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On Feb. 18, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued the largest beef recall in US history, calling for the destruction of 143 million pounds of processed beef from a Chino, California slaughterhouse, owned by Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. The recall was based on a clandestine investigation by a Humane Society worker passing as an employee, who secretly videotaped conditions that were previously unreported by USDA inspectors. Some 37 million pounds of this suspect beef was sold, and likely consumed, before the recall went into effect, by schools nationwide. In 2005 Westland/Hallmark was named “supplier of the year” by the National School Lunch Program–$39 million of their $100 million in sales over the last year that is impacted by the recall was sold to this federal program.
Although this very unappetizing news might lead some to convert to veganism, it is not so shocking to consumers lately who have been overwhelmed by announcements of lead paint on toys from China, or impurities in candies imported from third world manufacturers. What is obvious in all of this is the apparent disemboweling and defanging of our regulatory agencies by the current occupant of the White House. To the extent that you, as a consumer, risk your health or perhaps your life by going shopping is of little consequence. In the “free market” lingo, the watch words are “let the buyer beware” and we should be very wary of exactly what we are being sold by Bush & Co. with advice from the Chicago School of Economics advisors.
Oddly enough, it was just 100 years ago that the famous author and socialist Upton Sinclair published his most powerful novel, The Jungle, which so rocked this nation’s meat packing industry and shocked the Congress that President Teddy Roosevelt swiftly signed the first ever regulations creating the Food and Drug Administration and the USDA inspection of meat. The single biggest distinction between then and now is that Teddy was the last progressive Republican President to know better than to trust the big industrialists. Bush, in contrast, seems to routinely be sleeping with them and appointing them to oversee our regulatory agencies like the EPA or the Department of Energy.
I feel as though I am watching the replay of a silent era film that my grandparents saw back in the day, where the evil industrial barons squeezed every last dime out of the working class family to maximize their profits, while the average American worker toiled for enough wages to buy the basics of tainted meat and a loaf of bread for the table. And even though each of these failures of regulatory inspection can be seen, and are
reported in the corporate media, as individual incidents, what is increasingly clear is that they follow
the policy of “hollowing out” and downsizing the government. In other words, these failures didn’t just happen by mistake but by design.
While our national attention has been drawn to focus on the threats of terrorism from abroad, with gigantic
portions of our Congressionally approved budget spent on an ever increasing privatized war on terrorism, the Neo-cons in the Bush/Cheney régime have emasculated and defunded agency after agency at home. The end result being a stew of corruption and greed by both government contractors and corporations doing what they do best, making a profit regardless of the consequences to either the nation as a whole or you, the consumers. The height of such scandalous cronyism has not been seen since the time of Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, which some may recall ended in the great stock market crash of 1929. The Enron scandal and the Countrywide sub prime loan “meltdown” may be just the tip of the returning free market iceberg to sink our Titanic economy this time.
If this is not enough to either inspire or frighten the Democrats from assuming power in the next election, Bush has fired the parting salvo of a $295 billion budget deficit to sink any aspirations of universal health care, refunding education or seriously rebuilding public infrastructures. Like the old nursery rhyme—old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard much to her surprise she found it was bare.
Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle should be returned to the reading lists for all our English and history classes, as we are now doomed to repeat this history, simply because we made the mistake of thinking that crooks like George Bush couldn’t turn back the clock on the hard won social reforms of the last century. And he is bound and determined to have us repeat it again.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance– and we should be the most vigilant of those who wield the greatest power with the least understanding of history.
