NO MORE PLAY-BY-PLAY

Well, the USDA and CDC have proven so (take your pick) inept or apathetic that it's gotten to be quite tedious to report what the latest is in terms of each new plant fingered and/or cleared in the big deadly listeria outbreak. So I'm not going to keep on giving you that play-by-play. It obscures the big picture: Namely, that Wampler, like many other plants, had dozens of sanitation violations before this, meaning you can bet most of their poultry is tainted one way or another; that as the USDA now admits (despite their War on bacteria), their "food testing practices are 'not completely adequate' to deal with the amount of feces-encrusted meat being churned out of US slaughterhouses; and that the problem is very clearly and centrally located in the USDA's fealty to big business at the expense of ordinary people's (and animals') life and death: It recently emerged, for example, in a memo the agency is loudly disowning, that inspectors were given to understand that they could be held personally liable for any losses suffered by meat producers who were dissed by recall requests. Best quote from that article: "Poop is poop. I can't think of any circumstance where it is tolerable to have fecal material on any meat coming off the line." Yet as this latest fiasco makes clear, poop-covered meat is not just tolerated by the industry; it's the norm.