STOP TESTING THAT COW!

Here's a little trip down memory lane - an old fight that's just be ratcheted back up between the USDA and small meatpacker Creekstone Farms, the one that wants to BSE-test 100% of its cows. And of course, the USDA, which tests around a tenth of one percent of US cows, is actively fighting that move.

What's new is not just the latest round of appeals, suits or counter-suits, but the candor: "Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too." That's right, let the free market decide - unless it means dollars lost to the big meatpackers. It will surprise no one to learn, as the article continues, that "[t]he Bush administration sided with the large meatpackers."

There are larger fissures on the Right than this, but it's a telling sample of their dog-eat-dog, man-eat-cow ideology: Not only are animals and consumers thrown under the proverbial bus to please the big meatpackers - even meatpackers are being played for chumps by the Bush administration because they're a threat to other meatpackers. Big Business uber alles!

UPDATE 6/4: US beef exporter screws up again, allows BSE-risk material into shipment - South Korea re-institutes ban on US beef