Homeland Security?
Debbye Turner, the resident vet at CBS, warns that there are indications that the final number of deaths will be in the hundreds when the results are in for the tainted pet food. Matthew Philips of Newsweek asks Is Pet Food Properly Regulated?
I don’t mean to pick on Mr. Philips, but he needs to look at recent history, which makes the answer obvious – pet food has a lower priority than human food, and the record on regulation of human food is shameful.
Wikipedia maintains a List of United States foodborne illness outbreaks. If you come forward from year 2000 you will find:
- Salmonella in peanut butter, bean sprouts, and orange juice,
- E. coli O157:H7 in lettuce, spinach, and hamburger,
- Hepatitis A in green onions,
- Listeria in chicken, and
- Botulism in fish.
In case people have forgotten the mantra of Republans is that regulation is bad for business and should be avoided because of the costs. They forget about the costs involved when people and pets die from the lack of regulation. They forget about the cost associated with government bailouts after unregulated businesses go bust.
Right now we are looking at “Resolution Trust II” to clean up the mess in the home mortgage sector. More billions of tax dollars to rescue people from what unregulated business does under Republans.
And some people still believe these clowns are going to protect us from terrorists? All al Qaeda has to do is incorporate in Delaware and they’ll receive tax breaks and subsidies.
7 comments
Note that this is everyone’s problem. It won’t save you to be vegetarian or even vegan or macrobiotic. No matter who you are, and no matter what you eat… what happened to these pets can happen to you.
Regulation is one of the most essential and legitimate tasks of government, but the nuts in charge right now aren’t doing any and aren’t having any. Now there’s something to worry about: unregulated nuts, and not just those in the PB jar.
The thing people don’t understand is if problems are caught while products are still in the warehouse, no one has to know there’s a problem. When the problem is shipped all over the country and you have to recall products with a national media announcement, you are going to take a major hit and lose clients.
Quality control and inspections are good for business, when compared to any of these disasters.
Well I love this one in the vein of some High Broderisms on the “magic asterisks” of the Supply Siders –
“Stockman devised the first Reagan budget, with its broad tax cuts and big boosts in military spending, and helped move it through Congress over the objections of skeptical Democrats. At the same time, he secretly began giving weekly interviews to Bill Greider, a Post editor and an old friend of his. When Greider published an article based on the interviews, called “The Education of David Stockman,” in the Atlantic magazine, all hell broke loose.
Stockman told Greider that the Reagan budget was built on false premises, that it employed a “magic asterisk” to conceal the size of its inevitable deficits and that the tax cuts he had championed were really designed to benefit the wealthy. The detailed accounting of the internal battles that produced a budget that would saddle the country with years of debt was a stunning indictment of the very administration in which Stockman was serving.”
This applies to Just about everything Republican’ts! *Built on False Premises* is the understatement of the YEAR on how they DO Business!
It as if they don’t understand the entire concept of accident prevention. They may all be gambling addicts. That would explain their disdain for social safety nets, OSHA, or any other form of assistance – they are betting that nothing bad will happen and everything will follow the path they see in their fevered little brain stems.
I don’t think that it even has anything to do with “betting that nothing bad will happen” — they SIMPLY DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
Profits are all that matter, and they generally think, much like the pharmaceutical companies, that the disgustingly high profits will far outweigh the potential liability, seeing as how they have a 4-500% profit margin and the tax write-offs that they get for what little R&D that they still do.
And in the Bush world, as we all know, it’s PEOPLE who are disposable, and any “ancillary items” (four-legged furry children) are just so much more paperwork.
Kinda hard not to crawl into a hole and pull the rock across the entrance when you look at the way that these greed-whores have corrupted and destroyed so much of the planet.
They don’t even bother to learn enough to understand that one of these incidents can destroy a member of their base. People and animals are going to die, and the law suits will follow as the night follows the day. Merck is headed to the dust bin of history because of Vioxx. Some of the farms involved in the other problems will never recover their clients.
Screw the stockholders, but the workers are going to be without jobs.
They corrupt everything they touch and death and destruction follows in their wake. The cartoon at your place isn’t just about the war, it’s about every major screw-up since 2001.
Yuppers.
What scares me is how so few people, even on the progressive internet tubes, realize or recognize that we are already IN a fucking depression. Jobs still disappearing every damned day, prices being artificially inflated, even FOOD is becoming a luxury, and yet the billionaire motherfuckers keep flaunting their waste, greed, and ego.
Within the next five years, “EAT THE RICH” is going to become more than a goofy Aerosmith song, it’s going to become the MENU.
Start stocking-up on those canned-goods & water, kids.