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Tuesday, March 20, 2007

More fallout from lax regulation
Posted by Jill | 6:03 AM
This is what happens when you try to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Peter Pan peanut butter is contaminated with salmonella. Bagged spinach with e-coli. Chicken with listeria. And now the Menu Foods pet food recall is causing grief to millions of pet owners.

If you've ever had a cat, you've probably dealt with the relentless spiral of kidney failure. At first there's the more frequent water consumption. Then tests and low-protein foods that are easier to process. Then either euthanasia or an indeterminate period of subcutaneous fluid injections. It's not fun. If you're lucky, it happens when the cat is elderly and you can at least console yourself that the cat has had a good long run of it and it's part of the bargain you make when you bring them into your life. What you don't expect is to lose a young, healthy animal to kidney failure, and you sure as hell don't expect it to happen because you thought you were buying better-quality, high-end pet food brands such as Eukanuba, Science Diet, Iams, and Nutro.

"Less regulation" is a mantra Republicans have been using for years, under the delusion that when left alone, corporations will do the right thing, and if they don't, "market forces" will punish them. Perhaps that's true to some extent, particularly in the case of Menu Foods, which is now certainly facing a number of lawsuits. But when the damage done by corporations results in death, it's difficult to defend "market forces" to the parents of Kyle Algood, a two-year-old who died from Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome resulting from an E. coli infection from contaminated spinach, or Kevin Kowalcyk, another two-year-old who died in 2001 from consuming food contaminated with E. coli. Or ask the grieving pet owners who have already seen their pets die from kidney failure and those whose pets are still in danger. Ask Adrienne Ostrowski, Bruce Johnson, or this guy.

Those of us who have pets love them as much as we love other family members, for all that we only expect to have them barely a decade and a half -- if we're lucky. Tainted food should not be a partisan issue. This is not a situation where only pets owned by registered Democrats get sick. The fact is that corporate policy is geared towards the short-term bottom line -- satisfy the analysts for this quarter, pay this quarter's dividend, and don't worry about what lies ahead next quarter. We'll cross that bridge when we get there. And if the short-term bottom line for food companies means cutting corners on safety, well so be it.

Americans have bought this Republican mantra of "less government" for over two decades, ever since Reagan convinced them that government spending equals welfare to buy Cadillacs for 'welfare queens'. The Bush Administration has just further underscored that where the Republican Party is concerned, "less government" isn't about individual freedoms but about corporate freedom and corporate profits -- and hang the consequences. This pet food recall, and those people killed by previous tainted food episodes, are, as far as the Republican Party is concerned, just collateral damage -- an inevitable and acceptable outcome of the Doctrine of Corporate Rights.

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