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Tree Swallow

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Fox in the henhouse

There is an interesting article at Bloomberg, Boar's Head disaster shows the price of deregulation.

This summer, Boar’s Head Provisions Co. entered the recent pantheon of companies, alongside Boeing Co. and Abbott Laboratories, that could’ve used a little more oversight for their own good. The deli food giant spent more than a century building itself into a nationwide leader across multiple product categories only to torch its reputation over the past few months with tainted deli meat. A listeria outbreak that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked to unsanitary conditions in the company’s Jarratt, Virginia, plant has killed 10 people and sickened far more, prompting multiple lawsuits and a promised congressional investigation. Boar’s Head has announced it will close the affected plant, wiping out more than 200 jobs in a small town that depended on it, according to the New York Times.

Ten people dead from Boar's Head products. I didn't know that, did you?

The cry from the GOP that ripples through their talking points and their Project 2025 handbook, is to open it up and get the government off businesses backs. They can police themselves, right?

They can't and they don't.

This is a Robert Reich opinion piece that is a year and a half old but still salient, Republican Deregulation Is Dragging Us Back to the 19th Century. It is still worth reading, the whole thing, not just what I have excerpted and highlighted.

I'm not surprised that migrant children who have been coming into the United States from Latin America without their parents, fleeing violence and poverty, have ended up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country. And I'm not surprised that a train carrying dangerous chemicals derailed, causing a toxic plume that is sickening people in Ohio. In fact, I'm not surprised that corporate greed is making life dangerous for ever greater numbers of people.

I saw it when I was secretary of labor in the early 1990s, overseeing enforcing the nation's labor laws. The department had only 1,100 inspectors responsible for the health and safety of 130 million workers, including any children who might be working illegally in dangerous conditions. And not even the biggest penalty we could impose was high enough to deter companies that treated such fines as the cost of doing business.

The labor department is still woefully understaffed and penalties are still too low. Every time the department's budget is up for review, members of Congress—mostly though not entirely Republicans—refuse to appropriate enough funds for inspectors or to increase penalties.

So of course migrant children coming into the United States, fleeing violence and poverty, have ended up in dangerous jobs. In Delaware, Mississippi, and North Carolina, young children are working in slaughterhouses. In Michigan, young children are making auto parts used by Ford and General Motors. In Virginia, girls as young as 13 are washing hotel sheets. In Florida and Tennessee, 12-year-olds are doing roofing jobs. In South Dakota, children are sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts.

Unfortunately we can't trust businesses to police themselves . And I don't think we can trust the Elon Musks of the world to run our space programs or Starlink, where he can show favoritism to Putin and his right wing cronies and punish Ukraine.

Mark Cuban did a good job showing the world what a liar Musk is this week.

“Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform that’s lost nearly 80% of its value since he took over.

He then asserted, without any evidence, that Democrats are flying immigrants “directly into swing states” who are then “fast-tracked to citizenship” for the purpose of altering the outcome of the election.

The claim is false.

It turns out that noncitizens must first spend at least five years as a lawful permanent resident before they’re  eligible for naturalization, Musk’s conspiracy theory would have had to begin during the Trump administration to bear any meaningful fruit. (The average number of years in the U.S. for citizens naturalized in 2023 was actually longer: seven years.)

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the top 10 states where people who were naturalized last year reside are: California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia . 

Nine-tenths of those are not swing states. Pennsylvania, the lone exception, only accounted for 2.8% of those naturalized in 2023. More than 50% live in California, Texas, Florida and New York.

Musk’s rant also caught the eye of Mark Cuban, who fact-checked Musk using Twitter’s own “anti-woke” AI chatbot Grok, which Musk concocted after finding competitors were too politically liberal.

“Hey [Elon Musk], truly appreciate the work you have done with [Grok].” Cuban wrote to Musk in a public message. “It’s a great way to factcheck you.”

Cuban then shared a link to Grok’s lengthy analysis of Musk’s claim.

The chatbot concluded that Musk’s xenophobic theory “contains exaggerated claims and speculative fears rather than factual analysis,” and was “presented in an alarmist and overly deterministic manner.”

I could have told you.

We need government regulation. It protects our food, our drugs, our water, our air, our soil. As bloated and inefficient as they admittedly are, I trust the regulators a hell of a lot more than I trust big business.

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Third Teen Worker Killed In Industrial Accident As States Try To Loosen Child Labor Laws

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Seven ways the Trump administration deregulated the food system during the Covid 19 pandemic.

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The Republican party puts polluters over people.

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Trump administration rolled back over 100 environmental laws.

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Party of pollution, disease and death

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Immigrant child laborers are being killed in US factories. Companies are walking away with fines.

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