Personal Responsibility

This is the latest GOP mantra: "Americans, it's your own damn fault." They seem to want to remove all responsibility from corporations and from their own governance and place it squarely on the average Amerian's shoulders.

It's not the governments fault that most poor people can read. It's poor people's fault that they are too lazy to read. Never mind that their schools lack books, facilities and have class sizes too large for any teacher to manage.

This time, it's Americans' fault that 2/3 of us are overweight. It has nothing to do with the food that corporations concoct and market like mad. According to the GOP: the fast food industry bears no responsibility for the adverse effects of the products they sell.

They do have a valid point. Everyone knows that McDonald's is bad for you. I rarely eat fast food--never McDonald's. No one forces you to eat there. You have other food options out there, although they are pretty limited in many people's neighborhoods.

McDonald's tries to tell you that its food is "part of a well-balanced diet". Only if the rest of your diet is broccoli, carrots and grapefruit juice could they possibly be correct. McDonald's food has a negligible amount of fiber, lean protein and vitamins, but plenty of saturated fat, simple sugars and chemical additives. You know when you eat at Mickey D's that you are having junk food for lunch.

Beyond the obvious junk food aspects of fast food, for years McDonald's et al. have been putting additives into their product which are worsening America's waistlines. You are not just getting fat from the calories in ground beef, potatoes and ice cream. You are getting fat from beef tallow added to fries, from corn syrup added to nearly everything, and from shakes that are more of a chemistry experiment than your cholesterol medicine. This is little better than tobacco companies adding nicotine to their cigarettes to make them more addictive. The government rightfully sued them. In this case, the GOP is trying to protect fast food for putting their bottom line ahead of America's bottom lines.

This bill shouldn't be entitled "Personal Responsibility". It should be titled "GOP Corporate Protection from Responsibe Business Practices Act #5559". The GOP has rapidly corrupted "pro-business" ideology into a corporate crony relationship. They are not interested in helping America's economic growth through sound economic principles. They are interested in getting large campaign donations from rich corporations, who then expect large subsidies and wreckless deregulation in exchange. Laissez-faire has devolved into quid pro quo, where big corporations get big subsidies, protection from consumers and barriers to entry in their established markets to prevent competition from young upstarts.

If they truly want people to be responsible for their food decisions, they need restaurants to offer full disclosure. Perfect information is a basic requirement for a competitive market. Anything less is a market distortion in favor of the producer, but in George W. Bush's America, it's corporations above everyone else.

Corporate Responsibility