There was a time when Americans felt very secure about their food and drug supply. They felt that they were protected because their government cared about them and had checked to make sure that nothing they ate would harm them. I am not talking about how something is prepared or how a restaurant might refrigerate it and such, that is another ball of wax. I am talking about the product that reaches these places and reaches our homes. It was felt that we had the purest food of any country in the world. Well those days are gone forever, unfortunately. Over the last couple of presidential terms, most of the governmental agencies that deal with people's needs have deteriorated. Some of these agencies are more important than others, because they have an immediate effect on us. Two of the VERY most import agencies in the Federal Government are the USDA, The US Department of Agriculture and the FDA The Food And Drug Administration. What makes these agencies more important than the others? The reason that these agencies have to be placed on the top of the list of important agencies is, that they are directly charged with monitoring the food we eat and the drugs that we take. In other words they are responsible for what we put into our bodies to keep us alive.

You would think that agencies charged with such an important task would be proud to perform it well, wouldn't you? I can tell you this, I have found out, by many years of dealing with politicians, that there are many who are too uncaring or too stupid to actually hold normal jobs and many times these people are put in charge of agencies as a political favor. When this happens the quality of the work that the agency accomplishes often drops. That is the political game in Washington, It doesn't matter if someone is capable or not, that doesn't even enter into the picture. What matters is that they are loyal and someone is being paid back for their support, the public be dammed. One has to remember this, it is not only the top jobs that fall into this category, but there could be hundreds of lesser supervisory jobs that are also filled this way in an agency. The cumulative effect of all this incompetence leads up to things like the scandals that the FDA and USDA are experiencing. These agencies probably have thousands upon thousands of conscientious, hard working people in them, but they are being prevented from performing their jobs properly by politics.

A scandal just broke yesterday (the day before this article was written) where a huge meat packing plant was systematically dragging and lifting sick cows to their slaughter house, where they were being prepared to become the hamburgers that our children eat, among other things. The USDA can't really take credit for finding out about this, since this was reported by someone else. They had not done their job with proper inspections or worse. Can you imagine animals that are so sick, that they can't even stand up and yet they are being fed to us? What a disgrace. Now get this reaction by the USDA. They say that they are recalling all the meat back to 2006. How stupid do they think we are? We are talking about huge amounts of tonnage here, does anyone really think that this meat is still around? Folks, we ate it already. How can anyone with a conscience allow something like this to happen? This just goes to show you the utter contempt that some people in power feel for the common person. The meat was said to not only go to schools, but institutions and who knows were else?

Do not think that this was some isolated incident, it certainly wasn't. Most of the stuff going on at the USDA and FDA doesn't seem to make a splash that lasts too long. In 2007 it was discovered, way after it reached our food chain I might add, that some seafood imported from China had certain chemicals in it that were harmful to our health. How could this have happened? It happened because the USDA allowed 99 percent of all imported seafood, produce, animal feeds and grains to pass through our borders without being inspected. I bet you thought that we were a lot more careful that that, didn't you? My personal opinion is that even the 1% that is supposedly inspected, is not inspected very carefully, if at all in some cases. If it were, we would have caught the seafood problem, because it effected all of a certain kind of seafood from China. Did people just look the other way, what was going on here? It is hard to believe that an advanced country like ours, could let something like this happen. Was this a political thing, where we didn't want to offend China. I have to think that is more the point, it was more important not to offend China than care if people got sick and died from eating their fish, after all they have a lot of US dollars that they could dump, which would cause trouble for the US. When this happened if was found out that the USDA and FDA do not work together, can you believe that?

In 2007 a Los Angeles Times reporter won the Pulitzer Prize for his story about drugs that were killing our citizens. There were drugs that were approved by the FDA. He had stated that policy reforms in the agency had reduced the effectiveness of the agency. Supposedly he had found that several drugs that were being used were actually defective and were implicated in the deaths of over 1,000 patients. Again you have to wonder how drugs like these get approved by an agency that is charged with monitoring the safeness of the drugs we take. What could be the excuse? Could it be that they don't want to offend the huge drug lobby that contribute to all the political campaigns and throw money all around Congress and doctor's offices and medical labs? Could it be that no one wants to lose their paid for vacations? I would hate to think that is what is going on here, but what is someone to think about all this?

A story broke in 2007 in the prestigious news paper, The New York Times. The story spoke about a large Chinese drug company that was responsible for sickening 200 patients in China that had cancer. The drugs that they were given from this company; were contaminated and caused the patients to be paralyzed and harmed in other ways. You might ask why I am mentioning this since it happened in China? I mention it because these same drugs were imported into the US, according to the story. The Chinese authorities had accused the drug manufacturer of a cover up. It turned out that an abortion pill knows as RU-486 was being supplied by this manufacturer and shipped to the US. The Chinese government closed down the company. Here we had a company that was so bad that the government of the country that it was in had to close it down, yet we were routinely receiving drugs from them. Another disgrace in a loooooong list of disgraces.

In case you think that the New York Times article was just an isolated article, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on February 6, 2008 and stated that the Congress of the United States is in a panic about the state of the Food and Drug Administration. They went on to say that the " place is a mess and the most alarming news is receiving almost no attention". . The government came out with the excuse that as far as food goes, it would take 1,900 years to inspect every foreign factory. I guess that is their excuse. I got a better answer. Only buy from the ones as you inspect them after they pass. This country produces plenty of food, do we really need to buy food from places that haven't been inspected? The Wall Street Journal reports that the Congress hasn't increased FDA funding in proportion to its burgeoning regulatory demands. It goes on to state that the FDA's reach has been expanded 127 times and is now at the point where it has to oversee 25 cents worth of purchases out of every dollar. I guess the implication here is that they are overextended.

What ever the problems are, they have to be fixed, or we are all in jeopardy. There is just no excuse good enough to justify the fact that we are forced to consume potentially dangerous food and drugs. If your child needed a drug, would you want him or her to ingest something that might kill him or her, instead of helping them with their illness, of course not. That is the position that the government is in. Rather than take the steps necessary to assure the public that we have a clean food and drug supply, they would rather make excuses. Excuses never saved anyone's life and it is about time that they learned this. Let's get some people in charge of these agencies that really know what they are doing, not just someone that went to all the local club house meetings.