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| Here's your industdrial-style chicken dinner on the hoof. Appetizing? |
"The meat companies and their lobbies spent $8 million in 2010 alone,
just lobbying against this rule. That doesn’t include campaign
contributions, that’s just paying people to take congressmen out to
lunch, work the halls of Congress, try to convince lawmakers to kill the
reform effort. And it was remarkably successful. It seemed that [Obama's Secretary of Agriculture] Tom
Vilsack and his political appointees were really just caught off-guard
by the fact that the meat industry would fight back. And the minute
there was opposition, they started to retreat on their own initiatives,
they delayed their own reforms, and they really gave the playing field
over to these meat lobbyists who took full advantage of it. And the
reform efforts were all but dismantled by the end of 2011.
"Which,
in a way, left the big meat companies more powerful than they were
before Obama was elected, because they showed that the federal
government was really incapable of doing anything about this problem of
monopoly power in the meat business."
--Investigative Reporter Christopher Leonard in
Salon talking about his findings about America's meat industry, which are jaw-dropping.
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