challenge should the presidential race be close here or in some of other states where these ‘significant’ number of instances have occurred.” As America learned in 2000, President Obama doesn’t just have to win his reelection, he has to win it by a Scalia-proof majority.

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NEWS FLASH

British Court Rules Against Discriminating Catholic Adoption Agency | A British judge has ruled against Catholic Care, a Leeds-based organization that offers adoption services but wishes to discriminate against same-sex couples. The agency sought an exemption to the UK’s Equality Act of 2010, which instituted nondiscrimination protections for gays and lesbians and their families. The judge dismissed the complaint, ruling there was insufficient evidence that Catholic Care would lose funding if it complied with the law. In response to the ruling, the agency said it would simply abandon its adoption services to avoid providing for same-sex couples.