Tonight, while perusing my graveyard of a LiveJournal friends list, I noticed a link he posted:

Obama Official Applauds Rhode Island Teacher Firings

This caught my eye:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has “applauded” the move to fire every teacher at Rhode Island’s Central Falls High School, the Providence Journal reports.

Central Falls, the smallest and poorest city in Rhode Island, is also one of the state’s most troubled school districts, with more than half of the students at the high school not making it to graduation.

The headline above caught my eye as well:

Diamond Sold for Record Breaking $35.3M

A 507-carat diamond as big as a chicken’s egg sold for $35.3 million, breaking the record for the highest price ever paid for a rough diamond, the supplier said Friday.

How’s that for irony? The juxtaposition of the two subjects is a bit too much.

Actually, this whole week has been a bit too much.

Utah Can’t Afford Twelfth Grade But It Can Afford to Send a Whole Lot of Innocent Women to Jail

Let’s just hope nobody bails them out (of jail).

When this first started catching nationwide attention, all I knew was fear. Obsessively checking the FDA website for the latest recalled products, looking up the most recent count of related illnesses, the latest death toll.

However, as the month went on, another emotion crept up to keep fear company: anger.

The more news that comes out, the more scared and furious I get. Apparently, the plant in Blakely, GA was filled with roaches, mold, and plagued by perpetual leaks. Salmonella or not, it shouldn’t have been open in its unsanitary state: something like this was inevitable, easily predictable. And, lab tests even showed that this was no surprise; inspection records reported they sold products after already confirming they had been contaminated with salmonella.

Why? Because it all comes down to the bottom line. Someone… several someones… decided that the monetary value of the peanut butter was worth more than the price of human life, the cost of any lawsuit that a devastated relative could file. Someone made some calculations and then made a deliberate decision to ignore the risk of fatalities and ailment because it was more profitable.

So far, there have been 8 deaths. They were people, but I haven’t been able to find out that much about just who these unfortunate “casualties” were. For the most part, they remain faceless and nameless in the media’s eyes.

However, death is serious, the final period to end a life sentence. There is nothing casual about it, but to countless corporations who have killed for the capital that fuels capitalism, don’t ever forget: you are just a number.

You are nothing more than a statistic.