Why is Obama’s administration going after Gibson and not Martin?
Same wood, same paperwork, same everything, but Obama’s government raided Gibson and left Matin free. Why?
You may remember this recall of burger meat from Burger King (and other) restaurants that bankrupted Hudson Foods over 16 cases of e.coli and an arbitrary finding by FDA that there had been more “questionable practices” at their plants? (Note: They are all arbitrary).
http://articles.latimes.com/1997/aug/22/news/mn-24800
Hudson Foods was the biggest competitor to Arkansas-based Tyson Foods (maker of “Tyson Chicken”). See the story of how CEO Tyson was losing market share to CEO Hudson until Tyson buddy Slick Willie’s FDA slammed down hard on Hudson Foods.. (“Slick Willie” was the nickanme for Governor Bill Clinton, for his way of slipping smoothly out of trouble):
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1997/10/27/233332/index.htm
From that article:
> For more than a decade executives at Tyson, whose chicken business is more than twice the size of anyone else’s, have been itching to buy Hudson. But every time Tollett or Tyson Chairman Don Tyson approached Red Hudson with the idea of selling the company he created in 1972 (after buying Ralston Purina’s chicken operations), the 73-year-old chairman said no thanks. Tollett’s most recent entreaty took place in mid-July at an over-the-fence in Red’s kitchen across the street. Discussions broke off several days later because Red, who didn’t really want to sell, was asking what he calls “a pretty good price” for his 90% of the company’s voting shares.
>
> But Tyson wasn’t after Hudson just because Tollett was reminded of his rival every time his Ford pickup passed Red’s Mercedes at Pinnacle’s gates. The real reason is that Tyson needs to meet analysts’ projections of 15% annual growth, and in recent years Hudson Foods has been stealing some of Tyson’s thunder. Hudson has eroded Tyson’s position as the dominant supplier of chicken products to Wal-Mart, the Arkansas neighbor that Merrill Lynch estimates will own 9% of the country’s food sales by 2005. Hudson, a company with annual sales of $1.7 billion, now does slightly more business with Wal-Mart than the $6.5 billion Tyson. Shane Glenn, analyst for the Little Rock investment bank Stephens Inc., attributes this to Hudson’s greater willingness to negotiate on price and to its new chicken plant in Henderson, Ky., which primarily supplies Wal-Mart. (The fact that Red’s grandson, Mike Hudson Jr., is married to the daughter of a Wal-Mart executive can’t hurt either.) Other Hudson assets attractive to Tyson include a thriving turkey operation, chicken processing facilities in three states where Tyson has none, and other product lines that are complementary to Tyson’s.
And then (drumroll, please):
> Despite Tyson’s numerous attempts to acquire Hudson, it wasn’t until the company was thrust into national headlines for issuing the largest recall of meat in U.S. history that Tyson finally got its lucky break. Abandoned by a major customer and served up as an example by a government agency, Hudson was brought to its knees in September and driven into the arms of Tyson–something Red Hudson never would have imagined when he first received word at the end of July about E. coli-contaminated meat that was traced to Hudson’s beef facility in Nebraska.
>
> As far as outbreaks go, this one seemed mild. Unlike Jack-In-The-Box’s scare in 1993, which sickened 500 and killed four, only 16 people in Colorado became ill from eating Hudson hamburger patties. No one died. And it was determined that Hudson’s plant probably wasn’t responsible for contaminating the beef–it was brought in from an outside supplier. Hudson recalled 20,000 pounds of beef on Aug. 12. Then, for reasons still unclear, the USDA forced Hudson to increase the amount to 1.2 million and then again to 25 million pounds. Thomas Billy, head of the USDA’s inspection service, says that his department found record-keeping inadequacies and practices of recycling meat from one day to the next at the Hudson plant, which made it impossible to locate a break in the chain of tainted meat, but says he won’t elaborate because a USDA investigation is still under way.
Washington needs people who put their actions where they promise, every time. There’s only one who has done that without compromise. Americans are sick of compromise in Washington, they want Washington to get OUT of their lives.. If Americans continue compromising they will deserve the consequences…
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