From TPP to Epi-pens, electing our congressional executioners

First published in Blasting News:

In America, land of the free home of the brave we get to “elect” our executioners who serve in congress. 

Congress is coming off their vacation ready to ram through TPP a job killing, people killing trade deal.  Assured there will be no price to pay they plan a brutal assault on US citizens in the lame duck session.  The election system in America has been so rigged by the two parties that elections have devolved into a system of choosing our executioners.

Protecting merchants of death

Our elected officials pass laws not to advance the greater good, but to protect war profiteers, chemical death agents, lethal pharmaceutical peddlers, death armament agents and classroom to prison charter schools.  If you are one of the few they allow to vote you’re herded like sheep into poll stations to choose which executioner a corporate, for profit media has convinced will be the most humane when they put you to death.    

The choices are death by lethal chemical extermination, death by bombs and bullets in a foreign land, death by genetically altered flora and fauna, death by untreatable lab created microorganisms or death by congressionally protected carcinogens.  Our flag has come to represent global killing fields.  Nothing is sacred, not hospitals, not ancient artifacts, not religious buildings.  All must be leveled to make way for exploitation of the natural resources that lie under earth’s surface. 

 Legislated spike in pregnancy related deaths

The GOP is run by the Koch Brothers’ ALEC who writes legislation to foist federally funded lethal products and policies upon the electorate.  In Texas the GOP slashed funding for Planned Parenthood and closed low income women’s health centers.  The result, the rate of pregnancy-related deaths in Texas has doubled since 2010 making Texas one of the most dangerous places in the world to have a baby.

Pay up for Epi-pens or die

Democrats are no better, in West Virginia, the CEO of Mylan Pharmaceutical has hiked the price of life saving Epi-pens that deliver epinephrine to people having a fatal allergic reaction by over 450%.   The pens, once $50 have increased to over $600.  Mylan CEO Heather Bresch is the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin.  Bresch relocated Mylan’s headquarters to the Netherlands last year after a corporate “inversion” merger with Abbott Laboratories.  They now enjoy a low tax rate with corporate citizenship in Holland and Bresch’s salary went from $2 million to $18 million.

Congress gives Monsanto immunity from prosecution

In Missouri the EPA has been inundated with reports of crop damage from Monsanto’s dicamba herbicide.  Even though the EPA has not approved the highly volatile herbicide, Monsanto released the GM soybean and cotton seeds this spring.  Monsanto’s decision came after congress slipped a provision into Toxic Substances Act in March giving Monsanto immunity from prosecution. More than 10 states have had devastating possibly permanent damage to crops including peaches, tomatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, rice, peas, peanuts, alfalfa, cotton, and soybeans as well as Missouri’s largest peach farm. 

Deadly global warming

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.  In northwestern Greenland, where the US has a cold-war era toxic waste dump containing radioactive waste along with biological and chemical waste, global warming threatens nearby ecosystems.  The toxic waste is beneath 100 feet of ice that threatens to melt dumping it into the sea.  But our congress has ensured the US voters have no way to get them out of office.  The only choice you have is to elect your executioner.

By Patricia Baeten