Ghosts of the USDA

I’m wondering when the WoePost will stop haunting readers with stories of the US Dept. of Agriculture’s brutal forced migration from Washington to the primitive hellscape of Kansas City.

Rick McKee Augusta Chronicle

This week it’s low moans from former researcher Andrew Crane–Droesch who tries to convince us moving his department was a loss to research that rivaled the burning of the library in Alexandria.

Egypt, not Virginia.

If I’m reading Andrew correctly, humanity managing to feed itself over the centuries, without the help of scientists at the USDA, was just a lucky fluke. “Humanity’s dependence on the environment is made explicit through our food systems; without the right combination of weather, soil and labor, nobody eats.”

When bureaucrat uses the word “systems” it means the topic is too complicated for mere farmers or other laymen to understand. “…they need experts to make sure that food systems work efficiently and public funds are spent effectively.”

I’m going to interrupt here before Andrew tells us how many times to chew each bite of the “food system” before swallowing. Instead, let’s look at what USDA scientific “experts” and their research brought us in the past.

In a mere 40 years USDA “expert” researchers helped the USA waddle away with the prize for the fattest nation on earth. Then we ate the trophy. USDA research quacks and food fanatics are single–handedly responsible for the obesity crisis that has made type 2 diabetes the trademark affliction of the U.S. welfare state.

Their fraudulent “food pyramid” upended the food industry, bloated millions, cost billions and it was all based on “settled science” that was dangerously wrong.

Reduce saturated fat intake to 10 percent? Wrong. Cut back on salt until corned beef is only a memory? Wrong. Increase carbohydrate intake until you look like a stuffed shell? Wrong.

According to the Daily Mail: “A new review says evidence from [medical research] trials did not support the advice. It says it is ‘incomprehensible’ that such advice was introduced for …220 million Americans . . . ‘given the contrary results from a small number of unhealthy men.’”

Two generations now have no idea what a decent steak tastes like due to our current “food system.” A vile cabal of granola–heads and the USDA ruined beef. Instead of corn–fed beef that produced tender, marbled steaks — USDA anti–fat crusaders gulled beef producers into going back to “natural” grass–fed beef.

Now we can enjoy the same type of tough, stringy beef Augustus McRae and Captain Call ate in Lonesome Dove. The agency’s motto should be: The USDA – Making It Easy to Go Vegan!

Andrew also has the strange belief that taxpayers are penalized when duplication and empire–building are eliminated. “The team that studies patent law and innovation is gone. Experts on trade and international development, farm finance and taxes all left. The publishing staff all left, delaying dozens of reports on subjects from veterans’ diets to organic foods.”

Where to begin? Patent law and innovation belong in the lethargic hands of the USTPO. Trade and international development belong to Commerce and the State Dept. Publishing is handled by the Government Printing Office. The only entry in that laundry list of waste and duplication that really belongs to the USDA is “farm finance and taxes” and I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt there.

As for the reports on “veteran’s diets and organic foods [sic]”, if the research is of the same quality that produced the food pyramid, I guarantee vets are better off without it.

The truth is his USDA research department was a nerd’s playpen, “We loved ERS because it offered a rare degree of intellectual freedom, combined with the chance to make a real impact. We got to spend a great deal of our time pursuing research questions that we defined.”

And all at taxpayer expense!

Andrew and his merry band of Resistors were another group of self–aggrandizing Truth Tellers to Power! “The Agriculture Department wanted to restrict access to food stamps, for example. According to our models …food assistance programs were often a positive multiplier for local economies.” As if any agency report in the history of bureaucracies ever found that a program comprising a large part of the agency budget was ineffective and counter–productive.

An estimated 141 of the 180 bureaucrats ordered on the march refused to budge. That’s not a tragedy. That’s a good start.

The USDA is a self–licking ice-cream cone that essentially pays one group of dependents to grow food and pays another group to eat it, all at incredible taxpayer expense. If an order to move west produced an 80 percent attrition rate in the rest of the agency it wouldn’t occur a moment too soon.

On the Trail of Tears With Federal Bureaucrats

Breitbart News reports 80 percent of the female migrants to the USA’s heartland are sexually assaulted during the trip. Yet the heartless Trump administration remains relentless and will continue with its plan to force the USDA’s Economic Research Service to move to Missouri.

Rick McKee, Counterpoint

Wait. I’ve mistakenly conflated two stories. The sexual assault victims are willing illegals heading for our interior, while the USDA folks are unwilling migrants threatened with moving vans by the Orange Tyrant.

It’s an easy mistake to make. The WoePost’s coverage of the move has been so tear–jerky one could mistake Donald Trump for Democrat Andrew Jackson driving Cherokees from Georgia.

Here’s a recent headline: “The USDA relocation to Kansas City is ripping apart the lives of its employees.”

Wow, that sounds like the pre–dawn raid on Paul Manafort’s house!

Only there’s no drama. It’s 2200 words of hysterical pathos. The tale of travail begins with an alphabet crusader. He’s a 28–year USDA employee being asked to move for the first time. The story begins, “Randi Johnson raised the picture of her dead son’s football team.” Followed by a reference to “Her dead wife’s high school yearbooks.”

It looks like the standard media elite’s same–pronoun marriage mixed with a double personal tragedy.

Only it’s not. Events were condensed for drama. Johnson’s marriage was perfectly normal when his wife died of cancer 11 years ago. It only became retroactively irregular — scrambling the pronouns — when Mr. Johnson decided he was Mrs. Johnson three years ago. Two years after his son’s overdose death.

It’s confused and sad and none of it was caused by a moving van.

The same goes for the other examples. One is a normal family that bought a “forever home” just prior to the announcement of the move. Her job was a bit like working in a call center. “At the NIFA, she spent most of her time on the phone talking to researchers, farmers and small businesses with ideas for new farming techniques or products.”

She even met the odd farmer in his natural habitat, “Occasionally, she took road trips around the country to meet people face-to-face, one of her favorite parts of the job.”

However, the prospect of living among the “people” in Missouri was something else entirely.

The last victim is a 33–year–old who’s been there four years. No wife. No pets. He’s leaving a girlfriend he met on the web.

Let’s put this in perspective for people living in the coastal bubble. By the time I was a junior in high school the oilfield supply company my father worked for had moved us from Duncan, OK to Great Bend, KS; back to Duncan; then from Duncan to Oklahoma City; from OKC to Midland, TX and then from Midland to Dallas, TX.

The longest we stayed anywhere before Dallas was four years. Coastal snobs often dismiss inland unemployment by telling the jobless to move to where the jobs are. That’s exactly the situation here, but somehow, it’s a relocation tragedy.

The military is government and it moves people around in a regular fruit basket turnover without catching the eye of the Opposition Media. The difference is these USDA people have doctorates. They’re supposed to be immune to everyday cares and concerns once they go to work for the government.

Normal mom is unhappy she had only a year to prepare, the destination was uncertain because various municipalities were abasing themselves before Uncle Sam, hoping to land these highly–paid bureaucrats.

Compare that with Carl Icahn’s government move. The high taxes in New York supporting that bloated government are driving him to Florida. He announced his move with six months’ notice and as Bloomberg put it, “…employees who don’t [move] won’t have a job.”

The USDA move is expected to save $300 million over 15 years. It could save even more if the department resists the urge to replace all 366 employees who quit rather than be forced to bed down with hillbillies.

Even after wading through the WoePost’s angst–fest, the irony is all three employees had a happy ending. Mr. Johnson retired and moved to a beach town because “[he] always wanted to live near the ocean.” Plus, it’s closer to his grandchild.

Our homebuyer did indeed purchase a “forever home” because no one moved. She took a new job where she’ll be asking for government money instead of distributing government money.

And our single has taken a job at my alma mater, the University of Oklahoma, where he can enjoy a fine campus and a great football team.

For taxpayers, plans change. Life goes on. Only the government entitled attempt to make a federal case out of it.

Federal Employees Want Taxpayers to Keep Their Distance

The Washington Post (WoePost to regular readers) recently had a very ominous quote. Sandra Salstrom, a lobbyist for the American Federation of Government Employees, told an eager stenographer, “It seems like if they are successful here, this could just be the tip of the iceberg. We don’t know who’s next.”

Rick McKee – Augusta Chronicle, GA

What inhumane, outrageous and bigoted Trump administration policy has attracted the attention of Ms. Salstrom? Has someone purchased a one–way ticket to Somalia for Rep. Ilhan Omar?

Not exactly, but the outrage does involve travel. The Trump administration is planning to move portions of the Dept. of Agriculture and the Bureau of Land Management closer to where agriculture happens and land is managed.

Placing swamp bureaucrats closer to the people over which they rule is evidently inherently offensive. Cong. Steny Hoyer (D–Barnacle) warned, “In the White House, there is, among some people, a real disrespect for federal employees, animated by their disrespect for the government generally. So if you’re hostile to government, you’re then . . . hostile to those who work in government.”

For the USDA this means part of that behemoth will be moving to the Kansas City area. And if I lived in either Kansas or Missouri, I’d be offended. They got some crazy little women there, but I don’t think they hurt no one.

The left is acting like the destination really is Somalia — not that there’s anything wrong with that!

The WoePost, which slavishly covers the federal workforce, even has a swamp columnist. Joe Davidson writes the impending move of the Economic Research Service portion of the USDA has caused employees to “quit in droves.”

Which only proves the “drove” isn’t what it was formerly cracked up to be. The total headcount of this “drove” was six employees. That doesn’t even qualify as a crowded elevator, but it’s typical of the sky–is–falling response to any change in the bureaucracy.

The average employee attrition at ERS had been about one–per–month. After Sec. Sonny Perdue heralded the crack of doom and the arrival of Mayflower, the attrition rate doubled to two–per–month. For a 300–person agency the former rate was 4 percent and the doom–laden rate was 8 percent, which is still much less than the nationwide attrition rate for “government, education & non–profit employment sector” of 11.2 percent.

Even the relatively humane approach of the Trump administration is twisted into a choice between life among the wretches who pay their salary and professional suicide: “The Agriculture Department is offering employees a rare choice: accept a forced transfer to a post 1,000 miles away or be fired.” Having a choice certainly beats the George Clooney treatment where an employee is escorted to a conference room while his office is packed up in his absence. But that’s the savage private sector, not the humane, understanding federal government.

We’re also supposed to be concerned about the priceless “scientific talent” the nation will be using, but when you remember it was USDA “scientists” that foisted the high carb – low fat diet on the nation that resulted in an obesity epidemic, I think we can get along just fine without them.

And they can take their BMI index, too.

The Bureau of Land Management is also pulling up stakes. The plan is to move “84 percent of the agency’s headquarters staff west of the Rockies.” Coverage there was equally grim. “This announcement is deeply unsettling, and has created a lot of uncertainty for us,” the participant said. “The best part of my job is my co-workers, and they are working to tear us apart for purely political reasons. I’m sick to my stomach.”

I’m wondering when we’ll start seeing photos of former USDA employees sitting on the top of railroad cars heading to Canada for asylum when this item caught my eye, “Other employees embraced the reorganization, according to the meeting participant, asking how early they can leave Washington.”

Yet, strangely enough, there were no quotes or additional information from employees happy with the impending move.

It’s tough to take this wailing and gnashing of teeth seriously when it’s accepted government practice to shuffle military families like balls in a bingo drum, but somehow moving a bureaucrat is cruel and unusual punishment.

Conservatives should cheer this Trump initiative. It’s not shrinking the size of government, but it is breaking up the concentration of bureaucratic empire–building in the metro DC area. Why shouldn’t the entire USDA be moved to the Midwest where it’s closer to the farming heartland? Why shouldn’t the Dept. of Energy be moved to an area where energy production is supported and not condemned?

Best of all, maybe the work habits of average citizens will rub off on the newly–arrived swamp denizens.

2016 “Spendy” Award Winner Announced!

It’s time to announce the 2016 “Spendy” award, bestowed upon the federal agency with the most extensive record of incompetence and contempt for the taxpayer. Bonus points are awarded to agencies performing a function completely absent from the Constitution and better left to the private sector.

Spendy winners are characterized by cabinet secretaries who condescend to attend congressional hearings, where hours are spent detailing the mismanagement, waste, theft, and general uselessness found in their kingdom. After which the secretary looks the committee chairman straight in the eye and blames all his troubles on Russian hackers.

Who was in the running this year? Well, we had last year’s winner the US Dept. of Agriculture and the runner–up Veterans Administration, along with perennial contender, the US Patent & Trademark Office.

Then there was the Pentagon, which is always in a class of its own.

So how did I pick a winner among these unworthies and who was it? You know the drill. Click on the link below and be whisked to my Newsmax Insider column where all will be revealed.

http://www.newsmax.com/MichaelShannon/congress-pentagon-usda-va/2016/12/29/id/766070/

 

USDA = Busywork at Taxpayer’s Expense

The United States Department of Agriculture (Motto: Let’s Pay Farmers for What They Used to Do for Free!) is the 2015 Spendy Award defending champion and at the rate it’s going this year, the USDA could be a repeat winner.

For those who missed last December’s ceremony, the Spendy is awarded to the federal agency with the most extensive record of incompetence and contempt for the taxpayer over the past year. Bonus points are awarded to federal agencies performing a function completely absent from the Constitution and better left to the private sector.

Spendy winners are characterized by cabinet secretaries who gamely attend congressional hearings — where hours are spent detailing the mismanagement, waste, theft and general uselessness found in their kingdom — and then arrogantly assure Congress that if it would just pour more money down their rathole of an agency, all would be well.

Unfortunately, all is not well and will never be well at an agency that should be abolished by President Trump, but don’t hold your breath. Now the minions there are spending your tax dollars teaching Americans how to compose a grocery list.

If you feel insecure regarding your list abilities or just want to be up–to–date on the latest waste, please click on the hyperlink below:

http://www.newsmax.com/MichaelShannon/USDA-food-grocery-lists/2016/05/20/id/729929/

Ever-Vigilant USDA Oversees Thanksgiving

While you were giving gluttony a bad name on Thanksgiving Day, six federal employees were be sitting by the phone like the Maytag man, hoping it would ring so the United States Dept. of Agriculture can spring into action and aid “people who need help preparing their Thanksgiving dinner.”

And on line #2 the National Institute of Health was ready to help Americans digest their dinner.

Copyright — and a reluctance to step on my own jokes — prevents me from writing any more about this stirring saga here, but you can get all the facts, outrage and laughs by clicking on the link below, which will take you to my Newsmax column.

http://www.newsmax.com/MichaelShannon/thanksgiving-turkey-government/2015/11/27/id/703708/

 

Why Mr. Ed Gives Better Lifestyle Advice than the Media

Paraphrasing William F. Buckley, I’d rather take lifestyle direction from 200 randomly selected people in the phone book than follow the advice found in the 200 most prominent media outlets. Reporters are fad–conscious professionals at the expense of common sense. If they can identify a trend first, they become media experts and their journalistic prestige — if there is such a thing today — increases among their peers.

Since the media has the attention span of Joe Biden, it doesn’t matter if the trend makes sense or even exists outside a few malcontent exhibitionists. What matters is novelty. Putting the story in context could only take the luster off a scoop, so it’s rarely done.

I fell prey to this as a freelance writer in the 70’s. Some eastern media outlet, where I desperately wanted to work, ran a story on a decline in coffee drinkers. The tyranny of the young was making itself known by switching from coffee to carbonated drinks. (What an innocent age. Now the young drink powdered alcohol.)

Consequently coffee beans rotted in the warehouse, cocaine production was looking better and better and Mrs. Olsen was considering switching from Folgers to Metamucil.

Eagerly trend–surfing I contacted a coffee distributor, interviewed the owner of a well–known diner and talked to random customers sitting behind a coffee mug.

I would soon be Oklahoma’s caffeine–conversion expert. Only I didn’t know Starbucks had opened about three years earlier and was gaining fast on the Bunn complex. Soon a cuppa Joe would be an “Espresso Macchiato,” and the trend cycle would resume with carbonated beverages replacing coffee as the liquid on the decline.

A trendy Wall Street Journal story concerning high–end steakhouses is another cycle entry.

You may recall steakhouses, and meat for that matter, were dead just a few years ago as the Kale Revolution swept America. Food that had heretofore only been fit for rabbits was now appearing in the White House as youth (those wretches) traded flavor for regular bowel movements. Since it was a trend other businesses, with superficial easily stampeded management, had to hop aboard or be thought uncool.

Ronald McDonald was so eager to attract skinny herbivores it instituted a new “healthy” menu featuring the McCompost. In spite of McDonald’s subsequent sales decline, Subway felt the social pressure and hired a child molester to promote produce in a bun.

Steakhouses weren’t eager to serve malnutrition on a cracker, but it didn’t matter because a vile cabal of granola–heads and the USDA was busy ruining beef with another fad. Instead of corn–fed beef that produced tender, marbled steaks, anti–fat crusaders gulled beef producers into going back to “natural” grass–fed beef.

Now two generations of Americans have no idea how steak should taste. They try to masticate Florshiem–like steaks from cows that look like the herd in Lonesome Dove and think it’s a luxury.

When I was chasing the extinction of Juan Valdez diners could get a fork–tender steak at a mid–priced restaurant. No longer, today you must visit a den of one–percenters and contrary to past predictions, high–end steakhouses are prospering. The WSJ reported: “Eight of the top 15 highest-grossing restaurants among business diners in New York City are steakhouses.”

A popular dish — bulk food for bulky people — is the 40–ounce cowboy ribeye that sells for $59.95. This posse–sized meal of meat alone might be good enough for the late Cecil the Lion, but most diners want a side dish or two. Unfortunately all your $60 bucks gets is meat and utensils, everything else is a la carte.

It’s like buying a new car and discovering you have to pay extra for “options” the rational would consider basic. (Oh, you want tires with that?) Iceberg lettuce that Whole Foods hides in the Mitt Romney section at the back of the store sells for $9.00 a wedge.

These restaurants aren’t obsessed with attracting female customers, running contrary to other trends. Smith & Wollensky founder Alan Stillman explains in a quote that may indicate grammar ignorance is hereditary, ‘“I know a tremendous amount (sic) of women that love to go to our restaurants…but they’re the outliers.” By contrast, at Quality Meats (sic), developed by his son, around 45% of the customers are women, Mr. Stillman said.’

The moral is take any media lifestyle advice with a large grain of salt, if you’re still allowed to do that. As a wave of steakhouse trend stories begins to break over the nation, keep in mind fad stories are a blurry snapshot in time with about the predictive power and relevance of a political survey taken last year.

The Supreme Court & Robert’s Rules of Raisins

Evidently the philosophy of the Roberts’ Supreme Court is follow the Constitution when convenient, but if a decision strikes at the heart of the Big Government welfare state or would cause invitations from the Georgetown cocktail circuit to dry up, then the Constitution takes a backseat to the alliance of intellectuals and government dependents that rules our nation.

Fortunately for Marvin Horne, his case didn’t involve one of Obama’s signature initiatives like Obamacare. He was fighting a policy from our first socialist president: FDR’s Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 that fixed prices for farm products.

This meant Washington bureaucrats, whose only knowledge of soil and farming came when they cleaned the dirt from under their nails, arbitrarily set the price of farm products AND decided how much a farmer could grow. Just like the Soviet Union, except no gulag.

Marvin wasn’t going to take it anymore and he fought the law and the Horne won. Complete details in my Newsmax column:

http://www.newsmax.com/MichaelShannon/Supreme-Court-FDA-Raisins-subsidy/2015/06/26/id/652418/

 

Did You Know Farmers Used to Grow Food for Free?

One of the more brilliant Democrat ploys is getting consumers to pay for their groceries twice: Once in the form of tax dollars and then again at the grocery store. This scam has been going on for the past 80 years and now Republicans that don’t understand liberty or the Constitution are collaborating.

But that’s only true if you are a maker. If you are a taker then the USDA can help! We are now paying farmers to grow food and consumers to eat it. The government’s idea of an infinite loop.

Feel all the outrage in my Newsmax column at:

http://www.newsmax.com/MichaelShannon/National-Debt/2015/05/22/id/646376/

Don’t Worry if Your Cheese Is Older Than You

The USDA contends 36 pounds of food per person is wasted each month because easily frightened consumers are tossing groceries based on pessimistic expiration dates.

That’s probably a low estimate. I periodically have to go hands–on with my wife when she experiences a busy–body seizure and attempts to toss food that is merely gaining momentum in my refrigerator.

Learn the proper way to help cheese and milk celebrate its birthday in my Newsmax column:

http://www.newsmax.com/MichaelShannon/Health-Topics/2015/04/24/id/640675/