One should sit with it for a moment- the President of the United States, commanding the executive arm of the federal government, of what he touts as the greatest nation in the world, announces he must invoke emergency -defense- production laws in order to alleviate the critical shortage of baby formula. “To ensure that manufacturers have the necessary ingredients to make safe, healthy infant formula here at home,” he says, we must invoke a 1950 wartime readiness provision instituted for the Korean War.
The defense production act may sound familiar, because it was also recently invoked for the ongoing ~once in a generation~ global pandemic. There’s even some familiar names from there in this crisis as well. The baby formula shortage is in no small part due to the shutdown of a major US formula plant run by Abbott, the same massive firm which makes many of the COVID tests you depend on to know whether or not you might sicken your friends and family. It had to shut down due to bacterial contamination, which the FDA failed to investigate (let alone provide enough regulatory oversight to prevent) until after at least two infants were killed and who knows how many more got sick, despite a whistleblower who came to them well in advance. And who was fired.
The slow piecemeal crumbling is just a sight to behold. There’s only so much anyone can do to prop up a national market that has so been so consolidated, in the name of cutting costs and maximizing shareholder profits, that it has become riddled with institutional and infrastructural choke points, each of which are only a single industrial disaster or financial scheme away from collapsing. Which they do regularly! And allow people, or ‘consumers,’ or in this headline-making case, ‘parents of infant children,’ to absorb the damage of the risks that were taken. Because we can see no other way, apparently.
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