America is, increasingly, no longer a country; instead, we're being run like a business, and in some cases it's literally killing us.
Take for example, the ongoing problem of foodborne illnesses like Salmonella, which infects over a million Americans every year.
One of the most common ways of contracting Salmonella is by eating eggs.
According to the FDA, 79,000 people get sick every year from eating Salmonella-contaminated eggs, and of those 79,000 people, 30 actually die.
This is a type of preventable problem that pretty much doesn't exist across the pond anymore.
Ever since the United Kingdom started requiring chicken farmers to vaccinate their hens against Salmonella, reported cases of the disease have plummeted, and I mean really plummeted.
There were
almost 15,000 egg-related Salmonella cases in 1997 when the immunizations began; now there's close to none.
The FDA actually considered implementing a similar vaccine mandate here in the US, but decided not to in 2010, basically because chicken farmers didn't want to spend the extra money on the vaccines and they could buy lobbyists.
This is what it looks like when your country ceases to become a country and becomes something else -- a business, or maybe just another asset in a corporate portfolio.
How many lives could have been saved if the FDA had decided to look out for the public first and Big Ag second?
How many costly emergency room trips could have been prevented?
How many recalls avoided?
We'll never know for sure.
Which is just insane, because preventing things like Salmonella outbreaks is the whole reason we have a government in the first place.
When the founders created this country, they did so in the interest of the public good.
It's literally right there in the opening passage of the Constitution, which reads "We the People of the United States, in Order to... promote the general Welfare... establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
