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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The White House Egg Roll v. Gulag Ag
  • Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:26:46 -0700


The White House Egg Roll v. Gulag Ag
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN April 2 - 4, 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn04022010.html

There’s America the mythical, with the White House Easter Egg Roll scheduled
for next Monday and activities, in the words of the White House press
release, designed to “encourage children to lead healthy and active lives and
follow the First Lady’s ‘Let’s Move!’ initiative, a national campaign to
combat childhood obesity. The White House will open its South Lawn for
children aged 12 years and younger and their families.”

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.”

As Martha Rosenberg, a freelance journalist who covers America’s ghastly
agro-industrial landscape wrote 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.”

There aren’t many contented pigs on this continent, certainly not those
imprisoned in the Netley Hutterite Colony hog farm in Manitoba, where 8,700
pigs perished in a 2008 fire. Witnesses reported hearing the animals' "ear
shattering" squeals and "screams." Only six full-time employees tended the
animals, and bulldozers could not breach the factory farm manure pits. Fires
at two other Hutterite Colonies, Vermillion Farms and Rainbow, both near
Winnipeg, incinerated 8,500 pigs previously.

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.

Michele Obama has planted an organic garden on the White House grounds. The
symbolism would be more admirable if one did not know that Obama installed as
his secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa and a
notorious supporter of everything that is awful in the mass production of
food in America – from bioengineered crops from Monsanto to the treatment of
compromised meat with ammonia to produce what one USDA microbiologist, Gerald
Zirnstein, called "pink slime," saying to colleagues in an email, "I do not
consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground
beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling." It’s in fast-food chain hamburger
and school meals.

These days, animals in the days before slaughter are dosed with a dangerous
chemical additive fed to animals in the last days before slaughter. To quote
Rosenberg again, “Ractopamine, aka Paylean and Optaflexx, is banned in 160
countries, including Europe, Taiwan and China… Yet, in the United States 45
per cent of pigs, 30 per cent of ration-fed cattle, and an unknown percentage
of turkeys are pumped full of this drug in the days leading up to slaughter.
This drug increases protein synthesis. In other words, it makes animals more
muscular … and this increases the food growers’ bottom line." How does a drug
marked, "Not for use in humans. Individuals with cardiovascular disease
should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Use protective clothing,
impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask"
become "safe" in human food? With no washout period?” asks Rosenberg.
She answers:

“The same way Elanco's other two blockbusters, Stilbosol (diethylstilbestrol
or DES), now withdrawn, and Posilac or bovine growth hormone (rBST), bought
from Monsanto in 2008, became part of the nation's food supply: shameless
corporate lobbying.”

Across rural America, in the past fifteen years have spring up CAFOs. As
Steve Higgs writes in 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.

America the Mythical loves backyard barbecue. America the Real services the
myth with hogs from Gulag-Ag. The coastal plains and piedmont of North
Carolina, and now many other states, are pocked by vast pig factories and pig
slaughterhouses. People living there sicken from the stink of
twenty-five-foot deep lagoons of pig shit, which have poisoned the water
table and decanted nitrogen and phosphorous-laced sludge into such rivers as
the Neuse, the Tar-Pamlico and the Albemarle. Ammonia gas burdens the air. In
North Carolina, it is as though the sewage of fifteen million people were
being flushed into open pits and sprayed onto fields, with almost no
restrictions. That's where the millions of pigs’ worth of manure go.

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.

The noise in these factories is ghastly, and many workers wear ear pads
against the squealing and crashing of the animals in their cages. When the
Raleigh News and Observer did a series on North Carolina's pig barons in the
mid 1990s, readers were told they could call the paper's number in Raleigh,
549­5100, extension 4647, and listen to a recording of this terrible sound.

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.”

Michele Obama campaigns against obesity. She doesn’t campaign against Chicken
McNuggets, as sold by the McDonalds Corporation and devoured by kids across
America. Here’s a slice of America the Real, from Michael Pollan’s The
Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted
thirteen that can be derived from corn starting with the corn-fed chicken
itself …McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients,
quasi-edible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field
but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant … But perhaps the most
alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or
TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly
on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to ‘help preserve
freshness.’ According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a
form of butane (i.e., lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use
sparingly in our food: it can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil
in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a
single gram of TBHQ can cause ‘nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears,
delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.’ Ingesting five grams of TBHQ
can kill."

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.





  • [Livingontheland] The White House Egg Roll v. Gulag Ag, Tradingpost, 04/02/2010

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