By Gary Berg-Cross
A recent article in The
Washington Post (Tuesday, April 2, 2013) was called “Meat Inspectors Beat
Sequestration.” It described how behind
the scenes to get Congress to give back money for people who “inspect animal
carcasses” to
“In our food safety area ... we will have to furlough workers for a
period of a couple of weeks,” Vilsack said, speaking to an agriculture industry
conference in Las Vegas. “The problem is, as soon as you take an inspector off
the floor, that plant shuts down.”
The firm and unyielding threat of entire plan shut
down, backed by the right forces (inspectors & the powerful meat lobby), seems to have won
the day. The final winning part was described this way:
The effort was joined by the National Chicken Council, the National
Turkey Federation and the American Meat Institute, heavyweights of one of
Washington’s powerful agriculture lobbies. In the Senate, their cause was
picked up by two influential senators from strongly agricultural states: Mark
Pryor, D-Ark., and Roy Blunt, R-Mo.
Those two found a solution: $55 million in new money that had been meant
for other Agriculture Department programs. Blunt and Pryor wrote an amendment
that would give it, instead, to the meat inspection program. This was
sequester-proofing. After the sequester took its cut, the meat-inspection
program would be left with almost as much money as it had before.
It’s a bit of a peak into the hidden world of how
things get done in what Alexis de Tocqueville called “Democracy in America.” When aristocrat
de Tocqueville
arrived in the US he was hoping to see how the US managed to pull off a
functioning democracy when France had not. What he saw at first seemed like a
dysfunctional mess. Things just didn’t
seem to work smoothly or as he expected, He saw problems including:
- Institutional problems - too much power in the legislative branch (with “mediocre” representatives) blocking executive action,
- abuses of freedom,
- Individual problems - an excessive drive for individualism, and materialism
- ‘Materialism results from a passion for equality because people think that they ought to be able to have as much wealth as everyone else.
- Indirectly, materialism also comes from the philosophical tendency fostered by democracies to disdain lofty ideas or thoughts of eternity.
- The effect of materialism is that people may be so absorbed in their personal pursuit of wealth that they neglect to use their political freedom.’
But as he traveled around he saw
that somehow, behind the scenes, problems got solved. American Democracy was a bit like an iceberg
in that a huge part of how it worked was under the water and invisible to the
eye. And part of the reason de Tocqueville thought it worked was a form of faith people had in the
idea of Democracy itself. This was a fused religious and progressive belief
that things were destined to head in a better direction. Things may look bad, but there are hidden
solutions, we are good people in a Democracy and we will find a way.
Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t find this type
of faith in other places since there was less of an under the water iceberg to
how societies run. How dictatorships are run
is painfully obvious. The same might be
said of long standing aristocratic oligarchies. But America was mysterious and worked
solutions in wondrous ways.
It’s a feeling that there is probably
a bit less of now abroad in the country as problems are not being solved at an adequate
rate – elected politicians can’t decide on how to handle gun safety, solve
unemployment or avoid climate change.
Slipped into the
Agricultural Appropriations Bill, which passed through Congress last week, was
a small provision that's a big deal for Monsanto and its opponents. Anger
is growing over this “industry ploy to continue to sell genetically
engineered seeds even when a court of law has found they were approved by USDA
illegally,”
It’s another blow in faith in
a system that remains opaque but less subterraneanly, wondrously so.
Images
Icebergs:www.cohesioninstitute.org.uk/Resources/Toolkits/InterculturalDialogue/ConceptualFramework
Anger grows: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Anger-Grows-Over-Secret-%27Monsanto-Protection-Act-/2013/04/01/id/497254
