Egg
1 a : the hard-shelled reproductive body produced by a bird and especially by the common domestic chicken; also : its contents used as food.
Yegg
A Robber; A burglar
Robber Baron
2 : a business owner or executive who acquires wealth through ethically questionable tactics.
Tell me again douche baggers, how we need less government in our lives. And how business will take care of us if we just give it free rein. Uh huh.
An excerpt from my local newspaper regarding an egg salmonella epidemic. Pay particular attention to the last two paragraphs.
Salmonella outbreak could have been prevented
The salmonella outbreak could have been prevented if new rules to ensure egg safety had been in place a few months earlier, an FDA spokeswoman said.
The rules, which require producers to do more testing for salmonella and take other precautions, went into effect in July. They had languished for more than a decade after President Bill Clinton first proposed that egg standards be toughened. The FDA said in July that the new safeguards could reduce the number of salmonella cases by nearly 60 percent.
"There are preventive measures that would have been in place that could have prevented this," said Sherri McGarry of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
Hinda Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Wright County Egg, said it abided (sic) by guidance issued by the United Egg Producers, an industry group. Those procedures mirror several aspects of the federal egg safety rule.
Shell eggs produced by the farms of Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, both of Iowa are subject of a nationwide recall due to contamination with Salmonella. The eggs have been linked to Salmonella illnesses in numerous states including California, Colorado, Minnesota, Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas.
The Center for Disease Control, CDC, reports 1,953 confirmed SE illnesses in the outbreak period. CDC also estimates that for every confirmed illness, more than 38 go unreported, the real number of ill is probably close to 50,000.
Egg farm's owner has been cited previously
The businessman who owns Wright County Egg, Jack DeCoster, has been cited for numerous health, safety and employment violations in the past. In 1997, DeCoster Egg Farms agreed to pay $2 million in fines to settle citations brought in 1996 for health and safety violations at DeCoster's farm in Turner, Maine.
Wright County Egg already is facing at least two lawsuits related to the recall. One is from food distributor Dutch Farms, which says the company used unauthorized cartons to package and sell eggs under its brand name without its knowledge. The other is from a person who said she became ill after eating tainted eggs in a salad at a restaurant in Kenosha, Wis.
Etcetera, etcetera.
Nuff said, as my friend Punch is wont to say.
Yes, technically, the owner has neither a gun, nor is he a Robber Baron, in the classic sense of the 19th Century. He does however, circumvent ethical practices in the conduct of his business...for the God-Almighty buck. A fine hair of difference, in my view.
