Eggaxctly

Did you notice that Robert Reich wrote a blog about the same story I wrote about last Thursday? He knows more about it than I do. (No surprise is there?)

Corporate Rotten Eggs

”One especially rotten egg is Jack DeCoster, whose commercial egg agribusiness, which goes under the homey title “Wright County Egg,” headquartered in Galt, Iowa, sends eggs all over the country under many different brands. Those eggs have now laid low thousands of Americans with salmonella poisoning, and may well infect thousands more.”

That’s an interesting assertion -- when you consider liable laws. As far as I know, Robert Reich writes this blog on his own. There is no corporation behind him -- no newspaper’s legal department ready to defend him as “the price of doing business”.

”Thirteen years ago when I was Secretary of Labor, DeCoster agreed to pay a $2 million penalty (the most we could throw at him) for some of the most heinous workplace violations I’d seen. His workers had been forced to live in trailers infested with rats and handle manure and dead chickens with their bare hands. It was an agricultural sweatshop.

Several people in Maine told me the fine wouldn’t stop DeCoster. He’d just consider it a cost of doing business. ”

I think I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. I don’t want to put all corporations out of business. I just want to put the crooks out of business. (I’ll still be eternally grateful if someone finds Molly Ivin’s quote on the subject and sends it to me.)

Don Brown
August 22, 2010