Good News/Bad News October 3, 2002

By Matthew Wheeland, AlterNet. Posted October 3, 2002.

There's been so much Bad News this week that we hardly know what to focus on first -- Man-Cows, ice meteors, or the Bush administration's lifelong partnership with Pure Evil? It goes without saying that Bad News will be first this week.

Bad News

It was a strange week in the "Acts of God" department: above and beyond the "When Animals Attack" quality of lions, tigers and bears going on rampages world-wide, we've also seen the development of global-warming induced "ice meteors" falling from the sky. Makes us feel we'd be better off living underground...

Everyone, meet the Man-Cow; Man-Cow, meet everyone. A New Zealand company got approval to insert human genes into cows. Why? No one really knows. The company even admits this, we swear! "You do the research because you don't know the answers." Great jumpin' jesus!

In other great animal news, the factory farm industry is fighting a proposal to limit dosing animals with antibiotics for fear of breeding superbacteria. The argument here is sickening beyond belief: rather than give animals space to move around and fresh feed, the industry needs to medicate their animals (and, consequently, all you meat eaters) repeatedly to keep them from getting sick.

Here's a great exercise in reading between the lines: when this says "agricultural experts," it means "biotech PR flacks." When it says GM corn is "highly profitable," they're clearly referring to the biotech companies, not farmers. And when it says the conference was "organized by biotech," that just means that no one else is really interested in helping people eat right. Thank you, benevolent corporate rulers!

So we're thinking that maybe, just maybe, Bush had help crafting his environmental policies. Why, you ask? Well, no one reason in particular, except maybe the tooth-and-claw fight Bush's EPA is putting up to prevent the release of his policy-planning documents...

And we're certainly not reassured by the latest Republican push to loosen monopoly regulations on utility companies. Looks like that whole Enron fiasco is long forgotten, at least by greedy Republicans.

In the ongoing "forest-thinning" debate, we've got some seriously negative developments this week: Primarily because the Forest Service revealed that the report used to fuel this debate was "rushed and incomplete," and therefore the debate is based on faulty data. Despite this news, Congress agrees on a bill to "streamline regulations" preventing widespread forest logging. That bill is still subject to debate and a Congressional vote, so Bush took it upon himself to quietly "revise regulations" that protect old-growth forests. Good old Dubya, always working unilaterally and with no oversight.

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