Pack this one in amber so that later generations will understand the Bush era:
At one point, Parnell said his workers “desperately at least need to turn the raw peanuts on our floor into money” and at another point told his plant manager to “turn them loose” after learning some peanuts were contaminated with salmonella.
The disclosures came in correspondence released by a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee Wednesday during a hearing on the salmonella outbreak that has sickened 600 people, may be linked to eight deaths and has led to one of the largest recalls in history with more than 1,800 product pulled.
A federal criminal investigation is under way.
“We appear to have a total systemic breakdown,” said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the committee’s investigations panel.
Rick Perlstein (writing in early 2007) on what happened to the FDA under Bush:
The Associated Press studied the records and found that between 2003 and 2006 the Food and Drug Administration conducted 47 percent fewer safety inspections. FDA field offices have 12 percent fewer employees. Safety tests for food produced in the United States have gone down by three quarters—have almost ground to a halt—in the previous year alone.
[…..]Public relations has a lot to do with the way you’ve been learning about the Third Worlding of America’s food safety system. The Georgia source of the bad peanut butter was discovered in the middle of February. The very next day Dole recalled several thousand cartons of cantaloupe that their own “routine” inspections suggested might be carrying salmonella. Four days later, B.J.’s Wholesale Club recalled packaged fresh mushrooms: more routine inspections, this time coming up with E. coli. They always say the inspections are “routine.” But they also always manage to somehow come in clusters.
Connect the dots, and you suddenly notice a lot of these…coincidences.
What do we care if the world is a joke?