Culture Change Media International Editor New York, NY - January 12, 2004

This article is a sequel to the Christmas 2003 article, “The American Cow’s Revenge,” and my series of articles relating to the United Nations Climate Change Conference that was held in Milan December 1-12, 2003. That series of three articles included the December 12 article titled “The Light Brought to Milan From America”. All these articles deal with entrenched positions that led to non-ratification of the Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The case of the American Mad Cow disease is used here to highlight the American position on Climate Change.

The cow, now famous, was slaughtered and butchered December 9, 2003 and on December 23 it became known the cow was stricken by the disease. This article will bring up to date what happened since the December 25, 2003 article and finish this series.

Dr. Scott C. Raizan (M.D.?), Vice President of governmental affairs in Europe for the American corporation Johnson&Johnson, said in the op-ed page in the New York Times, December 30, 2003, based on his being a former public health researcher not involved in mad cow disease: “So far we are following the script from 1996, when Britain issued a warning about a rise in a Variant of Creutzfeldt Disease in humans resembling the mad cow disease ….only 20 Britons a year have died of VCJ since that scare. There were other victims though –

British beef farmers lost perhaps $10 billion in sales, and the British public’s trust in government and the press took a severe blow”.

Has this medical doctor forgot his Hippocratic oath? He has just said that 160 human lives lost meant less to him than $10 billion in sales. The actual known figure is 153 lives, and such a corporate mentality is the reason for these deaths.

He also says that the immediate focus must be to save lives… ”I feel we should also look at each new outbreak as an opportunity to enhance public health. For example, the deadly flu epidemic may in the end improve public hygiene if we can stress the need for hand washing, explain to the public the infectious nature of disease, and reinforce the value of epidemiologic measures. Perhaps the mad cow discovery will lead to good policy decisions based on sound science. But for now, that science does not exist – we simply do not know exactly what we are dealing with.” These same words were used at the Johannesburg World Summit for Sustainable Development to shoot down meaningful change. A folder was handed out there, incidentally also sponsored by Johnson&Johnson, explaining the value of washing hands, this in addition to a small piece of soap. This In a country that had its main problem because of AIDS, at a meeting that was prohibited to tackle questions of global warming or of decreasing the dependence on fossil fuels.

Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal of December 31, 2003 carried an Opinion piece by its own editorial page writer, Holman W. Jenkins Jr., titled, “Don’t Let Mad Cow Make You Crazy.” He writes:” What we did learn from the British experience? That if you really work at it, you can create a system of mass feeding to ensure that prion disease, once it appears, will spread widely… that millions of Britons consumed thousands of pounds of beef from infected cattle… the number of people dying from presumed mad cow infection peaked at 28 in 2000 and has declined every year since. This year the number of death is 16”…

“There is a real possibility mad cow isn’t catching.”

Dr. Ratzan’s piece “One Mad Cow Sets Off a Stampede,” has an ideologic brother in our old acquaintance, Virginia Professor Emeritus Fred Singer, who on December 31, 2003, similarly, on the comparable page in the Financial Times, published “We are Gripped by CO2 Madness.” He stated that “Satellite observations still exhibit no significant warming of the atmosphere… the great fear of warming translates to Siberia and northern Canada seeing temperature of –38 instead of –40…. We should recognize that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but essential plant food, and that more CO2 means more growth of crops and forests.”

The corporate world can indeed produce great moments of distorted truth, as George Orwell showed.

Looking at the influence of the energy industries and the auto-manufacturers, we need not belabor the fact that the oil industry sits now inside the White House. Global warming and climate change may be subjects remote from the public’s understanding. Not so when it comes to the daily hamburger – when it comes to their stomach, folks listen and think. So, let us see how the National Cattle Business Association (NCBA) is influencing US policy. The Head of the organization and chief lobbyist is Mr. Chandler Keys. His sister was a top assistant to Mr. Dan Glickman,, former Democratic Congressman from Kansas and Secretary of Agriculture to President Clinton.

US Department of Agriculture has a dual, often contradictory mandate: to promote the sale of meat on behalf of American producers and to guarantee that American meat is safe on behalf of consumers. Ms. Alisa Harrison, who was director of public relations for the NCBA, is spokesperson for the Bush Administration Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Venneman. Ms. Harrison has helped guide news coverage of the mad cow crisis, issuing the statements reassuring the world that American beef is safe – simply continuing what she used to do as a corporate lobbyist. Then she also put into circulation press releases that said “Mad Cow Disease Not a Problem in the US.”

Dale Moore, the chief of staff to Ms. Veneman used to be the NCBA chief lobbyist, and Julie Quick, another USDA spokesperson comes from NCBA. So does Chuck Lambert, currently USDA’s Deputy Undersecretary for Marketing and Regulatory Programs.

The Wall Street Journal of January 8, 2004, gives further USDA personnel former industry positions. One Deputy Undersecretary For Farm and Foreign Agriculture Services was a partner in a Texas ranch, another was Vice-President of the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA), the Chief Information Officer was President of a subsidiary of ConAgra Foods, the Deputy Secretary was manager of a hog farm, two Assistant Secretaries for Congressional Relations come also from ConAgra and IDFA. One could argue that this is how you get experienced people, but then this is surely going to produce inbreeding results and cover-ups.

Carol Tucker Foreman, a USDA official during the Carter Administration, a Washington bureaucrat, now the director of Food Policy Institute of the Consumers Federation of America said she has been working for 20 years to create a mandatory identification system for cattle, so that when illness is discovered its source can be found quickly – the industry did not want any part of this.

Canada has instituted such a system, and when horror did strike, and in May they found a case of mad cow disease, they could track down the herd’s mates.

The US, on the other hand, could not even identify her bull calf, born just several days before to the tainted cow that was slaughtered. On January 7, 2004 they destroyed all 449 bull calves old less then 30 days, that were held in that particular pen. The calves were never tagged.

Newsweek writes that 76 million Americans get sick from food each year. Most cases are mild, but “about 5,000 people die.” Does it really have to be this way?

As we mentioned previously, it was Mr. Karl Rove –

ranked third in importance in the Presidential re-election campaign immediately after the President and the Vice President – with his loyalty directly to the President, who was the first to understand that the Nobel Price winner for the finding of the prion was looking at tremendously important material that could impact the reelection campaign.

People are asking, “do I feel safe eating beef?” What will happen to the domestic market? Forty-three importing countries have already refused to buy US beef. With $3 billion earnings from these exports (10% of the production) have lost their market already. Having met Dr. Stanley Prusiner, and perhaps being admonished by Mr. Rove, Ms. Veneman issued on December 30, 2003, new rules that the beef industry had largely resisted for years. These include a ban on processing “downer” cows as food for humans and on using certain beef parts like brains, spinal cords etc. in foods like hamburger. These new rules also include speedier testing of animals suspected of being ill. Mr. Keys of NCBA is quoted as saying: “ We want to make sure that anything we do has a practical and real effect… we don’t want to do things that are window dressing and political posturing.”

Nevertheless, there is no commitment to check every cow that is butchered and placed on our dinner table.

Mr. Key’s statement was word by word like statements made by the Republican Congressional delegation at the climate change meeting in Milan.

Having made these new beef rules, US trade delegations were dispatched hastily to Tokyo to try to reopen that market, but does it not defy logic to imagine why the Japanese should let in meat that has not lived up to Japan’s own testing standards?

The mad cow crisis led to wholesale reinvention of the British and Japanese meat inspection system and a radically revised idea about acceptable feed sources – that is why the number of human casualties was relatively low. The hastily declared new US rules simply do not live up yet to these standards.

One most energetic effort in the US was to determine the Canadian birth of the cow – one of many millions of cows that were exchanged between the US and Canada. This is plain evasion of responsibility because the problem with that cow’s marketing was not her Canadian birth, but her being butchered under a set of non-existing US rules – her death made her into an American cow irrelevant of her place of birth. This fact also escaped the Democratic leader of the US Senate, South Dakota Senator Thomas Daschle. He comes from a state with strong cattleman interests and where Mr. Bush won by a 60 to 40 margin. Mr. Daschle is up for reelection in 2004 and his opponent is a former Congressman with ties to the President. Therefore Mr. Daschle introduced on January 7 a law to Congress in which he demands that the White House immediately require country-of-origin labeling for supermarket beef. The Democratic Senate Caucus, sensing his politically precarious position in this election year is backing Mr. Daschle, but what does that to the safety of meat on our dining table? It may endear him to the cattlemen nevertheless, even though their political funding went mainly to the Republicans. It was a coalition of congressional Republicans and farm-state Democrats that blocked Congress last summer from including a ban on the use of “downer cows” in a $373 billion spending bill that passed the House and awaits now a vote in the Senate.

To his favor, it must be said that Mr. Daschle fought to grow ethanol fuel (renewable energy) on South Dakota farms, but the proposed bill had such giveaways to the farm industry that even favorable Senators had a hard time backing it.

The center column in the Wall Street Journal, January 9, writes that “Mad-Cow Scare Thins Herd at Cattle Auction” at Port Pierre in South Dakota – Senator Daschle’s state.

Instead of 6,500 cattle originally advertised, only 1,450 were sold at a lower price per pound of 20%. On December 12, 2003, before the mad cow discovery, this barn sold 7,600 cattle. For cattlemen, the auction day is usually the most important day – that is when their labor is rewarded. Senators Daschle and Johnson called for an immediate ban on all beef- and live-cattle imports. This sounds interesting when thinking about the American efforts at opening global trade. Is the World Trade Organization supposed to listen to arguments based only on domestic US politics?

Is it hard to see that the industry interest has undercut its own future by trying shortcuts to greater financial gains?

We can extend this analysis to the climate change negotiations. What retaliation procedures will be right for the case that there is no correlation between US and World policy on cattle raising or on CO2 emissions ratings?

This brings us back to the Kyoto Protocol. It was a Democrat President who did not move for ratification during the 1998-2001 - three years of inaction before the Bush Administration. Granted that Messrs. Clinton and Gore knew that the mood in Congress was unfavorable to ratification but one could have tried at least in order to raise the public’s awareness of the problems. Nothing, not negative like the present Administration, but simply nothing. This observations translates to a warning that even if there were a change in the occupancy of the White House, and such a change does not seem to occur in 2004, there still is no guarantee that the US position would change. The system is such that the corporate interests rule for the sake of corporate interest. The best to hope for would be a second Bush term where he is freed from reelection worries so he could heed to someone like Mr. Rove who could lead him to establish his name for posterity. He started out by trying to leave a better legacy then his father did, and he may continue in this vain. I may be thinking wishfully rather than plainly reporting trends.

While watching out for reactions to the Mad Cow disease, my eyes fell upon a front page picture of a cow in the Jewish Sentinel of January 9, 2004. “The Kosher Effect; Mad Cow, Calm Butchers.” The Kosher butchers import some of their meat from Latin America, probably grass fed, but also buy cattle from the same auctions as the regular slaughter-houses. The difference is in the way the meat is brought to the market.

(1) An animal that is a “downer” would not be used as it is not Kosher

(not allowed by religious law).(2) Kosher houses use typically younger cattle – between 18-24 months and thus that particular cow of 30 months would not have been bought.(3) Kosher slaughter prohibits shooting or stunning cows in the head, which may cause brain matter splashed over the body.(4)

Kosher slaughter mandates that the animal’s throat be slit, and potentially contaminated blood is drained away from the carcass.

The bottom line is that today Kosher meat has increased sales as also people that have nothing to do with the religion are inclined to trust the kosher butcher rather then the regular meat markets. The article, though pointing out that the cattle may come from regular sources, nevertheless, it is not the mad cow that they worry about – “IT’S THE MAD BUTCHERS YOU HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT.“

(This article was first posted on CultureChange.org)