Yogurt, Chicken, and Child Labor

This post began as a diatribe by myself to an invisible audience in my travel journal. My infant daughter (Nibble,1f) is on vacation with us and has been eating copious amounts of Greek Yogurt to help combat the diarrhea caused by an antibiotic, cefdinir. In my musings, I wandered what it would have been like to travel with an infant suffering an ear infection with little to soothe her than the ineffective and near-witchcraft style medicine available prior to the age of antibiotics. I then began to write about what medicine may be like in the future and realized that along our current trajectory the Star-Trek-esque future we hope for likely isn’t a possibility.

The Final Frontier, for Medicine?

Nibble had Greek yogurt to help combat all the bubble gut from the cefdinir, an antibiotic for her ear infection. It’s insane to think that a few years ago (80~) an ear infection would have been treated by essentially witchcraft and even stranger to realize that because of a corporatist drive for “good enough” and “cheap enough” we may not ever get medicine advanced past this point.

There is a perverse incentive in our current system to produce products that provide the worst-best-option for the consumer, but the most profitable version for the corporatist. We can see this in the way that Amazon has recently been destroying its delivery and video-on-demand services. Pushing the threshold of “terrible” and “not-so-terrible the customer quits”. Prime’s enshittified advertising - Pluralistic.net

Sitting here in Delight, Arkansas, two news stories have reverberated through my mind and dominated our conversations. First a Tyson meat processing plant here in Arkansas has been caught with an eleven year old employee. A teacher reported students employed at the factory after over hearing one student complaining that they were scheduled for an 11p.m. to 7a.m. shift the night before school and another complaining that they weren’t sure how to use an ATM to get access to their direct deposited paycheck. Tyson foods under investigation again for child labor violations - Arkansas Times

As if this wasn’t insane enough, Tyson and other meat processors are already under investigation for monopolization, vertical integration and price fixing.McDonald’s sues top meat packers, alleging price fixing - Associated Press And the DNC is on the verge of putting in Kamala Harris, a candidate bought and paid for with the same corporatist dollars that demand the removal of Lina Khan from the Federal Trade Commission. Two billionaire Harris donors hope she will fire FTC Chair Lina Khan - CNBC

Even worse, Trump’s Christian (in name only) Nationalist friends at the Heritage Foundation, and author’s of Project 2025 call for an end to child labor laws, stating:

Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job. With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations.This would give a green light to training programs and build skills in teenagers who may want to work in these fields. - Project 2025, A Mandate for Leadership, pg 595 - PDF

How did we get here?

During Covid it seemed that people started to wake up to the level of exploitation and abuses at all levels. With union membership on the rise, the corporatist ruling class has realized the jig is up. If we can’t offshore the jobs, and we can’t decrease quality any further, we’ll have to exploit the workers harder.

A graph showing CEO pay at 1300% higher than 1978 levels

CEO pay has skyrocketed 1322% since 1978 - Economic Policy Center

Monopolization and Vertical Integration

If workers are protected by unions, then we need to find another way to effect the market. Monopolization allows for the neat trick of price fixing of goods past their value and into the upper limit of not only what customers are willing to pay, but what they’re able to pay as well.

It also allows for a reduction of quality which drives the cost-to-produce lower and lower. (Increasing profit!)

As quality reduces to the furthest limit customers will allow, and prices rise to the maximum customers will allow, the next obvious place to rob of money, the corporatists’ God, is the worker.

And finally it allows for the erosion of worker power in highly specialized fields. Highly skilled workers and craftsmen, in theory, have the market option to sell their labor where ever they would like. But due to the evils of non-compete agreements, another thing Khan’s FTC has went after, and monopolization, workers have less power and less choice about who they sell their labor to. Federal judge tosses U.S. ban on non-competes - NPR

If I’m an expert at butchering fowl and I expect to have insurance and a steady wage, my options may be between Tyson….and Tyson. And even if I attempted to go to one of the other 4 meat packers left in the US, the non-compete likely prevents me.

Furthering the humiliation, if I try and compete with Tyson and open my own chicken hatcheries, butchers, etc…Tyson will suddenly find itself a fervent proponent of very specific and strenuous regulations on small chicken production facilities. In some cases, (read: most), these regulations are introduced into Congress as boilerplate legislation from “special interest groups” (i.e.; legal bribery rackets) Who actually writes Congressional Bills? Not the Leaders you Elected

In all this, it’s not capitalism itself that have failed, rather the buying of influence in the American Experiment has devolved impossibly far into crony corporatism.

FDA Recalls

The second story to hit the news today is an FDA recall for listeria in the same meat packing plants mentioned above. BrucePac Recalls Ready-To-Eat Meat and Poultry Products Due to Possible Listeria Contamination - USDA

Read the full story above, but put simply, the FDA discovered 11,765,285 pounds of listeria contaminated meat in the supply chain. If this sounds familiar, unfortunately, these are becoming regular enough that I should distinguish and say this is not the Boar’s Head Deli meat listeria outbreak identified in July that has already killed 10. Boar’s Head Provisions Co. Recalls Ready-To-Eat Liverwurst and Other Deli Meat Products due to Possible Listeria Contamination - USDA

Instead, BrucePac found that it had sent infected pre-cooked chicken to Kroger, Target, Walmart, 7-Eleven, Trader Joe’s, Amazon, H.E.B., and numerous others with over 340 labels included at time of writing. USDA Labels and Recall List - PDF - USDA

Originally though to be nine million pounds of food, the number has now increased to nearly twelve million and additional labels are continuously being added. And these foods didn’t just arrive on grocery store shelves, they’ve also been distributed through restaurant supply companies, to state institutions (hospitals and prisons) and to schools.

After discussing the dangers of monopolization and driving down production by tanking quality, we’ll refrain from beating, grinding, macerating, and shipping a dead horse to school children as lunch. But we should stop to consider the fragility of supply chains caused by consolidation (vertical integrations).

As much as software, oil, and microchips are a part of the National Security conversation, it should be understood that a single chicken process providing contaminated chicken to Walmart, Target, etc… is as equally dangerous as a singly managed, centrally planned chicken farm under Mao or Stalin.

But so far, there are few if any cries from Congress about National Security. Want someone think of the Children!? The only bill I know of, introduced by Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) has been introduced but sits in committee year after year. S.346 - Meat and Poultry Special Investigator Act of 2023 - Congress.gov

Luckily Congress is working hard to make sure that our meat, while infectious, will make use of the latest and greatest in Blockchain technology. H.R.4199 - To amend the Agricultural Research, Extension, and Education Reform Act of 1998 to establish and carry out a pilot program to use blockchain technology in food safety and labeling - Congress.gov

Also, readers would do good to remember that while the food we eat not killing us may not be a concern for national security, the trains are. Or at least the Biden admin thought so in 2022 when they stopped rail yard workers from negotiating a new contract by declaring them a National Security concern. Biden signs bill to block U.S. railroad strike - Reuters Workers wouldn’t receive a tentative agreement from BNSF until 2 years later, in fact, just a few weeks ago. SMART-TD reaches tentative agreement with BNSF

The next few weeks will be an interesting. Either we continue down the path of profit extraction from quality and workers wages, or the FTC, DHS, and others begin to fight back and protect our country from within and without. With billionaires chomping at the bit to get rid of Lina Khan, unless there’s a significant surprise waiting for us in November; I don’t like our chances.

As for my family, we’re paying down debt as quickly as possible on core items, the mortgage and vehicles. We’re taking our Mutual Aid Group commitment more seriously and have begun building community in our neighborhood and town.

If you’re interested in Mutual Aid Groups, check out this article from theCut What exactly is Mutual Aid? How to Get Involved - theCUT

In short, people offer help — which could be resources, like food or money, or skills, like driving or picking up prescriptions — which are then redistributed to those in the community who are in need. Mutual-aid systems operate under the notion that everyone has something to contribute, and everyone has something they need.