Well, If the Government Says It's OK to Lie...

I'm almost embaressed to have expressed such outrage in my last entry over the legislation granting meat and poultry producers government-approved permission to lie about being organic if the cost of organic feed gets too expensive. After all, it's not like we aren't lied to constantly. Still, I think it's going a bit too far when the government actually enacts legislation explicitly saying "go ahead and lie if it costs too much to be honest."

Lying to protect the bottom line is commonplace nowadays. It is what Enron and all the other corporate accounting scandals are all about. And a recent report revealed a rise in the number of labs testing air water and soil samples for the Environmental Protection Agency that have been caught falsifying test results. According to an Associated Press story in the Philadelphia Inquirer on January 22, 2003 (I'll provide a link to the story if I find one that doesn't lead to a charge-to-view archive), "the fraud has caused millions of people to fill their cars with substandard gas that may have violated clean-air standards or to drink water that was not properly tested for safety....In addition, officials making decisions at hazardous-waste clean-up sites have relied on companies that fraudulently tested air, water and soil samples." One of the major reasons cited for this lab misconduct in falsifying results is "efforts to cut costs."

I don't imagine that Republican Congressman Nathan Deal of Georgia, who sponsored the law allowing meat and poultry producers to say their products are organic even when they aren't, eats much organic chicken himself. But he may very well be filling his car with substandard gasoline, drinking water with a high arsenic level and eating food contaminated with feces, thanks to corporations and laboratories that aren't bothering to wait for him to sponsor legislation legalizing their lies about their ingredients and standards.

And you also start to think: why should the little guy get left out? Suppose someone has a big credit card debt that's hurting their bottom line. Why shouldn't they simply start to lie, claim that these credit card charges aren't theirs, that they are a victim of fraud? Nothing wrong with that, is there? It's the American way....