Vicky Starr of 'Union Maids' : Working Class Hero

Stills from Union Maids. Images from escholarship.org. Vicky Starr (Stella Nowicki) is on right.
Vicky Starr dies at 93:
Socialist, labor organizer, feminist, film star

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / January 13, 2010

I read recently that Vicky Starr died on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2009. She was 93 years old. Thinking about Vicky Starr (or for fans of the film Union Maids, Stella Nowicki) reminded me about how her life, which many of us learned of through the film, was so inspirational.

As a teenager, Vicky Starr left the family farm in Michigan and arrived on the south side of Chicago in 1933. She stayed in the home of Herb and Jane March, Communist activists who had come to Chicago to organize the packing house workers in the huge Stockyards. Under March’s tutelage she sought employment in the Yards and almost immediately began to network with workers to build a union of workers in the days leading up to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

The processing of meat from the 1880s until the late 1950s was centered in Chicago. The Stockyards, housing the Big Four packers (Armour, Cudahy, Swift, and Wilson), employed thousands of workers. Because the work was so dangerous and unpleasant, it was largely carried out by the most marginalized sectors of the working class.

In the era of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle workers were primarily immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. After World War 1 and the “the Great Migration,” African Americans secured the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in the Yards. Historic union organizing drives in 1904, and 1921 faltered because of racism and ethnic conflict among workers. Communist and socialist organizers in the Yards, such as March, realized that combating racism was central to organizing industrial unionism in the meat packing industry.

Still from Union Maids. Image from Documentary Starts Here.
And it was rank-and-file activists like Vicky Starr who tirelessly met with workers, helped write leaflets and newsletters, interacted with the radical students from the University of Chicago who had offered their assistance to union organizing drives, and communicated with sympathetic members of the influential Catholic Church in the city.

As a member of the Young Communist League, Starr and her comrades would read classic Marxist and Leninist texts. Since Starr would be identified with organizing campaigns by her bosses she often lost her job in the yards. When that occurred she would apply for work at another packing house company using a different name.

She told Alice and Staughton Lynd (Rank and File, 1973) many years later: “When I look back now, I really think we had a lot of guts. But I didn’t even stop to think about it at the time. It was something that had to be done. We had a goal. That’s what we felt had to be done and we did it.”

In 1937, workers established the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC). Despite resistance by the major meat packers, state violence, red-baiting against union organizers by the state and the American Federation of Labor’s Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC), the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA-CIO) was constituted in 1943.

Until its merger with other unions, it remained a militant trade union that fought racism and red-baiting and publicly opposed United States foreign policies such as participation in the Korean War. And during its formative years in the mid-1940s Vicky Starr served for a time as Education Director for District 1 of UPWA.

Central to Starr’s contribution to the working class from the time she was a member of the Young Communist League, to the budding labor movement, the formation of the UPWA, and later as an organizer of clerical workers at the University of Chicago, was her constant struggle against racism and sexism.

After the formation of UPWA Starr said “We tried to make sure that there were both Negroes and whites as officers, stewards… in all the locals.” She fought residential segregation and participated in building the Back of the Yards Council on Chicago’s south side, and worked to end the exclusion of African Americans from professional sports. And in the end she recalled that the most militant trade unionists on the shop floor, the beef kill, were African Americans.

As an organizer in the 30s and a UPWA staffer in the 40s she combated sexism as well. “Women had an awfully tough time in the union because the men brought their prejudices there.” Women often had the most demeaning jobs in the Yards, wage rates discriminated against them, their special needs such as child care received no attention, and they often were fearful of demanding their rights on the shop floor and in the union.

As a socialist, Starr reflected on those halcyon days of UPWA-CIO organizing. She said that there was a sense that workers were ready to come together. There was a growing feeling of working class solidarity. Union organizers would show up at the Stockyards with literature and speeches. And at the grassroots she and others were on the shop floor spreading the word informally about the union.

And socialism needed to be addressed in terms of the concrete benefits of people’s lives. “You had to talk about it in terms of what it would mean for that person. We learned that you can’t manipulate people but that you really had to be concerned with the interests and needs of the people. However, you also had to have a platform -- a projection of where you were going.”

Starr left the Yards in 1945, was forced underground for a time in the McCarthy period, raised four children and returned to work as a secretary at the prestigious University of Chicago. She still had “a platform” at the university, organizing all non-professional staff. Despite predictable resistance from the bastion of liberalism in higher education she applied the grassroots organizing skills she learned as a teenager in the stockyards to achieve victory for clerical workers. Teamsters Local 743 was recognized in 1978. Vicky Starr became the first shop steward of the new local.

Vicky Starr in 1992. Photo from Chicago DSA.
But Starr’s contribution to the American working class, Black and white, male and female, did not remain unnoticed beyond the shop/office. Alice and Staughton Lynd captured her remembrances of CIO organizing in the 1973 book Rank and File and the clerical workers struggle in the 2000 book New Rank and File. And especially, “Stella Nowicki” was one of three stars (the others were Sylvia Woods and Kate Hyndman) in the wonderful documentary (Union Maids, 1977) about women organizing in the CIO in the 1930s.

This last project made Vicky Starr a major celebrity. It brought to the attention of new generations of activists the fighting spirit of the 1930s, the central role Communists played in the battles, and the absolute centrality to organizing the working class of fighting racism and sexism.

Still relevant today, Union Maids (and the Lynds' collections of interviews), can help inspire, educate, and inform activists about tactics, strategy, and basic principles of organizing.

Vicky Starr concluded her 1973 interview saying: “It was a privilege and a wonderful experience to participate in the excitement of those times.”

It is important to remember Vicky Starr for what she did for the working class, particularly industrial and clerical workers. And reflections on her life and work can still inform activists as they struggle for economic justice today.

[A memorial celebration of Vicky Starr’s life will be held January 23, 2010 at 4 pm at the North Shore Retirement Hotel, 1611 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, Illinois.]

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical, where this article also appears.]

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BOOKS / 'Eating Animals' : The Beef with Factory Farms

Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals:
A sweeping indictment of factory farms

...what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers.

By Jessica Roy / November 8, 2009

Jonathan Safran Foer is a strict vegetarian, but his most recent book, Eating Animals, is not a screed against meat. It is, rather, an indictment of the corrupt, large-scale factory farming that dominates the American meat market.

A journalistic work with a novelistic feel, the book is the result of three years investigating the U.S. meat industry, and it weaves together animal activist and farmer interviews with statistical research and even memoir to provide a sweeping account of Big Beef and its social, economical and environmental impact. Descriptions of animals suffering on the "kill floor" are enough to incite squirms from even non-animal lovers, but cruelty is not Foer's only grievance: There are health concerns and devastating environmental damage at issue as well.

Eating Animals may be Foer's first big swing at nonfiction, but primary themes hearken back to Foer's two critically polarizing novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Family folklore and ideas about the complexity of memory permeate each; Eating Animals begins with a section titled "Storytelling," about Foer's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (and passionate carnivore). "The story of her relationship with food," he writes, "holds all of the other stories that could be told about her."

The book is not without controversy, of course. Food politics gets at the very heart of what it means to be American -- alas, human -- and the subject of how and if we eat meat stirs up intense feeling. Last week, Natalie Portman kicked up a tiny tempest when she wrote about Eating Animals in a column on Huffington Post, championing Foer's argument but adding her own painfully tone-deaf riff about rape. (The controversy took place after the Salon interview but when I reached him afterward via e-mail, Foer had this to say about Portman's column: "It was such a thoughtful and generous piece of writing. I felt gratefulness more than anything else.")

I met with Foer recently in a coffee shop near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he spoke about what's wrong with PETA, how he finally went so local he ditched Amazon -- and what Americans can do to help put an end to the evils of factory farms.


This is not a straightforward case for vegetarianism. What is this book making a case for?

It's an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it's a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force -- historically, it's unprecedented how destructive our farm system is -- has taken over America and is starting to take over the world.

And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn't require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices. I think there are a lot of different choices people can make that will lead to dismantling the system. It's not like everybody has to go vegetarian. There are plenty of people who feel like, for whatever reason, they just can't stop eating meat, but if they bought meat at the green market, from farmers they know by name, that's as effective a rebuttal.

What if you live in a city and you don't live near a farm? I'm sure there are tons of people like that in New York. What's your suggestion for them?

Well, in New York everybody is near a green market. Everybody is near a source of family-farmed meat. In fact, cities are frankly the best place to be in terms of that. But you ask a good question because there are a lot of times when you don't have a choice. Like, in a restaurant, you never have a choice, with the exception of -- maybe there's 10 restaurants in New York City. In restaurants people are often faced with this problem, like, "Well, I'm either going to have to leave my values at the door and just eat this stuff, or eat vegetarian." Those are the only two choices we have.

And then people think, what does it mean to care about something if you don't act on that care? Even if it makes things less convenient, even if it makes your meal less enjoyable -- which is totally possible. But we make decisions all the time guided by our values that make our lives less convenient and less enjoyable. We do them because they're things that matter more to us than a momentary pleasure, momentary comfort. I don't know why food would be an exception.

How has writing and researching this book changed the way you and your family eat?

We were vegetarians before, and we continue to be, and we're raising our kids vegetarian. One thing that has interested me about my response to this whole project is that it's made me care about other things. I mean, caring is contagious. It's very hard to care about one thing and not care about its neighbor.

For example, I was not a huge advocate of buying things locally, not food but like books -- anything. I would buy books on Amazon all the time. But for whatever reason, the subject does not have anything to do with that, but the process of writing it made me much more concerned about buying things locally, supporting my neighborhood stores, it mattering that I know the person who's selling me something.

That's something that's great about food is that so much intersects there. Tolstoy famously said, "If there were no more slaughterhouses there would be no more battlefields." I don't think that's true, and I don't think all battlefields are bad, but what is true is that when you start to care about food and think about the animals and how we raise them, it encourages you to have lots of other thoughts.

This is your first nonfiction book.

Well, it's my first and my last. I don't think I'll ever do it again. It's not something that interests me. I felt a little bit like dressing up for Halloween. Although, my interests at the end of the day were never really journalistic and it always did feel personal. And the themes that this book falls back on are the themes that my novels fall back on, like, how are lessons transmitted through generations and families, how do our decisions matter, how do they influence others?

So, part of what inspired me to write about this was not that I cared about it so much but that nobody was writing about it. There are a lot of things I care about, but great people are writing about them. And there hasn't really been a mainstream book about meat, despite the fact that it's everything. I mean, if it isn't the biggest, most important issue in our country right now, it's up there.

Did any specific authors or works influence your book?

Many. Of course, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Peter Singer. I mean if any of them had written the thing that I wanted to read, I wouldn't have had to write my book. See, Pollan is wonderful, but he doesn't really get into meat too deeply; he sort of goes up to the edge of it and then stops. The same with Schlosser. Peter Singer writes about meat very directly, but in a way that I feel doesn't include enough of the messiness of being a person in the world and having cravings, having personal history, having family. Reason has something to do with our food decisions, but not a lot. Most food decisions are made out of emotions or psychology or impulse, and so I wanted a book that included those things.

What were some of the most surprising or disturbing things you found in your research?

The most disturbing thing is not any instance, but the rule. It's a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people's exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they're the rule. So an animal running and getting beaten up or running around with its neck slit open: That is the exception, even on the worst farms it's still the exception. But the rule that happens even on the best factory farms is animals are genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, animals that never see the sun and never touch the earth, animals whose cages are never cleaned.

These things are not as shocking and don't work as well in a video, but they're something to be concerned with much more because they're happening to billions and billions of animals every year. It's the way that the notion that an animal is a thing has been systematized and it's part of the business model and that everyone thinks this way. That was the most surprising thing.

You also talk about your dog George, and consider why people will eat farm animals but not dogs. Can you elaborate on that?

The book in the beginning sort of presents two approaches. One is philosophical -- is it right or isn't it right? Why do we do this at all? And the other is practical. I side with the practical. I mean, the book moves in the direction of the practical because in a way the philosophical questions are irrelevant. "Is it right to eat an animal, is it not right to eat an animal?" That's how most people talk about vegetarianism. But to me it doesn't even matter.

The truth is I actually don't know what I think about that question. What I know is that it's wrong to do it the way that we're doing it. And we could sit here and argue about a perfect farm where animals are treated perfectly and slaughtered perfectly and whether that's right. But if it exists at all it exists in a place that is impossible for us to find on any regular basis. So what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers. And that's bad; I mean, those things are bad. And that conversation preempts the philosophical conversation.

Your grandmother was a huge influence on your concept of food, and you also say she's an unapologetic meat eater. How did she react to the book?



I don't think she's read it yet. I think she will agree with a lot of what I said. I don't think she's going to change. I think she's past changing. But I've had pretty frank conversations with her about what's right and what's wrong, and she'll agree -- as will everybody, by the way. There's not a reader of this interview who will say it's right to make animals suffer unnecessarily.

So then it becomes a question of what is suffering to different people and what is necessary to different people. And people can have all kinds of different, very respectable differences of opinion on this question, but I've spoken to my grandmother about why this might be wrong and she doesn't disagree. It's sad. She said in a very upfront way, "I don't think about it, I'm not going to think about it."

For someone like my grandmother -- frankly, for a lot of people -- I don't really push it. I think for people who are still forming their habits, like high school students or college students, that kind of willed ignorance is lame at best and something much worse because they're most able to change. They're the ones who are ultimately going to have to foot the bill of factory farming and are more required to do the uncomfortable thinking that a 90-year-old doesn't.

Can you talk a little bit about America's obsession with food?

There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. Factory farming supplies a demand for cheap meat. That's it. It doesn't taste good, it's not healthy for us. The only good thing about it is that it's cheap.

But the thing is that it's not cheap. It's cheap at the cash register, and it's sold as cheap -- that's the defense for factory farming, "Look, we're making affordable food for normal people and all other arguments are elitist." But in fact factory farming is like the ultimate elitism because it's the most expensive food ever produced in the history of mankind. We pay very little at the cash register, but we pay and our kids are going to pay for the environmental toll, obviously the animals are paying, rural communities are paying.

And for what? So that corporations can prosper. The huge agribusiness -- companies make hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, not in the name of feeding the world, but in the name of making something that's so cheap that people become literally addicted to it.

Aside from getting green meat and eating locally, what are things that both vegetarians and meat eaters can do to help the transition from factory farms to something better?

First of all, they just have to say no to factory farms always. Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always, which means eating vegetarian a lot of the time. I think this issue is frankly more important than our conversation about the environment, because it is the No. 1 cause of global warning. The World Watch just released a report that showed that they thought animal agriculture was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, but it turns out it's 51 percent. So to talk about the environment and not talk about this is not to talk about the environment.

This conversation has to be totally mainstreamed. There has to be a consensus behind it that factory farming is bad and we're not going to support it and we're done with it. And it has to be unacceptable either to pretend these problems don't exist or not to actively engage with them. I'm not saying everybody has to reach the same conclusions, but they do have to agree on the common enemy.

Source / Salon

Thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : The Public Option and the Public Good

Graphic by patriotboy.
Honesty, honor and universal health care

We hear cries of woe about costs of universal care from the insurance-subsidized Republican members of Congress. Yet, these same folks have no problem with spending on foreign wars, of questionable need...

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / October 25, 2009

The Machiavellian maneuvering in the United States Congress continues. As a keen observer of the complexities involved in health care legislation I am confused.

Granted there are a few forthright, honest elected representatives such as Rep. Alan Grayson on the scene; however, there is much conflicted double talk arising from our elected representatives in general. How can the general public ever understand? Just what is a "public option"? Hopefully, it would be a program akin to Medicare available to all. Apparently not. During a recent discussion on MSNBC it was pointed out the program may well be limited to those currently without insurance, or for employers to provide employee benefits when they find commercial insurance overly expensive.

It would seem that those who have found their insurance to be too expensive, or those who would turn to the public plan for more humane, more intensive, or more honest, coverage, may well be excluded. One still feels the evidence of Faustian arrangements between certain Democratic Senators and the insurance/pharmaceutical/medical equipment alliance.

The drumbeat of opposition to universal health care continues. Reasonably new on the scene is an organization interestingly named AmeriPac –- the American Political Action Committee -- whose motto is "No Obama Care!" These folks have amassed every lie, misrepresentation, and distortion into one central location, producing pamphlets, bumper-stickers, e-mailings, the works.

An interview with ex-senator Dr. Bill Frist on Fox News October 18, 2009, makes one appreciate the well funded efforts that the health insurance cartels employ to hoodwink the public. It brings to mind Josef Goebbels’ credo:

"There is no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway yield to the stronger, and this will always be ‘the man on the street.’ Arguments must therefore be crude, clear, and forceable, and appeal to the emotions and instincts, not to the intellect. Truth is unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.

According to The Washington Post on October 10,

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America,. the drugmakers' main trade group, shattered records by spending nearly $7 million on lobbying July through September. The outlay brings PhARMA's total so far this year to nearly $20 million, just shy of the group’s entire lobbying budget for 2008. Other big spenders for the third quarter included Pfizer, Inc. ($5,42 million); the American Hospital Association ($3.8 million); the AMA ($3.95 million); Amgen, Inc. ($3,0 million; Bayer Corporation ($2.45 million) and Americas Health Insurance Plans ($2.4 million). Many of Washington's broader interest groups have also ramped up their lobbying efforts. The powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is at loggerheads with President Obama on health care, climate change and other key issues, spent a stunning $35 million on lobbying in the third quarter.

When we have a prescription filled at an outlandish price we are indirectly paying for the lobbies that are working to defeat efforts to establish price control on prescription drugs. The pharmaceutical industry spends much more on advertising than on research. It seems like every other commercial on television is for a pharmaceutical product.

Finally keep in mind that, when you are paying a health insurance premium, 40% of it will not go to pay your medical bills, but will provide for multimillion dollar executive salaries, lush stockholder dividends, and payments to your elected representatives aimed at defeating universal health care for you and your family. Universal health care would provide insurance without exclusions, high co-pays, and denials of preexisting conditions. Universal health care would be akin to Medicare, where you can choose your own physician, consultants, or out of town clinics, without the exclusions placed on HMO sponsors such as the Humana Corporation.

We hear cries of woe about costs of universal care from the insurance-subsidized Republican members of Congress. Yet, these same folks have no problem with spending on foreign wars, of questionable need, which have cost the American citizens $923,211,375,341 since 2001. The taxpayer has spent $693,457.283,717 in Iraq and $229,754,091,624 in Afghanastan, according to costofwar.com

Paul Craig Roberts, writing in Information Clearing House on October 21, 2009, notes: "According to reports the U.S. Marines in Afghanastan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon that comes to a $320 million daily fuel bill for the Marines alone." Mr. Roberts also notes that it costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanastan. And we cannot pay for health care for the 45,000 Americans who die each year for lack of resources to pay for the fundamental right of having decent health car! Please check out Rep. Grayson's new website Names of the Dead.

Happily there is a bit of good news and that is the fact that both the House and Senate are working to include the health insurance industry under the antitrust laws, from which they and major league baseball have been the sole exemptions. Furthermore, there is legislation pending in both the House and Senate, the latter sponsored by Sen. Debbie Stabanow, as SB 1776, that would eliminate Medicare's Sustainable Growth Rate from the physician formula. This, plus a bill for health care reform, deemed necessary by the American College of Physicians, would provide a 10% bonus to primary care physicians for five years, establish a workforce Advisory Committee to develop and implement a national workforce strategy, redistribute unused graduate medical education funds to primary care, and create a CMS innovation center to test new payment models that support primary care.

In short we will begin to produce more family doctors, pay them a decent salary, and perhaps some day once again rediscover the house call, which is still available in many European nations. We have fewer primary care physicians than any Western nation. For no good reason some surgical specialists have an income 20 times that of a family doctor.

In the midst of all of this we again hear a cry from the highly paid specialties that Medicare discounts their usual fees. We who practiced prior to Medicare remember that that many of the elderly were able to pay only a token fee, and some could not pay at all; thus we who were in internal medicine, internal medicine subspecialties, or general practice were delighted to see, with the advent of Medicare, on time if discounted payment. I do believe that under a government sponsored program that a payment scheme like that of the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic should become the national standard.

I hope that Congress will pass a comprehensive public option and not the watered-down version noted in my first paragraph. In addition there must be some control of the insurance cartel concerning “pre-existing conditions.” It was noted in a 2008 study on law.com that women are discriminated against by the health insurance cartel, being charged as much as 48% more than men for health insurance. Of more than 3500 plans studied, 60% did not cover maternity care, and women are regularly denied coverage for “pre-existing conditions” which can include pregnancy or a previous C-section. In eight states and the District of Columbia, insurers are allowed to use a woman's status as a survivor of domestic violence to deny her health insurance.

It would appear that President Obama has rid himself of his idée fixe concerning Sen. Snow and the need for “bipartisanship.” It seems that he finally has come out from under the cloud of subservience to the insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical appliance industries and will take an active part in providing the 60% of the public and 65% of the physicians with a true, unencumbered public option.

It also appears that the House of Representatives is listening to the majority of the American people and their physicians. One can only hope that Sen. Reid throws off his jellyfish facade, stands up like a true leader, and demands that the Democrats in the Senate vote for cloture, thus avoiding a filibuster by the “death care” inspired Republicans. (What do we do with Sen. Lieberman?) In the meanwhile the majority of the American public must stand firm against the corporations and their political allies who put profit above morality and the negative image of American society in the civilized world.

I am still not sure that the American public understands the term “public option.” I have seen no polling on the matter. Hence, I conducted a brief survey of my own in a grocery store checkout line, talking to six people. Two middle aged ladies with breast cancer ribbons on their lapels were fully informed. One elderly lady feared it would in some way interfere with her Medicare. (I explained that it was merely a Medicare-like program for those under 65, and she was satisfied.)

One gentleman told me that he had General Electric health insurance and was not interested. Another gentleman was fearful of “socialized medicine,” but it turned out that he was a Korean War Vet and attended the V.A. Clinic; hence, it was easy to explain in terms of the V.A. and his wife's Medicare. The sixth, attired in hunter’s garb, assured me that any government program was "Communism," and took off in his Hummer with the NRA sticker on the bumper.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform.]

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Stephanie Smith : E. Coli and the Killer Burger

Escherichia coli (known as "E. Coli" to its friends).
E. coli nearly killed Stephanie Smith:
All-beef patty can be big-time trouble

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / October 9, 2009

Stephanie Smith was pretty much committed to vegetarianism. But after her mother insisted she get a little protein from a traditional meal, she broke down and let her mother (Sharon) cook her a burger. Sharon slapped a Sam’s Club beef patty in the frying pan and they had their American style meal.

When Stephanie got sick, her mother was sure she knew what had caused it. It had to be the spinach. What neither of them knew was that the meat industry poisons people all the time. That’s why it rarely makes the news. Stephanie went into seizures and had to be put into a coma to save her life. Today she is recovering, but she will probably never walk again.

The story of the burger that poisoned her is a complex one. No, as you probably have already guessed, the cows (as opposed to steers) who supplied the meat for that burger were not raised on a family farm. If the cows had been raised in this traditional manner, they would have been grass fed, allowed to exercise and slaughtered in a clean environment.

As it was the killer burger came from multiple sources. To maximize profits, Cargill purchased cow meat from here and there, high intensity feedlots where cattle are penned in and pumped full of the high protein food (soy) that makes their meat attractive on the plate. After feeding out in these filthy crowded lots, the animals are brought in to be slaughtered in an assembly line process. Although there are safety rules, greed and the sheer impossibility of keeping feces off the future meat products make food safety in this environment extremely difficult to achieve.

No one knows exactly where the E. coli tainted meat came from. Could be Omaha. Could be Uruguay. All the different sources make it easy for the companies to blame each other, while they speed up production and hire illegal immigrants at lower wages. The American Meat Institute says it is doing what it can to slow down the rate of E. coli poisoning.

Cook your burger all the way through and you will kill the pathogens, diseased tissue and possibly some of the hormones and antibiotics. Then you will have a wholesome American style meal. Medium rare could quite possibly kill you. Meat promoters point to the need for total irradiation of meat products. Just another part of a mouth watering American food experience, I guess, but obviously another workplace hazard for the largely immigrant workforce.

Are there other options? Aside from the obvious vegetarian diet that feeds the world 15X over compared to meat eating? The vegetable diet that is better for your health? The diet that does more to stop global warming than driving an electric car, riding a bicycle and recycling 100% of your trash? The diet that allows humanity to live at peace with animals and each other? Not that diet?

Okay, the other alternative is to go to your butcher and have him (or her) cut and grind up a piece of animal flesh for you to eat. It won’t cost $1 a pound and come in a pre formed patty, but it will put you in a safer and more morally honest position as a meat eater.

Bon appetit!

The Rag Blog

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Foodie Friday: Food Inc., the Movie

"If we squander the ecological capital of the soil, the capital on paper won't much matter." Wes Jackson, President of the Land Institute.

Food Inc., the Movie
By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / July 3, 2009

Don’t miss the latest incarnation of the company that brought us agent orange. They knew at the time that it was damaging the troops and the villagers in Viet Nam, we all knew. Now they have moved on to control of the food supply. Only a few corporations control almost all the food, where once we had tens of thousands. The few “farmers” left are in debt to the corporations and dare not speak up, and Monsanto leads the pack, taking ownership of the seeds themselves.

If we knew how the food was made, we wouldn’t eat it, and Monsanto goes to a lot of trouble to see that no cameras are allowed in the concentration camps where the animals and their illegal humans are kept, in striking contrast to the pictures of farmhouses and barns and meadows the industry wants us to believe still exist.

It started innocently enough, with government subsidy of corn, and now if you eat beef, chicken, pork, or fish, you are still just eating corn, the incredible cheap feed paid for by the taxpayer. The animals, not intended for corn, are sick, but antibiotics still work enough to keep it going.

We are however, on a precipice.

Twenty thousand years of agriculture transformed in fifty years.

You vote three times a day.

A surprisingly powerful film, with Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan both telling us how it is.

Here are the Austin show times:

Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz 4:15, 6:45
Arbor Cinema @ Great Hills 1:00, 3:10, 5:30, 7:40, 9:55

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Al Giordano : How the 'NAFTA Flu' Exploded

Updated May 4, 2009

This photo, on the Smithfield Farms website, (still there at this posting on May 3, 2009), carries the following caption: "Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that made you smile." Smithfield Farms is a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods.

Smithfield Farms fled U.S. environmental laws to open a gigantic pig farm in Mexico, and all we got was this lousy Swine Flu.

By Al Giordano

See 'The Name of the Beast,' by James Retherford, below.

[Al Giordano first published the following eye-opener on April 29, 2009, in the Narco News Bulletin. Posted by The Rag Blog on May 3, 2009.]

US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the “swine flu” outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:

Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.

The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu symptoms in March.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified “swine flu” in February as “patient zero,” five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a survivor of the disease.

By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all – the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was “the cause of the epidemic.”

La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), dumped hog waste into the river.

It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But “free trade” opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US regulators.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the “Carroll Ranches” in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new subsidiary corporation, “Agroindustrias de México.”

Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the new Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated 27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about three percent of its total production.)

Photo from doveimaging.com / Rolling Stone.
Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield’s US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs—anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in clear and understandable human terms.

The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.

False mental constructs of borders –- the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands –- are taking a long overdue hit by the current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.

None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.

Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.

Source / The Narco News Bulletin

The Name of the Beast: Smithfield Foods

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / May 4, 2009

Smithfield Foods, inc. -- not Smithfield Farms -- is the name of the multinational food corporation ($11.4 billion in 2008 sales) whose Mexican subsidiary near Veracruz, Granjas Carroll de México, is linked by writer Al Giordano to ground zero of the swine flu outbreak. Smithfield Farms is a small subsidiary selling mail-order pork products.

In addition to the Carroll operation in the Perote Valley, Smithfield Foods owns international hog factory farms near Sonora, Mexico, and in Poland, Romania, China, and the U.K. and slaughterhouses in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Florida, and Kentucky. The corporation also owns a number of well-known private brands such as restaurant supplier Curly's Foods and retail names Armour, Eckrich, Farmland, and more. Its wholly owned subsidiary Murphy-Brown -- with 300 company-owned farms and 1,500 contract farms across 12 states -- boasts of being the world's largest hog producer and one of the nation's leading turkey producers. Last year the corporation became the U.S.'s fifth largest beef processor. Through its specialty foods group, Smithfield markets peanuts, the source of the nation's last big health scare.

In October 2007 Smithfield Foods filed a federal civil suit against the United Food and Commercial Workers Union for alleged "racketeering" in the union's effort to organize the workers at Smithfield's Tar Heel, N.C., pork processing plant. The company dropped the suit a year later and agreed to hold a fair election. Two previous union elections, in 1993 and 1997, resulted in narrow union defeats later overturned by the federal appeals court's determination that the company improperly influenced the outcome, and Smithfield was required to pay $1.1 million plus interest to workers who had been fired as part of the company's union-busting effort.

In December 2006, Smithfield Foods was the subject of an explosive investigative report by Jeff Tietz, published in Rolling Stone magazine.

Thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

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Swine Flu and the Monstrous Power of the Livestock Conglomerates

The nature of the livestock industry has been transformed dramatically. Photo by Oleg Popov / Reuters.
The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

The Mexico swine flu outbreak should alert us to a highly globalized industry with global political clout.

By Mike Davis / April 27, 2009

The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin, H5N1, this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. It seems less lethal than Sars in 2003, but as an influenza it may be more durable than Sars. Given that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.

Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long preached by the World Health Organisation, that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality of local public health. Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with antivirals and (if available) vaccine.

An army of sceptics has contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in the case of avian flu) faster than WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often non-existent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases. But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the US and UK, who prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot lines rather than dramatically increasing aid to epidemic frontlines overseas, as well as to big pharma, which has battled developing-world demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche's Tamiflu.

The swine flu may prove that the WHO/Centres for Disease Control version of pandemic preparedness -- without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health, and global access to lifeline drugs -- belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as Madoff securities. It is not so much that the pandemic warning system has failed as it simply doesn't exist, even in North America and the EU.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals. Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.

But no one was less alert than the disease controllers in Atlanta. According to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. There should be no excuses. The paradox of this swine flu panic is that, while totally unexpected, it was accurately predicted. Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story to evidence that "after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fast track."

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies

This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift." But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million US hogs on more than one million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses. . . in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers.

This is a highly globalized industry with global political clout. Just as Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress inquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.

This is not to say that a smoking gun will never be found: there is already gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of big pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialised and ecologically unhinged livestock production.

[Mike Davis is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu.]

Source / Guardian, U.K.

For a Spanish language translation of this article, go here.

Thanks to Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog

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