'Merican Way Is Best?

 I heard an hour of quality radio analysis today.

On NPR.

"What else, you obvious-stating disciple of redundancy" I heard shrieked from that arena just beyond life, that I can't penetrate, but can't elude.

So it constantly harasses me.

From the void.

The interview was about infant formula.

You, know, the stuff that can't be found any more, and without which, American infants are going to start dropping like flies? 

Net, net: the problem is that that business, infant formula, has been ceded to a monopoly ("lot more efficient; we can cut national contracts; we can control prices; poor people can get the stuff for nothing").

The parenthetical remarks are from our government.

Sounds humanitarian.

Real humanitarian.

But, like the FAA, FDA has produced its own Max 8.

In that monopoly, one big company, a conglomerate, has as one of its LOBs (lines of business) an infant formula company.

Since being a monopoly with an unavoidable product - food for the very young of the human race, especially the very poor of that race - seems to be such a no-brainer that no corporate executive of any consequence would pay any attention to it.

The big company didn't.

Pay any attention to it.

The plant that produced the stuff was a cash-producing cow.

There was something resembling milk coming out the back, after all.

Unfortunately the stuff began to have bacteria that killed infants.

That was a problem.

But problem aside - the FDA and the plant manager had a long-time friendship so little aberrations like lethal bacteria were easily handled - running that thing for shareholder value was like flying an airplane on auto pilot.

Actually I made most of that up for literary emphasis.

It turns out that the software that runs that LOB had been purchased from Boeing Software Services.

I made that up also.