Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Salmonella farm no different than BP or Chilean mine bosses; hide the truth as long as you can get away with it no matter what the consequences.

The energy industry, mining, Kosher meat factories, you name it, production in the hands of private individuals or consortium's will always mean putting profit before public safety whether its Chile or the US. Now it comes to light that the Iowa egg company at the center of the recent Salmonella outbreak “held back two years of testing results showing Salmonella had been found at the farm” the Wall Street Journal reports today. The information came out of a US House Subcommittee investigating the issue. These investigations and revelations always come after the fact.

The Iowa company, Wright County Egg Co, tested positive for Salmonella at its facility before the Salmonella outbreak became big news. Between 2008 and 2010, Wright received “426 positive results for salmonella including 73 samples that were potentially positive for salmonella enteritidis, the same strain that sickened 1519 people.” the report says.


In response to questioning about his inability to see the financial crisis coming, former fed guru, Alan Greenspan blamed it on the bankers; he was shocked that they didn’t regulate their own excessive behavior.  He was lying of course but the idea that capitalism can regulate itself, can make itself human friendly has been proven flawed long ago.   Egg manufacturers are no different, their purpose in the production process is the extraction of surplus value, the source of their profit, it just happens to be in the production of eggs in this example.

Naturally, the eggheads atop Wright and company intend to “fully respond” to the investigation, the WSJ adds. Remember the hearings when they dragged the auto bosses up to Washington before they gave them a bailout after slashing jobs and worker’s living standards? Henry Waxman should have won an Oscar for his performance chiding the CEO’s for their behavior. All a charade I’m afraid, a scam where the political representatives of these characters cover for them in the public eye.

They all “fully respond” after neighborhoods or whole cities have been destroyed and workers killed, but if that did any good we would see a significant decline in these incidents but they continue.

The only way these disasters can be averted is a strong organized presence of the workers on the job. It is in our interests not the bosses to put safety before the bottom line, before profit. Ultimately, these issues will only be dealt with seriously when production is taken out of private hands and is determined collectively by those who work in an industry and those who consume from it.

For one thing, we’d sure as hell produce food in a different way. Anyone whose been to a chicken or hog farm would guarantee that. And we’d be a lot healthier for it.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

As the ancient Greek poet said,"man is money".this has been the problem with a cash economy since it started.
merchants bought in order to sell at a profit.the system kept getting larger and spinning out of control because of greed.the capitalist class kept demanding more and more money.eventually these civilizations self destructed.the capitalists proved incapable of sharing the wealth.it seems that we have learned very poorly from our ancestors.the chicken factories,the oil companies and the bankers demanding enormous bonuses are great examples.wealth is simply not being shared.