• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Unfortunately for Dr. Niemtzow—and for the six others who died in the same outbreak and for forty-six other people who were sickened and for the three women who miscarried—the Republican Party is the party of unregulated meat and poultry. That is not a partisan charge; it is a statement of fact. The Republicans win elections in the “red states” in the center of the country, where cattle and chickens are produced and slaughtered. Democrats win their elections in the “blue states” on the coasts. Republicans use the USDA to pay off their contributors from the red states. The result of that crude electoral calculus is laissez-faire food-safety policy whenever a Republican is in the White House. (If you must eat while the R’s control the White House, both houses of Congress, and the judiciary, you might want to consider becoming a vegetarian about now.) In the 2000 election, the corporate food-production combines donated $59 million in both hard and soft money, 73 percent of it to Republicans. Forget hanging chads. It was the hanging sides of beef in IBP’s hamburger factories that made George Bush president.

We’re not suggesting that Republicans have a monopoly on bad food policy. As governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton carried beaucoup de water for Little Rock chicken magnate Frank Tyson. (If that water came out of Arkansas’ rivers, it was increasingly polluted by Tyson Industries.) But after two years in Washington, Clinton saw that his cozy relationship with Tyson Foods wasn’t polling well and so distanced himself from Tyson. No courageous stand for the people was involved; Bill Clinton couldn’t take the heat, so he got out of the chicken.

Bush, like Clinton, was a Southern governor whose career had been promoted by the CEO of a large poultry processor. The chief of Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation is Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim, Bush’s chicken guy. He’s a charming old Texcentric who appears in his own ads and loves to tell people that he marches “to the beat of a different drumstick.” Bo is one of Bush’s top ten donors, and he bankrolled other Republican candidates who backed Bush. He also hosted a big Bush fund-raising bash in his home in Pittsburg, Texas—a baronial estate locals refer to as “Cluckingham Palace.”

Lonnie Bo was making public policy long before George W. got elected governor. Bo’s something of a legend in the Great State—where elected officials can’t be bought but can be rented if the price is right. In the late eighties the price was right at $10K. During the legislative session, Lonnie Bo walked onto the floor of the Texas Senate and started handing out checks to senators—the “payee” line was left blank. The senators were about to vote on a workers’ compensation bill that would have saved Pilgrim’s Pride millions in payments to workers who had lost fingers or who were crippled by repetitive-motion injuries. (“It was such a poultry sum I wouldn’t have accepted it,” said one senator who missed the handout.) To everyone’s amazement, it turned out to be quite legal to hand out checks on the floor of the Texas Senate. The law was later changed to cover that odd contingency. Money can no longer be stuffed into the pockets of legislators during the four months the Lege is in session every two years.

So Bush came to Washington with a preexisting condition in favor of lax regulation on bad food. Not only was he elected president as the candidate of the party of tainted meat and foul poultry, he’d been elected both governor and president with the help of one of the biggest chicken kingpins in the South. It’s no surprise Bush killed off his predecessor’s Listeria regulations. He was just doing what God and the party of poultry intended him to do.

It was a deadly policy decision.

Neither Bush, his chief of staff, Andrew Card, his political strategist, Karl Rove, nor ag secretary Ann Veneman can plead ignorance. They were warned. Former agriculture undersecretary Carol Tucker Foreman was utterly dismayed that the Listeria regs she had lobbied Clinton to enact weren’t safely on the