Capitalists just don’t care. They care about making profits. The US has now joined with China in food scandals where company officials knowingly and deliberately sold off contaminated and deadly food substances to the general public. Salmonella found at Ga. plant as early as 2006 Owner Stewart Parnell of Peanut Corporation of America refused to testify at Congressional hearing; 9 have now died
And we here at NotMyTribe personally know one of those people effected by this horrible Salmonella epidemic, and it has made a mess of our friend’s life! We have no functioning Public Health System that can be depended on in our country and plenty of people are negatively impacted by this sad reality. Why do people have to live this way in our modern age?
And where were our FDA guardians when lab tests were showing Salmonella time and time again at the peanut plant? The bastards don’t act until illness and death force them to. Even then they merely wring their hands and order all peanut products off the shelves until an “investigation” can be completed, which penalizes organic growers and manufacturers as well as end consumers.
You’d expect heartless behavior from corporate twits, but the FDA is called stand in the gap between us and them and make sure that our food supply is safe, something we can’t do ourselves in this Corporate Age. Unfortunately the FDA is the most incompetent and corrupt of all governmental agencies, or maybe it’s that their malevolence affects me most directly. Either way, it’s clear they are not our protectors.
It is seriously time for each of us to find new ways to feed our families, to reconnect to the land, to locate suppliers that are trustworthy and closer to home. Maybe as close as our own backyards!
Ms. Walden,
If you, your family, and/or friend(s) have been affected, I hope that you/they are better now.
Clearly, there has been a regulatory failure. Had a more effective regulatory framework been in place and had more effective regulatory oversight been practiced, the housing bubble and the consequences of its collapse would likely have been less than they are now and at least some health-related matters such as the one you describe might have been avoided.
Furthermore, there has been an observed tendency where, over time, regulatory agencies evolve into de facto captives of the industries they are supposed to oversee. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed, “…regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age—after a matter of ten or fifteen years—they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.”
Markets are good and most market participants are decent. Markets are not perfect and not every market actor is good. Markets have limitations on account of the realities of human nature, existence of asymmetric information, production of externalities, etc. There is a need for an adequate and effective, though not excessive, regulatory framework to reduce the risk and mitigate the consequences associated with market imperfections and market failure.
I believe that she is doing better, Don.