Just like in the media and so many other fields, industry consolidation, fewer and fewer companies and businesses owning more and more of the marketplace, means that we lose diversity, and diversity is strength.
Whats wrong with one company being so large.
A million pounds of tainted meat, that's what is wrong.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15587340/
Can you imagine what a million pounds of meat contaminated with E. Coli, salmonella or the newer strains of drug resistant staff could do?
A million pounds was part of a single day's run!
The Reagan-Bush administration destroyed the family farm and started this march of the mega-agri -businesses, providing subsidies and corporate welfare to these beheamoths, while allowing them to slowing gobble up more and more of our food supply, as well as create extensive verticle markets.
These companies not only own the food, but the processing plants, the trucks and the name brands that these products sell under. They do the marketing and the product 'roll outs'. From raw chemicals, additives, preservatives, packaging, and agricultural products right to your plate.
This generation of Americans has seen many of its favorite small family owned food products and local markets disappear, the quality brands we knew as children, bought up and assimilated by these mega companies. "Stepford food", that no longer resembles the original in quality, integrity or safety.
Now when you have a salmonella outbreak or another food bourne pathogen, gets into the system , you get many brands and tons of food effected. Not just a recall of Jena's pizza, but Tostino's and Frito Lay, and Mama Leone's, in ten states etc. etc.. Not just a recall of meat, but a recall of a million pounds of meat.
We used to have thousands more family farms, producing foods that were eaten locally, local control, local consumption. And frankly, we ate better food. We traded efficiencies of scale for diversity of production. This leaves us with a system that economists like Alan Greenspan fawn over as 'geared up for maximum profits', but at what cost? The loss of safety, diversity, and a prosperity that serves only the very wealthy and skips over the millions of Americans displaced by consolidation. What the Greenspan's always seem to fail to realize is that all those pretty numbers on the page represent the very real lives of human beings. And that maximizing profits comes at a price, that price is accepting a system that no longer serves humanity. You know those fleshy things that created the system. When our human economy no longer serves the best interest of human beings that create and sustain it? Whats the point.
Con-Agri , ADM and a few other companies dominate the business. They Own All The Food!
ADM was prosecuted for trying to collude with another company overseas to fix the global price for lysine. A food additive in the processed food market it is an enzyme essential to human life.
Did you get that? They were trying to corner the market and fix the price for a chemical essential to human life! Even if you are too dumb to understand, it effects you too. Also the chemical citric acid. Another chemical essential to human life.
The same horrible corruption is evident in many industries where our leadership has allowed consolidation to the detriment of diversity and strength.
The most obvious is in telecommunications, media and broadcasting industry.
Where we get information, news, culture, science. It's where we communicate with each other, learn about each other and what is 'really' going on in our world.
Now fewer and fewer companies own more and more of the media. It could be said that "they own the news".
MTMIND
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