Corruption and Monopoly in Food Supply

Have you been finding yourself in here

a little bit too much recently?

Let's talk about it.

Just recently, Taylor Farms Lettuce tested positive for cyclospora.

Or maybe they didn't.

All of a sudden, the positive test got rolled back.

It was a false positive.

And by the way, just days before the FDA's backtrack,

they'd met with Trump officials in the White House.

But this isn't the first

time Taylor Farms had met with Donald Trump.

In fact, they're a donor to MAGA, Inc.

And they've been supportive of the Trump administration

and MAGA for a very long time.

Now what does that buy you?

Apparently it buys you the ability to change a whole positive test.

And the impact here is that it's not just Taco Bell.

They supply Walmart and Kroger and Trader Joe's

and Taco Bell and Chipotle and McDonald's.

Now this is a story about two things.

One, it's frank corruption.

The ability for one megacorporation to turn a test result

that they don't like,

even though there are thousands of people who have gotten sick from a product,

that's a problem in and of itself.

But the other problem is monopoly.

Not only is that one corporation buying access to

very powerful people to change an outcome

that's making people sick,

but they also supply so much of the rest of the economy

that it's not really possible to get goods outside of them.

This is everything that's wrong with our economy.

When I say I want to get money out of politics,

this is what I'm talking about.

You shouldn't be able to buy access to overturn a test result

if your product might be making people sick.

And you shouldn't be so big that one product affects

all of these other suppliers.

This is just one example of everything that's wrong with the way

that the economy and our politics get too close.

So money out of politics means

that corporations like Taylor Farms shouldn't be able to buy political access.

They shouldn't be so big that they can rig the rules

that they become one of the only suppliers in the whole economy.

And yeah, their lettuce shouldn't be causing you diarrhea.