Down on the Farm

A report from the AP today that the Bush administration won’t require farmers (read agribusiness, family farmers now exist only in the specious arguments against estate taxes) to register their animals in a national database to track outbreaks of diseases.
More wrong thinking from people who think laissez-faire and caveat emptor is the answer to everything. The danger of leaving food safety in the hands of the market was exposed during the Spanish American War when more troops died from eating Armours bully beef than in combat. The White House is bowing to the Cattlemen again, remember, the people who tried to sue Oprah? They consider deaths from e-coli and bovine spongiform encephalopathy an acceptable part of their business model. Worse, consider the billions we spend to keep mad jihadders from blowing themselves up in our planes and buildings. Such attacks could kill thousands. This is small beer compared to what a cheap and dirty biological attack on the food supply could do to this country. A testing and inspection regime comparable to what is done in Europe and Japan could detect and contain such an attack. This inaction by the people who claim to be protecting us is identical to their insistence on leaving our healthcare system in the hands of buccaneers in the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries in a time when we have been threatened with biological attack. Remember, Saddam Hussein had anthrax spores, hell, they came from U.S. Army stocks at Fort Dietrich Maryland. Ask Donald Rumsfeld about that one.