The US 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 more than 1 million Americans every year.
One of the most common ways of contracting Salmonella is by eating eggs. According to the US Food and Drug Administration (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. There were almost 15,000 egg-related Salmonella cases in 1997, when the immunizations began; now there’s close to none.
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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.
With Reaganomics came the idea that government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem. But this mantra is the source of many things wrong with this country. By waging war on government, which they call the “problem,” Ronald Reagan and his contemporary followers in the Republican Party have sold us out to big business.
You can find evidence of this everywhere you look.
It’s why Americans pay more for health care than anybody else in the world, from drugs to eyeglasses to dental work, and why we are the only developed nation in the world that allows for-profit corporations to offer primary health insurance.
It’s why you have banks like Wells Fargo ripping off their customers by opening up accounts in their names.
It’s why you have Salmonella outbreaks every year, even though they stopped being a real problem in Europe years ago.
It’s why you have corporate farms spraying glyphosate basically everywhere, even though European countries are banning it.
The list goes on.
Thanks to Reaganomics, we have nearly lost our country.
It’s been sold off to the highest bidder, and until we repudiate the “free market” fundamentalism that has infected our public discourse, we’ll not get it back.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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