This morning I set out on a very specific search; a hunt for the corporate links to the massive recalls of beef. This is the second vast beef recall in two months.
The irrepressible bad news about the the foods began last year with the E. coli spinach. An organic crop contamination was traced back to a factory farm, manure runoff.
Then we had the pets dying from tainted foods, from chemo drugs to antifreeze in the discount toothpastes and upscale body products, lead paint toys from China.
That doesn't begin to count what's been approved, ignored or unknown in the gmo food. Today the search was the friendsters tied to 5,226 pounds of ground beef, across seven states, that may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.
The story has been cycled through the news with little mention of connections to ConAgra or the bigger companies.
Reporting has instead followed the Pentagon style of kick it down, as far as it can go. Then take it one more, hold one step up in reserve as insurance and sacrifice to any suggestion of investigative findings and justice being done.
To find everyone of significance involved is as easy as going to the FDA recall announcement, a step edited for us in widespread reporting so there is no alarming the public.
That is not good for business and what's good for business is every regulator's concern and we live in the age of corporate government partnerships. Unprecedented numbers of formerly Federal payroll jobs have now been privatized and are in the hands of a cadre of Equity Club Investors.
Among the Equity Club members, Mitt Romney and Bain Capital that bought Bill Frist's Medicare fraud plagued HCA and Dunkin' Donuts and Toys R Us, all tied to the tainted food, agribusiness subsidies, cheap toys made at slave wages and policy driven income that never seems to make it into the stories about a man running for the White House.
Cycle it through the news with some goodwill and crisis management PR. Get the coverage back to Rudy v. Hillary and how being in Iowa spending millions on advertising, to fine tune the message, is preferable to working in the office we pay you to hold, or in some resolution building effort as a committed citizen.
They could be tending to one or two things that may be of value and importance to the Nation. Surely there's a to do list for Congress where they could break the past record of 90 days in session and tackle something that's unresolved. Really makes me scratch my head and wonder at the absurdity of the presumption.
Even now as the mainstream eases into covering what the Comedy central and cyberspace audiences have known for so long the omissions and spin takes a kind of hubris, actually discounting the collective National intellect into the double digits that can always be managed. Never mind, onward with protecting Americans and my detour in the recall archives of the FDA, shall we?
This made me so angry steam practically blew out of my ears, not because it was so different from the normal abuse of public trust and lack of oversight for industry we've come to bank on but because it was published on the 25th of September, less than two weeks ago and I never heard a word and this is 100% preventable, if we one whit cared about protecting lives as much as profits.
Women of child bearing age might not know that the common prescription drugs they take could cause birth defects should they become pregnant. That's because most doctors don't take the time to council patients on potential drug side-effects when they prescribe medications.
The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) does classify drugs according to their risks for birth defects. But a busy doctor, under pressure to see as many patients as possible, might not take the time to look up a drug's FDA classification. A wide range of prescription drugs, including some antibiotics, acne medicines, cholesterol drugs, sleep aids and blood thinners, are known to carry a high risk of birth defects.
In a study of nearly 500,000 women, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center found that nearly half were not told by their doctors that a particular prescription drug caused birth defects. As a result, a patient might not have taken precautions to avoid becoming pregnant while taking such a medication.
This is the simplest issue to address since it is relevant to everyone in the public. There are tomorrow's babies and they come from every part of the Nation and the affected are all who take prescription drugs. I'm not up for the exact math but it's got to be worth having labels added to every Rx medication warning that woman who may become pregnant risk serious effects to their unborn children. Even people who know a woman, who may become pregnant, might like to know and pass the information along.
Whether its the lead in the baby toys, the e-coli in the factory farm beef processed in the Sinclair style slaughterhouses staffed by illegals, the Monsanto factor in your food or the drive through doctor visits with pages of microscopic print listing warning of dire and deadly consequences, the fact is Uncle Sam is watching out for the corporate friendsters and you my fellow Americans are on your own to protect yourselves.
If it's a nursing home you're headed for, Warburg Pincus and Carlyle have got a collection they've just bled dry and rolled over for a tidy profit.
There's Dan Quayle and Snow's IAP Worldwide run as the Walter Reed facility known as Building 18. For those in uniform returning from Iraq, missing limbs, maimed and injured, sidelined in life for your sacrafice, you can sacrafice a bit more for the financial comforts of the corporate friendsters.
Despite record spending for war and the contractors, the Army hospital is bled dry and left crumbling, just like the bridges, there's never enough for the ones who stepped, up or who toil, as we can not afford to do well care for our children but we can pay to build a bridge dubbed the Heroin Highway, to effectively distribute the record opium yields Afghanistan has managed to see flourish in the years of military occupation..
But it is good times for those who sit back and push paper, sellers of arms and equipment, oil and drugs have seen their values soar. We the public have seen the cash value of our homes and savings drop like a rock.
Politics and policy go on as usual, with champagne and caviar flights between Wall Street's Washington H.Q. and the little islands where their nested corporations and subs assigns and joint ventures swirl to a tidy mix of greed deception and fraud, fueled by hardworking American taxpayers. Are we there yet?
