The Tradition of Pretending Animals Are Rewards

I've been avoiding writing about this whole "new dog in the White House" thing, but figured that enough was enough.

So, to keep up the years long tradition of each new US President having an official White House Critter, the Obamas promised their daughters a brand new puppy if Obama was elected. One of the Obama daughters is allergic to dogs, but that won't throw a wrench into the longstanding tradition -- instead, the Obamas have been searching for a hypoallergenic breed. In the interim, VP-elect Joe Biden's gotten himself a three-month-old purebred German Shepherd. I stumbled across a bloggish piece in the Christian Science Monitor that mentions it. In this piece, according to Biden's spokesperson Elizabeth Alexander "[h]e’s excited to bring it home when it gets a little older and has promised that his grandchildren can name it after the New Year".

"It" pretty much sums things up. The puppy is a thing. A gimmick. Worse, Biden went to a breeder to get a dog, when in the US alone, 4 million companion animals are killed each year because they've been abandoned or mistreated by people. Many of those are purebred dogs.

The CSM piece is titled "Biden gets new dog -- animal rights advocates not happy". What got my attention about is that the supposed animal rights advocates named in the article are the folks from HSUS and those from PETA, which are both clearly animal welfare organizations and not animal rights advocates. And this whole "Let's hope Obama does the right thing and gets a shelter dog" just misses the point altogether. You don't promise someone a dog the way you'd promise them a car on their 16th birthdays. There's no heavy symbolism in the Obamas' getting a shelter dog, unless that symbolism is that dogs are things to be given. Sure, I'd rather see President-elect Obama rescue a dog from a shelter rather than perpetuate the companion animal status quo by getting one from a breeder. Whatever he does, though, means little when you look at the bigger picture.

Or so I thought when I started reading the comments left by CSM readers:

"It’s a dog, who cares where it comes from."

"Why should the Bidens, or the Obamas, have to accept somebody else’s leftovers?"

"Bringing in an unknown dog from a shelter is risky especially when you are dealing with kids. Often no history about the cute dog is known. Perhaps it was abused, beaten, had a tough life or for whatever reason would like to snap and eat your child’s head off. [...] The positive is, he bought from a reputable breeder, some one who breeds dogs for the love of the breed."

"Don’t breeders have a right to do business or is PETA saying that all dogs should be gotten from the pound. I have a dog which is wonderful and was gotten through a no-kill humane society. But there is nothing wrong with getting a dog from a breeder and why should they have to join the ranks of the unemployed."

Ah, that old grey area that I can't for the life of me ignore. I keep forgetting the level of ignorance held by so many when it comes to animals species we deem worthy to welcome into our homes. As much as I hate this whole White House tradition and the message I can't help but feel it delivers, I guess that I can't help but hope, myself, that the Obamas -- if they have to go through with this act at all -- do choose to adopt from a shelter: If only to send the message out that just because you've been abandoned doesn't make you a bad dog; in some cases, it just means that there are bad caregivers.

Obama and the Biotech Boys

Wednesday, I posted about how a couple of top members of Obama's transition team have ties to Monsanto. Yesterday the Huffington Post featured an article on the same topic, throwing a few other names into the mix.

The more things "change"...

It looks like lobbyists for biotech companies like Monsanto are going to be pleased with Obama's stint in the White House. According to Grist, members of Obama's Energy and Natural Resources transition team include Michael R. Taylor, who has spent the last 30 years alternating between working of Monsanto and the FDA and USDA. Taylor was purportedly one of the people responsible for ushering in rGBH. To be precise, in 1991 the FDA created the position of Deputy Commissioner for Policy for him (the Grist article mentions it was 1994, but it was, in fact, 1991), which left him with a significant amount of control over government regulation of GMOs. After his stint with the FDA, Taylor went back to Monsanto to serve as its vice-president for public policy. See this Sourcewatch article for references and further information. DailyKos has an article on Taylor and his Monsanto/FDA dance, as well.

So, what else? David J. Hayes is listed as the ''member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project's Agency Review Working Group responsible for overseeing review of the energy and natural resources agencies". His bio has this long list of the environmentally-friendly sounding positions he's held, including an on-again / off-again stint as a partner at Latham & Watkins, a HUGE law firm that defended Monsanto in an Agent Orange case brought against the company by Vietnamese plaintiffs and that's represented Monsanto in other cases. Another Latham & Watkins partner, John Manthei "has represented the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries as counsel in nearly every major FDA legislative initiative" since 2000.

This is just the tip of how sketchy it all gets. TruthOut has a great article on all of the former lobbyists involved in Obama's new transition team, for those who are curious.

Once the Post-Election Giddiness Subsides

I've found myself regularly checking out the Breaking News section of Matt Savinar's Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash website. A thin Savinar book -- The Oil Age Is Over, a gift from a friend -- had been my harsh intro to Peak Oil a couple of years ago. He's regarded as a hardcore "doomer" -- i.e. he not only believes that we're running out of oil, but that life as we know it now is going to change so drastically as this progresses that most of us can't even envision how great an impact it will have on the things we take for granted today.

Over the past couple of months, the stories about what's going on with the US economy (as well as the global economy) have been pouring in and out of there -- and they're almost all from ordinary mainstream sources ranging from the NY Times to the Wall Street Journal. He's basically compiling what's out on the wire already, bringing it all together. And when you see all of those articles together, it certainly leaves a stronger impression. Things aren't good in the US. At all. And while a large segment of the US population may have breathed a collective sigh of relief when the geography-challenged moose-hunting momma didn't become their next Vice President, the truth seems to be that all history-making socio-cultural wows aside, this big "change" that's supposed to happen in Washington is just going to be the perpetuation of a government run by the same handful (albeit shuffled) of Washington insiders who've been drifting in and out of there for years.

So, what now? Oil prices have been going back down after a huge drop in consumer demand, so after a flurry of interest in Peak Oil over this past summer, the topic seems to have been banished to a back shelf in somebody's tool shed. Obama was just elected, so all of this tension and anxiety over recent goings on at Wall Street seem to have been forgotten, when the truth is that things are just starting to rock and roll there. Consumers are spending less (not such a bad thing, in my opinion -- although spending and incurring debt is what props up the US economy). Now there are more and more stories about the rate of unemployment spiking -- perhaps more so than people realize or the government is willing to admit.

This whole bailout thing -- it's now turning into a smorgasbord for credit card companies, auto manufacturers who are having a hard time pushing their gas guzzlers on the public, and others who want a turn at the cookie jar. Heck, American Express just got reclassified as a bank so that it could access more funding from the government. How cool is that?

I'm just wondering how long it's going to take for the post-election afterglow to fade. I hope it's sooner than later.

Would blogging about anything *but* today

leaving me feeling as if there was a large pachyderm hopping up and down on my sofa?