I hope I can be forgiven for bringing this up out of phase with fashion, because it's not about a crime wave that isn't happening or Republican intransigence or the psychotic fugue brigade out to prove Obama is Satan's evil twin.
It's about pigs. Perhaps it's because I enjoyed a piece of bacon for breakfast and shortly before viewing this video. It's not that I'm against eating meat. If farm animals are given a better but shorter life, free of the constant fear and the disease and parasites and hunger that define the lives of wild beasts, I can live with it. What I can't live with is the brutality quite on a par and sometimes worse than what happened at Sobibor or Auschwitz.
I don't want to eat something that was skinned alive or that lived its entire life unable to move or that died in prolonged screaming agony. Pigs are intelligent as animals go and yet people who get all moon eyed at kittens and puppies which may be less intelligent and aware, are themselves unaware of piglets being tossed around with pitchforks like dead meat or tossed squealing into machines of slaughter. None of that is necessary. There are ways to slaughter animals without pain or terror and to raise them without extreme misery. But no, it's not just about pigs, at least not the four-legged kind. It's about the monsters who own these houses of horror, the factory farms, the slaughter houses that not only scoff at the law, but want to put you in jail if you expose the satanic operations that sicken any but the most depraved and inhuman amongst us.
ALEC, a conservative business advocacy group is attempting to criminalize meat industry employees who might neglect to tell an employer how they feel about the illegal torture and abuse of animals on job applications. I'm talking about laws that mandate jail time for filming illegal activities and fulfilling a legal requirement to report them to authorities. Yes, it's already a jail-time crime in some states to expose the crimes of your employer and ALEC seems to want a country where although the government can capriciously carry on surveillance and seizure over individuals, the privacy of meat packers is sacred no matter how many heinous offenses to decency they commit.
There must be something we can do, short of taking the family Kalashnikov down to the farm and expressing your opinion ballistically. There are congressmen, senators and others who may under duress be tempted to ignore the blood soaked contributions of slaughterhouses and factory farms. Some of them can read. Some of them do read -- and you can write, can't you?
George Orwell got it right: Some animals are more equal than others, and the corporate animal is most equal of all. Hell, corporate animals even think they are people, and people are mere ciphers in the economic food chain – undeserving of rights or humane treatment.
ReplyDeleteALEC is the same organization lobbying for tort reform – the wet dream of all vulture capitalists. If a corporation markets a defective product – say, glass in a candy bar that rips apart your esophagus – consumers will not be able to sue for damages and hold them accountable. ALEC is the ’maim, mutilate, and torture’ wing of Corporate America.
Who are the corporate sponsors of ALEC? It is a veritable Who’s Who of American industry.
Once this post runs its course, your intrepid cephalopod intends to post a list of ALEC members. I’ll call it my “BOYCOTT LIST.”
Funny how often "strong Christians" don't give a shit about the suffering of animals. Islam and Judaism have strict rules about humane slaughter and some Eastern Religions forbid it.
DeleteSo if I Boycott these boogers, am I going to have to live in some remote cave and live off the land? I'm picturing a pretty big list.
ALEC is an obscenity. Citizens United seeks to legitimize such scum.
ReplyDeleteHow they ever conned America into thinking an oligarchy fosters personal liberty I don't know, but Citizens United certainly nourishes oligarchy and of course any economy that is based on equating profitability with morality and justice is, I think, headed right back to the kind of feudalism our sad world has suffered under for much of its history. Thanks, Ayn for exchanging the rule of the proletariat for the rule of immortal and immoral aristocrats.
ReplyDeleteIronic that our nation was founded on ending the rule of an aristocracy and has ever since been dedicated to re-establishing it. All men may be created equal, but Corporate Persons are a little more equal in our world.
I'm not satisfied to blame it on industry and more than I can blame a lion for eating cute little lambs. It's only nature and in nature we can only have civilization by denying many natural tendencies that have us at each others throats. It's human nature to be greedy and selfish and unconcerned with other humans' condition and the future of civilization depends on being able to control our greed and yet balance it against our dislike of being controlled.
Just how much control we need and are able to exert is the question. Democrats are very divided on this and that weakens us a lot. I'd like to avoid the utopian raptures they indulge in and think about stopping short of counting our french fries, rationing the beer and imagine some guy in the street shouting HEY YOU - GET AWAY FROM THAT KEYBOARD. DROP AND GIVE ME 50!
One of the goals of ALEC is to lobby for the privatization of public assets and services, such as the privatization of state prison systems. This is what follows after a prison is run for profit: Violence and drugs plague private prison after corporate takeover. This is not the first scandal of this type. Years ago, juvenile detention centers in Pennsylvania were the subject of scandal after two judges were dismissed for arbitrarily setting long prison sentences for juvenile offenders - after taking money under the table from the company that profits from those prisons.
ReplyDeleteA favorite old trope of conservatives is that government should be run like a business or - better yet - privatized, the underlying assumption being that profit always drives efficiency. WRONG. Conservative don't understand the difference between moral decisions versus business decisions. Matters of law and punishment and healthcare and the public welfare are moral decisions - not the provenance of private, profit making enterprise. This can never work. The profit motive will always compromise and corrupt any institution whose mission and purpose is a moral one.
ALEC is EVIL.
About the juvenile detention scandal mentioned above, it's called Kids for Cash - click here.
ReplyDeleteALEC is EVIL.
Two more articles about the Beast: ALEC Is Now Deciding What You Eat and …
ReplyDeleteWave of "Ag Gag" Bills Threaten Food Safety and Freedom of the Press
ALEC is EVIL.
Where is Mr. Sinclair when you need him? The sad answer is that Business interests are far too protected from public sentiment for his kind of expose to matter much any more. The lyin' lions rule the jungle.
ReplyDeleteOur food source should be of great concern to everyone. The big AG/Corporate industry has been operating in secret protected by their political cronies for years and the result is that most of our food is being produced either inhumanely or inhumanly. Farm animals are beaten, tortured and fed unnatural products in an effort to maximize profits. Fruits and vegetables are genetically mutated and grown in toxic chemical soups and then processed with other harmful products and chemicals before being boxed, bagged or canned and then placed on grocery stores shelves in your community. It is why we are one of the fattest, unhealthiest nations on Earth. We need to be very vocal in supporting whistle blowers and diligent in pursuing those who would try to vilify them.
ReplyDeleteIf you've read or read about Temple Grandin, it seems thata great deal of work has been done on the humane handling of animals for slaughter. I think many meat packers -- perhaps most, do an adequate job, but obviously some don't. Making reporting of violations more difficult and even criminalizing such things is obscene and should not be tolerated. It's easy to blame the ag lobby, but we all have telephones and computers and congress does usually respond to public outrage. Be a pest!
ReplyDeleteI know the idea that everything we eat is poison is almost a liberal credo, but I have my doubts. I think our problem is more related to the fact that we eat too damned much, but getting real, true verifiable facts about diet, nutrition and food chemistry is all but impossible what with all the snake oil salesmen, TV doctors, Diet peddlers and other purveyors of lucrative misinformation.
I think we should dine exclusively on cephalopods.
“Workers who do not have access to paid sick days are one-and-a-half times more likely to go to work sick with a contagious illness, putting their co-workers and customers at risk, and costing an estimated $160 billion each year in lost productivity. Children are more likely to go to school sick when their parents can't get off work to care for them, causing illness to spread. Delaying treatment for illness can cause conditions to worsen, leading to more emergency room visits and increased costs for public health insurance programs.
ReplyDeleteAn estimated 40 million workers, or forty percent of the workforce, cannot take sick days without losing wages or possibly their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Efforts to Kill Paid Leave Tied to ALEC).
Paid sick leave laws have been passed in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, New York, and Washington DC.
However, corporate-backed bills passed at the state level in Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Mississippi have nullified and permanently preempted paid sick leave ordinances passed at the local level.
Similar bills introduced in Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Washington have been linked to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC is EVIL.