On December 28th, 2006 I sent an email about childhood obesity at the request of Trust of America's Health. Here are few of the e-mail's highlights: More than 9 million children are overweight or obese, the childhood obesity rate has more than doubled from 5 to 17%. Being overweight or obese increases an individual's risk of developing 35 major diseases like heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer. The direct and indirect costs add up to more than $117 billion dollars. Federal funding on chronic disease programs is less than $3 per capita less than a fast food meal. This obesity epidemic " threatens to make this the generation of Americans to live shorter and sicker lives than their parents!
The White House even bragged about spend less than $600 million dollars on anti-obesity efforts (about $2.57 per obese person). Then they tied in the movie "Shrek 3".
Tom Harkin noticed and so did I.
The White House letter was signed by Darrel Hipp Special Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Correspondence. Sounds like a really official title until one realizes Darren K. Hipp is a University of South Carolina graduate and is paid more than $97,500 per year to read and write for President Bush. From the looks of this letter Mr. Hipp is doing President Bush's public relations work and playing an overpaid glorified janitor for the GOP. I believe no one in the White House especially President Bush can read an e-mail, a PDB (like bin Laden to attack the United States) or understand the law (or the spirit of the law).
President Bush in his ethical statement against stem cell research said:
"As science brings us ever closer to unlocking the secrets of human biology, it also offers temptations to manipulate human life and violate human dignity. Our conscience and history as a Nation demand that we resist this temptation. "
Hypocrisy! This ethical statement is just public relations. PR sounds good until one puts it into context.
One can't right with one hand and wrong with the other - M.K.Ghandhi
Mr. Hipp as a University of South Carolina law student ought to know his letter could be considered a smoking gun proving the food and beverage industry has had an undue influence on the Executive Branch and our nation's health policy. The Supreme Court case Daubert versus Merril Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. (1993) and the Data Quality Act (2001) are forms of cognitive dissonance. I don't believe it was the intention to do harm but once the mission creep began the natural thing to do was cover up the truth and deny the science. It is not the crime that does you in but the cover-up.
Health policy is social policy. To have governmental health research organizations like the National Institute of Health's National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute and it's health promotion campaigns like "The Heart Truth" and the Women and Heart Disease "Red Dress campaign" dedicated to fighting obesity, heart disease and stroke with a more than cozy relationship with an industry believed to the leading factor in the rise of obesity is in my view ethically at best unacceptable. What trouble me more is that the fact I noticed the research papers on high fructose corn syrup amounted to a great public health bait and switch. The beverage and food industry wants to say high fructose corn syrup is no different than sugar to avoid like tobacco industry like regulations while openly acknowledging their product increases triglycerides in the blood (a major factor in heart disease, diabetes, atherosclerosis and stroke). The American Beverage Association like the tobacco industry be considered illegal under RICO. Coca-cola blocks and influences national health funding and research while Pepsico funds pro-industry studies to blur the science and Cadbury Schwepps organizes grassroots looking corporate (or astroturf) health campaigns. In 2006 I went to Saying America's Youth Conference on childhood obesity in Des Moines. It looked real but it wasn't. Are corporate lies are justified when a business employing thousands is looking at closing it's doors forever? Some people think so.
Seldom do cost/benefit analyses take into account people or their health. We can't tell people to cut back on sugar and soft drinks because it would harm the nation's food industry and hence our economy. We already have enough trouble on Wall St. Why couldn't I just shut up for few more weeks? I fear a President McCain.
The single largest employer outside the federal government happens to our nation's restaurant industry. America's restaurants employ more 12 million people in more 900,000 venues. They are a rich and POWERFUL lobby. These National Restaurant Association figures make about 300 customers per restaurant. Going out to eat is part of nation's culture but someone is going out of business. Either it is our nation's public health and health care system or the fast food industry. We can't continue our unsustainable policies with more than one fourth of our nation's GDP being spent on health care costs. We spend more and get less than any nation on Earth. $2.2 trillion dollars is huge drag on our economy. What about the more than 70 million people who struggle with consequences of obesity? Do we simple get rid of them like Iowa Senator Grassley suggested at the 2007 Lance Armstrong Cancer Forum? On the King Corn DVD, Grassley states:
"America is 9 meals away from revolution."
And what about our health care costs? Every single one of us pay for the price of disease because- we all pay into the insurance risk pool. There is no free lunch.
McCain accuses Obama of wanting to spread our nation's wealth. I accuse President Bush, Senator McCain, Governor Palin and the Republican Party of placing a plague upon the houses of the American people. The McCain/Palin ticket believes diseases are accidential or acts of God when the truth might be closer to an act of man and his greed. Neither the Grand Old Party nor this nation's leadership can afford to continue the cognitive dissonance that allowed an unprecedented case of corporate cronyism to flourish in the halls of our government and bring harm to the American people.
Even the most simple and optimistic population biology like the Hardy Weinberg Equation (p^2+2pq+q^2=1) combined with our morbidity figures like our obesity rate from reports like "F as in Fat from the Trust for America's Health" show America has run out of time. The Bush White House considered Trust for America's Health credible enough to write people back but too politically inconvenient to deal with the consequences and people’s concerns. Governing by public relations is hallmark of the Bush Presidency and is form of human rights abuse. Stanley Cohen in the Human Rights Quarterly (1996) noted the several types of government denials of human rights abuse:
Three forms of denial appear in the discourse of official responses to allegations about human rights violations: literal denial (nothing happened); interpretive denial (what happened is really something else); and implicatory denial (what happened is justified).
Literal denial is not possible when the evidence is all around us. This leaves the writer/accuser/observer facing the gauntlet used by those with power "If one can't shoot down the message then shoot the messenger or blame the victim." Democracies can't do this kind of thing easily. The reasoning is often circular because "democracies don't do that, we are a democracy and therefore people making these kinds accusations are traitors to democracy."
Put me on trial for my life and my freedom of speech if you dare! I am yelling fire in crowded theature.
Interpretive denial is like saying obesity is preventable but we stall any action with more debate (calories in, calories out or carbs vs. fat). The longer debate means the better profits.
Cohen breaks it down into euphemism, legalism, denial of responsibility and isolation:
Euphemism: The most familiar form of reinterpretation is the use of euphemistic labels and jargon. These are everyday devices for masking, sanitizing, and conferring respectability by using palliative terms that deny or misrepresent cruelty or harm, giving them neutral or respectable status. Cohen (1996)
Both Sarah Palin and John McCain is use jargon to blur the facts and create emotions more palatable to the human (Republican) spirit.
Legalism: Euphemism derives from everyday language or technology, psychology and other professional discourses. But most forms of interpretive denial are supplied by the language of legalism. Countries that are proud of their democratic credentials and sensitive to their international image cannot easily issue crude literal denials. Their standard response is to embark on a legal defense--often scholarly and protracted. Cohen (1996)
This is exactly what the Supreme Court cases- Daubert versus Merrril Dow Pharmacueticals Inc., Joiner v. General Electric and Kumho Tire v. Carmichael do. Create a wall, roadblock or uncertainity around the circumstances or the facts to deny people justice and their right to health and life.
Denial of Responsibility: The technique of "denial of responsibility" has many functions in the vocabulary of human rights violations. Cohen (1996)
Isolation: An important form of reframing accepts that a particular act has occurred, accepts the imputed legal interpretation, even accepts responsibility, but denies the systematic, routine, or repeated quality attributed to the act. This was an "isolated incident," quite atypical of the overall pattern. It did not happen before; it has not happened since. It was isolated in space (untypical of what normally happens) and time (nothing like this happened before or after). Hence it is unfair and tendentious to accuse our government of any serious violations or to imply that we belong in the same category as other governments that systematically do this. Cohen (1996)
Abu Ghraib is the White House example of an isolated circumstance of a few bad apples. When it comes to Republican social(health) policies there is definite pattern of pathological thinking from mining safety to environmental protection.
Implicatory Denial could be considered an unjustified form of Utilitarianism where is no one is happy.
A full list of the justifications and rationalizations for human rights violations would constitute no less than a catalogue of all the causes and ideologies behind conflict, war, and repression throughout history. These are the standard denials that conventional moral codes apply in particular situations or towards particular groups. The literature on atrocities such as genocide, political massacre, mass rape, or torture distinguishes between the justifications offered by perpetrators themselves (at the time or afterwards) and the underlying structural causes, which may not correspond to those verbal accounts. Cohen (1996)
We have the science to stop obesity but can't afford to because we need the cheap food to feed an increasingly impoverished nation. Benjamin Barber in his book "Jihad versus McWorld" put this way
Democracy is about making social choices about the consequences of private actions.
We aren't making the social choices because people don't have the facts to make an informed choice. Democrats are not without blame.
Democrats don't want to burden the poor with more hardship. Fuel, food and health costs will not fall until break our cycle of bad habits. We can't do that. So what do we do? Kill the people? Simply put either we act now or future generations will pay the price for our generation's inaction and ignorance.