Senators and lobbyists to America's voters and their kids: "Drop dead!"

Has your home turned into

a killing jar for humans? 

This cranky post will tell you 

whom to thank.

I was eight years old when I learned about trapping and killing butterflies and other insects. It involved a killing jar — essentially a glass jar containing some wadded up cotton soaked in an awful-smelling chemical. The summer camp nature counselor who taught me about this stuff also taught me the name of the chemical. Formaldehyde.

Killing bugs with formaldehyde is no longer the most popular method. The professionals would rather use ethyl acetate, chloroform, or cyanide. Those are considered less harmful to you than formaldehyde. But there is one place where formaldehyde is still wildly  prevalent.  Your home.

Turns out that the glue that holds layers of laminated furniture together – not to mention laminated flooring and even certain items of clothing – is generously laced with formaldehyde, and those items gradually give off formaldehyde fumes. 

No, you’re not likely to keel over dead, like a bug in a jar, after a few seconds . But exposure to formaldehyde over time, even in small amounts, is associated with leukemia, especially myeloid leukemia, nasal cancer, and for good measure, asthma, according to the National Cancer Institute.

So the Environmental Protection Agency has been tying for the past five years to limit how much you can be slowly gassed to death by formaldehyde-laced products. Unfortunately, a small — shall we call it an impediment? — has cropped up: corruptible law makers under the sway of lobbyists with fists full of money.

Start with a guy who has already been labeled “Senator Formaldehyde,” — Republican Senator David Vitter from Louisiana. Although Republicans will tell you they’re not scientists and don’t know diddley squat about climate change, some of them suddenly turn to experts when it comes to formaldehyde. 

Vitter is a case in point. By his actions and things he said, he is implicitly in favor of poisoning of Americans with this subsance. Not a huge surprise considering that since 2009 he has graciously accepted approximately $900,340 in campaign contributions from the chemical industry and other industries that use various poisonous chemicals in the products you, I, and your children use and inhale the gasses from. Hey, the Supreme Court says it ain't bribery. It's merely freedom of speech.

Sad for this cranky old Democrat to say, it’s not just Republicans  like Vitter and Roger Wicker of Mississippi who are guilty of allowing industry to poison us and our kids to make a grubby buck. Senator Barbara Boxer and even the current White House are effectively co-conspirators, the way I read information recently published in a New York Times article.

One of he poisoned furniture and floor lobby’s arcane arguments is the cost of the illness and death their products spew into America. Under the pressure of the poisoners, reports the New York Times…

“the estimated benefit of the proposed rule dropped to $48 million a year, from as much as $278 million a year. The much-reduced amount deeply weakened the agency’s justification for the sometimes costly new testing that would be required under the new rules, a federal official involved in the effort said.’’

In other words, if the lobbyists manage to whittle down the value of your life and health, after a while you and your kids just aren’t worth saving. You're  just another bug in a killing jar. After all, a senator who graciously accepted close to a million bucks from America's Lucrezia Borgias doesn't need to worry about you. Or your stinking vote. You'll be dead anyway.

No no, you people who don’t trust government. You’re only half right. You can’t trust anybody.

Listen, you can’t really hate people for not trusting government. Just look at Congress. 

The most useless people in that useless body are the ones who got into office by running on an anti-government platform. And since Congress is part of government, and the people who ran against useless government are equally useless, you can assume that Congressmen don’t even trust each other. Or themselves.

 So I wasn’t exactly flabbergasted when a publication called Target Marketing reported this morning that people trust business more than government. 

Target Marketing’s report was based on a survey released by a PR firm called Edelman. But in attempting to dig deeper into the report, which wasn’t easy on Edelman’s hard-to-navigate web page, I learned  that just because a lot of people hate Congress more than business, it doesn't mean any love is lost on business, either.

In fact,  “government is still distrusted in 19 of the 27 markets surveyed,” and also, “trust in business is below 50 percent in half those markets.” So people don’t see business as all that trustworthy, either. 

And since business now exerts undue influence on government, by lobbying their bought Congressman – Washington’s favorite indoor sport  – we now have Congress and business slithering  around, building distrust on top of distrust, and chasing chasing their own tails. 

With any luck Congress and business will catch and eat themselves like this snake, that evidently doing a pretty fair job of digesting its own body in its own stomach. (WARNING: Some people may find this video disturbing. Some snakes, Congressmen, lobbyists and business moguls may, as well.)

But Congress and business aren’t the only ones oh the public’s poo list. In addition, “sixty percent of countries now distrust media.” Thanks to all of you who are the ilk of Fox News, Brian Williams, Breitbart and its wannabe pimp and news fake James O’Keefe, and all others who play fast and loose with the facts.

And speaking of mistrust in business, there was yet another story that caught my attention in Target Marketing this morning, and that one was a hair-raiser. It had to do with Dish Network, which evidently has about as much respect for consumers or the regulations of the U.S. Government’s Federal Trade Commission as ISIS does for Charlie Hebdo.

Seems that people have been, and may still be hounded beyond all understanding, even after they put themselves on the Federal Trade Commissions’s Do Not Call List and informed Dish Network of the facts

Target Marketing’s Jeremy Zimmerman reveals:

One FTC report details one woman's struggle:

"One consumer works the night shift at a North Carolina hotel. Turning the phone off when she tries to sleep during the day isn't an option. Her husband has a serious medical condition and she needs to be available in case of emergency. After getting repeated calls about Dish service, she took steps to put an end to the annoyance. She listened to the whole recorded sale pitch, hoping a live person would pick up so she could beg them to stop calling. When she finally got somebody on the line, she told them to put her on their Do Not Call list. She started sleeping on the couch with pencil and paper in hand so she could document the calls when they woke her up. Ultimately, she filed two complaints with her State AG. Dish responded that she probably already was on the company's entity-specific Do Not Call list, but she would be added "in an abundance of caution." But despite all that, the calls kept coming—and according to the government's motion, she was never put on the entity-specific list.

Zimmerman speculates that since Federal Trade Commission rules call for fines of up to $16,000 per violation “Dish will most likely be learning a very pricey lesson on how to treat its customers.”

If I were you, I most likely wouldn't count on that. Maybe some lobbyist will lean on somebody in Congress, to lean on the FTC,  to reduce those fines down to a piffle, and those annoying S.O.B.s at Dish TV will just chuckle. 

Or maybe Zimmerman is merely speculating just as the qualifier he used “most likely” might indicate. (Could Zimmerman's choice of  the phrase “most likely” actually indicate “sorta likely?” Or could Zimmerman be whispering, sotto voce,   “maybe, I hope, I hope.” Or even, “I can’t predict what the FTC will do , but let me throw out a big number and see if it shakes anybody up.”

Meanwhile, I counsel you to trust but verify. And that includes verifying my own stuff, which you can do by following the links in this story.