When Organizations Don't Think Before They Speak...

This morning, I was listening to Public Radio, as is my usual drive-to-work custom, and I happened across a short bit about the President's efforts to ease regulations that make it hard to do business in the US and the political butt-kissing he's been doing to the chamber of commerce and other groups to promote his efforts.  Apparently, the feds released a couple thousand page document detailing feedback from industry and industry groups about which regulations should be looked at (a worthy effort, one would think).

One of the excerpts read from the document was an assertion from some meat industry group claiming that certain "new labeling laws" would "cause consumer hesitation," resulting in lower sales and loss of jobs in the industry.  Mind you, I'm paraphrasing heavily, but I'm pretty sure the key word used was "hesitation" and they definitely tried to link it directly to job loss.

Let's pause and think about this for a second....

Knowing more about what's in our food (or how it's grown) equals people "hesitating" about buying the product (because presumably, the label says something that scares the crap out of us) and THAT will directly lead to job loss.


I'll give you a moment to let that logic sink in...

Not only is this completely half-assed correlation a complete load of crap, but can you believe they actually said it publicly?  Nothing like being as transparent as glass about your greedy intentions.  They might as well have said:

"Well, you see, if we tell you what's in our product, you may not want to eat or buy it anymore.  And if you don't buy it anymore, we won't make as much money, and if we don't make as much money, we won't have to manufacture as much of it and that means we'll have to lay-off a ton of people.  So you see, sir, it's really best that we continue to NOT tell the people what they're eating.  It's for their own good, really!  It's in the name of job stability, and in this time of economic troubles, that's WAY more important than the health of the American public."