Peanuts, regulation, and Upton Sinclair's Jungle

Heard on NPR this morning the disturbing story of the massive recall of peanut products from a Plainview peanut processing plant. Everything ever produced there since it opened in March 2005 has to come back. An article in the Houston Chronicle pointed out that inspectors discovered "dead rodents, rodent excrement, and bird feathers in a crawl space above a food production area of the Peanut Corp, of America's Plainview plant.
The article also mentions that there are only 34 inspectors to cover 17,000 food manufacturers in Texas.
The painful part is that the company had not applied for a license in the 4 years it has existed (which is why no one visited).
What timing - I'm just getting ready to deal with the Progressive era on Monday in one college glass. Oh, boy! Having recently read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" and its lurid descriptions of meat processing at the turn of the 20th century, it all reminds me that perhaps it is time for a breath of fresh air. With the allegations of poor oversight on the part of the SEC in the Bernie Madeoff case, we seem to have forgotten the lessons of those days of 06(1906, that is!). I hear so many Christians decrying government regulation and the taxes that support it. Well, this is our answer. Who are we kidding? A healthy dose of the "T" in the Calvinist TULIP acrostic (total depravity) should help us understand that we all have a strong tendency to get lax when no one is looking (gee, ya think our students don't cheat if we aren't paying attention?). Anyone who teaches post-Reconstruction US History or even the first Industrial Revolution can find plenty of room for skepticism in the human ability to work without accountability. And like many an industrial worker during that era, it appears that we are still working for....peanuts!