Beth's Everything Blog

And the federal Department of Agriculture?

All four have allowed Austin “Jack” DeCoster to continue his egg businesses as usual. He owns one of the two operations that recalled almost HALF A BILLION eggs last month.

Here’s part of his record.

1960’s through present– Austin “Jack” DeCoster has owned multiple industrial confinement chicken and hog operations in Iowa, Maine, Ohio and Iowa

1994 – Iowa: four separate penalties for hog waste violations

1997 – Turner, Maine: DeCoster Egg Farms fined and paid $2 million for “unguarded machinery, electrical hazards, exposure to harmful bacteria . . .”

2000 – Iowa: designated DeCoster a “Habitual violator” of  environmental regulations.

2002 – Settlement of more than $1.5 million with Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for sexual harassment, rape and abuse on behalf of Mexican workers at DeCoster’s Wright County Iowa plants.

2007 –During one of four raids by federal officers, 51 suspected illegal immigrants were arrested at 6 DeCoster egg farms.

2010 – The Maine successor company to DeCoster Egg Farms  paid $125,000 in court penalties to cover charges of animal cruelty.

2010 – Linked to one thousand cases of salmonella poisoning, Wright County Egg, owned by Austin  “Jack” DeCoster, recalled 380 million eggs.

DeCoster Farms have been investigated and penalized by such agencies as the federal Occupational Safety and Health Commission, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Administration, Maine Human Rights Commissions, EEOC, Maine Department of environmental Protection and Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

He and his companies have paid millions in fines but the business is apparently so lucrative that the fines do not act as a deterrent and may even seem paltry by comparison.

Some in Iowa complain that the DeCoster farms buy large quantities of their corn and employ many local resident. Yet those same people pay a horrible price in the gross contamination of their land.

This month, Congress has subpoenaed DeCoster to explain how eggs from his farms were linked to the recent salmonella outbreak. (Yawn) My bet is that this will accomplish nothing.

Still, it is way past time to stop DeCoster’s desecration of our environment, the pollution of our food and the brutality to animals and humans as well.

It is up to Secretary of Agriculture Ton Vilsack and Secretary of Human Resources Kathleen Sebelius to work together with Iowa Governor Chet Culver, Senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin and state Senator Gene Fraise, chair of a legislative committee on agriculture to put DeCoster and his ilk out of business once and for all.

Government officials don’t make it all that easy to contact them. The higher up they are, the less easy it is but this is important enough to try. Here’s how.

Secretary Tom Vilsack

U.S. Department of Agriculture
1400 Independence Ave., S.W.
Washington, DC 20250

(202) 720-2791

Secretary Kathleen Sebilius

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
200 Independence Avenue, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20201
Toll Free: 1-877-696-6775

Senator Chuck Grassley

http://grassley.senate.gov/contact.cfm

Senator Tom Harkin

http://harkin.senate.gov/contact.cfm

Governor Chet Culver

http://www.governor.iowa.gov/index.php/constituent_services/contact_us/

(See. It’s getting easier)

and

State Senator Gene Fraise

E-mail: eugene.fraise@legis.state.ia.us

(Easiest of all)

Sixty years ago there was a cry for urban housing for people who lived in squalid conditions in the center city of St. Louis, the city in which I grew up.  A housing project based on the Modernist concepts of the French architect Le Courbusier was the answer that thrilled and excited the people of the city.  It was designed by a classmate of mine at Washington University who was a partner in Helmuth Obata and Minoru Yamasaki who later  designed the twin towers of the World Trade Center.  St. Louis would become Manhattan on the Mississippi.  And so in the years of the early 1950s the design which was redesigned many times arose.  This was to be a solution to all of the overcrowding of urban dwellers, a high rise that cut costs and simultaneously allowed each tenant clean, livable, and new quarters.  The reality was almost instantly recognized despite the architects and builders earnest hopes and dreams. Upon completion Pruitt-Igoe had 2000 dwelling units in 33 11 story buildings whose 10,000 people were stacked into an environment of despair.  It was a federally built and supported slum in which only blacks lived because whites refused to live in the units after desegregation became the law of the land.  Never more than 60% occupied, it became a mini city that possessed all the problems and difficulties that arise from race and poverty and all the impotence, indifference and hostility with which our society dealt with these problems at that time.  To save building costs the elevators stopped only on the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth floors of each building.  Stairwells used to reach the other floors reeked of urine; thugs and thieves lying in wait for tenants to use them.  Children were exposed to crime and drug use as well as rodents and roaches.  Children fell out of windows.  And in less than 20 years the decision was made that Pruitt-Igoe was a drastic failure.  I remember watching the first 3 buildings implode.

There was a similar failure in Chicago with Cabrini Green, another housing facility of high rise buildings designed to accommodate 15,000 people.  It too was to designed as an ideal affordable Modernist approach to urban living. Gang wars and murders were so prevalent that the Mayor Jane Byrne made a valiant effort to live there in the 1980s to prove that it  was a safe place for tenants.  She was  protected by police guards 24/7 and a steel door was installed at the back entrance to her apartment.  She lasted 3 weeks.  The difference in the two housing projects is that Cabrini Green lies on valuable land on the near North side of Chicago which is in demand for gentrification.  The people who own property surrounding Cabrini Green estimate that the value of their homes and apartments increases at the rate of $35,000.00 each time another of the high rises is imploded.

It would seem that these two projects live on symbolically as icons of failure.  Architectural critics deem it proof of the failure of high rise public housing for families.  Liberals perceive it as an example  of government’s appalling treatment of the poor.  But hope springs eternal among architects and city planners.  Teachers Village in Newark New Jersey is being designed and planned by Richard Meier as a complex for middle and lower income tenants.  Meier is famous as the designer of white domiciles for the rich and international art museums.  Teachers Village returns architecture and Meier to designing for other segments of society than the wealthy.  It is a signal that after more than sixty years of frightening and devastating failures in architecture for the poor there just might be hope that creative energy in this area will be part of an overall effort to provide decent housing for the poor and the less affluent.  And it may return architects to a commitment to elevate the lives of ordinary people. It may not be as ambitious as the federally funded ghettos built in the 1950s and 1970s but there is a refreshing involvement  with solving the failures of the Modernist movement that created debacles like Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini Green.  The building surge of the 1990s and 2000s concerned itself solely with corporate towers and cultural institutions, witness the Gehry project in Bilbao, the Nelson Gallery addition by Holl.  With Teachers Village there is a mix of condos and low and middle income housing anchored by two charter school buildings which are staffed by teachers living in apartment buildings that range in size from 17 to 66 units.  There is space for the 1000 charter school  teachers and also for another 5000 teachers in public schools.  The design incorporates some of the sensibilities that are typical of Meier’s high end projects.  There are small open courtyards and outdoor terraces which allow natural light into the apartments.  There is already a preliminary design for a second phase of development with 15 additional apartment buildings which would extend the project several blocks further out in the area so that this could become a larger critical mass which could turn the area around.  If this project succeeds in bringing life to Newark’s depressing downtown, if it manages to survive the decay  around it, who knows what wonders may begin to flower.  It does not have federal funding in the mix as did the projects before them.  Perhaps this is the kind of project that can succeed. Architecture has always been dependent on the dictates of their clients and the financial feasibility of the project.  Teachers Village has the support of all those involved, the city, the financiers, the architects. Said Meier, “You always hope what you build has arms, that they reach out and affect others.  You want to feel you’ve done something that allows other positive things to happen.”  Let’s hear it for the architects and builders willing to try to build urban housing for all classes of people!

Pruit igoe – collapse – series

As we confidently paddled our canoe down the Meramac River, I in the stern and my husband in the bow, we happened to pass under the limb of an overhanging tree. Just at that moment, a long, skinny snake dropped out of the tree and landed on the midship thwart from which it slid to the bottom of our canoe and slithered rapidly towards the bow.

Missouri has beautiful rivers. Our farm sat on a bluff above the lazy Sac, a slow, meandering waterway used by the Indians many years ago. The Current in the Ozark foothills is a bit more raucous and The Niangua and The North Fork of The White River run swift and cold making them a trout fisherman’s dream.

My favorite float is the Merrimac which meanders through 220 miles of Missouri land, mostly Ozarks,   Even though its name means river of ugly fish, it is full of beauties like largemouth bass, crappie and rainbow trout.  Along its banks you may catch glimpses of blue heron, duck and beaver. Deer come frequently to drink and more recently, black bear have been sighted.

That day, as the snake glided toward the bow seat upon which my husband sat, he began a gyration of unknown origin, throwing his legs across the gunnels batting at the snake with his paddle and yelling unprintable words. I, an amazed spectator to all this, doubled up with laughter . . .  which, of course, made my husband’s words all the more unprintable.

By the time we navigated to shore, the snake had disappeared somewhere under the bow deck and even though we jumped out and turned the canoe upside down, neither of us ever saw the snake (which my husband swore was a water moccasin) again.

Throughout the past century, huge dams have been built to harness the water energy of our country’s rivers and produce hydroelectric power. Unfortunately, they cause great damage to fish as well as an environmental imbalance to the surrounding area and particularly downstream. Keep in mind that the engineers of Grand Coulee Dam used enough concrete to build a four lane highway from New York to Los Angeles.

Bagnell Dam, built to impede the flow of the Osage River, has the capacity to generate 250,000 kilowatts of electricity . It also gave us The Lake of the Ozarks with over 1100 miles of shoreline.  Further downstream, Truman Dam was constructed on the same river with the capacity to generate 160,000 kilowatts of electricity. It too created a recreational reservoir with over 900 miles of shoreline.

The hydroelectric power generated by all of these dams produces no greenhouse gases or toxic wastes. Smaller dams with turbines geared to produce electricity for smaller areas are already being use in parts of Kansas and Missouri.

Yet we must use great care. Many attempts have been made to dam the Merrimac, the lower part of which has already been damaged by mining company dikes. So far, public outcry has largely prevented reckless dam building. Midwesterners are strongly committed to maintaining the healthy environment of their surroundings.

Let’s keep it that way.

For more information, check out The Missouri Department of Conservation and Canoe the Great Rivers of Missouri

Yesterday my friend Mollie turned 94.

She greeted her many friends, seated in the living room of her fashionable retirement home and surrounded by her loving family. Mollie looked beautiful; eyes sparkling, bright smile, makeup perfect and as always, fashionably dressed with not a hair out of place.  Sharp witted, she had words for everyone who came to give her a hug. “Oh Betty,” she said to me. “I’m so glad to see you. I’ve truly missed you.” I’ve missed her too and was feeling a sharp pang of guilt for not making plans to see more of her.

Up until a few months ago, Mollie lived alone in her lovely home where everywhere you looked was a feast for the eyes. She and her husband Frank had traveled extensively and brought many exquisite pieces to furnish their lives and their fabulous antique store. But then, dear sweet Frank passed away and Mollie’s hearing got worse. Still, she is not one to sit around and feel sorry for herself. She moved to a place full of nice people and brimming with activities.

On this day, most of her new friends and many of her old celebrated her birthday with an array of delicious snacks, drinks and two different cakes, both with thick, creamy icing. Then her family, aided by noted performers, recounted her life with famous songs from the year of her birth to the present. I found myself humming and clapping alone on a journey that spanned almost a century.

Clayton and I joined ‘the fishing gang’ in the fifties. Frank was a builder back then with Mollie his willing assistant as well as homemaker and mom to two growing boys. We and four other couples went fishing twice a year, four days in the spring and four days in the fall. We drove to Boal Shoals Lake in the Ozarks and stayed at a lodge deep in the woods. The house contained a living room with deep, comfortable furniture, a wood burning fireplace, five bed rooms upstairs, each with two double beds and one bathroom for the whole place. It was owned and operated by two middle aged sisters who had lived in the vicinity all their lives.

An additional building served as a dining hall where the two women whipped up real down home country breakfasts; thick sliced, home cured bacon and ham, chunky sausage, biscuits and gravy, fresh country eggs, homemade bread, and thick molasses to pour on our hotcakes.  With guides and rented boats and armed with sack lunches we pulled away from the dock at six AM sharp, not to return until dusk. After cocktails we hurried back to the mess hall for delicious roasts, homegrown vegetables and three or four different kind of homemade pies.

Then we sank into chairs around the fire and traded fishing stories, laughing uproarishly at some pretty tall ones. Finally, after one last nightcap, we’d drift off to bed.

One spring, Clayton had to go back to Kansas City early. I stayed on to fish that last day with one of the couples and drive home with them the next.  When we returned to the dock that evening, our guide asked if I’d like to do a little night fishing and lured me with stories of lunkers.

Silently, we drifted along the shoreline with only the moon for light. He told me to caste what he jokingly called garbage towards the bank. The lure was a weighted black and silver twin spin with a long piece of black pork rind trailing off behind. He told me to throw it to the edge of the bank and slowly retrieve it. On the first caste, I thought I’d hung up on a log but my guide told me to reel in and when I did, a nine pound bass appeared. Wow! What a thrill. We boated that fish and several more before calling it quits.

Dog- tired, I dragged myself back to the lodge, brushed my teeth in the one bathroom, went upstairs to our bedroom, undressed in the dark, fished out my P.J.’s,  and crawled into our bed. Almost asleep, I heard a soft snore. My eyes flew open. Since my husband had gone back to Kansas City, who was that?

I jumped up and raced down the hall to my friends’ room. Just as I burst in on them, I saw a man run out of my room and down the stairs. My friends returned with me to my room and crawled into the other bed. Comforted by their presence and too exhausted to care, I too went back to bed and fell fast asleep.

The stranger didn’t return. Later, we discovered he and his buddies had arrived late at the lodge and went to the rooms they were accustomed to renting. He was as probably as shocked as I.

Happy memories, Mollie and many more happy birthdays.

Fishing Ladies’ Fiftieth Reunion: Molly in the Pink

Poor Shirley Sherrod.  There she stood in front of a local NAACP gathering telling them how she’d overcome her prejudice against white farmers when, with the stroke of his computer  key, Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger, took the first part of her speech ‘out of context’ and made her sound like a racist. The whole thing turned into a big brouhaha.

Without checking the facts, her boss, who just happens to be the Agriculture Secretary, asked for her resignation. When the truth came out, the president got involved. Maybe Shirley Sherrod isn’t so poor after all. She’s been offered a new and better paying job and she’s thinking about suing Andrew Breitbart,

But the fact is, what happened to Shirley Sherrod happens all the time.

Creationists are fond of quoting this ‘out of context’ sentence from Charles Darwin’s  Origin of the Species.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Here is what Darwin wrote: To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their saccade should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

Political campaigns seem to bring out the worst. Last week before the primaries in Kansas and Missouri, our mailbox was full of  ‘out of context’ quotes on mailings from opposing candidates.

Sarah Palin has mastered the art of pulling quotes out of context to prove her point.

For example, she said that ”when he (President Obama) was asked last week about his faltering efforts to advance the Middle East peace process, he did something remarkable. In front of some 47 foreign leaders and hundreds of reporters from all over the world, he  (President Obama) said that whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower.

“Whether we like it not?” she continued.” Most Americans do like it.”

This is what the President really said while speaking to fellow leaders at the nuclear weapons summit.

“But what we can make sure of is, is that we are constantly present, constantly engaged, and setting out very clearly to both sides our belief that not only is it in the interests of each party to resolve these conflicts but it’s also in the interest of the United States. It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.

And speaking of President Obama, Have you heard these out of context’ quotes, the first two from his book,  Dreams of My Father.

When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for ‘’I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites,) I see the split second adjustment they have to make, the searching of the eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am.

I took the long way home, along the east river promenade, and tried to figure out what to make of the man (Marty Kauffman) He was smart, I decided. He seemed committed to his work. ‘There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.’—he’d said himself that was a problem.

This sentence came from an article on Obama’s book written by Steve Sailer in March 2007.and published in The American Conservative Magazine ‘I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race. Barack Obama didn’t even write this.

Even bill Maher is not above quoting ‘out of context.’ He attributed John Adams with saying, “this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were not religion in it.”

What the president really said: “Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.’!!! But in this exclamation I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly [two clergy from his childhood]. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society, I mean hell.”

The bible is frequently quoted ‘out of context.’ Here is a quote from Corinthians 3:16: “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.”

Some ministers use this to persuade their parishioners to stop smoking by saying “don’t defile your body by smoking.”

Actually, If you read the entire passage you find that the quote concerns the body of Christ, not your body.

Here’s another one from Genesis 3:1 “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.” The minister I heard went on to say Cain came from the evil seed of the serpent and that the Jews were descendants of Cain.

I’ve looked everywhere but I can’t even find that one.

But then, George Bernard Shaw once said, “No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.”

Finally, I happened to come across this cartoon in the Kansas City Star.