Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:14 pm
by admin
CRANK, CRAP & CRUELTY, ERIC SCHLOSSER'S FAST FOOD NATION, by Charles Carreon
7:42pm, September 11, 2005
Crank, Crap & Cruelty
A Review of Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation”
It may only take a village to raise a child, but it takes an entire planet to build a Big Mac. That’s the message of Eric Schlosser’s nonfiction thriller, “Fast Food Nation.” Nonfiction, as in every line of it is true. Thriller, as in, money, power, drugs, oceans of spilled blood and shit, and a runaway train loaded with biological weapons set to destroy the entire planet. It’s a cliffhanger, a role-playing story for all humanity. It turns out that, a couple of million years after we left the trees and conquered the savannahs with our omnivorous appetites and tool-making ways, it’s time to return to eating like gorillas.
Just the Facts, Ma’am
Schlosser is a big magazine writer, but don’t let that turn you off. He writes like a good cop thinks. His style is tuned liked a Kawasaki 1000 police motorcycle and he investigates like he’s got a grudge against corporate evil. He chases down the bad actors other reporters call boss for the same reason every muckraker rakes muck – he hates what he sees because what he sees is ugly as hell. But he’s a diligent professional. He doesn’t babble jargon like a zealot. He builds his case. He bags and tags his evidence meticulously, unobtrusively footnoting his extensive sources. Then he presents it all in a very detailed and convincing exposition that reveals a complex criminal conspiracy operating an ongoing criminal enterprise. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll be ready to issue indictments.
We’re a long way even from defunding the fast food industry, much less indicting it for its crimes. Our parents didn’t eat the way we do. We don’t know why we’re eating corporate burgers, munching oil-soaked fries, and downing vats of iced sugar soda. We don’t know why we eat in plastic environments built like school cafeterias, attached to plastic playgrounds. We don’t know why we don’t find fresh foods attractive, why antacids are the most popular over-the-counter medicine.
Knowledge is power, and knowledge is often difficult to acquire, which may be why so few people have any power. This book makes acquiring vital knowledge easy, with crisp chapter titles and a story that starts at the beginning, studying the deeds of four old white guys — Walt Disney, Ray Kroc of McDonalds, Carl Karcher of Carl’s Junior, and Colonel Sanders of KFC. These four men each streamlined their products, automated production, marketed uniformity, and anonymized their employees to proselytize their visions of life and commerce. Although Kroc approached Disney solicitously with a plan to operate McDonalds restaurants in Disneyland, and was painfully rebuffed, Ronald McDonald is now far better known than Mickey Mouse. Indeed, the surrealistic purveyor of Happy Meals is giving Santa Claus, the number one imaginary being, a run for the money.
The Mechanization of Food Production
Kroc didn’t invent Ronald McDonald out of whole cloth. The original McDonald brothers operated a massive drive-in burger joint in San Bernardino, complete with young waitresses bringing trays of food to those enormous rolling fortresses they called cars. The cars were filled either with families or young men looking to hit on the carhops. The business was very successful, but the brothers tired of hiring platoons of carhops and replacing broken glasses and stolen silverware. So they closed the place for retooling, installing bigger grills and a burger production line, so skilled cooks were no longer needed. They threw away all the glasses and silverware, and henceforth served only foods that could be wrapped in wax paper or sucked through a straw. They ditched the carhops and made everybody line up at the window, but the burgers were cheap and business took off like a rocket. Kroc, then a traveling salesman in his early fifties, admired the McDonalds operation because they bought enough mixers to make forty milkshakes at one time.
The formula that Kroc bought from the McDonalds and franchised to the masses was a hit, and others followed the trend toward assembly-line food preparation. Carl Karcher copied McDonalds because they were just twenty miles away from his successful barbeque restaurant down in Anaheim, and Karcher knew the future when he saw it. Harland Sanders reinvented himself as a Southern gentleman, adopting the string tie and white suit as a marketing gimmick, and achieved his goal of putting at least two drumsticks in every bucket by adopting the new method of mass-produced cooking pioneered by the McDonalds brothers. Southern California loved the new way of eating, that fit perfectly into the seventy-mile an hour lifestyle, and soon the era of monumental sign architecture began to mark the landscape. Kroc built Golden Arches so big they dwarfed the stores, but they could be seen from a distance in time to let freeway drivers maneuver to the next exit. Eventually, the profile of the fast food industry has come to loom equally large over our entire civilization. Schlosser summarizes the numbers: “In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2001, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined.”
The mechanization of food production turned people called cooks and waitresses into something much less dignified – burgerflippers. Burgerflippers are underpaid, and generally work a job less than six months. Small wonder. The job is statistically incredibly dangerous, like late night cashiering in a gas station or liquor store. Bet you didn’t know that the largest cause of employment death today is homicide. That’s because security at your average McDonalds sucks, because the money handling system is as uniform as the food, and sometimes angry employees come back to take their share of the loot they used to count, and sometimes decide to even the score with an assistant manager or two. Schlosser interviews one McDonalds employee who matter of factly packed a pistol to work and expressed no concern about a possible holdup, since he intended to act proactively in any armed encounter.
The Cruelest Business
The philosophy and method of manufacturing fast food turned into a machine with such tremendous money-moving power that today, when McDonalds says “jump,” the meat industry says “how high?” For years the USDA has been unable to obtain clean ground beef for the school lunch program, and it still can’t. But when McDonalds saw European store sales falling off the chart, and Jack In The Box demanded clean meat for its restaurants, the meat packers fell into line. Fast food ground beef at Jack and Mac’s are much cleaner than the cow crap laden meat that the nation feeds to its schoolchildren. And it make them sick, by the thousands. Food poisoning is far more common and deadly than you would think, afflicting 200,000 Americans every day, sending 900 to the hospital, and 14 to the morgue. For those whose eyes glaze over when they see latin names like Salmonella, Listeria, Staphylococcus, Clostridium or E Coli, Schlosser boils it down into “a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.”
The meat is full of crap and the meatcutters are tweaking on methamphetamine, aka “crank.” Crank is the drug of choice for immigrant slaughterhouse workers that have to “make a knife cut every two or three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts during an eight hour shift.” The pace of production is insane, surpassing any prior known levels of cattle butchering: “The old meatpacking plants in Chicago slaughtered about 50 cattle an hour. Twenty years ago, new plants in the High Plains slaughtered about 175 cattle an hour. Today some plants slaughter up to 400 cattle an hour – about half a dozen animals every minute, sent down a single production line, carved by workers desperate not to fall behind.” No matter how much meth you do, though, there is no way to gut and extract the gastrointestinal system of a cow that fast and not make a regular mess of it, spraying shit all over the beef that is destined for America’s dinner table.
What’s A Prion?
In an afterword entitled “The Meaning of Mad Cow,” Schlosser updated his first edition of Fast Food Nation. In the afterword, Schlosser establishes that the destructive power of the meat machine has not been fully unleashed, because the truth about mad cow disease – its causes, vectors of transmission, and incubation period, are still unknown. Similarly unknown is how many people in the USA have in fact eaten meat infected with “prions,” the nearly-indestructible protein-based agents for the transmission of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (“BSE”). The answers to these unknowns will determine the number of victims and the scope of the cattle-destruction effort that the USA will have to undertake. The answers are lacking of course, for the same reason we don’t know how many Iraqi civilians have been killed in our liberation operation – bureaucrats aren’t good with big numbers.
Since the date of Schlosser’s afterword, published in 2002, we have been treated to a continuing coverup by the USDA about the extent to which BSE has afflicted the American cattle population. In case you thought your meat was cleaner because you live in the Pacific Northwest, where everything is better, it’s time to take a reality check. On August 20, 2005, the Associated Press reported that “slaughterhouses in Oregon and Washington have been cited at least eight times for breaking federal rules to protect against mad cow disease, putting the Northwest above average for violations.” The federal rules to protect against mad cow disease don’t require testing to be sure that BSE-prions aren’t in the meat, they just forbid the meatpackers from feeding people any “tonsils or small intestines,” or if the cows are over thirty months old, “the ban extended to the brain, skull, eyes and parts of the spinal column,” because these parts are “the most prone to mad cow infections.”
Are you surprised that the USDA tells you there’s no risk of BSE turning your brain into a mass of spongiform encephalopathy, but it still doesn’t test to see if cows have it? Well don’t be! It would be way too much trouble to test every one of those cows for mad cow disease. What’s a priority with our current President, as he made clear in one of his “State of the Union” addresses, was testing athletes for drugs, because an athlete on drugs would be far more dangerous than a hamburger full of BSE. Hmmm, now that I think about it, “athlete on drugs” describes California governor Schwarzennegger pretty well, and may be a good description of Bush himself. It just goes to show, politicians often know what they’re talking about.
More Than The Meat Is Rotten
Speaking of politicians, it’s not just the food supply that’s contaminated, my friends. The consolidation of food production forced by the fast food industry’s demand for uniform goods has turned potato production, beef production, chicken farming, and flavoring production into highly concentrated industries, each dominated by a handful of corporations that fix prices, suppress wages, and jointly wage a pitched battle against government regulation. But for the European ban on “Frankenfoods,” genetically engineered potatoes would be in every bag of French fries, and Taco Bell would still be feeding people corn that was meant for animal feed only. We know more about the industry’s insane drive to act as a law unto itself due to the heroic efforts of a couple of London Greenpeace activists who defended themselves, with almost complete success, against a libel suit McDonalds filed in England, by proving the truth of their harshest accusations. After eight years of litigation and a trial, Justice Rodger Bell concluded, in an 800 page judgment, that McDonalds advertising exploited children, McDonalds food endangered diners, McDonalds wages were unreasonably low, and McDonalds was to blame for animal cruelty violations by its suppliers. Through the litigation, the Greenpeace activists learned that their London group had been infiltrated by at least seven private detectives hired by McDonalds, so many that sometimes half the people at Greenpeace meetings were working for the Big Clown. At trial, Sidney Nicholson, a former South African policeman who supervised the Greenpeace spying, testified that McDonalds enlisted Scotland Yard’s Special Branch to track Greenpeace as a subversise organization, who then passed the information on to McDonalds.
Time To Take ‘Em Down
Like cancer, the fast food industry has taken over the productive capacity of the planet, and is busy reproducing its own cells at the expense of the entire organism. Like the tobacco companies, the fast food industry has been attacked for its policies, but has more successfully controlled the media and obtained government protection. Of course, when you can get a fat pig like Limbaugh to ridicule lawsuits filed by obese people, you’ve got a pretty good weapon. The fast food industry and its minions, agribusiness and the cattle and chicken tycoons, contribute disproportionately to publican candidates, seeking and obtaining the deregulation that makes the assembly lines move faster, keeps the crap in the meat, the grease in the fries, and all of their workers underpaid, uninsured, and at risk of violent death. Fortunately, Schlosser notes, we can vote with our feet. Here in Ashland, the voting has already started. A&W shut down a decade ago, McDonalds closed last year, and last week, we bid adieu to Dairy Queen. Perhaps 2005 will mark the high-water point for the industry that currently sits astride the world’s population like a huge, gross parasite. Do your part. Eat beans.
Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:17 pm
by admin
EVACUEES NEED CLOTHING? "LET THEM WEAR KNOCKOFFS", by Charles Carreon
10:00pm, September 13, 2005
This just in from the Dept of Homeland Security website — the Customs arm of the Dept of Homeland Security is delivering $17 Million worth of clothing seized because it was "in violation of trademark laws." That is to say, these clothing are fakes, knockoffs of famous brands like Adidas, Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, and other popular consumer names.
From the DHS website: "Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement - U.S. Customs and Border Protection(CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) trucks delivered several thousand items of clothing to Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Jackson, Miss., Houston and San Antonio, Texas. The clothing, seized in violations of U.S. trademark laws is worth estimated at over $17 million."
One of the problems of clothing like this is it's not just got fake brands, it's shitty apparel. It falls apart quickly. As Bruce Sterling described this phenomenon in a recent Wired article:
"They say you can't understand people until you've walked a mile in their shoes. I just walked across Belgrade in a brand-new pair of Nikes. Now I understand something: The citizens of this city are the vanguard of a new phase of capitalism. They're busily subverting conventional multi-national commerce and creating a dark parallel process - call it black globalization.
My new shoes look authentic, but they're a scam of ominous sophistication. The insole logo is silk-screened on; my socks erased the Nike swoosh in a single afternoon. The stitching is coarse and sloppy - the pull tab at the heel ripped loose the first time I tried to use it. The sporty soles are slippy, not grippy. The tag proclaims MADE IN KOREA, although the product is almost certainly a fake churned out by a Chinese factory. Adding insult to Nike's injury, the phony barcode denotes a pair of Reeboks."
So, while FEMA is actively turning away donations of decent clothing being offered by people all across America, DHS is rushing them all the fake, crappy apparel they have on hand. It must strike the guys in Customs as very funny: "And ye shall know them by their phony baseball caps and pirated pants." Other good jokes, "Hey whaddaya mean you're not from New Orleans. You tell me you bought that Louis Vuitton on Rodeo Drive?"
I should also point out that all of these counterfeit goods are, in ordinary times, a total liability. When I worked for Louis Vuitton at an LA lawfirm, we paid big, big storage bills on "millions of dollars worth" of Vuitton luggage we'd seized. That was a drag on the system. We couldn't give it away, or give it to charity, because that would defeat the purpose of seizing it — to keep poor people from sporting wealthy people brands. We couldn't burn it because it was an environmental hazard. So we stored it. The people at DHS are very clever, because this is going to free up a lot of storage space.
Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:33 pm
by admin
SHE SHOULD SUE! WAPO & FOX KEEP SLANDERING GOV. BLANCO, by Charles Carreon
10:25pm, September 14, 2005
Back on September 4th, The Washington Post ("WAPO"), mysteriously unable to get hold of public documents of great national importance, falsely accused Democratic Louisiana Gov. Blanco of having not declared a state of emergency. Now, WAPO has a correction on their website, and has deleted the original NewSpeak item. WAPO now admits that Gov. Blanco made the declaration on August 26, but has offered no apologies.
But it's never too late to be wrong twice, when you are all part of one big media cesspool of disinformation. So on September 12th, Fox News presented a "timeline" that eliminated Gov. Blanco's declaration of emergency from the record, while carefully including the declarations of Florida and Mississippi's governors.
Given the gravity of these mis-statements, which accuse Gov. Blanco of criminal negligence in the conduct of official duties, causing the deaths of hundreds of Louisiana citizens, I would recommend that she immediately file suit against WAPO and Fox for displaying reckless disregard as to the truth of the matters asserted by their spincasters. And be sure and sue in Baton Rouge.
Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:34 pm
by admin
HOLBROOK SAYS EXPERTS DENY KATRINA-GLOBAL-WARMING LINK, by Charles Carreon12:54am, September 16, 2005
The publicans are getting out in front of an issue that could have legs — Katrina was caused by global warming. Out in the forefront of the opposition, bucking the storm winds, is Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe:
Washington post wrote:
Bill Holbrook, spokesman for Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), said ".. the notion that Katrina's intensity is somehow attributable to global warming has been widely dismissed by scientific experts."
Maybe so, but in a recent Science article, Georgia Tech researchers and the National Center for Atmospheric Research reported that the number of major Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has nearly doubled over the past 35 years. And, the researchers expressed the opinion that this strengthens the connection between global warming, rising sea temperatures, and the increasingly damaging hurricanes.
My advice? Invest in brick houses!
Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:38 pm
by admin
POWER RESTORED FIRST TO PIPELINE WHILE HOSPITALS REMAIN DARK, by Charles Carreon6:36pm, September 16, 2005
Cheney pulled Mississippi power workers away from their work restoring electricity to hospitals that had been dark for several days, delaying the return of power to those facilities for 24 hours.
The workers weren't told until after they'd worked sixteen straight hours that they were making the world safe for Big Oil and risking their lives to help out Cheney's cronies at Colonial Pipeline Company. Everything about the work was dangerous, their foreman said, likening the job to chainsawing wood in the dark with a flashlight. Given that the job was decorated with broken power lines, flaming tree branches, and floodwaters, it's a tribute to their skill they succeeded.
I can understand Cheney's alarm, and why he felt it was a national emergency. He is very identified with the flow of oil. Having had a quadruple bypass, he knows that continuous, uninterrupted fluid flow is the way to health and survival. He personally identifies with the oil infrastructure almost as if the pipelines were his own veins, and the flow of oil his blood. See illustration below.
Power crews diverted -- Restoring pipeline came first
By Nikki Davis Maute
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina roared through South Mississippi knocking out electricity and communication systems, the White House ordered power restored to a pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast. That order - to restart two power substations in Collins that serve Colonial Pipeline Co. - delayed efforts by at least 24 hours to restore power to two rural hospitals and a number of water systems in the Pine Belt.
At the time, gasoline was in short supply across the country because of Katrina. Prices increased dramatically and lines formed at pumps across the South.
"I considered it a presidential directive to get those pipelines operating," said Jim Compton, general manager of the South Mississippi Electric Power Association - which distributes power that rural electric cooperatives sell to consumers and businesses.
"I reluctantly agreed to pull half our transmission line crews off other projects and made getting the transmission lines to the Collins substations a priority," Compton said. "Our people were told to work until it was done.
"They did it in 16 hours, and I consider the effort unprecedented."
Katrina slammed into South Mississippi and Southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29, causing widespread devastation and plunging most of the area - including regional medical centers and rural hospitals - into darkness.
The storm also knocked out two power substations in Collins, just north of Hattiesburg. The substations were crucial to Atlanta-based Colonial Pipeline, which moves gasoline and diesel fuel from Texas, through Louisiana and Mississippi and up to the Northeast.
"We were led to believe a national emergency was created when the pipelines were shut down," Compton said.
White House Call
Dan Jordan, manager of Southern Pines Electric Power Association, said Vice President Dick Cheney's office called and left voice mails twice shortly after the storm struck, saying the Collins substations needed power restored immediately.
Jordan dated the first call the night of Aug. 30 and the second call the morning of Aug. 31. Southern Pines supplies electricity to the substation that powers the Colonial pipeline.
Mississippi Public Service Commissioner Mike Callahan said the U.S. Department of Energy called him on Aug. 31. Callahan said department officials said opening the fuel line was a national priority.
Cheney's office referred calls about the pipeline to the Department of Homeland Security. Calls there were referred to Kirk Whitworth, who would not take a telephone message and required questions in the form of an e-mail.
Susan Castiglione, senior manager of corporate and public affairs with Colonial Pipeline, did not return phone calls.
Compton said workers who were trying to restore substations that power two rural hospitals - Stone County Hospital in Wiggins and George County Hospital in Lucedale - worked instead on the Colonial Pipeline project.
The move caused power to be restored at least 24 hours later than planned.
Mindy Osborn, emergency room coordinator at Stone County Hospital, said the power was not restored until six days after the storm on Sept. 4. She didn't have the number of patients who were hospitalized during the week after the storm.
"Oh, yes, 24 hours earlier would have been a help," Osborn said.
Compton said workers who were trying to restore power to some rural water systems also were taken off their jobs and placed on the Colonial Pipeline project. Compton did not name specific water systems affected.
Callahan's Visit
Callahan is one of three elected public service commissioners who oversee most public utilities in the state. Commissioners, however, have no authority over rural electric power cooperatives.
Nevertheless, Callahan said he drove to Compton's office on U.S. 49 North in Hattiesburg to tell him about the call from the Department of Energy. Callahan said he would support whatever decision Compton made.
Callahan said energy officials told him gasoline and diesel fuel needed to flow through the pipeline to avert a national crisis from the inability to meet fuel needs in the Northeast.
Callahan said the process of getting the pipelines flowing would be difficult and that there was a chance the voltage required to do so would knock out the system - including power to Wesley Medical Center in Hattiesburg.
With Forrest General Hospital operating on generators, Wesley was the only hospital operating with full electric power in the Pine Belt in the days following Katrina.
"Our concern was that if Wesley went down, it would be a national crisis for Mississippi," Callahan said. "We knew it would take three to four days to get Forrest General Hospital's power restored and we did not want to lose Wesley."
Compton, though, followed the White House's directive.
Nathan Brown, manager of power supply for the electric association, was responsible for overseeing the delicate operation of starting the 5,000-horsepower pumps at the pipeline.
Engineers with Southern Co., the parent company of Mississippi Power Co., did a dual analysis of what it would take to restore power and Brown worked with Southern Co. engineers on the best and quickest way to restore power.
Work began at 10 a.m. Sept. 1 and power was restored at 2 a.m. Sept. 2 - a 16-hour job.
Night Work
A good bit of the work took place at night.
Line foreman Matt Ready was in charge of one of the teams that worked to power the substations and the pipeline. Ready's shift started at 6 a.m. Sept. 1; he received word about the job four hours later and saw it to completion.
"We were told to stay with it until we got power restored," Ready said. "We had real safety issues because there were fires in the trees on the lines and broken power poles."
Ready described working on the lines in the dark like attempting to clear fallen trees out of a yard with a flashlight and a chain saw.
"Everything was dangerous," he said.
Ready said the crew members did not learn they were restoring power to pipelines until after the job was done.
How did they feel about that?
"Is this on the record?" Ready asked. "Well, then, we are all glad we were able to help out."
Compton said he was happy to support the national effort. But he said it was a difficult decision to make because of the potential impact in the region had the plan not worked and the area's power restoration was set back days.
"It was my decision to balance what was most important to people in South Mississippi with this all-of-a-sudden national crisis of not enough gas or diesel fuel," Compton said.
"In the future, the federal government needs to give us guidelines if this is such a national emergency so that I can work that in my plans."
Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid
Posted:
Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:47 pm
by admin
DID WARLOCK AID KATRINA?, by Charles CarreonSeptember 21, 2005
How do you stop a bomb from going off if it will be triggered by a single call from a portable cellphone? Don’t let the bomb pick up the phone. That’s the principle behind Warlock Blue and Warlock Green, technically known as IED jammers, for the Islamic Explosive Devices they’re directed at thwarting. They work well, too, and a cell phone jammer is credited with thwarting an assassination attempt on the life of Pervez Musharraf, the Friend of America and Pakistan’s Ruler for Life in 2003. Warlock Blue is an upgrade from Warlock Green, that allows defensive jamming across a broader range of frequencies, to thwart sneaky channels who switch frequencies and thus get through to their friend Mr. Bomb despite our best jamming efforts. The Warlocks are small, portable units, but larger ones are available, for other uses, including “communication control during riots.” As this ad for the TRJ-89 SERIES TACTICAL RESPONSE JAMMER shows (see below), this unit will tow behind your vehicle and block cell calls in or out up to a radius of five miles. That’s helpful when law enforcement are required to deploy “a blanket of radio frequency silence.”
The TRJ-89 model was designed specifically for TACTICAL RESPONSE units required to deploy a blanket of RF silence during the following situations:
a. Explosive device location(s) (bombs)
b. Hostage situations (campus environments)
c. Communication control during Riots
d. Military intervention
The TRJ-89 can be easily towed behind most vehicles, is electrically self sufficient, and has a maximum jamming radius of up to five miles.
According to Wayne Madsen, ham radio operators said communications of specific frequencies were intentionally jammed during the flooding of New Orleans from an “intermittent frequency jammer operating south-southwest of New Orleans aboard a U.S. Navy ship. A former Department of Defense source says the U.S. Army uses a portable jammer known as Warlock in Iraq, and the jammer may be similar to the one that is jamming the emergency frequencies.” Whether Madsen is right about the cause of all the cell phone dysfunction in the New Orleans area is difficult to know, unless more disclosures occur. What we do know is that on August 29, 2005, Howard Melamed, CEO of CellAntenna Corp. of Coral Springs, Florida, urged Congress to change the law and let not only the federal government, but also state, county and city law enforcement, buy CellAntenna’s cell phone jammers. In Europe and elsewhere, in fact, small jammers are becoming ubiquitous. They’re in the Greek subways, Mexican churches, Indian temples, and Tokyo theaters and commuter trains. Could one have been deployed by FEMA and the military in New Orleans? Well, duh. But why would they? Given what we know they did – standing around watching people die while sitting on a mountain of supplies – you’d just have to answer, “Why not?"