Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Snowkr]

I usually don't pay much attention to stuff like this but lately this uproar over U.S. beef imports is getting on my last nerve.

Does anyone know any sites or links to sites for good, comprehensive and useful information about "Mad Cow Disease"?

I teach teachers and although they are professional and responsible people, most of them are only familiar with the term. They don't know what it means.

[R. S. Refugee]

[ttompatz]

[Snowkr]

Thanks.

This whole thing is so ridiculous. I tend to side with Koreans when they get all worked up over certain things but this time, I just feel sorry for them. If they had any idea how foolish this stuff is... how foolish it makes them look.

I'll see if I can use some of the stuff from those sites in my classes next week. Thanks again!

[bassexpander]

See here:

http://forums.eslcafe.com/korea/viewtopic.php?t=125367

A few great articles from overseas (non-US ones especially) ripping the stupidity apart.


One of my favs:

[R. S. Refugee]

Published on Friday, June 13, 2008 by The New York Times
Bad Cow Disease
by Paul Krugman

�Mary had a little lamb / And when she saw it sicken / She shipped it off to Packingtown / And now it�s labeled chicken.�

That little ditty famously summarized the message of �The Jungle,� Upton Sinclair�s 1906 expos� of conditions in America�s meat-packing industry. Sinclair�s muckraking helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act - and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.

Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines - tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes. The declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a foreign-policy crisis: there have been mass demonstrations in South Korea protesting the pro-American prime minister�s decision to allow imports of U.S. beef, banned after mad cow disease was detected in 2003.

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

It started with ideology. 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.

Eventually, the department did expand its testing, and at this point most countries that initially banned U.S. beef have allowed it back into their markets. But the South Koreans still don�t trust us. And while some of that distrust may be irrational - the beef issue has become entangled with questions of Korean national pride, which has been insulted by clumsy American diplomacy - it�s hard to blame them.

The ironic thing is that the Agriculture Department�s deference to the beef industry actually ended up backfiring: because potential foreign buyers didn�t trust our safety measures, beef producers spent years excluded from their most important overseas markets.

But then, the same thing can be said of other cases in which the administration stood in the way of effective regulation. Most notably, the administration�s refusal to countenance any restraints on predatory lending helped prepare the ground for the subprime crisis, which has cost the financial industry far more than it ever made on overpriced loans.

The moral of this story is that failure to regulate effectively isn�t just bad for consumers, it�s bad for business.

And in the case of food, what we need to do now - for the sake of both our health and our export markets - is to go back to the way it was after Teddy Roosevelt, when the Socialists took over. It�s time to get back to the business of ensuring that American food is safe.

Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics at Princeton University and a regular New York Times columnist. His most recent book is The Conscience of a Liberal.

[Zaria32]

Earlier this week a 6th grade girl in one of my classes informed me that the US is "sending all your infected meat to Korea and Japan to make us sick."

I did not react with the maturity one would hope to find in an experienced teacher, but did enjoy the enlarging eyes of the class when I said that if we wanted to kill Koreans and Japanese, we had much quicker, more certain methods

[aka Dave]

I'm a big Paul Krugman fan. What he's commenting on really isn't mad cow, but the Bush administration's deregulatory ideology.

And if the Korean protests stiffen U.S. beef regulations, that will be a good thing.

American policy needs to change, we need to be more accomodating to our allies, we need to act less arrogantly and allow our allies more dignity. I know that sounds vague and touchy feely, but it actually has practical consequences in diplomacy.

It's absurd that Bush forbade companies to conduct their own mad cow tests. Just absurd. That's the free market at work.

However, I also found this whole mad cow thing absurd as well, simply because *I ate that same beef*. My family eats it, every day, having no idea and caring not how old the beef is. If we honestly thought it were dangerous, would we (all 300 million of us) be eating beef every day (and proudly eating and preferring *American* beef).

Are we a nation of suicidal maniacs?

It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.