Boehner’s District Suffers From E. Coli Outbreak As House Republicans Try To Gut Food Safety

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, despite yet another outbreak of food-borne illness — this time stemming from listeria infected cantaloupes — congressional Republicans are still trying to cut back onthe nation’s food safety regulations. The tainted melons have caused 16 deaths so far, making this the deadliest outbreak in more than a decade, and it comes just a month after salmonella-tainted turkey forced food-giant Cargill into the third-largest food recall on record.

Lost in the well-deserved focus on the listeria outbreak is the fact that another giant food-producer, Tyson Fresh Meats, was forced this week to recall more than 130,000 pounds of ground beef due to E. Coli contamination. And this particular breakdown in food safety should earn the attention of the man leading the GOP in its slash-and-burn approach to the budget, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), as four children in his districtwere sickened by the meat:

The recall of 65 tons of ground beef that might be contaminated with E. coli has hit close to home for House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio.

The meat, recalled today by Tyson Fresh Meats, was shipped to 16 states…WCPO, ABC’s affiliate in Cincinnati, reported today, “four children became ill after eating the meat with their family in Butler County, Ohio, in the second week of September.” “A 9-year-old child was hospitalized for about 10 days with severe diarrhea,” the station reported.

As we’ve pointed out time and time again, one in six Americans is sickened by food-borne illness each year, and more than 3,000 die. The annual cost to the country of food-borne illnesses is $152 billion, according to Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project. However, the GOP has not only refused to fund the implementation of a landmark food safety law passed last year, but has said that the current rules on the books are too onerous, because the food industry “self-polices.” But as the current slew of recalls shows, that it clearly not the case.

Michele Bachmann’s Latest Job Creation Idea: Less Food Safety Regulation, More E. Coli

By Pat Garofalo/Think Progress

GOP 2012 presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann yesterday brought her anti-government message to a meatpacking plant in Des Moines, Iowa, one day after she delivered the same rhetoric at a traffic light factory in Waterloo, Iowa (that depends on government contracts). At the meatpacking plant, Bachmann railed against regulations that protect the nation’s food supply, saying that they are “overkill” that is preventing job creation:

Bachmann says, as do most of those in the GOP field, that a lightened regulatory load would allow employers to spend money on expansion rather than federal compliance. But the Minnesota congresswoman is the first to focus the argument on the food-processing industry.

“That’s part of the problem, the overkill,” Bachmann told reporters during an appearance in which she posed with huge slabs of beef. “And when they make it complicated, they make it expensive and so then you can no longer stay in business.”

As the Associated Press noted, Bachmann’s call to do away with food safety regulations “follows high-profile recalls of peanuts, eggs and other tainted food products.” Just last month, in the third-largest recall on record, food giant Cargill had to pull 36 million pounds of ground turkey out of stores after a salmonella outbreak linked to one of the company’s plants sickened nearly 80 people, killing one.

At the moment, one out of six Americans suffers from a foodborne illness every year, with 128,000 of those resulting in hospitalization. Ultimately, 3,000 people die from foodborne illness annually, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Georgetown University’s Produce Safety Project has found that foodborne illness costs the U.S. $152 billion each year. This month, the Agriculture Department announced that it “will ban the sale of ground beef tainted with six toxic strains of E. coli bacteria that are increasingly showing up as the cause of severe illness from food.”

Early this year, President Obama signed a landmark food safety law, which was the first upgrade of the nation’s food safety system since 1938 (and which Bachmann voted against). However, House Republicans have refused to approve the necessary funds to implement the law, because they believe the private sector always “self-polices.” And it seems that if Bachmann had her way, the government would begin rolling back these regulatory advances.

Perry Reveals Plan For Total U.S. Anarchy: ‘Put A Moratorium On All Regulations’

By Brad Johnson/Think Progress




Today, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) issued the first policy position of his presidential campaign by asking the White House to issue a “moratorium on regulations across this country”:

We’re calling today on the president of the United States to put a moratorium on regulations across this country, because his regulations, his EPA regulations are killing jobs all across America.

Watch it:

“We’re sending out a request today asking President Obama to put a moratorium on all regulations,” Perry said on WHO radio in Iowa, recorded live by ThinkProgress.

Under such a moratorium, the Food and Drug Administration would stop approving new drugsand preventing human experimentation; the USDA would stop checking for food safety; the EPA would stop monitoring for poisons in drinking water; the Library of Congress would stoploaning materials to blind people; the NTSB would stop investigating airplane accidents; HHS would end Medicare payments; no more patents, copyrights, or trademarks would be issued; DHS would stop protecting chemical facilities from terrorist attacks; the Treasury would stopprinting currency; financial sanctions on hostile nations like North Korea and Iran would end; and the Federal Reserve System would shut down.

Perry’s “moratorium on regulations” would mean a literal end to the rules of law in the United States. At least it would also mean that all of President George W. Bush’s midnight regulationsfavoring polluters and industry abuses would also be lifted.

UPDATE

Perry is taking a more strident stand than the one his staff has prescribed for him on his website, a “six-month freeze on new federal regulations.” Such a freeze would prevent everything from science-based standards for smog pollution to approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

VIDEO: GOP Candidates Call For Massive Deregulation, Dismantling Of Health, Worker and Consumer Protections

By Pat Garofalo

Last night, seven of the Republican 2012 presidential hopefuls participated in a debate in New Hampshire, and as the Wall Street Journal noted, the candidates used the occasion to “[press] for the dismantling of government regulations drawn up over 40 years.” Indeed, the candidates unveiled a deregulatory zeal, proposing to repeal everything from environmental and labor protections to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and regulations included in the Affordable Care Act. Here are some highlights:

NEWT GINGRICH: The Congress this year, this week, ought to repeal the Dodd-Frank bill, they ought to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley bill.

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-MN): What we need to do is pass the mother of all repeal bills…and I would begin with the EPA, because there is no other agency like the EPA. It should really be called the job-killing organization of America.

RICK SANTORUM: This president has put a stop sign against oil drilling, against any kind of exploration offshore or in Alaska and that is depressing. We need to drill.

GINGRICH: And one of the things Congress should do immediately is defund the National Labor Relations Board.

HERMAN CAIN: If the federal government continues to do the kind of things that this administration is trying to do through the backdoor, through the National Labor Relations Board, that’s killing our free-market system.

Watch a compilation:

Despite a financial crisis caused in large part by deregulation, climate change wreaking havoc on the country, and plummeting unionization coupled with plummeting incomes, the GOP still seems to believe that the government has no role in setting rules of the road or enforcing any sort of standard to guard against corporate greed or environmental devastation. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) even seemed to imply that the government should privatize disaster relief, responding to a question about FEMA by saying, “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”

But not every statement uttered by the candidates was anti-regulation. Cain replied to a question about whether the government has a role in food safety by saying, “The federal government should be doing food safety, yes.”

GOP Guts Regulation Requiring Adequate Rest For Pilots

By George Zornick

In February 2009, Continental flight 3407, operated by Colgan Air, plunged into a suburb of Buffalo, NY, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground. Pilot error was named as the chief cause of the crash, and investigators focused on pilot fatigue as one of the primary problems. The co-pilot had taken a cross-country, overnight flight the day before the crash, and only slept briefly in an airline lounge before she was required to pilot the flight.

When the plane encountered an ice storm as it attempted to land in Buffalo, the pilots struggled to respond appropriately, and The National Transportation Safety Boardfound that their “performance was likely impaired because of fatigue.” Both pilots wereheard yawning on the cockpit voice recorder.

Families of the victims channeled their grief into action in the following months, launching a 15-month campaign to convince Congress to enact a variety of pilot performance safeguards. The bill passed last summer and, among other things, required the FAA to create tougher rules aimed at controlling pilot fatigue.

But today, the Republican House of Representatives passed an amendment sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) to a Republican-drafted aviation bill that would essentially gut the planned pilot fatigue rules by requiring extensive tailoring to many different segments of the aviation industry, and exempting several others.

Hero pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger blasted the amendment yesterday before it passed, saying “it creates a huge obstacle to new regulations,” and that, “at some point in the future, we don’t know when, it’s likely people will die unnecessarily.” Last night on the Ed Show, Sullenberger said the bill is a “slap in the face” to the Flight 3407 families. He also decried “special interests only interested in the bottom line.”

Watch it:

Family members of those killed on Flight 3407 are already speaking out against the Republican vote. “You can try to dress this up however you like, but we all know which special interests that [the amendment] is attempting to help and what it’s attempting to do for them, which is make it more difficult for the FAA to do its job and regulate them,” said Susan Bourque, who’s sister, Beverly Eckert, was killed in the crash.

Eckert’s husband, Sean Rooney, was killed in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and in the years following his death, Eckert became a leading 9/11 activist and helped lead the push for the 9/11 Commission. She was flying to Buffalo that evening to attend the unveiling of a scholarship in her late husband’s name.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) has vowed to prevent the Shuster Amendment from becoming a part of the final aviation bill, after the House and Senate versions are reconciled.