Who's Minding The Store?

Last week I heard Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew speak. Frank, who has a Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in history and writes a weekly column in The Wall Street Journal, is a fabulous speaker. In this latest work he outlines how the conservative system of governance is so deeply entrenched in Washington that is going to take more than just the election of a "liberal" to "fix" things.

One of his big bones of contention is the lack of government oversight (i.e. deregulation) in so many industries and certainly last week on Wall Street played out his concern that no one is indeed "minding the store." Other areas in which this is equally apparent are the airline industry in which "oversight" is exceedingly lax (remember those routine maintenance issues recently in the news?), the Department of the Interior in which key government officials were literally found "in bed" with representatives from the oil companies and the Department of Agriculture (need I say more than "downer cows" and spinach?).

Frank's thesis is that these oversight jobs are handed out to cronies--most of whom have direct ties to the industries they are supposedly policing. Hardly impartial and as we have seen, hardly effective, especially when substantial profits can be made if they just change the rules.

So it was with great trepidation that I read about the government's plan to consider the sale of genetically engineered animals as food. A Boston area company called Aqua Bounty Technologies is banking on winning government approval for its faster-growing salmon and hopes to market it by 2011.

Now I don't know about you, but I want anything that has been genetically altered to grow faster, stronger and more disease resistant to be labeled as such and more importantly I want to know who is doing that labeling. Even more importantly I want to be sure that lobbyists from these genetically altered food source companies are not paying off the scientists at the FDA and then grocery store executives to gain shelf space. And most importantly I want PROOF (as in long-term studies) that this stuff is SAFE to consume. Never mind what would happen if God forbid, a genetically engineered animal started to reproduce with one that wasn't?

"They are talking about pigs that are going to have mouse genes in them and this is not going to be labeled?" said Jean Halloran, director of food policy for Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. "We are close to speechless on this."

I guess nothing surprises me anymore, especially nothing that has to do with making a profit. And as long as the oversight committee is predominantly overseeing what goes into their own pockets, we are not going to be safe from anything.

A few years ago we had a terrible storm that rendered us powerless for over four days. It was horrible. We couldn't take a shower or flush a toilet--never mind the food in our freezer that went bad. In the aftermath, we got a generator so that we would not be dependent on the power company to exist. That's when I got this great idea to somehow divest ourselves from everything else on which we were dependent--cable, water, you get the picture.

Of course, it was a fantasy, and an impossible one at that, but there are times when I wish it wasn't so.