Pack this one in amber so that later generations will understand the Bush era:
At one point, Parnell said his workers “desperately at least need to turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money” and at another point told his plant manager to “turn them loose” after learning some peanuts were contaminated with salmonella.
The disclosures came in correspondence released by a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee Wednesday during a hearing on the salmonella outbreak that has sickened 600 people, may be linked to eight deaths and has led to one of the largest recalls in history with more than 1,800 product pulled.
A federal criminal investigation is under way.
“We appear to have a total systemic breakdown,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the committee’s investigations panel.
Rick Perlstein (writing in early 2007) on what happened to the FDA under Bush:
The Associated Press studied the records and found that between 2003 and 2006 the Food and Drug Administration conducted 47 percent fewer safety inspections. FDA field offices have 12 percent fewer employees. Safety tests for food produced in the United States have gone down by three quarters—have almost ground to a halt—in the previous year alone.
[…..]Public relations has a lot to do with the way you’ve been learning about the Third Worlding of America’s food safety system. The Georgia source of the bad peanut butter was discovered in the middle of February. The very next day Dole recalled several thousand cartons of cantaloupe that their own “routine” inspections suggested might be carrying salmonella. Four days later, B.J.’s Wholesale Club recalled packaged fresh mushrooms: more routine inspections, this time coming up with E. coli. They always say the inspections are “routine.” But they also always manage to somehow come in clusters.
Connect the dots, and you suddenly notice a lot of these…coincidences.
What do we care if the world is a joke?
TenguPhule
We’ve found the solution to the budget crisis.
Fines.
Big Fines.
Fines that will make these CEOs pee their pants.
And make the shield of corporate personhood not apply in this case.
Make them PERSONALLY liable for it.
TenguPhule
Or as Bushies would call it, "business as usual".
Stuck
Ya think there Bart. We don’t even know the half of it yet. Cheney and his minions have mined about every Agency with all sorts of administrative booby traps and "mole Winguts" burrowed deep to muck up the works and let the profiteering to continue for as long possible, or until the Obama admin. can clear out the er.. "ideological Blockage" . Leahy wants a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Truth and Incarceration would float my boat.
TheHatOnMyCat
Stay on this topic, Doug. This is a problem that is not going away soon. Things can be worse … and might be before we fix the system.
Government got drowned in a bathtub, and it will take a while to put it back together.
TenguPhule
Improved.
Because the only way these kinds of people stop this shit is over their dead bodies.
El Cid
I remember back when Reagan was undermining food inspections by slashing staff and decreasing their effectiveness
From Time magazine, "Three Steps Forward, Two Back: A balance sheet on Reagan’s efforts to deregulate America", By Ed Magnuson.
Because shitting your brains out or dying because some dumbass former B-actor turned President thought it meant "freedom". And Americans were crying out for more fecal mattered, salmonellad poultry products.
Aw, what the heck, it’s been a few years since 1983; those who doubt that the righties saw George Bush Jr. as Reagan II incarnate, just re-read this crap:
That’s your hero Reagan there. Shittier meat. More ignoring of safety violations in nursing homes.
El Cid
Why can’t we block quote without it all being bolded? Or if we can, how? Table?
El Cid
More on the drive to crap up our food from the Freedumb-minded Republicans. From 2006:
cite>
But we’re not a big, rich country who can afford to inspect our food. We send all our food inspectors to watch over our banking system, right? Right?
Mike in NC
That’s what these assholes do and it should surprise approximately nobody. I spent St. Reagan’s first term on active duty in the Navy and the fraud, waste, and abuse I witnessed every day were astronomical. But that was nothing compared to some poor grandma in a housing project getting a couple of extra food stamps…
Steeplejack
@El Cid:
Do this–braces substituted for angle brackets so this doesn’t trigger formatting:
{blockquote}{p}Text you want to quote.{/p}
{p}A second paragraph of stuff you want to quote.{/p}
{p}Etc., etc. More text.{/p}{/blockquote}
That should do ya.
wag
Food irradiation would make a HUGE difference by killing the bacteria and destroying viruses, without changing the nutritional content of the food one bit.
Yes, I’m serious.
LiberalTarian
Yeah, cuz we all know that Repubs are impervious to poison. Right. Remember the expression, "sell their own grandmother," for a buck? What, you thought that was allegory? Republicans either think their old men and ladies don’t die from food poisoning and bad air/water, or they don’t care. SATSQ.
El Cid
Thanks. Will do.
LiberalTarian
@TenguPhule:
That’s how they keep CEO’s from dumping their raw hazardous waste into the canals in Bakersfield–they are personally liable.
And yes, they reason they wrote the law was in response to actual people doing it. Never underestimate the power of greed.
Steeplejack
@El Cid:
Hey, you got it! Cool.
Jay Severin Has A Small Pen1s
Michael Phelps should have said he was using the marijuana to alleviate the pain caused by all the tainted Kellogg’s products he consumed.
jenniebee
What do you suppose the odds are that Parnell serves some serious jail time for this? Eight dead – he had to know that salmonella kills and that it would be traceable to the peanuts. The only explanation for why he would persist in selling them anyway is that he had an expectation that there would be no meaningful consequences.
Gawd, if I was the judge in the civil lawsuit, I’d give ownership of the company over to the survivors of the people he killed. It would be a nice change of pace to have a company in the hands of people who can appreciate what happens when a company fails in its responsibilities to its customers.
John Cole
Have any of you seen the Trials of Ted Haggard on HBO?
I just watched it. Wow.
Andre
I don’t get what people are complaining about. You’re getting something for free.
The fact that that something is salmonella is simply central to my point.
kilo
Hey, great idea! Now the shit-tainted meat that they pump off the assembly line can have even more Real Shit Taste ™ without the nasty shit-borne bacteria!
Alternatively, we could have a food system with inspectors. And testing. And tainted foods that get detected, rejected, and destroyed.
Good food, or cheap food. You choose.
El Cid
Would irradiating Republicans help purify them for human use as well?
Polish the Guillotines
At least the Chinese had the balls to kill the corrupt bastard that ran their version of the FDA.
With all the "Loyal Bushies" out there in need of a good hemp necktie, we could re-invigorate the economy with gallows construction alone.
srv
We are all a petri dish now.
Since reading Upton Sinclair in Jr. High, it’s never surprising that this stuff happens, but it does surprise how long people pretend to not notice. I mean, you have to really, really work at it. Every day. For years on end.
Like in Wilkes Barre, where juveniles are just another cash commodity.
Rome Again
Awww, give this man Stupak a break, he didn’t think anyone would die, they’d just get some bad diarrhea for a day or two and all would be well and he’d still have a money making operation.
::banging head against keyboard::
Church Lady
I’m confused. I thought the budgets for the various agencies are appropriated through the legislative process. The President doesn’t have a line item veto, so could not slash a departmental budget on his own. Is there anything on record about the FDA’s budget being cut from 2001 and 2007, when Republicans controlled the House? Was it cut from Clinton administration levels? Has it been increased since January 2007, when the Democrats achieved a majority in the House? As it appears that food safety has become such a problem, why haven’t the Democrats been railing about it for the last two years and then doing something to improve the situation?
I think Bush was an absolute disaster, but he didn’t control every aspect of the federal government aparatus during his tenure. There is plenty to blame him for, but not every bad thing that happens is his fault. If, a year from now, there is another problem with our food supply, will the same people be calling for Obama’s head on a pike? I would hope not. This appears to the fault of someone who saw the opportunity to make money, damn the consequences. He needs to be stripped of every penny he has and then sent to jail for a long, long time.
Rome Again
Can you say Deregulation?
Polish the Guillotines
@El Cid:
Only if irradiation has IQ-boosting powers.
Something tells me, though, that it would have the spine-chilling effect of rendering them impervious to all known weaponry, while keeping them dumb as broomsticks.
El Cid
@Rome Again: Well, that was the subtitle of the article. Note that Time mostly praised Reagan’s bold success in slaying the oppressive regulatory beast, although, yeah, some whiners kept blah blah blah-ing about poultry inspections and health standards for nursing homes and construction violations blah bladety bladdy blah…
On the Legislative versus Executive spending, there’s not a whole lot Congress can do if the Executive says "Thank you for our year 19XX (or 20XX) agency budget, but I am the President and I will set up the agency’s internal budget as I prefer."
Reagan ran a terrorist war against Nicaragua’s government and its civilian populations and hiring death squad governments to slaughter wildly in El Salvador and Guatemala (to great liberal hawk approval), and the eventual consequences were that a few officials were convicted of lying to Congress, and they were forgiven and were brought back to run Bush Jr’s policies and to run our great blowing up of Iraq.
So, when
the Presidenta Republican President says, "F*@% you, Congress, I’ll do what I god damn please," there’s not a whole lot which gets done to change that.srv
@John Cole: I’m waiting for the Broadway version. Maybe a new definition of a Passion Play.
Conservatively Liberal
@El Cid:
If there is more than one paragraph in what you quote, put:
& nbsp; (remove the blank space between the & and the n)
on each blank line between the paragraphs and everything will all be within the same blockquote. Remember to add {p} to the start of each paragraph to turn off bolding (change the {} to greater/less brackets). Note: You don’t need to add the {/p} closing tag at the end, it will do it automatically when you post.
For example:
and I wanted to blockquote both of them and then respond to them on this line, this is how it would look after I write it:
{blockquote}{blockquote}{p}If someone quoted this line…{/blockquote}
& nbsp; (remember to remove the blank space between the & and the n)
{p}and responded to it with this line…{/blockquote}
And this would be the line I respond to them on.
I hope this formats correctly!
Polish the Guillotines
@Church Lady:
The FDA is an agency under the Executive branch. Congress could mandate 9 out of 10 tax dollars goes to the FDA, but the President sets the agenda. If he puts someone in charge who’s essentially anti-regulation, then good luck getting the money spent on inspectors and enforcement.
Prepare to hear more stories like this for the next couple of years.
Oh, and this isn’t the first time a Bush Administration department’s incompetence and corruption got people killed. Think back to the various coal mining deaths that were an indirect, if not direct, result of deliberately lax oversight.
TenguPhule
But the people he appoints can direct the money away from enforcement and into things like long vacations and reimbursements for personal expenses.
Also, you owe me an apology with groveling, Churchlady.
TenguPhule
Only if we used plasma.
And even then we’d need to burn the ashes again just to be safe.
Radio One
It’s mind-boggling why this is surprising -almost every scientist I’ve know since 2001, including many who have found jobs in the FDA in the last few years, have hated the Bush administration more profoundly when it came it food and drug safety admissions.
Funkhauser
I probably won’t the be first to suggest that Congresscritters go eat for a week in India, or Peru, or Cambodia, or China, or Indonesia. And not at the five-star Ugly-Americans-insulated-from-reality hotels.
Then when they come back they’ll appreciate the FDA in all its glory.
TenguPhule
Except he appointed so many incompetent suckups just like him into positions of authority that in fact he did essentially fuck up the entire Executive branch of government all the way down to the footwork level.
TenguPhule
Better idea, they will be served the EXACT same menu as a high density public high school.
Any Senator who wants to eat Wagyu beef has to pay out of pocket.
Conservatively Liberal
It did! Now, if the first (or second) quotes have more than one paragraph, then this:
My response would go here.
And the formatting would look like this before I post it:
{blockquote}{blockquote}{p}First paragraph quoted.
& nbsp;
{p}Second paragraph quoted.
& nbsp;
{p}Third paragraph quoted.{/blockquote}
& nbsp;
{p}First response paragraph quoted.
& nbsp;
{p}Second response paragraph quoted.{/blockquote}
Note: Replace all { } with greater/less than brackets and remove the space between the ‘&’ and the ‘n’.
Stuck
never mind
LiberalTarian
You know a while back we were discussing how much pork actually had to be cooked? You know, like trichinosis is a thing of the past, yadda yadda?
The fundamental failure of regulation is its faith that people will do the right thing because it is simply the right thing to do.
No, you cannot trust people to do the right thing. You can trust them to do the right thing because it is to act in their best interest maybe 80% of the time. If it is in their best interest to serve you food that will not make you sick, 80% of the people will say, "Hey yeah, that is what I should do. If I didn’t, how could I sleep at night?" But, the other 20%? Well, they will count on luck, or they will say that somehow it is not their fault, or they will say, "Caveat emptor." Those 20% believe that even if something bad happens, they will not be held responsible.
That is what is funny about "liberalism." Liberals have been painted as the believers in goodness and light, but really, we are anything but true believers. We believe that given the opportunity to injure our fellow humans for gain, most humans will go for the brass ring of screwing stangers for profit. We try to protect our fellow man from our fellow man. And somehow, we hope for a better life for everyone. Inexplicable, yes?
In the meantime, I am on tenterhooks for the next BSG episode. Grant me my escapism. I deserve it.
scarshapedstar
Looks like they caught that Trig Palin, whaddayacallit, clown syndrome?
Rome Again
@Church Lady:
For someone who seems to have a penchant for research, you seem to miss facts quite often.
Bush deregulated everything he could possibly get his hands on. This is not news to anyone. Wingers were happy with this arrangement, we here were yelling about it, so why is it news to you?
Rome Again
Only when the right thing makes their wallet fatter.
TenguPhule
Fixed it for you, Rome Again.
TenguPhule
@Rome Again: Oops! Sorry!
@LiberalTarian: Fixed.
Conservatively Liberal
Want to know what can happen when we privatize our prisons, jails and juvenile facilities? This.
If they can do this to children, you know it is happening to adults. This is what happens when you allow people to profit from the misfortune of others.
HT to the GOS for the link.
TenguPhule
Off topic, but the banner on the top right now is cracking me up.
Did the Onion buy out Hot Air or have we finally crossed into the land of Pure Xanthian Spoof?
Church Lady
@TenguPhule – You must not have ever checked back on that thread. I gave you a mini-grovel and said you owed me a small one back. :)
DeMint did suggest eliminating all deductions except for mortgage interest and charitable contributions (along with cutting every other tax he could think of). That part you had right. The problem with your assertion, however, was that it was tied to the proposals to cut payroll taxes in half and to cut the two lowest tax brackets by 5% each. It wasn’t. Those proposals were in two separate amendments submitted by two different Senators, neither of which proposed eliminating any deductions. DeMint’s amendment said absolutely nothing about cutting either payroll taxes or individual tax brackets. Your turn to grovel just a little.
MNPundit
Question for everyone: Since Nixon let his paranoia run rampant, can anyone name one thing Republicans touched that hasn’t crumbled to dust in their hands?
Martin
Criminal investigation. Bring the executives up on reckless endangerment charges and revoke the corporations charter – liquidate assets, shareholders get what they get. Corporate death penalty for killing people, and investors who are actually the owners of these companies start to learn that they need to pay attention to what the management is doing.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work…
Conservatively Liberal
It will be interesting to follow this peanut story and see what happens to the guy who owned the company. If he is properly punished I wonder if anyone will point out that there is no difference between this peanut guy and the banks and other corporations who ripped us off. Everyone screwed everyone else over for profit. The banks robbed us, the companies sold our jobs off and this one company poisoned us, all for the mighty dollar.
I thought I heard some blurb on Hardball about four Merrill execs walking away with something like $121 billion right before Merrill fell. I was in another room so I didn’t catch the whole story. If this is true, think about what this amount is compared to what we are expecting to use to try to save our country of over 300 million people.
If this is true then four guys got all of that cash. Anyone else hear about this?
El Cid
The answer is clear: we have no choice except to give the peanut industry, and this company in particular, several hundred billion dollars no questions asked and ruling out in advance any of these crazy fringe "accountability" demands, since we believe the best way to facilitate proper action and responsibility is to get the peanut industry fully functional again, though we can’t say that this plan in any way will get them there, in which case we’ll probably have to give them several hundred more billion dollars, ever since that one afternoon a few months ago when they brought us all behind closed doors and said that if we didn’t do something to stop losses in the peanut industry, the world could have been robbed of protein within several hours’ time. God help us all.
Mako
How we used to laff at this song back in the day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMJ2wugESQo
Here in Japan, CEOs would be on their knees on national television apologizing and every peanut would be tested from this day forth, but I doubt that will happen in the U S of A.
Coming so close after the Habitat For Humanity scandals this can not bode well for Jimmy Carter’s historical legacy.
Mako
I never got sick in any of those places[1]. Sure, China’s overuse of msg gives me a splitting headache, and it can be a bit unnerving watching flies land on the pigflesh you will be eating later, but at least you see the pigflesh, there on the table, not off in some factory.
"Congresscritters"? Am I the only one who thinks that sounds stupid?
[1]Did,however, have a near death attack of the explosive ass-squirts in Kathmandu back in the 80’s. Of course, that was from eating at a place that was considered "five-star". Never made that mistake again.
TenguPhule
I humbly Grovel before you, Church Lady, for getting it half-wrong. ^_-
different church-lady
Costello quote!
"Death wears a big hat ’cause he’s a big bloke
We’re only living this instant…"
DougJ
@Church Lady
I’m confused. I thought that the Perlstein wrote that inspections were taking place less often not that the budget for the FDA had been cut.
I know you enjoy being contrarian, but stick to the facts and stop bringing up unrelated bullshit and putting words in my mouth. Okay?
TenguPhule
Pew Research Center, so take it with a grain of salt, 63% of Americans do not believe in Evolution. We have seen Idiocracy and it is us.
Zombie Jesus will just not fucking die.
DougJ
I think there’s at least a 50-50 chance you’re one of my cousins.
Redhand
"Total systemic breakdown" about sums it up.
Was Bush so wedded to the idea of corporate profits and "deregulation" that it trumped safety of the food supply in our country? Apparently so. It makes me wonder just how close we are to China and its tainted milk scandal.
My wife dragged me to "Trader Joe’s" to shop last weekend, and I was amazed at the number of different posted recalls they had at the check-out counter for various products in their inventory.
This peanut plant president needs to be prosecuted for this conduct, and to do time.
kay
@Conservatively Liberal:
Want to know what can happen when we privatize our prisons, jails and juvenile facilities? This.
I represent juveniles in a county court. The privatization of the locked facility was the money incentive, but that county has serious problems, and it goes much further than 2 crooked judges.
Here are all the people and agencies in that county that had to have been aware that juveniles subject to detention in a locked facility went unrepresented:
1. the entire criminal defense bar
2. the prosecutors office
3. juvenile parole agency and officers
4. county children’s services agency
5. any court employees who worked there prior to 2001 when this reign of terror started, so were aware that children have a right to representation
6. any of the other juvenile judges in that county
They ALL allowed this to happen for 8 years. NONE of them raised hell. ANY of them who are county employees should be called to account and asked why this was allowed to continue.
The prosecutors who stood next to those kids at sentencing ("disposition" in the juve system) know they have to be represented when subject to detention. WTF? They accepted guilty pleas? Entered by whom? A 15 year old? They just stood there?
Glocksman
Can we shoot them now?
Seriously.
Parnell should be the first motherfucker against the wall, and the firing squad should be made up of relatives and friends of his victims.
If someone shot that fucker on the street and I were on the jury hearing the case, I have two words: jury nullification.
Conservatively Liberal
@kay:
Thanks for pointing that out Kay, that makes it all the worse. I wonder if anyone will ask questions of those who remained silent as to why they did noting, especially the so-called ‘defense’ for the accused. That girl getting locked up for a fake MySpace page lampooning her vice principal was unreal. That the courts have to look at overturning hundreds, if not thousands of cases is mind boggling.
And this is just what two corrupt Judges were capable of doing while others stood by and let them get away with it. These two judges better not be the only people who get jail time for this.
This is why things like the drug war have to end; when we privatize these things, sometimes justice gets set aside in the name of profit. Like the healthcare industry, when you allow people to control something so they can make a profit, abuses happen, and they WILL happen.
People who profit from the suffering of others need to be closely monitored and regulated to keep them honest. Even then cheats will pop up but at least there is a system in place to deal with them and that will help to discourage others from screwing people over for profit.
This shit with our markets, jobs, banks, food, justice, housing and so on has been like some kind of bizarre wild west period where lawlessness was not only rampant but encouraged and rewarded, as long as the lawmakers got their cut.
kay
@Conservatively Liberal:
It’s big news in juve circles. As I understand it, the judges weren’t appointing defense counsel at all. Juveniles subject to detention have the same right to counsel as indigent defendant’s who are adults. The SCOTUS ruled on it in 1967, and it’s all state code now. Those who retained private counsel weren’t detained.
Lawyers are gossipy. The defense bar knew. Prior to 2001, the detention rate for juves in that county was 1 in 10. It went to 1 in 4.
It’s hard for me to imagine as a practical matter. They were holding one and two minute hearings. That’s it. Two minutes, then ship. There’s a pre-trial process, then, under juvenile procedure, initial appearance, adjudication, disposition.
The prosecutor didn’t notice he or she was the only lawyer in the room at the pre-trial? Was the juve actually negotiating directly with the prosecutor? The parents say they weren’t heard. Did they just skip that part? It’s shocking.
Jails shouldn’t be for-profit enterprises. That’s just a recipe for corruption.
Walker
There, fixed that for you.
ComradeDread
Not entirely.
Proponents of complete deregulation don’t assume that people will do the right thing. They assume that people will do what is best for them in the long term: i.e. building a safe brand and therefore trust with their customers that their products are safe and won’t kill them. Or producing a product that doesn’t completely destroy the environment and reduce their customers to walking tumors (thereby cutting off their income in the future).
They don’t, however, take into account people who just don’t give a fuck about the long term and are willing to cut corners to make a profit in the short term before cashing out and running off to an extradition free country.
RSA
It’s not enough that the Bushies wanted to take us back to Hoover’s 1930s America; they want to go further, back to Upton Sinclair’s Jungle. Thanks, guys.
Tropical Fats
This whole salmonella/peanut thing is obviously a hoax. The Invisible Hand would never allow it to happen. All praise the Invisible Hand!
El Cid
Another step in Grover Norquist’s brave attempt to return us to the glorious McKinley era, the Republicans’ idea of perfection, especially the Jim Crow part.
ksmiami
Dirty meat, dirty peanut butter and broken roads. Heck of a job Republicans. I won’t be attending your party any time in the future cause I value my life.
Jeezus krist, the firing squad may be too good for these people. I say make them eat their words and their deeds in the form of a peanut butter satay meat dish. That or at least the pillory.
Svensker
No, but the best part is Parnell was appointed to the USDA Peanut Standards Board by Bush in 2005.
See C&L.
Evinfuilt
Its because we live in a reality-based environment, and have witnessed our fellow man screw strangers for profit time and again. Its why we’re liberals, not Libertarians.
Comrade Dread
Not really. The perception is only about a quarter right.
I’ve noticed that a few liberals still tend to have faith in government institutions and government programs if the ‘right’ people are in power, as if anyone is immune to the temptation to screw over their fellow man for their own gain given the opportunity.
Which, personally, is why I would love to see more checks and balances and mandatory review boards and sunset periods on a lot of government programs, projects, and laws. To force Congress to actually give some oversight and thought to see if what they’ve done in the past has addressed the stated problem and no longer needs to be continued or if it failed, to repeal it and try another solution.
different church-lady
@ walker
There, fixed that for you.
flywheelgrinding
I was unfortunate enough to be incarcerated in a Privately Owned Prison back in the 80’s, in Eden, Texas. They had they good humor to call it The Garden of Eden of course, but it was officially The Eden Detention Center. It has probably changed hands by now and been gobbled up by the Corrections Corporation of America.
It was corrupt from top to bottom. The warden had an ongoing affair with the prison nurse and their offspring worked there as a guard. It was like a bad Burt Reynolds movie.
It was owned by the City of Eden, Texas and we, the inmates, were evidently the poor people of Eden, since our food came directly from the Federal Government. Government commodities which were at one time headed for commodity distribution centers. Stacks and stacks of boxes marked USDA. These jobs brought employment and opportunity to a great many men who would otherwise have their arms up a a cow’s ass. All presided over by the Bureau of Prisons.
I remember when the BofP guy came to inspect the place when I was there, and it was like the scent in Stalag 17 where the Commandant accompanies the Red Cross guy when he asks the prisoners if they are being treated well. What are you gonna say? It was common knowledge that the BofP guy departed each year with a good deal on a new pickup truck from a local dealer.
The place at the time held 200 men, most being illegal aliens. There were four "cells" holding 50 men each. That was your day, except for meals. They gave our Hispanic brethren English language classes and when they got out they were driven to the border and someone watched as they walked across the bridge to Mexico. Some were back in weeks or months.
The rest of the inmates were short time federal prisoners serving no more than a year. They were low-level screw ups. Did you know that altering the mileage on a car title and moving that car and title across a state line was a federal crime? It is. Somebody else got drunk on a military reservation. Somebody else stole a front loader and sold it in Oklahoma. A wrestler got drunk on a flight and interfered with a flight crew. Another guy was a weight-lifter who got caught selling steroids. Somebody else made a false statement to a bank concerning the collateral on a loan. A Costa Rican guy who worked for the United Nations came through Dallas with some (protected) turtle eggs from Costa Rica. Same judge as the wrestler. Three months each.
I was lucky in more than one way. One was, my bunkie was the car dealer I mentioned, Nearly Honest Earl. The second was, I got a light sentence, six months, for a being a coke mule, coast to coast, Miami to California, for a year. Money east, Coke west, round trip. But I was, and am, properly remorseful for doing the crime, but I still hadda do some time. Not too bad considering I was lookin’ at 25 years.
And to add insult to injury, just like the song, my dad died the day I got out of prison.
But in short, Crime is Good. Good for their business. Now that capitalism has entered the Prison Business, crime is good for America.
I’m glad I could do my part.
DougJ
flywheelgrinding:
That was the most interesting comment I’ve read in a while.