Corruption, corruption, corruption...
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American. What stood out for me:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-12-2022?s=r
'The House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, chaired by Representative James Clyburn (D-SC)...issued a report today laying out how meatpacking giants got around local and state health officials trying to protect workers.
...top executives of JBS, Smithfield, and Tyson asked Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to get Vice President Mike Pence to throw his weight behind keeping workers in the plant. Less than a week later, Pence said at a press conference that meatpacking workers “need…to show up and do your job.” Industry leaders wrote a proposed executive order for Trump to issue, declaring a meat shortage and invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that the plants continued to operate. Less than a week later, Trump issued a similar executive order.
But there wasn’t actually a shortage. Even as John H. Tyson, chair of Tyson’s board, ran full-page ads in national newspapers warning that “[t]he food supply chain is breaking” and “[o]ur plants must remain operational so we can supply food to our families in America,” U.S. pork exports were at a three-year high.
This story points to a larger problem of the consolidation of food production, a problem we are seeing right now in the acute shortage of baby formula in the U.S., where supplies are 43% below normal...Today the administration announced it would increase imports of baby formula until U.S. production comes back to normal levels.
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