One of the reasons I’m always so pissed at Obama for going along with austerity cuts is the loss of vital services, and his apparent inability to effectively advocate for them.

I kept waiting to hear him make this speech: “Let me be clear. What these Republican cuts mean are increasing numbers of illness and death from uninspected meat and medication, dirtier water and air, more dangerous roads, and a whole host of necessary parts of invisible government. Things you don’t think about, but that you’ll feel the effects when they’re no longer there, things that make us a civilized society and not a Third World nation. I am deeply opposed to these cuts, and instead of thinking of these elected representatives as doing an important job of deficit reduction, you should know the reality: Government is being stripped of its most vital services. I have to sign this bill, because these partisan political vandals are holding our debt ceiling hostage. But the American people should have no illusions about the effects.”

But he never did, and instead we see stories like this:

The American meat supplier at the center of a major food safety scandal in Asia engages in widespread food safety and labor violations at its massive processing plant in West Chicago, Illinois, former employees alleged Wednesday in exclusive conversations with International Business Times.

OSI Group LLC, which posted more than $6 billion in sales last year, has been under fire since Sunday, when Chinese regulators shuttered OSI’s Shanghai Husi Food Co. Ltd. meat processing facility. Chinese authorities later detained five individuals connected to the company. The moves came in the wake of an investigation by a local TV station that revealed that OSI sold expired meat and meat that had fallen on the floor to several fast-food chains throughout China and Japan.

OSI said Monday that it had launched its own investigation into the practices at the Shanghai Husi plant, and issued a statement saying that “[o]ur company management believes this to be an isolated event.”

The Aurora, Illinois, company’s West Chicago plant reportedly produces more than five million beef patties per day, making it one of OSI’s largest facilities. Sheldon Lavin, CEO and chairman of OSI, has said that the company is the world’s largest protein supplier for McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD). The West Chicago plant is mostly dedicated to providing meat products for the fast food giant, which the supplier has done without major scandal for four decades.

But OSI’s food safety problems may extend beyond Asia. Aurora resident Rosa Maria Ramirez, 47, described practices she allegedly witnessed at the West Chicago plant where she worked for six years.

“The meat would fall on the floor and they would put it back in and pack it,” Ramirez told IBTimes through a translator Wednesday evening. “They would spit in the meat, and have sweat dripping off their faces into the meat, and there were times when people’s gum would drop out of their mouths into the meat and they would just let it go if they couldn’t find it. It’s a requirement for every person to wash their hands when they go into the production area but pretty much nobody did it.”