Veterinary clinic in Boca Raton declares Dr. Marvin Moskowitz persona non grata - and it appears to me they did it because they were caught fibbing

This is Dr. Marvin Moskowitz, a 10 year old Persian cat from California 

who is not happy with the treatment he got in Florida.

The Crank’s brother, who lives in California, went to Florida recently, to try out living there for a while. He brought his cat with him. 

They’re back home in California now, and neither the Crank’s brother nor the cat, whose name is Dr. Marvin Moscowitz, is likely to return to Florida any time soon.

One of the big reasons why has to do with a veterinary clinic in Boca Raton. The clinic, in addition to treating sick animals, also does animal grooming. Because Dr. Moscowitz is an indoor cat, his nails need clipping fairly regularly. In addition, Dr. Moscowitz needed a bath. So the Crank’s brother made a grooming appointment and brought in Dr. Moscowitz.

Next thing you know, the clinic was demanding to give Dr. Moscowitz a fecal exam.

“Why is that?” the Crank’s brother asked.

“He could have fecal worms. And if he leaves any worms in the tub, all the other cats we bathe will catch it,” the clinic’s front desk guardian explained. 

That sounded odd. Not to mention that the explanation also raises questions about how thoroughly the clinic washes out its tub between cat baths.

“That’s ridiculous,” said the Crank’s brother. “Dr. Moscowitz has never been outdoors in his life, except in a carrying case. He’s an indoor cat.”

“This is Florida,” insisted the front desk guardian, ominously. “Anything can happen.”

Anything? Like what? Was she implying that a scouting party of fecal worms congregated at the curb at Miami Dade airport waiting for an easy mark? And that when the Crank’s brother and Dr. Moscowitz arrived from California, the worm scouting party noticed Dr. Moscowitz in his carrying case, and deliberately crawled in through the vents and jumped into Dr. Moscowitz’s behind while he and my brother waited for a car to pick them up?

 Somehow, what the front desk guardian was saying didn't quite add up. But she stuck to her story. “This is Florida. Anything can happen.”

This argument went on for a while, but finally the Crank’s brother gave in and agreed to let Dr. Moscowitz have a fecal exam so that he could also get a bath and a manicure. He left the good doctor at the veterinarian for a few hours, and came back when he had been told to come back. 

It turned out that Dr. Moscowitz hadn’t been bathed because he began to “bite and scratch,” according to the clinic’s own records. Hey, if  somebody had just shoved a probe up your butt looking for fecal worms, you might bite and scratch too. Whether you’re a cat or not.

The Crank’s brother was presented with a bill not only for the manicure, but also for the fecal exam.

“Great,” said the Crank’s brother, “I’d like to see the fecal exam test results.”

“Oh, we won’t have the results until they come back from the lab tomorrow,” said the front desk guardian.

“Then the story you gave me about requiring the fecal exam to avoid infecting other cats wasn’t true,” said the Crank’s brother.

The front desk person simply repeated the amount due, including the amount for the fecal exam.

“I’ll pay you for the nail clipping. I’m not paying for a fecal exam that Dr. Moscowitz didn’t need and that was administered for a specious reason. Now give me my cat,” said the Crank’s brother.

“If you won’t pay the full amount, you’ll have to wait until the veterinary staff manager discusses this,” said the front desk guardian.

“Wait? How long?”

“Well, the manager is in a meeting about something else now. They’ll be finished in an hour or so.”

“Give me my cat right now or I’m calling the police,” said the Crank’s brother.

The threat of calling the cops evidently put the fear of God into the front desk guardian. She brought out Dr. Moscowitz. The Crank’s brother paid for the nail clipping , but not for somebody sticking a probe up the cat’s ass for an unnecessary — but revenue-generating — lab test.

They’re back in California now. And the Crank’s brother recently received a frosty e-mail from the clinic. Here’s the text with the name of the clinic redacted to help some lawyer in Florida avoid getting over-stimulated:

"[CLINIC NAME REDACTED]  will not be able to offer you any future services. At [CLINIC NAME REDACTED], we strive to provide exceptional care and to act only in the best interest of our patients. In order to accomplish this goal, we make every effort to achieve a level of mutual trust, open communication, and respect with each one. After several failed attempts working with you and after discussions with staff members, we feel our relationship with you is not a good fit. [CLINIC NAME REDACTED] has elected to end all services with you effective immediately. Please do not call, email, text, or trespass at [CLINIC NAME REDACTED]. Attached to this email are Dr. Marvin medical records for you to consult a new veterinarian for continuation of care."

Dr. Marvin Moscowitz yawned when the letter was read to him, and then went off to his kitchen (in California) to lap some water from his bowl.

The medical records in question were, in fact, mostly copies of records from Dr. Moscowitz’s California veterinarian, so the operation manager in Boca who e-mailed them could have saved herself the trouble. The Crank’s brother had given the clinic copies of those records to begin with.

The fact that the clinic is conjuring up calls, e-mails, text or trespasses — tresspasses! — indicates that the fertile imagination of somebody at the clinic can be applied to a lot more than inventing reasons to subject a cat to a fecal exam.

Oh, and since this is a political blog, and this story would be incomplete without a political moral, here’s a political moral:

Government regulation exists to protect people — and sometimes even to protect cats — against the depredations of people out to do whatever it takes to move money out of your bank account and into their own. Evidently, the process of regulating veterinarians in Florida, if it exists at all, needs some work. But that’s just on a local level in one state.

When the Trump Administration starts nullifying regulations left and right, somebody’s going to suffer. You may unwittingly fall into the hands of payday lender loan sharks. You may find your air suddenly getting more polluted. You may find acres and acres of what was once pristine wilderness turning into an ugly industrial mining site. 

And for all I know, before very long, you may go out for a haircut or a manicure and end up having someone shove a probe up your butt — and then billing you for it.

And if you don’t believe me, just ask Dr. Marvin Moskowitz.

A musical ode to financial manipulation

If Congress would only restore the Steagall-Glass Act, which separated the FDIC-insured money of depositors from the high-stakes, high-flying money that hedge funds and investment bankers play with, this performance would not be necessary.

A few notes:

• If you slow this performers down and take careful note of every word, you’ll find that the technical descriptions are just about perfect.

• There once was a time when banks could never be too big to fail because each bank was limited to operations in one state. No longer.

• How to stop the financial thugs throwing the equivalent of knives at us to see who can miss by the least? This can be done either through restoration of the Steagall – Glass Act, or restoration of now repealed prohibitions against Interstate banking, or preferably both. But this would be what the Republicans call “Needless, job-kiling government intervention with the free market.” Draw your own conclusion about Republicans.

• The performers in this video work under the unfortunately klunky name, Fascinating Aida. They're clever enough to think of better. Nevertheless, I wish some enterprising Broadway producer would bring these three over to the United States for a limited run on Broadway. They’d be a smash hit. I’ve displayed one of their performances previously, in a piece explaining how consumers are getting nickeled and dimed. (Go here, and scroll down to the end.)

Yeah, let’s deregulate everything. How about starting with traffic regulations? Hungry for a flesh-and-steel sandwich?

What caused the subprime market meltdown?

“Greed,” says John McCain.

“Greed,” echoes Sarah Palin.

Yeah, they say, and we gotta get those greedy, conniving, evil, predatory Wall Street lenders and show 'em what for.

Give me a break!

John McCain—deregulate, baby, deregulate—seems never to have met an economic problem that deregulation (and perhaps a few more tax cuts for rich corporations and individuals) couldn’t fix. After all, “market forces” balance everything out after a while. Right?

Small problem: “Market Forces” are a hanging judge. And the judge is currently hanging the entire economy of the United States from a very tall tree.

Of course the Wall Street guys were greedy. Greed is as American as apple pie. But blaming greedy bankers and predator lenders is like blaming a bullet for shooting you. Greed and predation is what they do. Regulating greed to keep it under control and thwart predatory behavior is what governments are supposed to do.

It’s deregulation that
shot the economy dead

It’s the function of government to protect us from the market manipulations that are a byproduct of rampant greed. Just as it used to protect us from greedy usurers. People used to go to prison for charging the kind of interest rates the banks are getting on credit caards now.

Marketplace regulation is no more onerous than government traffic regulations that help to shield us from highway traffic accidents. In fact, imagine that highway traffic accidents were the major campaign issue now.

People are still getting killed with a 65 MPH speed limit? Tell yuh what. Let’s deregulate speed and eliminate all speed limits. Get rid of those speed limit signs. Get rid of those rumble speed bumps. Get rid of that radar.

Even more people are getting killed with no speed limits? Easy fix. Just get rid of the highway patrol.

Still more people getting killed? Well, let’s take the dividers out between the eastbound and westbound lanes so that cars can go in any lane, any direction they want. And just to encourage “innovative” driving, we’ll give a tax break to anybody who takes a spin on the Freeforall Highway.

The “gotcha” doofus
will strike again

I should interrupt this rant to mention that some doofus with his finger on the “gotcha” button shoots me either an e-mail or a post every time I discuss this subject, reminding me that Bill Clinton signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, one of the more important regulations that used to protect us.

Well, yes Clinton did—when it was attached to other legislation that he really needed and it all got shoved down his throat by mischief-making Republicans. And if Republicans are so offended now by its repeal, why didn’t they reinstate it during the six years they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House? And why didn't John McCain complaint about it once in those eight years?

There's no point in
bailing out the boat if you
don't fix the leak

Bailing out the banks will do us no good at all if once the bankers are bailed out (or even before that) they can jump into their 500 horsepower Greedsters and go roaring down the highway again.

But of course, I never met a Republican—John McCain and Sarah Whatzername most certainly included— who could think ten seconds ahead.

Oh, for those of you who are interested in such things, the Direct Marketing Association— those wonderful folks who brought you spam and junk mail—are holding their convention this week.

And just take a wild guess what they’re complaining about.

Results of Bush free trade policies and laxness on food purity: First your cat dies. Then your dog. Next? Maybe you.

One of the problems with laissez-faire capitalism is that it fails to account sufficiently for the bottomless pit of evil that is home to men with dollar signs in their eyes.

It doesn’t matter if they’re American or Chinese. If they can make a buck and you die from their efforts, tough luck for you, pal.

A case in point is the melamine-infested “wheat gluten” and “rice gluten" that have been making their ways into the food chain via producers in China.

Melamine is essentially a high nitrogen chemical useful as a fire retardant and a pesticide. The latter use ought to be enough to raise government radar antennas in Washington to full mast, but hey, sleeping at the switch is a Bush administration specialty.

At any rate, some Chinese producers have been mixing melamine into wheat gluten and rice gluten because it tends to “fool” some lab tests into thinking it’s protein. The formula seems to be “less protein + more melamine = more profit.”

The Chinese producers are thrilled, because they’re making bigger bucks. The importers are thrilled, because they can buy and sell a bit cheaper, increasing demand for their services. The food processors are thrilled, because cheaper product in means higher profits out.

Or at least they were until the scandal broke.

The U.S. Government Departments of Commerce, Argiculture, Homeland Security? Well, as usual, they were too busy hiring good little Republican aparatchiks to take notice.

Sometimes I wonder if they weren’t also thrilled because some Republican and Bush campaign contributors were making bigger profits. I can’t prove that, although I wish some enterprising journalist would. The pattern certainly seems to fit.

Then the dogs and cats started dying. I dunno about you, but I got scared right away. I was leaving town to do some traveling, abandoning my blog for a while, but in my notice that The New York Crank would be on hold for a while I wrote, “…if poisoned wheat gluten could kill cats and dogs, it might be killing people, too? I mean, do you know where the wheat gluten in your bread comes from?” You’ll find it here:
http://thenewyorkcrank.blogspot.com/2007/04/announcing-short-and-cranky-damn-hiatus.html

While it depresses me to tell you so, hey dude, I told you so. Since then, guess what?

It’s been discovered that melamine is making its way into hogfeed and chicken feed. And now fish feed.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070508/ap_on_he_me/food_contamination

And moreover, it now turns out melamine is working its way into plain old wheat.

Which means just about everything you might enjoy eating is poisoned. Every-damned-thing.

That, of course, has awakened our Republican administration. Somebody’s eyelids fluttered open long enough to say, according to an Associated Press story:

“The level of contamination is expected to be too low to pose any danger to human health, said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection.”

Yeah, just the assurances you know you can trust from those wonderful folks who gave you A Helluva Job Brownie, Mission Accomplished, WMD in Iraq and other tributes to forked tongue politics.

Hey, wasn’t America once the breadbasket of the world? Aren’t we still subsidizing farmers not to grow stuff? Why do we have to buy wheat and rice from China in the first place?

Laissez-faire free trade is the answer. The doctrinaire belief is that the market always speaks to the benefit of the consumer. A bunch of corporate sleazebags let poison creep into the food chain? Hey, no problem because the free market will take care of it. People who learn the stuff is poisonous will stop buying it.

Sure, after we’re all dead.

Here’s what we need:

1. America needs a five year ban on food or food ingredient imports – whether animal or human food – from any country that lets poison creep into the stuff living things ingest here. China, that means you too, you greedy poisoning bastards!

2. America needs food testing on all agricultural products. Al Quaida doesn’t need a bomb, it turns out. All it needs is a bag of fish food to start wiping out Americans.

3. America needs rigid, rigid, rigid FDA enforcement. You don’t “work with” people who poison you. You pop them in the pokey and feed them their own glutenized bread and water. That rule most certainly should extend to American citizens. People who import, distribute, or mix poison into the food supply are serial killers. No pun intended. (But hey, what really is in your corn flakes?)

4. America needs clear source labeling law that affects all food – every damn morsel – that Americans eat. This includes most especially beef, poultry, chicken and fish. But it also extends things like bread and breakfast cereals, all of which contain grains and glutens. The label should clearly and readably state the source of all ingredients. “Wheat gluten” is not enough. Is it Chinese wheat gluten, “wheat gluten of unknown origin” or “American wheat gluten?” The difference could mean life or death for you.

5. Support for the American family farmer. Not the agri-business combines. I'm talking about individually owned farms with net income of $200,000 or less. There are fewer and fewer of those every year. But we need more and more. If we ever get into a hassle with China and we start relying on some mega-manipulative argri-business trading company to import all our food, we’re royally screwed. You think energy dependence is a problem? Try food dependence.

We don’t need less government. We need more government, protecting what we put in our mouths.

But from the Bush Administration? Don’t hold your breath.