Tuesday, November 17, 2009

I Should Have Voted For Hillary!

More than one year after Barack Obama won the presidential election, and nearly ten months after his inauguration, the current administration's efforts to improve our food safety system have stalled. For example:
  • We are still waiting to hear who will fill the key post of Undersecretary for Food Safety at USDA.
  • Food safety legislation, which passed the House on July 29th, is taking a back seat to health care reform and is unlikely to pass the Senate this year.
  • FDA's backbone is as stiff as a strand of spaghetti, as shown by the Agency's cave-in last week over raw oyster safety policy.

President Obama and his "team" have given very little concrete direction to legislators working on food safety reform. His Administration apparently prefers to lead by wishing. The Food Safety Working Group, announced by Obama in March 2009, published its list of food safety principles on July 1st:
  • Principle 1: Preventing harm to consumers is our first priority.
  • Principle 2: Effective food safety inspections and enforcement depend upon good data and analysis.
  • Principle 3: Outbreaks of foodborne illness should be identified quickly and stopped.

This took more than three months to figure out?

The President should have asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to join the Food Safety Working Group. She unveiled a detailed food safety policy agenda in February 2008 – one day after Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company recalled more than 143 million pounds of beef. Her program included:

  • Immediately conduct a thorough audit of our nation's food safety systems to locate weaknesses and gaps.
  • Increase USDA food safety funding by more than 50% so that our inspectors have the resources and staffing they need to do their jobs.
  • Move toward a single Food Safety Administration responsible for all food products, with strong authorities to protect consumers.
  • Give our safety agencies mandatory recall authority and direct them to create a national tracing system so we can determine the origin of tainted food.
  • Find, prosecute, and punish food production facilities that abuse animals and allow unsafe food to enter our food supply.
  • Ban the slaughter of downed animals.

If Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic Party nomination and the White House, she would not have relied on Congressional committees to draft legislation based on a wish list. Hillary would have sent a detailed draft Food Safety Modernization bill to Congress, and would have lobbied strenuously for its passage. Nor would she have allowed a key food safety position to remain vacant for 10 months.

I definitely should have voted for Hillary!


6 comments:

  1. Yes, so far it seems all talk and no action.
    There'll be a few tough years ahead, I'm afraid!

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  2. I wish more people had realized that they should've voted for her.

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  3. I don't honestly know that Hillary would have done any better. It is one thing to say things and even write proposed policy changes while campaigning. It is quite another to actually get things done once elected. Don't get me wrong, I think Hillary would have been a good POTUS, and the nasty opposition may not have been as bad, but it still would have been there. She would have faced a lot of obstructionist opposition to everything she would have proposed, just like President Obama is. She also would have had the same eight-years-in-the-making mess to try to clean up upon taking office.

    We have no way of knowing that Hillary's food safety proposals would have seen the light of day. The economy, the wars, and health care/health insurance have emerged as the top issues. Most everything else, including food safety, is taking a back seat to those problems. I don't think that things would have been much different under Hillary Clinton. I do think that things would have been much worse, however, if John McCain had been elected.

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  4. Yes, you should have. She knows how to get things done and isn't afraid to use her power to get things done.

    We would have Universal Health Care by now with her in the Oval.

    I knew that he wouldn't be effective.

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  5. Hillary actually won the popular vote in the primary but the DNC (with the help of the MSM) found ways to steal the nomination from her. The powers that be wanted a puppet that would not outmanuever them and actually help the people, like Hillary would have.

    Sadly, misogyny is alive and well in the U.S. and the dems are not different than the repubs when it comes to sexism.

    Because of this extraordinary biased towards any powerful woman, Hillary was cheated out of what was rightfully her's and the will of the people because the men in power would rather destroy the village than have a woman in charge of it!

    I have no doubt Hillary would have been one of the greatest presidents the U.S. has ever had. That loss is incalcuable to our country, who needs a strong leader now more than ever.

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  6. Unfortunately, we'll never have a chance to find out!. My home state (Vermont) went very strongly for Obama in the primary, so my vote wouldn't have made any difference, anyway. At least we have Hillary as SecState.

    Phyllis

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