Underneath A Policy Of Corruption, Rubashkin's Meat Hook

During the first Rubashkin scandal, people wondered how the USDA could have allowed ripping out the throats of live cattle with a meat hook.

Here's the answer.

I exclusively reported in December 2004 that Orthodox rabbis, kosher supervision agencies and kosher industry mouthpiece (and paid Agriprocessors' consultant) Menachem Lubinsky – led by Agudath Israel of America – met with senior USDA officials in Washington on October 23, 2003, one year before the PETA videos documenting graphic, horrific animal abuse at Agriprocessors were made public. In this meeting, the rabbis claimed USDA directives outlawing "sawing" by the religious slaughters would be wrongly used to stop all kosher slaughter.

The rabbis asked for the directives to be reworded. The USDA agreed. Ann Veneman, a former food industry lobbyist who was appointed Secretary of Agriculture by George Bush, is thought to have participated in that meeting and to have approved the rewording.

The new directive was written with close participation of Agudath Israel of America and its supporter, Nathan Lewin, a noted constitutional lawyer. Lewin was also Agriprocessors' (the Rubashkin family's) attorney.

(Both the original and the new directives are found at the end of this post.)

The new directive made it nearly impossible for a USDA line inspector to stop a kosher slaughter line and created the horrors seen in the above videos.

The latest food safety crisis (tomatoes) has brought intense media scrutiny to the Bush Administration's enforcement of food safety regulations and its ability to do what is necessary to ensure the safety of our food supply.

Paul Krugman lays out the history of the problem in the New York Times:

…Hard-core American conservatives have long idealized the Gilded Age, regarding everything that followed — not just the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era — as a great diversion from the true path of capitalism.

Thus, when Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate, was asked about his ultimate goal, he replied that he wanted a restoration of the way America was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”

The late Milton Friedman agreed, calling for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. It was unnecessary, he argued: private companies would avoid taking risks with public health to safeguard their reputations and to avoid damaging class-action lawsuits. (Friedman, unlike almost every other conservative I can think of, viewed lawyers as the guardians of free-market capitalism.)

Such hard-core opponents of regulation were once part of the political fringe, but with the rise of modern movement conservatism they moved into the corridors of power. They never had enough votes to abolish the F.D.A. or eliminate meat inspections, but they could and did set about making the agencies charged with ensuring food safety ineffective.

They did this in part by simply denying these agencies enough resources to do the job. For example, the work of the F.D.A. has become vastly more complex over time thanks to the combination of scientific advances and globalization. Yet the agency has a substantially smaller work force now than it did in 1994, the year Republicans took over Congress.

Perhaps even more important, however, was the systematic appointment of foxes to guard henhouses.

Thus, when mad cow disease was detected in the U.S. in 2003, the Department of Agriculture was headed by Ann M. Veneman, a former food-industry lobbyist. And the department’s response to the crisis — which amounted to consistently downplaying the threat and rejecting calls for more extensive testing — seemed driven by the industry’s agenda.

One amazing decision came in 2004, when a Kansas producer asked for permission to test its own cows, so that it could resume exports to Japan. You might have expected the Bush administration to applaud this example of self-regulation. But permission was denied, because other beef producers feared consumer demands that they follow suit.

When push comes to shove, it seems, the imperatives of crony capitalism trump professed faith in free markets.…

The Rubashkin family are very heavy Republican supporters who contribute large sums of money to Republican campaigns. The family had an "amazing decision" made on its behalf when the rabbis and consultants in its employ helped to rewrite USDA Humane Slaughter directives to allow a brutal procedure – throat-ripping with a meat hook. Throat-ripping was done to reduce blood splash in the meat, an unwanted byproduct of Rubashkin's unusual slaughter methods that greatly reduced the value of his meat on the non-kosher market. It was not a part of shechita (ritual slaughter) and therefore should have been illegal.

I believe Bush Administration corruption and cronyism are at the heart of the Rubashkin scandals. Haredi bloc votes and bundled cash go a long way.

Perhaps one day soon more information will come out, enough to say without question that the Rubashkins' money bought our rabbis – and our rabbis and the Rubashkins bought the Republicans.

Another example of Bush Administration ag corruption.

The Ghost of Jack Abramoff.

Everything Rubashkin.

[Hat Tip for the Abramoff article: Yisroel-by-the-Bay]

Comments

[Carol Ann Varley]

Kosher slaughter incurs greater moral and financial costs to the non-kosher consumer since the majority of meat is sold to secular markets. Labeling meat for non-Kosher and non-Halal consumers is necessary for consumer choice and to remedy the USDA's part in advancing religious practices. I am amazed the federal government is complicit in this deception. Thus,I have petitioned the USDA to label meat derived from religious slaughter.

"Aggrieved" By Carol Ann Varley
(Dedicated to Ann M. Veneman, former director of the USDA)

A whiff of fear,
the taste of dread,
its life-source bled till
the last drop of pain is shed.

Divine blood of bovine slain
swirls into a sewage drain and
through a labyrinth of vein
to pool in a dank domaine.

Bellows cease, convulsions wane,
A body limp hangs by a chain.

Swayed by the lie,
"It did not suffer,"
We savored its remains at supper.

[michael ben drosai]

Swayed by the lie,
"It did not suffer,"
We savored its remains at supper.

that wouldn't be the "last supper" would it?

[Smelly Tushie]

I feel not the cut
losing consciousness I dream
dead now as I flail

[Torah Bora]

Smelly: Masterfully written, but do you really feel there is no pain or fear? Is it all just a dreamy fainting loss of consciousness despite what we see? And if so, how do you really know?

[yidandahalf]

It is good you have brought this matter up, Shmarya. But in reality the meat industry and the effect it has had on our government's policies like its agribusiness brothers, is truly non-partisan. Its money has found its way into the hands of politicians of every stripe since extremely agressive marketing and lobbying campaigns were indeed made easy during the Reagan administration's deregulation. Each successive administration has given the meat industry whatever they have asked for. The Clintons retained the deregulatory practices of the preceeding Republican administrations. Don Tyson, senior chairman of the board of Tyson Foods Arkansas, was the second largest contributor to a fund Bill Clinton used to pursue his Arkansas political agenda.
The meat industry is in bed with everyone. Such are politics. Money has the same sweet smell to conservatives, liberals, communists, preachers, and any other variety of parasite. It greases the wheels of the USDA no matter who sits in the White House. "USDA is unsurpassed as a historical example of the regulated industry formally policing itself from inside the government. The department has the crudest revolving door in the executive branch." (Tom Devine of the Government Accountability Project )

[Yochanan Lavie]

Yid & 1/2: Thank you. Due to the anti-Bush backlash, the Dems are now the Children of Light and the Reps are now the Children of Darkness. That's bullshit. Both parties are thoroughly corrupt. I would have brought up Clinton's coziness with Tyson, but you said it better than I would have.

[yidandahalf]

See the documentary "The Future of Food". There is a sacredness to food, a divinity to the life we consume. But agribusiness has trammeled over these in order to promote blind gluttony for profits. Watch them become more frenzied as the idea of ethanol becomes ever more untenable. How will they market all the corn? What new animal agriculture process can they come up with to use it? These are things we never thought about before. But the Rubashkin has brought the interaction and inter-relationship of many issues to our attention. In many ways we who have been following this story, have changed permanently. We can never look at things the same way as we used to. How long would we have gone on slumbering if not for the Rubbishcans? This is the only positive aspect to it as far as I can tell.

[Yochanan Lavie]

Yid & 1/2 writes: "There is a sacredness to food, a divinity to the life we consume." That is a wise statement, that shows that you are more than a mere gadfly. The "slow food" movement is all about that. Many political conservatives actually believe in healthy food.

In the book "Crunchy Cons" by Ron Dreher, it mentions that not all conservatives are enamored of our instrumentalist, commercialized culture. What is it that we want to conserve? The traditions of Judaic and Western Civilizations (the latter of which is Greco-Judaeo-Christian). Popular culture is good for business, but not good for the soul all the time (not all of it is bad). Many of the values espoused by business are hedonistic and neopagan ("Just do it!") and actually- liberal.

Lenin, whom I don't admire, wasn't wrong when he said that a capitalist would sell anything, including the rope to hang himself. Daniel Bell, in the "Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" mentions that untrammelled capitalism undermines the very values which sustain it: thrift, transparency, competition, deferral of gratification. Every once in a while, a correction is needed.

That is why TR was a great president. He was not a "socialist" unlike his cousin. He knew that trusts and monopolies undermine competition and lead to a backhanded plutocratic socialism, whereby the cartels overpower gov't and everything else. The gov't that governs best governs least- but that doesn't mean not governing at all. Nor does it mean socialist redistribution, or dependency creating social programs. What it means is that the social contract shall be maintained, so that resourceful special interests (such as transnational companies that have no loyalty to America) don't use their power to undermine society. Even FA Hayek, an enemy of central planning, acknowledged that such a function is legitimate.

Paul Krugman is a socialist, who is setting up a straw man. Most conservatives don't want to eliminate the FDA, or bring back the Gilded Age. We just don't want the "Great Society."

[Yisroel-by-the-Bay]

In Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" (1879) "the previously held doctrines as to the distribution of wealth and the tendency of wages to a minimum are examined and reconstructed. In the fact that rent tends to increase not only with increase of population but with all improvements that increase productive power, Mr. George finds the cause of the well-known tendency to the increase of land values and to the decrease of the proportion of the produce of wealth that goes to labor and capital, while in the speculative holding of land thus engendered he traces the tendency to force wages to a minimum and the primary cause of paroxysms of industrial depression.

"The remedy for these he declares to be the appropriation of rent by the community, thus making land virtually common property, while giving the user secure possession and leaving to the producer the full advantage of his exertion and investment. In 1880 Mr. George removed [from San Francisco] to New York. In 1881 he published 'The Irish Land Question,' and in 1883-4 he made another trip at the invitation of the Scottish land restoration league, producing on both tours a marked effect. In 1886 he was the candidate of the United labor party for mayor of New York, and received 68,110 votes against 90,552 for Abram S. Hewitt, the Democratic candidate, and 60,435 for Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican candidate. Soon after this, Mr. George founded the 'Standard,' a weekly newspaper, which he still edits (1887). He has also published 'Social Problems' (1884), and 'Protection or Free-Trade' (1886). The latter is a radical examination of the tariff question, in which connection is made between the controversy on that subject and the views as to land with which Mr. George has become identified."

(Appleton’s Cyclopædia of American Biography / ed. by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske. New York : D. Appleton and Company, [v.2], 1888.)

http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist9/hgeorge2.html

[yidandahalf]

Can someone tell me what this character is talking about? Like the only people to pay taxes are those who own land?

[Yisroel-by-the-Bay]

Yes. See www.arwep.org for further info.

[Carol Ann Varley]

Y&1/2,
I'm glad I wasn't the only one confused by the post--for a moment I thought I stumbled on a MENSA blog.

Someone asked if it were the "last supper"? After viewing the videotapes, it was MY last supper of meat.

When the videos were released, veterinary scientists concluded the animals suffered. Holly Cheever, D.V.M., stated, "...the cattle were conscious and suffering an agonal and inhumane death".

In best-case shechita, cattle should lose consciousness under 20 seconds; beyond that, animals should be put out of their misery.

The language of the Humane Slaughter Act states the ritual throat cut is "instantaneous and simultaneous". For the USDA to allow additional cuts to the wounds of a conscious animal is illegal and inhumane.

Additional cuts to improve the value of meat for NON-KOSHER markets is beyond understanding. It's one thing if religious groups want to slaughter that way, but why involve others in religious practices without telling them? Products should be labeled to inform non-observant consumers the animal was slaughtered under religious method.

One scene in the 2004 videotape showed the slaughterer kicking blood in the face of a dying animal. People asked why? Hmmm, could it have had something to do with the animal destined for the goyim? Anything is possible.

It strikes me as curious how we human animals, superior in intellect, would NEVER consent to a surgical procedure without some form of anesthesia--yet, we see no double standard when it applies to non-human animals.

If a human volunteers to undergo a transverse incision of the skin, muscles, nerves, trachea, esophagus, and carotid arteries without anesthesia or sedation and tells me it is painless, I'll change my opinion.