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SWAMP ALERT: Pork Industry Soon Will Run Their Own Food Safety Inspections
In every aspect of life, there are complex decisions with a multitude of factors to consider and difficult choices to be made. Conversely, there are those that the dumbest person you've ever met can understand and make the correct decision. Except Republicans in 2019 are so corrupt, they go ahead anyway either figuring we are stupid or not paying attention.
The Trump administration plans to shift much of the power and responsibility for food safety inspections in hog plants to the pork industry as early as May, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees.
....responsibility for identifying diseased and contaminated pork would be shared with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners. There would be no limits on slaughter-line speeds.
The new pork inspection system would accelerate the federal government’s move toward delegating inspections to the livestock industry. The Trump administration also is working to shift inspection of beef to plant owners.
There was a trial program for this and it went very poorly, so Republicans naturally pressed ahead with it. The reason is simple: the industry paid the Republicans to do it so they could make more money. It's called CORRUPTION.
Joseph Ferguson is a former USDA hog inspector who retired in 2015 after working 23 years under the traditional inspection system as well as with a trial program that created the new proposed system. He said federal regulators lost control when plant workers supplanted them. Hog carcasses whizzed by him and the plant-paid inspectors at speeds so fast that fecal contamination — an important indicator for E. coli and salmonella — could not be detected.
“All the power gets handed over to the plant,” Ferguson said. “I saw the alleged inspections that were performed by plant workers; they weren’t inspections. They were supposed to meet or exceed USDA standards — I never saw that happen.”
The prisoners run the prison? The banks police themselves? That always works great, right?
Pat Basu, the chief veterinarian with the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service from 2016 to 2018, refused to sign off on the new pork system because of concerns about safety for both consumers and livestock. The USDA sent the proposed regulations to the Federal Register about a week after Basu left, and they were published less than a month later, according to records and interviews.
“Look at the FAA. It took a year or so before the crashes happened,” Basu said. “This could pass and everything could be okay for a while, until some disease is missed and we have an outbreak all over the country. It would be an economic disaster that would be very hard to recover from.”
Allowing Boeing to "regulate" themselves more and more over decades led to planes crashes killing hundreds of people, ruining forever thousands of lives, parents who will not see their kids grow up; children who will never see their parents again.
Repbulicans broader effort to reduce regulations, come as the federal government is under fire for delegating some of its aircraft safety oversight responsibilities to Boeing, which developed the 737 Max jets involved in two fatal crashes over the past six months. Federal Aviation Administration certification of the two aircraft involved in the crashes took place under Trump, but the major shift toward delegating key aspects of aviation oversight began during the George W. Bush administration.