MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: December 28, 2006 Archives

« December 27, 2006 | Main | December 29, 2006 »


Advertisement
recent entries Breaking: Osama bin Laden to Make 9/11 Video Address to U.S. Major Report on Status of Iraqi Security Forces Presented in Congress Today Looking Past Petraeus Huckabee vs. Paul: Video from Yesterday's Republican Debate With World Not Tense Enough, Israel and Russia Decide to Provoke Their Neighbors Fred Thompson Flubs the Facts on Tonight Show African Pentecostal Christians Destroying Ancient African Culture In Nigeria Congressional Battle Over GAO's Iraq Report Continues Saddest Picture of the Day Alert Since Nothing Else Important Going on in World, Congress Takes on Hip-Hop

December 28, 2006

Every Time A Bell Rings, A Communist Gets A Foothold

Some of us consider It's A Wonderful Life to be one of the least appealing films ever made, but even our disdain cannot compare with the FBI's assessment of the 1946 Frank Capra ode to codependence. The Bureau thought that the film was a piece of Communist propaganda with an anti-consumerist message.

According to Professor John Noakes of Franklin and Marshall College:

The casting of Lionel Barrymore as a "scrooge-type" resulted in the loathsome Mr. Potter becoming the most hated person in the film. According to the official FBI report, "this was a common trick used by the communists.

What's interesting in the FBI critique is that the Baileys were also bankers," said Noakes. " and what is really going on is a struggle between the big-city banker (Potter) and the small banker (the Baileys). Capra was clearly on [the] side of small capitalism and the FBI was on the side of big capitalism.

In a memo entitled "Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry," agent D.M. Ladd tells FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that it was totally unnecessary to portray Old Man Potter as a "mean character," and that making him such meant that the Capra "deliberately maligned the upper class." It is possible, of course, that Ladd actually believed the case he made, but it is just as possible that he was doing his best to get on the good side of Hoover, who made a career out of seeing Communists under every rock and around every corner.

Capra, by the way, also made Why We Fight, a series of documentary films commissioned by the U.S. government during World War II to convince both military personnel and the American public that U.S. involvement in the war was necessary.

More Financial Aid for CEOs

A good number of recent corporate scandals have had to do with stock options for CEOs. Paying executives in company stocks gives them heady incentives to focus narrowly on profits and engage in insider trading. (I mean, come on, if you knew your company wouldn't make its expected quarterly earnings, wouldn't you sell some stock before the price dipped?) Stock options also give executives the chance to hide their earnings in the technical fine print of annual corporate reports. The most recent spate of corporate wrongdoing involved setting stock options at outdated lower prices, allowing CEOs to maximize their capital gains. (For Mother Jones' quick and dirty coverage of corporate pay abuses, click here.)

The SEC has had just about enough. Err, scratch that. The SEC wants to make it easier for companies to pay their top executives in stock options and harder for investors to determine just how much they're handing over. The commission announced the Friday before Christmas (in a move that was clearly not designed to skirt media attention) that it will allow companies to account for executives' earnings from stock options by spreading them out over the full vesting period. Just this summer, the SEC had demanded for the first time that companies include annual estimates of executives' stock-options earnings.

That was then, this is now, baby. But Rep. Barney Frank, who is expected to lead the House Financial Services Committee, has cried foul and promises to look into the matter. So perhaps there will be some brakes on the robber barrons' trains this session.

F.D.A. Jumps the (Cloned) Shark

The New York Times reports that the F.D.A. offered a draft resolution today, announcing its intention to approve the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals. A voluntary moratorium on food from cloned animals has been in place since 2001 to allow the F.D.A. to study its safety. But critics say the science is still shaky.

The F.D.A., which has long maintained that cows given growth hormones produce milk which is "indistinguishable" from that of hormone-free cows, concludes that milk and meat from cloned animals is "virtually indistinguishable" from those of—let's call them real animals. The agency isn't even suggesting any special labeling for the products. I find that frightening. And roughly 65 percent of consumers agree, indicating in a recent poll that they are uncomfortable with the idea of cloned food. The dairy industry has also expressed some discomfort, after a survey revealed that 14 percent of women would stop using dairy products altogether if milk from clones was introduced.

A few juicy highlights from the Times story:

[E]ven if two animals have identical genes, they can turn out differently if those genes are turned on or off at different times.…These differences are presumed to account in large measure for the low success rate of cloning. Fetuses can grow unusually large…Many clones die during gestation or shortly after birth. Some are born with deformed heads or limbs or problems with their hearts, lungs or other organs.

Yummy.

The draft assessment based its conclusions in part on studies, some done by cloning companies, comparing the composition of the milk, meat and blood of cloned animals and conventional animals.

Said one F.D.A. officer: "I ate this meat and I found it delicious. I ate this meat and I found it delicious." I'm convinced.