Pigs win a big 1 over corporate hoggishness
It’s an odd marketing strategy for an industry to assail its own consumers.
Yet that’s what the monopolistic meatpacking industry (led by such huge conglomerates as Tyson, Smithfield, JBS and Hormel that control nearly 70% of America’s pork market) is doing. “Just shut up and eat your bacon,” the industry shrieks! The target of their corporate tantrum is the growing grassroots movement of consumers, animal rights advocates, farmers, chefs, retailers and others who are dismayed and disgusted by Big Pork’s profiteering on animal cruelty.
“None of your business!” shout the executives, lobbyists, lawyers and forrent politicians who run the tortuous system.
But gutsy groups like the Humane Society made their way inside the industry’s animal factories, videoing such mass horrors as thousands of pregnant sows locked for 16 weeks at a time in gestation crates so small the animals can’t even turn around. In 2018, such exposes prompted 60% of California voters to approve a ballot initiative outlawing the use of the inhumane crates.
Adding plutocratic stupidity to their greed, the pork barons then sued the people for overreaching their power! Yes, the pork profiteers actually asserted that democracy (i.e., people power) must not interfere with “sound business practices.”
Never mind that few of us uncorporatized commoners consider animal suffering to be a sound practice. Even the corporate-coddling Supreme Court gagged at the industry’s claim that it has the sovereign power to dictate what type of pork chops are available to the public. This month, in an odd-fellow 5-4 decision rendered by two progressive judges and three corporatists, the Court ruled that “policy choices like these usually belong to the people.” Well, yes — and to the animals!
This is an example of how grassroots activism matters in important ways. To stay involved in this issue, go to humanesociety.org.
TWO JOE BROS VERSUS THE PEOPLE OF APPALACHIA
If poohbahs of the national Democratic Party wonder why working-class families, which once formed the party’s solid base of political support, have gone astray, they might ponder the awful message they’re sending by constantly smooching Sen. Joe Manchin’s flabby tail.
The multimillionaire West Virginia coal baron and anti-democratic “Democrat” is demanding that a massively polluting pipeline, named Mountain Valley, be rammed through rivers, watersheds, national parks, towns, farmlands, homesteads — and down the throats of the people of West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina. Why? Money. The senator’s fossil fuel funders, who own the project, want the federal government to mandate construction of their corporate boondoggle.
For a decade, gutsy grassroots groups have rebelled and defeated these Wall Street profiteers, and the people of this Appalachian region are still adamantly opposed. But here comes President Joe Biden to rescue Manchin and his fossil fuelers with a dirty backroom deal overruling the will of the people. Proclaiming that he wants to advance America’s conversion from fossil fuels to renewable energy, Biden is pushing a bill to make it easier and faster to get federal approval for new energy projects. Fine. But his bill specifically greases the skids for more fossil fuel projects. And guess which one is first in line for quick approval? Yes, Brother Joe Manchin’s Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Continually pumping fracked gas across three states would produce a mess of leaks and spills, but the project would also emit some 40 million metric tons of planet-warming gas a year — equivalent to the annual pollution of 10 coal plants. As the Natural Resources Defense Council puts it, “We won’t build the clean energy economy of the future by doubling down on the dirty fuels of the past.”