I don’t consider China to be a model for anything… except for how they deal with white collar criminals.  If this happened in China, every executive who took part in the decision to knowingly sell tainted peanuts would be executed.  

The Georgia peanut plant linked to a salmonella outbreak that has killed eight people and sickened 500 more across the country knowingly shipped out contaminated peanut butter 12 times in the past two years, federal officials said yesterday.

Source: Peanut Processor Ignored Salmonella Tests, Knowingly Sold Tainted Products – washingtonpost.com

Note also that because the impotent FDA doesn’t have subpoena power, the manufacturer was able to conceal the positive salmonella tests from the FDA. 

How long will it be before the corporate apologists complain that this company will be unfairly sued, or that juries can’t be trusted to be fair with this company?

If history teaches us anything about the human condition, it teaches us that there is no level too low for for people to stoop in search of profit.  The Bible of course expressed this principle as, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”  And that’s probably true. 

What’s definitely true is that as long as it’s more profitable to sell defective products, some unethical manufacturers will do so.  There’s even an entire movement dedicated to legitimizing the idea that it’s OK to kill people to make a good profit.  See Law and Economics.

How many regulatory failures, how many lives lost, how many more times must this same story repeat before the government does its job and protects us from rapacious executives who put profits ahead of all else?

If we put just one CEO to death who was responsible for these decisions, we’d see a lot more CEO’s deciding to do “the right thing.”