For those who follow the news regularly, cable news that is, Marsha Blackburn, the Republican congresswoman from Tennessee's 7th district is an immediately recognizable face. She's a regular on Fox News and is frequently shown on MSNBC making the case for some far right cause or legislation.
Recently she's in the news for being against proposed legislation to strengthen laws meant to stop abuse of horses. The issue that is coming to the forefront of the debate is the practice of soring in the trade. Soring is the practice of using acid and other chemicals to soften the hooves of horses then binding the hooves in chains so that the mere act of walking is extremely painful for the animal. So painful that the horse lifts his legs up as high as possible to avoid the pain.
The practice has been illegal since 1970. But recent reports have demonstrated that it is still alive and well and too frequently employed in the training of horses to be walkers. So bills are being introduced to strengthen regulations and try to curb the practice further.
There is, of course, widespread backing for the bills and it's a pretty sure thing they will be passed. Marsha Blackburn is not one of the backers. Rather she is backed by the Tennessee Walking Horse lobby. She and they argue that the industry is already heavily regulated, the practice is no longer common, most breeders are in compliance, and any further regulation would place undue burden on the breeders.
Rep. Blackburn does contend that she is against the practice of soring. That's not the point. In fact this particular blog isn't even about the practice of soring although I do want to bring attention to it and have included a link to one of dozens of petitions to strengthen regulations to fight it.
Rather it is my intent to point out the timeless arguments by politicians like Marsha Blackburn against any form of regulation and enforcement of regulation by inspection.
Let's be clear, the reason businesses and their lobbying groups fight regulation does have to do with expenses to the business. It's generally cheaper to not have to worry about having a safe workplace. It's generally more lucrative to do things that are illegal. It's generally a pain in the ass when you get caught.
So if you're saying it's an undue burden to have to prove that your business is operating according to the law it's hard to be sympathetic. I think many people who think regulation is a bad thing don't really understand how regulation came to be in the first place. Most people have not read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Most would be surprised to learn little facts like it used to be okay for sausage to be made with a certain percentage of sawdust as filler or that whole rats might be in your hot dogs.
Regulation came into being in this country as a reaction to businesses doing whatever the hell they wanted to do in the name of making a profit. Workers were treated as poorly as you wanted to treat them because if they needed money they just needed to grow a pair and deal with it.
Somewhere along the way, long into the era of regulation, a belief came to be that businesses were these benign things. That businesses were nothing but a boon to their communities. They were models of capitalistic altruism. Of course they did the right thing because otherwise they would be weeded out of the marketplace. Very Randian views. They came to a head during the Reagan years when deregulation became the rule of the day.
It continued through the first Bush and Clinton years. Hospitals began to be bought out by companies like HCA who would guide them with a capitalist hand. You know, private sector people who would keep prices down through competition and effective administration. Drug companies were allowed to begin advertising their products. Turn out that the target demo for those ads is predominantly men's penises. Banking and insurance companies were deregulated so they could start being everything they wanted to be. We know how that is working out. We're doing so much better because of the competition.
What Marsha Blackburn is doing really doesn't have anything to do with animal cruelty. It's just a steady beating of the deregulation drum. The problem is that there are a large number of people out there who are poor or from what's left of the middle class to whom the argument makes perfect sense. You know? If a business isn't so regulated it will hire more workers and that sort of thing. Regulation is a form of socialism and inherently bad. A bigger government with expanded regulatory authority is a weight around the neck of the virtuous businessman just trying to get by.
I have worked for a variety of businesses and every single one of them has been doing something illegal. That's no exaggeration. Well except for the music instruction business of which I was part. The illegalities were matters of degree but honestly there was always something sketchy going on. All of these businesses were gambling that they wouldn't be caught and the gamble usually pays off. The U.S. government isn't big enough to enforce or even inspect every business in this country. We could never afford to have the number of inspectors required at any rate.
To be fair a lot of the shady stuff really doesn't affect anybody in a negative way. But just for example. I was working in a seafood restaurant in Orange Beach, Alabama. We had a chef there for a while who had no scruples at all. He put an item on the menu that was a grouper roulade stuffed with crab meat. Yummy right? But the owner of the restaurant wouldn't buy grouper because it was too expensive. Like most seafood restaurants the fish we normally used was swai. Swai is a type of catfish raised in farms in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. People who come to eat at a restaurant on the beach of the Gulf of Mexico should legitimately assume they are getting fresh caught Gulf fish. My boss was perfectly fine using the swai and calling it grouper.
Big deal right? I mean yes you're ripping your customers off but everybody does it. Well one problem is grouper is okay if you're on a kosher or hilal diet; swai is definitely not. I guess that's cool if you don't care about a person's religion? A person with a palate for seafood would know the difference but most people just assume they are not being lied to.
They would be wrong in many cases. There's nobody going around and checking what's be cooked and sold on a regular basis. A shocking report not too long ago by a team with DNA testing equipment found that something like 75% of fish sold in seafood markets wasn't what it was being advertised as. This wasn't a government study. The government can't afford to run these kind of spot checks.
The point here is that the majority of businesses will try to get away with what they think they can get away with. They will do whatever it takes to make more money. Capitalism is not a beautiful and honest system. It's a way to make money and do it any way you can until you get caught.
People like Marsha Blackburn are the front line defense against people wanting to try to make businesses do the right thing. There is no such thing as a frivolous lawsuit. All lawsuits are by definition inherently frivolous. Lawsuits are an undue burden on businesses. Of course they are normally the only way a consumer can try to make a business be held accountable for bad actions.
So frivolous lawsuits, undue burdens, the terms are the weaponry used to defend bad actors in the business community who pay good money to the politicians who serve them. In my eyes this makes Marsha Blackburn just pure evil. She is a syndicate enforcer. A mouthpiece.
It's all covered for her by her interpretation of the Bible. The capitalist Bible, the one used in the Prosperity Christian churches across this country, is redacted to the point where you and I may not recognize it. All the stuff Jesus said about the poor being blessed and how corruptive wealth is is gone. Any place where there is mention of being blessed by God is interpreted as being material and financial reward here on earth. It's a disgusting lie. But it's used to keep the poor and middle class teabaggers and conservatives in line. They are shown the carrot and stick to keep their support.
Sidebar here. When I say carrot and stick I am using the old analogy. It used to be that carrot and stick referred to a meme where a man would be sitting in a horse drawn buggy powered by a stubborn horse or mule. He would have a long stick with a string on the end. Hanging from the string was a carrot. He would hold the carrot just out of reach of the animal's mouth and the it would walk after it not realizing it was an unobtainable or unrealistic goal. Sometime during World War II Winston Churchill said when someone suggested a stick and carrot plan with the Italians Churchill said if they wouldn't eat the carrot they should beat them with a stick. The saying has been used in this way since but isn't as good as the original meaning.
In the case of the people being mislead by the business community and its political and religious propagandists the are being shown an unobtainable or unrealistic goal. Just keep supporting us and you will have your reward. But they keep just getting screwed. They suffer from a severe form of Stockholm Syndrome. It's like sheep voting for wolves.
I'm certainly not saying that this doesn't happen on the Democrats' side of the aisle. But, my god, you wouldn't see a Dem fighting to preserve something as barbaric as soring.
Maybe it's getting so flagrant that these people will wake up and see that regulation isn't a threat. But religion truly is the opiate of the masses and odds are the status quo will just get worse. After all, my Socialist, Marxist, Kenyan president has almost killed the stock market. If he's going to kill it by loving it to death and that death comes as the brokers explode from joy as it hit 16,000 for the first time in history today.
Here's video on the subject of soring. Be warned it shows some animal cruelty and is pretty disturbing.
And the link to sign an anti-soring petition.
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