The White House Egg Roll v. Gulag Ag

Dateline: April 2 – 4, 2010

Editor’s Note: This is a “meliorist” point of view in relation to animals. It’s obvious the author has sincere feelings about the fate of animals, but his feelings do not extend yet to their complete liberation from human exploitation. —PG

BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN • CounterPunch Diary • [print_link]

Then there’s America the Real, where on March 23 a big fire in Ohio in a warehouse at a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, owned by Ohio Fresh Eggs, prompted the euthanizing of 250,000 laying hens after – in the words of a local news report – “electricity in some of the buildings had to be shut off, and some of the birds suffered from issues with ventilation and smoke inhalation.”

Rotten luck on the birds, of course. But, fire or no fire, their future was not bright. The same news story quoted Kevin Elder, executive director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s Livestock Environmental Permitting program, as saying Ohio Fresh Eggs was permitted to keep 2.4 million birds and had about 2.2 million on hand. He said the birds were euthanized according to industry standards and none were known to have died in the fire. He said those euthanized were nearing the end of their laying cycle and would have been euthanized soon, regardless of the fire.”

on this site, “At Ohio Fresh Eggs, only eight employees were tending 16 barns when the fire was reported … What kind of ‘care’ can workers give animals in fume-filled barns the size of football fields? Removing the dead and putting the half dead into kill carts, say those who’ve worked there.”

Mythical America is interminably featured in pastoral commercials and cute cartoons, where contentment reigns at Animal Farm. The cackle of chickens mingles euphonically with the grunts of what Bertie Wooster, commenting to Jeeves on his breakfast bacon, invoked as coming from “contented pigs.”

“One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.”Martin Luther King

Every Thanksgiving, the U.S. president pardons a turkey, a cute ceremony – in fairness, Obama did not look enthusiastic – as repulsive as would have been the spectacle of Adolf Hitler excusing from the gas chamber on each anniversary of Kristalnacht a Jew imported for the ceremony from Auschwitz.

She answers:

our current newsletter “ In most instances, the C in CAFO means ‘concentrated,’ but it can also stand for ‘confined,’ as in Confined Feeding Operations (CFOs). Regardless what the letters stand for, the meaning is the same: the concentration and confinement of huge numbers of hogs, cows, chickens and turkeys in places where sustainable agriculture had served both farmers and society for centuries.” These animal gulags emit appalling stinks, clouds of methane so toxic that they kill, sewage filling vast poisonous lagoons.

The reeking lagoons surround darkened warehouses of animals trapped in metal crates barely larger than their bodies, tails chopped off, pumped with corn, soy beans and chemicals until, in six months, they weigh about 240 pounds, at which point they are shipped off to abattoirs to be killed, sometimes by prisoners on work release from the county jail. The sows are killed after about two years or whenever their reproductive performance declines. It takes maybe eight to ten people to run a sow factory, overseeing two thousand sows, boars and piglets. A computerized “finishing” farm, where the pigs are fattened, may just require a part-time caretaker to check the equipment and clean up between arriving and departing cohorts of hogs.

America’s food corporations, only a handful of them, wield huge political power. Their lobbyists shuttle in and out of government. Their bought politicians safeguard the CAFOs from local regulation and okay “organic” standards designed to destroy the small farmers and processors.

Only last week Obama recess-appointed Islam Siddiqui to be chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the U.S. trade representative. Dr. Siddiqui’s nomination had been held up in the Senate and was opposed by the Center for Biological Diversity and more than 80 other environmental, small-farm, and consumer groups. More than 90,000 concerned citizens contacted the White House and Senate to oppose the nomination. Siddiqui is a former pesticide lobbyist and is currently vice president of science and regulatory affairs at CropLife America, a biotech and pesticide trade group that lobbies to weaken environmental laws.

As the Center for Biological Diversity remarked, “As undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Siddiqui oversaw the development of the first national organic labeling standards, which allowed sewage sludge-fertilized, genetically modified, and irradiated food to be labeled as organic before public outcry forced more stringent standards. Siddiqui has derided the European Union’s ban on hormone-treated beef and has vowed to pressure the European Union to accept more genetically modified crops.”

The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

Many Americans eat at fast food outlets because it’s all they can afford or have time for. I count myself lucky. I live in the country, and I take care to know which pasture and farm yard the pig, the steer and the lamb in my freezer came from. There’s no reason why there couldn’t be mass online ordering from small farms and real-time footage to show how the creatures are treated. No, it’s not veganism, thank God, but it would be progress nonetheless.

Aside on Pope Benedict XVI

Monsignor Georg Ganswein.

“This first ever Chief Inquisitor-made-pope (who appointed 112 of the 115 cardinals who elected him pope) pushed through in record time the canonization of a Hitler-admiring, Franco-supporting, fascist priest named Jose Escriva founder of the infamous and secretive Opus Dei Society. This clandestine group the present pope and the past one used as a bludgeon to kill off liberation theologian and base communities in Latin American (with CIA assistance) and substitute its motto of ‘a preferential option for the poor’ with a preferential option for the rich and powerful.”

ALEXANDER COCKBURN is the founder of Counterpunch.org, one of the largest leftist sites in the English language.  He cut his teeth many years ago as a media critic for The Village Voice (NYC).