The E. coli Free Market — In These Times

Today, vast corporate enterprises—protected by a legal system that defines corporations as persons endowed with the same constitutional rights as flesh-and-blood people—control whole sectors of the U.S. economy, the three branches of government and the Fourth Estate (the mass media through which the public gets its information). The end result: an interconnected, self-reinforcing system of political power—Corporate America—that operates outside human control. (Of course, the machine is oiled by a class in thrall to their six, seven and eight figure paychecks.) Concerns about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness aside, the problem with this system is that it is, ultimately, unsustainable. Not only does this corporate behemoth chew up and spit out the people it employs as wage slaves, it gorges on resources of the natural world, disrupting the balance of life on Earth.

Great begining about corporations in general but then they go into corporate agriculture in general.

The real culprit, in this case, is corporate agriculture, which uses economies of scale to mass produce food. And while the consumer may benefit in the form of lower prices, America’s agricultural communities bear the brunt of this consolidation. Consider these statistics. According to the Department of Agriculture, in 2001, 5 percent of U.S. farms, both corporate and family, raised 54 percent of the nation’s beef and dairy cattle, hogs and poultry. Ten percent of farm owners received 63 percent of the $27 billion in federal farm subsidies paid out in 2000. Between 1994 and 1996, about 25 percent of hog farmers, 10 percent of grain farmers and 10 percent of dairy farmers went out of business. Of the 50 poorest counties in the United States, all but one are rural and agriculturally dependent. The United States today has more people in prison than people farming. And, thanks to the war on drugs, more of those people in prison come from farm families, as crystal meth does to rural America what crack did to America’s inner cities.

This excerpt is to show how corporations through profit maximization and creating lower prices can end up hurting people.

One could also look closer to home, to the 199 people fell who ill and the three who died after eating spinach contaminated with E. coli 157 bacteria. E. coli 157 was discovered in 1982, and now, on average, is responsible for some 20,000 infections and 200 deaths per year in the United States. Today, infection from E. coli 157 is the single greatest cause of kidney failure in children.

The origin of the recent outbreak is thought to be cattle that are fed a grain-based diet—more precisely the manure they produce. As researchers at Cornell University discovered in 1998, cows that graze or eat hay, as nature intended, do not produce the pathogen in their stomach.

This can become serious especially when the massive buildup of manure can end up polluting the water. The article goes on to highlight the “biosolids” movement which is also very dangerous. The sewage treatment industry hired a PR firm to reclassify sludge from sewer plants as “biosolids” that can be spread as a fertilizer.

So, where others see a mountain of E-coli 157 contaminated, factory farm cow shit, the sludge industry—which lobbies under the National Biosolids Partnership (a joint venture of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, the Water Environment Federation and EPA)—sees opportunity: Tons upon tons of cattle feces waiting to be processed.

This is disgusting. Besides corporations i’m quickly learning of the power of PR firms like Edelman as well.

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