The
New York Times is on a bit of a roll, with editorials more eloquent,
more passionate, and more forward-thinking than we've seen from them in
a long time. It's about time. Although the paper has some token
conservative editorial writers, and bends over backwards to be fair and
even-handed (and not offend its corporate shareholders) there comes a
time when the mainstream standard-bearer for progressive thinking just
has to take a more radical stand, and they seem to have reached that
point. Some cases in point from the last week:
What Meat Means (Feb.6):
"Nearly every aspect of meat production in America is disturbing, from
the way animals are raised, to inadequate inspection of the final
product. When it comes to what happens in the slaughterhouse, most of
us mentally avert our eyes. Yet in the past decade, the handling of
livestock on their way to the killing floor has actually been one of
the parts of the business that has improved most significantly. What is
most alarming at the slaughterhouse is not what happens to the animals
- they have already met their fate. It is what happens to the humans
who work there." Read the rest. A clarion call for reform of this horrifically corrupt (and contemptuous of its customers) industry.
US Redesigning Atomic Weapons (Feb.7):
"Worried that the nation's aging nuclear arsenal is increasingly
fragile, American scientists have begun designing a new generation of
nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer
lives, federal officials and private experts say. The officials say the
program could help shrink the arsenal and the high cost of its
maintenance. But critics say it could needlessly resuscitate the
complex of factories and laboratories that make nuclear weapons and
could possibly ignite a new arms race." Read the rest. An
important warning that the self-proclaimed American "war president" is
still pursuing "mini-nukes" as part of his war on everything, not as a
deterrent, but as a weapon of aggression.
When Math is Worse Than Fuzzy (Feb.10):
"Whenever the Bush administration wants to sell a costly new program,
look carefully before you accept any numbers it puts out. The math
isn't just fuzzy, as the current euphemism would have it - it is often
downright misleading, and deliberately so...The administration is
trying a similar dodge in its efforts to sell the idea of converting
part of Social Security to private accounts. Those accounts are a bad
idea on the merits, but even many who might be inclined to support them
are fearful of the enormous transition costs, which could exceed a
trillion dollars over the first 10 years of the program. So the
administration has conjured up a more palatable number." Read the rest. An
all-out attack on an Administration guilty of massive financial
mismanagement and of duping the public to conceal the outright theft of
taxpayer dollars to repay campaign kindnesses to its corporatist
supporters.
A Dismal Class-Action Finale (Feb.12):
"Instead of narrowly focusing on real abuses of the system, the measure
reconfigures the civil justice system to achieve a significant rollback
of corporate accountability and people's rights. The main impact of the
bill - which has the sort of propagandistic title normally assigned to
such laws, the Class Action Fairness Act - will be to funnel nearly all
major class-action lawsuits out of state courts and into already
overburdened federal courts. That will inevitably make it harder for
Americans to pursue legitimate claims successfully against companies
that violate state consumer, health, civil rights and environmental
protection laws...Having spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying for
this bill, the United States Chamber of Commerce and allied business
groups are understandably pleased. They got what they paid for." Read the rest. Remember Erin Brockovich?
Well, thanks to the US Government, such actions against egregious
corporations by citizen and consumer groups will no longer be possible.
So, let's see now...This
is a country where the meat industry is abusing animals and endangering
employees and consumers, where a war-mongering president is funding new
forms of nuclear weapons for his next adventure, and has bankrupted the
economy, stolen taxpayer money and workers' pensions to pay off his
campaign donors, and passed laws to prohibit citizens from getting
redress for corporatist excesses. Oh, and the political system is
incapable of determining reliably who won the presidency and is fixed
so that representatives are guaranteed re-election. Sounds like a great
'model of democracy' to me. Those guys at the Times are such soreheads, never happy.
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