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Is the US About to Become One Big Factory Farm for China?

by KetaHeadraf Posted on May 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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The small number of companies that dominate global meat production is about to get smaller. The Chinese corporation Shuanghui International, already the majority shareholder of China’s largest meat producer, has just bought US giant Smthfield, the globe’s largest hog producer and pork packer, in a $4.7 billion cash deal. (It still has to get past Smithfield’s shareholders and the US Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment, which reviews takeovers of US companies.)

Now, I hope this merger of titans doesn’t provoke a xenophobic reaction. Shuanghui has strong ties to China’s central government, but it also counts Goldman Sachs among its major shareholders. And the US meat industry is already quite globalized. Back in 2009, a Brazilian giant called JBS had already barreled into the US market, and now holds huge positions in beef, pork, and chicken processing here. And true, as China has ramped up its food production—and rapidly reshaped hog production on the industrial US model—it has produced more than it share of food safety scandals, including recent ones involving hogs.

But as I have pointed out, the US pork industry is no prize either—it pollutes water as a matter of course, hollows out the rural areas on which it alights, relies heavily on routine antibiotic use, recently inspired a government watchdog group to lament “egregious” violations of food safety and animal welfare code in slaughterhouses, and uh, has an explosive manure foam problem.

So forget about where HQ is for the vast conglomerate that ultimately profits from running Smithfield’s factory-scale hog farms and slaughterhouses. The real question is: What does this deal telling us about the global food system and the future of food? Reuters offers a hint:

The thrust of the deal is to send the U.S. made pork to China, a factor that one person familiar with the matter said would help during Shuanghui’s CFIUS Committee on Foreign Investment review.

If Reuters is right that deal’s purpose is to grease the wheels of trade carrying US hogs to China and its enormous domestic pork market, then we’re looking at the further expansion of factory-scale swine farming here in the US: all of the festering troubles I listed above, intensified. For Smithfield itself, the deal is savvy, because Americans are eating less meat. In order to maintain endless profit growth, the company needs to conquer markets where per capita meat consumption is growing fast, and the China market itself represents the globe’s biggest prize in that regard.

As for China, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed in a blockbuster 2011 report, the central government strived for years for self-sufficiency in pork, even as demand for it exploded, by rapidly industrializing production along the model pioneered by Smithfield. By essentially buying Smithfield, the government may be throwing in the towel—saying, essentially, let’s just offshore our hog production, or at least a huge part of it, to the US.

In an ironic twist, China appears to be taking advantage of lax environmental and labor standards in the US to supply its citizens with something it can’t get enough of. Industrial pork: the iPhone’s culinary mirror image.

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Is the US About to Become One Big Factory Farm for China?

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The Real Reason Kids Aren’t Getting Vaccines

by Abby Bath Posted on May 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Much ink has been spilled railing against vaccine skeptics—you know, those people who don’t get their kids immunized against catastrophic childhood diseases because they believe the shots can cause autism and other serious problems. In a recent Parade magazine piece, reporter Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear, pointed out that vaccine resisters tend to cluster in places “where parents are often focused on being environmentally conscious and paying close attention to every aspect of their children’s development.”

Journalist Megan McArdle, in a 2011 post for The Atlantic, opined: “We spent most of the last century trying to stamp out the infectious diseases that used to cripple and kill hundreds and thousands of people every year. Sometimes it seems like the bobo elites plan to spend the 21st century bringing them all back.”

These “bobo elites” are fair targets, especially if you live somewhere like Marin County, California, whose schools granted “personal belief exemptions” to 7 percent of kindergartners in 2010—enough to compromise what epidemiologists call herd immunity. Some of these vaccine resisters refuse shots outright, while others opt for alternative vaccination schedules that delay and stagger shots. This increasingly popular system minimizes kids’ exposure to supposedly harmful vaccine ingredients—but it also leaves them more vulnerable to outbreaks.

Yet the vaccine resisters and delayers are not the only parents whose kids miss out on shots. Far more children are undervaccinated for reasons unrelated to personal beliefs, according to a January 2013 study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The study found that an astonishing 49 percent of toddlers born from 2004 through 2008 hadn’t had all their shots by their second birthday, but only about 2 percent had parents who refused to have them vaccinated. They were missing shots for pretty mundane reasons—parents’ work schedules, transportation problems, insurance hiccups. An earlier CDC study concluded that children in poor communities were more likely to miss their shots than those in wealthier neighborhoods, and while that may not be too surprising, it’s still a dangerous pattern. “If you’re going to delay one or two vaccines, it’s not going to make a huge difference,” says the new study’s lead author, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at the Kaiser Permanente Colorado Institute for Health Research. “But you could also think of it like this: If a million kids delay their vaccines by a month, that’s time during which a disease could spread.”

That’s no mere hypothetical. In 1990, for example, an outbreak of measles killed 89 kids in the United States—most of them from poor families who said they couldn’t afford the vaccine. A 2008 outbreak in San Diego resulted in 12 cases, this time among kids whose parents had refused the vaccine—but authorities had to quarantine an additional 48 who were too young to be vaccinated. The episode cost taxpayers an estimated $10,376 per case.

Shannon Stokley, the acting associate director of science at the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told me that many parents simply need a reminder. “You have so many things to remember when you have a child, and vaccines can just slip your mind,” she said. Indeed, sending out reminder texts has been shown to increase vaccination rates. Making shots convenient also helps. In response to a whooping cough outbreak last year, the state of Washington sought to get more teens and adults vaccinated. It plastered buses and billboards with ads; in some harder-hit counties, health departments sent out mobile inoculation units—if people couldn’t make it to a clinic, health workers would bring the shots to them. Within a year of the campaign, the adult vaccination rate had doubled.

To be sure, access to vaccines has been improving nationwide. The federal government now offers free shots to children who aren’t otherwise covered. But the program doesn’t cover adult vaccines, most of which cost from $20 to $100, even for diseases that are easily passed from adults to kids, like whooping cough—which can kill infants.

Unfortunately, short of an outbreak, money for expanded access is hard to come by. “It took an epidemic to make our pertussis push possible,” says Tim Church, a spokesman for Washington’s health department. And while Obamacare will make vaccines cheaper, it won’t ensure that people actually get their shots.

Because I live in Northern California, where whooping cough has been a problem among adults—those childhood shots don’t last forever—I recently emailed my doctor to inquire about the adult pertussis vaccine. She invited me to drop in “anytime”—from 9 a.m. to noon or 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., right in the middle of the workday. I’m planning to go in eventually, but finding the time is going to be a hassle. Those undervaccinated people that everyone talks smack about? I guess now I’m one, too.

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The Real Reason Kids Aren’t Getting Vaccines

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Liberace’s Best TV Moments

by NatishaFe Posted on May 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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The King of Bling before it was a thing Alan Light/Flickr

When I met Liberace in 1986, I tried to eat his diamond rings. He was making an appearance at Caldors in Riverside, Connecticut, promoting a coffee table book of photos of one of his fantastic homes. My mom tells me he held me in his famously bejeweled hands and we exchanged grins. I was two.

“He was an absolute sweetheart,” Mom recalled the other day. “Beautiful in his ermine sweater. Big dimples, big diamonds.”

I don’t remember the encounter, but as an “older millennial” I have an awareness of who Liberace was: a flamboyant pianist with a taste for furs and jewels who was the butt of many a terrible late-show joke. Wladziu (Lee) Liberace was a child prodigy born of humble Midwestern roots who gained fame by combining exceptional musical talent with personal charm and a flair for showmanship.

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Liberace’s Best TV Moments

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Tom’s Kitchen: Chipotle-Rubbed Grilled Whole Chicken

by Shawanna11 Posted on May 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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Because I’ve lived in two meccas of smoked meat—Central Texas and North Carolina—people often ask me for tips on barbecue at this time of year. Here’s the thing: barbecuing is long, smoky cooking over low heat. If you want to get the flavor of how to do it, check out the “Fire” chapter of Michael Pollan’s new book Cooked. The chapter ends with Pollan smoking a whole hog overnight in his backyard—a tricky process that takes practice, skill, and lots and lots of time. For me, barbecue is like beer: its making is best left to pros and obsessive amateurs.

Meanwhile, Tom’s Kitchen is devoted to simple home cooking, so you won’t see me devoting a column to proper barbecue anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like to have a bit of fun with fire and smoke. What people usually have in mind when they ask me about barbecuing is really what should be called grilling—essentially, roasting over charcoal. (I’ve been told grilling also happens over gas flame, though that concept is foreign to me.) What follows is a dead-simple way to turn a whole chicken into a cookout through the magic of butterflying—cutting out the backbone with a sturdy pair of kitchen shears. Don’t be intimidated. It only takes about 15 seconds and it gets you a moist, evenly cooked bird with a crisp skin.

You can take your butterflied chicken party in many different directions. You could slather it in a barbecue-style sauce before crisping off the skin and serve it with slaw and other traditional ‘cue sides; you could go Mediterranean and marinade it in lemon zest and chopped rosemary and serve with a fresh salsa verde (essentially a parsley pesto); or do as the recipe below suggests, which is to look south to Mexico for inspiration. I hacked the meat up for tacos, and served with tortillas, guacamole, and a charred-tomato sauce.

Grilled Whole Chicken with Charred Tomato Sauce

Prep and marinade bird

2 cloves of garlic, crushed and peeled
½ teaspoon powdered hot chile pepper (could be paprika, smoked paprika, or ground chipotle pepper—I used the latter)
½ teaspoon of cumin, ground
A bit of fresh oregano if you have some on hand
½ teaspoon sea salt
Several generous grinds of coarse black pepper
I tablespoon of olive oil
1 4-pound chicken, preferably raised on pasture

Place the first five ingredients, garlic first, into a mortar and pestle. Pound the garlic into a rough paste. Add the oil, and pound a bit more.

Using kitchen shears, carefully cut the backbone out of the chicken (see this Melissa Clark video for an excellent demo), and using your hands, open the chicken outwards and press down down vigorously, flattening it. Now turn it skin-side up and rub the paste all over the skin. Let it sit in the fridge for at least 30 minutes and optimally overnight.

Prep the grill

Get some good hardwood charcoal going by whatever method you prefer—I use a chimney. When the coals are white-hot, collect them on one half of the grill basin. The goal is to create a hot side and a cool side. Put the grated grill top, which should be clean, in its place and let it heat up for a minute or two.

Prep the salsa

6 medium-sized, ripe tomatoes
1 clove garlic, crushed and peeled
1 to 2 fresh jalapenos or serrano chiles, roughly chopped
Sea salt to taste

Put the garlic, half of the chopped chiles, and a pinch of salt in a food processor and set aside—you’ll run the blade after adding roasted tomatoes.

Grill time

Place the butterflied chicken, skin side up, on the cool side of the grill, and the tomatoes on the hot side. Cover with the grill lid. Let the tomatoes cook, turning and recovering the grill as needed, until nicely charred all over. Add them to the food processor and whiz until you have a smooth salsa. Check for seasoning—add and process more chile pepper and salt if needed.

Meanwhile, leave the chicken cooking on the cool side, covered, until a meat thermometer plunged into the deepest part of a thigh reads 105 degrees. When it reaches that temperature, you’re ready to crisp off the skin. Simply flip the bird over, skin-side down, onto the hot part of the grill and let it cook there until he skin is crisp and caramelized and the thigh temperature reads 180 degrees.

Let it rest off the grill for 20 minutes before cutting the meat off he bones into taco-ready chunks. Serve with the salsa plenty of hot tortillas.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Chipotle-Rubbed Grilled Whole Chicken

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Farewell Froggy, the Age of Ribbit is Nearing an End

by 4q4cv8v Posted on May 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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Amphibians are disappearing horrifyingly fast worldwide, with a third of species imperiled. But they’re disappearing even faster than believed in the US—and probably worldwide (more on that below)—according to the first ever analysis of the rate of population losses among frogs, toads, salamanders, and newts.

Eastern newt: Patrick Coin at Wikimedia Commons

Even amphibians presumed to be relatively stable and widespread are declining. With species everywhere—from the swamps of Louisiana and Florida to the high mountains of the Sierras and Rockies—all disappearing with mind blowing speed.

Toad mountain harlequin frog: Brian Gratwicke at Flickr

A team of researchers with the USGS Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative analyzed the rate of change in the probability of 48 amphibian species occupying ponds and other moist habitats in 34 sites over a period of nine years (see map/figures below).

Gray tree frog: Robert A. Coggeshall at Wikimedia Commons

What they found: overall occupancy by amphibians declined 3.7 percent a year from 2002 to 2011. That seemingly small number adds up to particularly virulent form of extinction hunting down these species within two decades if the rate of decline remains unchanged.

California newt: jkirkhart35 at Wikimedia Commons

Much worse, species Red-listed as threatened or vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declined on average 11.6 percent a year.

Yosemite toad: Natalie McNear via Flickr

Surprisingly, declines occurred even in protected lands, like national parks and national wildlife refuges. “The declines of amphibians in these protected areas are particularly worrisome because they suggest that some stressors—such as diseases, contaminants and drought—transcend landscapes,” says lead author Michael Adams.

American bullfrog: Dave Menke at Wikimedia Commons

Amphibians seem to be experiencing the worst declines documented among vertebrates, but all major groups of animals associated with freshwater are having major problems.

From the PLOS ONE paper: (A) Location of monitoring areas. (B) Distribution of species among IUCN categories. (C) Number of years monitored in each time series. (D) Mean annual estimates of probability of site occupancy and number of occupancy estimates (N). Credit: Michael J. Adams, et al. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064347.g001

While the PLOS ONE paper didn’t address causes, another recent study found a multitude of natural and manmade stressors affecting amphibians, including human-induced habitat destruction, environmental contamination, invasive species, and climate change.

“An enormous rate of change has occurred in the last 100 years, and amphibians are not evolving fast enough to keep up with it,” says Andrew Blaustein, author of the 2011 paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, and professor of zoology at Oregon State University. “With a permeable skin and exposure to both aquatic and terrestrial problems, amphibians face a double whammy. Because of this, mammals, fish and birds have not experienced population impacts as severely as amphibians—at least, not yet.”â&#128;&#139;

Shenandoah salamander: Brian Gratwicke at Wikimedia Commons

“Amphibians have been a constant presence in our planet’s ponds, streams, lakes and rivers for 350 million years or so, surviving countless changes that caused many other groups of animals to go extinct,” says USGS Director Suzette Kimball. “This is why the findings of this study are so noteworthy; they demonstrate that the pressures amphibians now face exceed the ability of many of these survivors to cope.”

I’ve written more about climate-induced amphibian disappearances here, about problems with herbicides on farms here. And for a long read on the problems with the loss of biodiversity here.

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Farewell Froggy, the Age of Ribbit is Nearing an End

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See How Citigroup Wrote a Bill So It Could Get a Bailout

by Delores Crane Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Friday, the New York Times reported on the front page that Citigroup drafted most of a House bill that would allow banks to engage in risky trades backed by a potential taxpayer-funded bailout. The Times notes that “Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill.” Special-interest lobbyists often play a role in writing legislation on the Hill, but such sausage-making is rarely revealed to the public. In this instance, members of Congress and a band of lobbyists have been caught red-handed, and Mother Jones has obtained the Citigroup draft that is practically identical to the House bill. As you can see in the side-by-side comparison below, the lobbyists for Citigroup really earned their pay on this job.

The bill, called the Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act, was approved by the House financial services committee in May and is headed for a vote on the House floor soon. It would gut a section of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act called the “push-out rule.” Banks hate the push-out rule, which is scheduled to go into effect on July 13, because this provision will forbid them from trading certain derivatives (which are complicated financial instruments with values derived from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates). Under this rule, banks will have to move these risky trades into separate non-bank affiliates that aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and are less likely to receive government bailouts. The bill would smother the push-out rule in its crib by permitting banks to use government-insured deposits to bet on a wider range of these risky derivatives.

Here is the key section of the legislation that Citigroup cooked up compared to the same section of the final bill:

The bill is sponsored by Republican and Democratic members—Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.), Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Richard Hudson (R-NC), and Sean Patrick Mahoney (D-NY)—and its passage would be great news for Citi and other financial titans. Five banks—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo—control more than 90 percent of the $700 trillion derivatives market. “The big banks support the bill because it means that they’ll get to keep the public subsidy”—FDIC insurance and the implicit promise of a taxpayer bailout—”to their derivatives-dealing business,” explains Marcus Stanley, the policy director at Americans for Financial Reform.

The origins of the Citigroup proposal date back to 2011, when several large banks fought to repeal the push-out rule entirely. When it became clear that full repeal couldn’t pass, Citigroup pitched an alternative: allow banks to use FDIC-insured money to bet on almost anything they wanted. It proposed letting banks keep most types of derivatives trading in-house, requiring only that derivatives based on certain pools of assets, such as mortgages, be moved into separate entities. Citigroup was not able to get the measure passed before the end of the last Congress, but its allies on Capitol Hill reintroduced it this year.

Citi’s move to expand the types of derivatives it can trade comes as banks have increasingly been shifting derivatives out of their investment banking divisions (which aren’t backed by FDIC insurance) and into taxpayer-backed entities. “The rule is needed more than ever,” says Mike Konczal, an expert on financial reform at the Roosevelt Institute. The financial services committee passed the Citi-written bill on a 53-to-6 vote; all the no votes came from Democrats.

This is certainly not the first time that the financial industry has shaped financial reform laws for Congress. Citigroup was a central player in the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era law called the Glass-Steagall Act that forced banks not to engage in investment activities. Its lobbyists flooded Capitol Hill for that fight. “Citigroup was of course the bank that administered the coup de grace to Glass-Steagall,” says Stanley.

Citigroup’s drafting of the anti-push-out measure fits into “a long history of things being written by industry—and that generally has not worked out very well,” says Konczal. “This is very bad news.”

See how the Citigroup proposal allows more risky dealings by taxpayer-backed banks:

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See How Citigroup Wrote a Bill So It Could Get a Bailout

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Eliminating Hunger, One 3-D-Printed Meal at a Time

by yq7izr Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Hunger remains a massive problem here on planet Earth. Globally, nearly 870 million people—1 in 8 of us—live with “chronic undernourishment.” Meanwhile, obesity stalks us, too—about 1.4 million people worldwide count as overweight, 500 million of whom are full-on obese.

The scourge of lingering hunger amid rising obesity is notoriously complex and difficult to solve. It raises knotty questions about our shockingly unequal global economic system, about European and US farm policy, about the rise of global agrichemical/GMO firms, about global commodity markets and land grabs.

But what if we could just ignore all of that unpleasantness and hack our way to answers with novel technologies?

For example, what if we could deliver food to the globe’s hungry millions through 3-D printing? Here’s Chris Mims, writing about an engineer whose company “just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer”:

He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store.

While global population is expected to top off at 9 billion, not 12 billion, I guess the idea here is to reduce humanity’s dizzying variety of foodstuffs to a set of “powder and oils,” to be combined at home by a gadget. By stripping raw ingredients of their uniqueness—”a powder is a powder,” as Mims puts it—food can be really, really cheap, and within reach of even the poorest people. This is an intensified version of the the promise of today’s industrial agriculture—produce lots and lots of a few commodities like corn and soy, which can then be processed into a variety of cheap products, from burgers to breakfast cereal. This “universal food synthesizer” represents the apotheosis of the industrial food dream.

And what about obesity? An enterprising engineer is hard at work on that, too—this time Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. From PopSci:

A valve gets surgically implanted in the user’s stomach, and the gadget sends a tube through it into their belly. About 20 minutes after eating, the gadget sucks out some food, and when the user squeezes a bag filled with water, the liquid gets sent back into the stomach instead. Rinse and repeat until up to 30 percent of your meal is gone.

Wait, what? PopSci digs into the Kamen’s website for details on how it works:

The aspiration process is performed about 20 minutes after the entire meal is consumed and takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The process is performed in the privacy of the restroom, and the food is drained directly into the toilet. Because aspiration only removes a third of the food, the body still receives the calories it needs to function. For optimal weight loss, patients should aspirate after each major meal (about 3 times per day) initially. Over time, as patients learn to eat more healthfully, they can reduce the frequency of aspirations. Emphasis mine.

Got that? You eat as much as you want, and then deposit a third of it directly into the toilet, undigested.

Better yet, why not combine these two innovations—3-D-printing optimum amounts of those powders and oils directly into the stomach, using Kamen’s contraption hacked to work in reverse? By the time we’re dining on home-synthesized combos of industrial goo, it’s hard to imagine overeating being a problem, anyway.

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Eliminating Hunger, One 3-D-Printed Meal at a Time

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Worse Than Watergate? The Ultimate White House Scandal Matrix

by Amy R. Eddy Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Worse than Watergate. That’s the refrain coming from the Obama administration’s critics as it scrambles to tamp down a growing pile of scandals. “The Obama administration’s cover-up of the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack surpasses Watergate,” states Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). The IRS-tea party scandal “is far worse than Watergate,” according to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). And Pinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Paul Babeu maintains that Fast and Furious “is a much larger scandal than Watergate.” And of course there is a hashtag: #WorseThanWatergate.

Comparing the scandal du jour to Watergate is an easy way to score political points. (Conservatives aren’t the only guilty ones here.) But if you’re interested in making a more subtle and perhaps accurate comparison, you need only refer to the United States’ long history of White House scandals, starting in the first days of the republic.

To help you keep track of them, we’ve plotted more than 25 on this matrix, organized by their relative seriousness and their place in our current collective memory. (The current crop of Obama scandals aren’t on there since it’s not yet clear where they fall on the continuum between, say, Billygate and Iran-Contra. See a missing scandal? Suggest it in the comments.)

The SCANDALs

Sandra Gligorijevic/Shutterstock

Watergate: The mother of all White House Scandals. It had everything but sex: A burglary, spying on political opponents, secret tapes, an enemies list, obstruction of justice, campaign-finance shenanigans, onimous-sounding acronyms (CREEP), memorable denials (“I am not a crook”), congressional investigations, crusading journalists, articles of impeachment, and the first resignation of a sitting president. Beat that, Benghazi.

Spiro Agnew: Before Richard Nixon stepped down, he was preceded by his alliteration-prone vice president, who had been charged with taking bribes and evading taxes. Agnew insisted until the very end that the “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history” had gotten it all wrong.

Iran-Contra: High-ranking officials in the Reagan Administration made an end-run around federal law by secretly selling missiles to Iran in order to help free American hostages in Lebanon and fund the Nicaraguan contra rebels. What could go wrong?

Missing Iraqi WMD: President George W. Bush and top members of his cabinet insist that Saddam Hussein is definitely almost nearly developing and or amassing weapons of mass destruction which he might probably absolutely use against us. The United States launches a preemptive invasion of Iraq. Ten years, tens of thousands of deaths, and billions of dollars later, the search for the elusive WMDs continues.

KtD/Shutterstock

Plamegate: After former ambassador Joe Wilson blew the whistle on the Bush White House’s claims of Saddam’s pursuit of nuclear materials, his wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA agent. The subsequent investigation leads to the conviction (and pardon) of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby.

Abu Ghraib, torture memos: Prisoner abuse at American military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and the CIA’s extradition and torture program were authorized by Bush and top administration officials. But that’s all behind us now.

NSA spying on US citizens: After 9/11, Bush authorized the National Security Agency to covertly surveil Americans’ email and phone calls—in violation of federal law.

Pentagon Papers: A secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg revealed that the Johnson administration had been lying about the true scope and of the war. The Nixon White House tried to prevent their publication

mjaud/Shutterstock

Teapot Dome: Before Watergate, there was Teapot Dome, the early 1920s scandal that led to President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of the interior being convicted for accepting bribes from oil companies to lease Navy petroleum reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

DNC campaign finance scandals: In 1996, Vice President Al Gore attended an event at a California Buddhist temple that illegally funneled $65,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Eventually, the party had to return nearly $3 million in forbidden gifts, some from foreign donors such as James Riady, an Indonesian businessman who was fined $8.6 million.

Johnson impeachment: Disputes between President Andrew Johnson and Radical Republicans in Congress spun into a constitutional crisis when the House voted to impeach him in 1868. He survived in the Senate—by one vote.

Teddy Roosevelt’s corporate cash: After winning election as a trust-buster in 1904, Roosevelt and the Republican Party are revealed to have quietly courted big corporate donors.

The Grant administration: President Ulysses S. Grant’s terms were marred by a succession of high-level scandals, including the Whiskey Ring, Belknap affair, the Delano Affair, the salary grab, and the Cattelism scandal. The administration’s endemic corruption became known as “Grantism.”

Wikimedia Commons

LBJ’s mystery money: In 1963, Life magazine was preparing a bombshell exposé on how Vice President Lyndon Johnson had amassed a fortune through his connections to Texas oil barons. The article, which biographer Robert Caro says would have linked LBJ to the Bobby Brown Scandal, was set to drop in late November. Kennedy’s assassination killed the story and a planned Senate investigation.

XYZ Affair: A diplomatic kerfuffle led to an undeclared “Quasi War” between the United States and France in the late 1790s. Back home, it led to passage of the draconian Alien and Sedition Acts and fueled the growing split between President John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Hamilton’s affair and insider trading: In 1797, former treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton revealed that he had carried on an affair with a married woman—while bribing her husband to let it to continue. He also defended himself against accusations of having used his position to engage in insider trading.

US attorney firings: In 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned amid an investigation into whether the firing of nine US attorneys in 2006 was politically motivated.

Pardongate: As he left the White House in January, 2001, President Bill Clinton hastily pardoned Susan McDougal (for contempt of court during the Whitewater case), his brother Roger (for old drug charges), and Marc Rich, a fugitive tax cheat whose wife had been a major Clinton donor.

Library of Congress

Lincoln Bedroom: The Clinton White House provided perks to big donors including stays in the Lincoln Bedroom as well as coffees, golf outings, or morning jogs with the president.

Whitewater: Failed Arkansas land deals involving Bill and Hilary Clinton spawns a wide-ranging investigation into several -gates: Filegate, Travelgate, and Troopergate (and eventually Ken Starr’s probe of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair).

“Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”: “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” This catchy slogan followed Grover Cleveland after he won election in spite of reports that he had fathered an illegitimate child.

Clinton-Lewinksy affair and impeachment: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” the hug, the blue dress, Ken Starr, “it depends on what the meaning of is is.” Good times.

Fast and Furious: A botched ATF operation birthed a conspiracy theory that

Jefferson-Hemings affair: Thomas Jefferson was dogged by rumors that he had fathered children with a slave who served as his “concubine.” Jefferson never addressed the allegations, but it is now known that Sally Hemings had six of Jefferson’s children.

SNAP/Entertainment Pictures/ZUMAPRESS.com

Petticoat Affair, a.k.a. the Eaton Affair: Ridiculous by modern standards, this scandal rocked Washington when Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war married a widow too soon after the death of her husband. It led to the resignation of most of the cabinet and was immortalized in the 1936 film, The Gorgeous Hussy, starring Joan Crawford.

Skeetgate: After President Obama says that “at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time,” skeptics demand proof. A photo of the president shooting is produced; the skeptics insist it’s faked.

Andrew Jackson adultery scanal: Forty years after he wed his wife Rachel, presidential candidate Jackson was attacked for marrying her before her divorce from her first husband was finalized, making Old Hickory an adulterer and the First Lady a bigamist. He blamed the smear campaign for causing her death shortly after he took office.

Solyndra: The federal government gave more than $500 million to a solar firm that went belly up. Even congressional inquisitor Rep. Darryl Issa (R-Calif.) eventually had to concede there was no there there.

Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS.com

Billygate: President Jimmy Carter took major heat when it was revealed that his ne’er-do-well brother Billy had received payments from the Libyan government.

Mary Todd Lincoln’s price “flub-dubs”: When Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency, the first lady set about remodeling the White House, but went over budget by $7,000. As complaints of her profligacy spread, the president wrote, “It would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the President of the United States had approved a bill overrunning an appropriation of $20,000 for flub-dubs for this damned old house when the soldiers cannot have blankets.”

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Worse Than Watergate? The Ultimate White House Scandal Matrix

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Sequester Guts Wildfire Prevention, Sets Up Bigger Blazes

by 2343b4u4u Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Tree coming down!”

Skyler Lofgren shouts above a din of buzzing chainsaws, leans into his own, and with a final heave topples another 40-foot Ponderosa pine. Lofgren, 27, a forest firefighting crew boss with Flagstaff, Arizona’s fire department, felled a dozen trees on Monday, overseeing an outdoor classroom for a new crop of seasonal recruits who will spend the summer patrolling the Coconino National Forest with three-foot chainsaws at the ready. The crew will fight wildfires when they come, but the vast majority of their time will be spent on prevention or, as Lofgren puts it, “working ourselves out of a job.”

In a stand of trees ten minutes outside downtown Flagstaff—a tight cluster of low-slung brick buildings peppered with Route 66 paraphernalia—Lofgren and his fellow firefighters are hard at work on a new project that local officials say is the first of its kind in the nation. Funded by a $10 million bond that voters approved by a three-to-one margin in November, the program puts local tax dollars to work clearing trees and brush, and lighting carefully-managed fires, in an effort to stave off the devastating, astronomically expensive megafires that have become increasingly common in the West. If successful, the project could also untether the community from a withering federal firefighting budget.

Last year saw the third-worst wildfire season in five decades; the Southern California fire that threatened thousands of homes earlier this month looks to be only the first flash of what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week will be an above-average season for much of the Southwest. But the sequester took a 7.5 percent bite out of the Forest Service’s budget, nearly half of which is spent fighting wildfires. That means there will be 500 fewer pairs of boots on the ground and 200,000 fewer acres treated to prevent fires; the agency’s next proposed budget cuts preventative spending by a further 24 percent. It’s all part of what fire ecologists, environmentalists, and firefighters interviewed by Climate Desk describe as an increasingly distorted federal budget that has apparently forgotten the old adage about an ounce of prevention: It pours billions ($2 billion in 2012) into fighting fires but skimps on cheap, proven methods for stopping megafires before they start.

Firefighting greenhorn Jake Hess, 23, practices his chainsaw control on a fallen tree. Tim McDonnell/Climate Desk

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Sequester Guts Wildfire Prevention, Sets Up Bigger Blazes

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"Arrested Development" Was The Best TV Satire of the Bush Era

by Margurite Axley Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Arrested Development is finally (for real this time) coming back. On May 26 at exactly 12:01 a.m. PDT, the series’ fourth season will debut exclusively on Netflix, the on-demand streaming service that on any given weeknight accounts for nearly a third of Internet traffic in North America. It’s a hotly anticipated premiere that fans are praying will not crash the website.

This TV series—about a spoiled family wading through a glut of personal, financial, and international scandal—occupies a place in popular culture that few other shows have managed to reach. Fans have even witnessed Arrested Development burrow itself into Western politics. In March 2011, before NATO forces launched an air war that would help topple Moammar Qaddafi‘s mass-murdering regime in Libya, The New Republic ran a fantastic slideshow comparing the notorious Qaddafi family to Arrested Development‘s Bluth clan. During a speech this month in the House of Commons of Canada, opposition leader Thomas Mulcair quoted a famous episode of Arrested Development while criticizing the prime minister for over $3 billion in unaccounted anti-terrorism funding. And as the series revival neared, Republicans started dropping Arrested Development references to ridicule the Affordable Care Act, Democratic leadership, and the Obama administration.

The series has also found its way into the syllabi of college courses, and onto the pages of academic essays. “The writers worked miracles addressing philosophical and social issues,” says J. Jeremy Wisnewski, an associate professor of philosophy at Hartwick College who served as a volume editor on the book Arrested Development and Philosophy. “To see the way race, gender, sexual orientation, and class are handled in the show is to witness genius at work.”

There’s something else the show handled so well that’s often taken for granted: During its original run on Fox from 2003 to 2006, the series delivered what was arguably the sharpest satire of the Bush era and the Iraq War that has ever been broadcast on television.

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"Arrested Development" Was The Best TV Satire of the Bush Era

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