Russ McBee

In the wake of numerous cases of poisonous Chinese goods making their way onto store shelves (including toxic pet food sold in the US), the FDA has decided to initiate what it hopes will be perceived as a bold step:

Under fire for not having the resources to better protect consumers at home, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is deploying staff members abroad to work directly with importers and foreign regulatory agencies to guard against contaminated animal feed, counterfeit drugs, toys made with lead paint and dairy products containing melamine.

On Wednesday, the FDA will open it first overseas office here in China, whose growing role as an exporter of food and drug products to the United States has combined with several recent food safety scares to prompt the change in strategy.

That sounds promising, but the FDA is only sending thirteen employees to China to oversee $320 billion worth of goods flooding our markets from their poisonous factories.

That's all; just thirteen employees to oversee thousands of plants.

Gee, I feel better already.

Even some in China think it's pointless:

Jiang Weibo, a professor at China Agriculture University's School of Food Sciences, is skeptical that the challenge can be met.

"The FDA can never find all the potential poisons in Chinese-exported food products," Jiang said. "There are dozens of pesticides used. Each product might have more than a thousand different poisonous possibilities."

During the presidential campaign, Obama promised to take a second look at NAFTA and other trade deals. I certainly hope that second look extends to GATT, which is the agreement permitting poisonous Chinese goods to land on our store shelves. Globalization has resulted in a mostly unmonitored flow of food and pharmaceuticals into our markets from God knows where, using God knows what ingredients, and with no significant consequences for the perpetrators.

We need a complete renegotiation of GATT that imposes sanctions for violations of consumer safety. Enough is enough.

Over the last couple of months, we've seen a $700 billion bailout of the financial sector, the nationalization of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, pleas for a bailout of the US auto industry, and emergency FDIC guarantees for everything from money market funds to gift cards (hat tip to Suzy Trotta for that one).

Randy Neal asked, where does it end?

I have no idea where it ends, but I think we should begin asking a more fundamental question: where does it come from? What factors in our economic system have permitted this kind of chaos to metastasize unchecked, until the entire system is imperiled?

I'm no economist, but part of the answer seems to lie in the fact that the American version of capitalism has always allowed (and even encouraged) the externalization of risks and consequences. In a purely entrepreneurial system, the investors in a company stand to lose their shirts if the business goes belly-up or lands itself in deep legal trouble. That threat works pretty well in companies that are privately owned, but the system completely falls apart when companies are publicly traded. For public companies, the shareholders shoulder the risk, and if the company goes bankrupt, shareholder equity is the first thing that's wiped out; this fully externalizes management's risks onto the shoulders of the shareholders, who end up with no recourse once their equity evaporates. Meanwhile (as we've seen with Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and AIG), the executives who steered the company into the ditch get to keep their salaries and golden parachutes.

This externalization of risk goes beyond merely the financial health of a company. From the very beginning, companies in the US have been allowed to push liability for risks away from themselves without consequence. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are some examples:

Coal companies are allowed to pollute our water due to mountaintop removal, and power companies are allowed to change our very climate by burning that coal.

Chemical companies were long allowed to pollute the ground, air, and water without liability.

Tobacco companies are allowed to sell and deceptively market a product whose toxicity cannot be mitigated.

Wal-Mart is allowed to decimate mom-and-pop stores in a community, then completely abandon the community when their corporate bean counters say it's time to move somewhere else.

Microsoft is allowed to sell profoundly insecure software without any culpability for the IT chaos, expense, and data theft that insecurity causes.

Companies and government entities housing your private data bear no liability for the nefarious misuse of that data when it is stolen, even if it's stolen due to their own negligence.

Given all those examples, it should be no surprise to anyone that the con artists on Wall Street felt no hesitation about palming off the risks of credit default swaps onto someone else. It should be no surprise that GM expects the rest of us to bail them out of their own bad management decisions. No one should be shocked to hear AIG ask the taxpayer to clean up after their negligence. That expectation is built into the system, from the ground up.

I'm not saying that legal liability doesn't exist in our system -- clearly, it does. I'm saying it doesn't go far enough.

(And before anybody on the Right gets all apoplectic about the "nanny state" bogeyman, I'm talking about two specific kinds of risk here: 1) risk that is hidden to outsiders, as with Microsoft's products, and 2) risk that we as individual consumers and taxpayers are powerless to mitigate, such as the housing of our private data by third parties.)

The damage to our financial system is already done, and the damage to our automobile industry is now coming home to roost. The cost of inaction in both cases would be catastrophic, so I'm reluctantly in support of government intervention to prevent our system from collapsing. But I think it's high time we revisited some basic assumptions about the way risk is allowed to fester and consequences are allowed to be palmed off in the American version of capitalism.

Simply put, the entity that triggers the risk should shoulder its consequences.

If Microsoft were held liable for data theft due to the insecurity of Windows, you'd see Redmond produce the world's most secure operating system so fast it would make Bruce Schneier's head spin. If Wall Street con artists were held liable for the collapse of financial instruments they hawked as being a bullet-proof hedge against risk, we might be able to have faith in our financial system again.

Here's a flashback to 1982: "You Dropped A Bomb On Me," by the Gap Band:

This is good for gettin' your groove on at 8:00 on Friday morning.

When the TVA Board of Directors recently announced they were giving a half-million dollar raise to TVA's already overpaid (and completely superfluous) CEO, they also announced that they "hoped" TVA's electricity rates would decrease in the coming months. Today, TVA announced that its fuel costs had dropped a whopping 25 percent this quarter. One would think that a 25 percent decrease in fuel costs would result in a significant (if not 25 percent) decrease in electricity rates.

One would be wrong.

The 25 percent drop in fuel costs will be passed on to TVA's customers all right, but only partially. We'll get a miserly 6 percent decrease in electricity rates, beginning in January.

Meanwhile, Tom Kilgore gets to keep his $3.27 million salary, for doing whatever it is he does for a living.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is issuing a statement which characterizes any pro-choice legislation enacted under the Obama administration as an "attack on the church." By some bizarre twist of logic, they also assert that any such legislation would "reduce religious freedom."

Whatever.

The Catholic Church, one of the most retrograde institutions on the planet, spends a tremendous amount of effort in this country trying to steer public policy along its theocratic path, even to the point of threatening to excommunicate legislators who are pro-choice. At least in theory, Catholic doctrine is just as strongly against the death penalty as it is against abortion, but I don't remember the Conference ever condemning Republican legislators for supporting capital punishment, nor do I recall them ever threatening those legislators with excommunication.

The bishops are being selective in their outrage, directing it solely against the political party they oppose. That's the point at which their church has crossed the line from free religious expression into politicking, and that's the point at which the IRS should carefully reconsider their tax-exempt status.

On the drive home from work today, I saw a church sign that read simply, "Proverbs 29:2." That was it. There was no expository text beyond the bare citation. When I got home, I looked it up:

When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.

Appearing just one week after the election of Barack Obama, I doubt the citation was a coincidence. To be sure, they kept it just vague enough to preserve their tax-exempt status, but it seems doubtful that a lily-white fundamentalist church in a lily-white part of Knox County meant to imply that they were rejoicing over the election's outcome.

How sad it is that certain elements of our society would consider optimism about the environment, civil liberties, the economy, the Iraq occupation, and health care to be "wicked," while a continuation of the depravity of the last eight years appers to them somehow "righteous." I almost pity them.

Ninety years ago today, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the War to End All Wars came to a close. Although its carnage was eclipsed by the global disaster that followed twenty years later, the devastation of the First World War was the worst ever seen up to that point.

As I discussed in this post, Dad and I visited the battlefield at Verdun, France a few years ago. After ninety years, the landscape still bears scars of the destruction brought down on that region (my photos of the battlefield are here). The place now bears a certain serenity, and the horror of it all is now muted by the passage of time. Still, after nine decades, World War I stands as an indelible reminder that humans are capable of unimaginable destruction, and sometimes for no good reason at all.

Regardless of whether a given war is justifiable, our soldiers serve this nation, they do their jobs with honor and dignity, and sometimes they give their lives for their country. They deserve our undying gratitude.

Roll Call, via DailyKos:

Two-thirds of voters saw the “Saturday Night Live” election parodies during the campaign season and 10 percent said the program had an influence on their vote. Asked whether they would prefer Alaska Gov. Saran Palin (R) or actress Tina Fey -- who portrayed Palin on the show, to hilarious effect -- as vice president, 51 percent said Fey.

Those who consider themselves aligned with the Republican base need to spend the next four years meditating on that last sentence.

Think back to the spring of 2005, just three and a half years ago, before this presidential campaign started. The Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. The Democrats in the Senate were more or less powerless to stop the GOP from running the country into the ground, and seldom exercised their right to filibuster legislation or judicial nominees.

Then, Bush nominated some particularly offensive candidates to the federal bench, and the Democrats in the Senate threatened to filibuster a few of them. The Republicans went apoplectic. They threatened to revoke the filibuster for judicial nominees, screeching endlessly about how judicial nominees deserved an "up or down vote." James Dobson and his gang of thugs held events at churches called "Justice Sunday," which were thinly disguised political campaign events intended to intimidate Democrats into caving to the Bush agenda. Bill Frist and his cronies made appearances at several of them. The GOP threatened to invoke the "nuclear option," which would have completely eliminated filibusters for judicial nominees.

Remember that?

Here are the words of Arizona's Republican Senator Jon Kyl, speaking at the time in support of the "nuclear option:"

There may well come a Supreme Court vacancy soon. I just don't think the people of the country are going to stand by and let a minority dictate whether or not we're even going take a vote on a nominee.

And here:

Our Democratic colleagues have to make a decision. Will they continue their filibuster or not? If they do, and they're not willing to discuss any kind of a compromise, then I don't see any alternative but to reestablish the tradition of the majority vote.

By "majority vote," he means 51 senators instead of the 60 needed to stop a filibuster.

But that was then. Now that Barack Obama is due to be inaugurated in a couple of months, Kyl seems to have shifted his views on "the tradition of the majority vote:"

Jon Kyl, the second-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, warned president-elect Barack Obama that he would filibuster U.S. Supreme Court appointments if those nominees were too liberal.

Got that? Kyl was against judicial filibusters before he was for them.

This week's "Feel Good Friday" is Parliament's "Flashlight:"

Drop what you're doing, turn the speakers up, and get up and dance. George Clinton is without question the coolest man who ever lived.