Oligarchy: Animal-Industrial Complex
This podcast is about the animal industry or the operational systems known as CAFOs and CFOs. The confined feed operations are operated throughout the Midwest and the Heartlands here in the USA. Due to the misnamed Right to Farm bills, the dirtiest of operators have free reign over our lands. Many of them are also massive polluters of our waterways, as indicated below:
Transcript:
Speaker 1 00:00:14 When recording it, night and a train come through. It’s kind of interesting to play a little led Zeppelin, cashmere, and, uh, uh, to blend into the actual recording. Anyway, I got a lot of feedback from the last, uh, uh, recording that I did on oligarchy. Uh, we talked about the military-industrial complex and how great thinkers like Albert Einstein pointed out that we were an oligarchy but never received an invite to the, uh, why ha house. Um, kind of the same thing for the military-industrial complex. They don’t need an invite. They’re in there all the time. In fact, they’re sitting and waiting in think tanks and other nonprofits supported by the military-industrial complex. They are the, what we call the neocons, and they work for both the Democrat and Republican parties. Uh, make no mistake about it. They work in, they work both parties and, uh, they work it all the way down to the local level.
Speaker 1 00:01:45 And that is pretty much what you’re gonna find with the animal industrial complex is what Wikipedia calls ’em. And, um, uh, their definition is the term animal industrial complex refers to the systematic and institutionalized exploitation of animals. It includes every economic activity involving animal animals such as the food industry, meat, dairy, poultry, agricultural, an animal testing, uh, academic industrial animals in space, medicine, uh, clothing, labor and transport, tourism and entertainment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, um, and most of this takes place in confined animal feed operations. That means a lot of animals in a very small space. And some of these animals don’t get, uh, uh, get to move, and they’re confined to a cage at a very young age. And there they will live out their, uh, short lifespan, and then they’re are slaughtered and put into the meat production facility. So, and, um, we’ve invited China.
Speaker 1 00:03:26 China’s now the top, uh, pork producer in the United States. They own Smithfield, uh, which used to be US corporations now owned by China, which brings in an unusual slant to all our China bashing that our politics are doing right now in order to prepare ourselves for war over there. So as you, as you see how the oligarchy works, um, you see them operating behind closed doors. Uh, they’re the ones that put together the, um, right to farm bills, you know, the misnamed right to farm, just like the misnamed right to work. Um, bills are put together by these industry oligarchs and pushed through by the politicians that they pay. Um, do they go against the, uh, American people? Well, we, we enjoy eating the meat, uh, but the problem is we subsidize the process of us eating the meat in the fact that the animal industrial complex, just like the military-industrial complex pollutes, they’re the biggest polluters in our country.
Speaker 1 00:05:03 And, uh, um, it, it is really hypocritical when you look deep down behind the closed doors, how these oligarchs and oligarchies operate in that the animal industrial complex is, uh, um, the number one polluter of our waterways. It’s, uh, it’s a heavy polluter. And, uh, we okay, it, we, we put, we subsidize that, uh, contamination because, uh, the government, you know, as I mentioned in, um, in the first tape, the, uh, the government is charged with, you know, we as a society put together the government. We say, okay, you guys are charged with taking care of the commons and regulating the private industry. So that private industry, Jefferson wrote, the economic wolves in the private industry, uh, do not take advantage of us. Well, uh, you know, they utilize names like the right to farm as an opportunity to, you know, when you look at the bills and you look at the fine print, uh, you know, the expression is the devil is in the details.
Speaker 1 00:06:41 And what you will find is that the right farm bills is the devil <laugh>. It is the devil. Uh, uh, the fine print is the opportunity for them to pollute without the demand by the public to clean up that pollution or make their feed operations the food production, um, non, uh, contaminated. Now, I went on a journey several years ago with my motorcycle here in eastern Indiana. I was taking a ride up to, uh, uh, northeastern Indiana, and went across the Wabash River, where I used to, um, fish. My dad used to take me up there when I was a teenager and taught me how to fish for Channel Cat and, and, uh, smallmouth bass and anything else that w we could catch up there. And we caught a lot of cars, uh, not a game fish, not an edible fish, um, but mostly channel cats, and we caught ’em plentiful.
Speaker 1 00:08:10 Um, but then the CAOs and the Wabash River turned a color of lime green in the early summer as the water started to warm up. And, um, when I crossed the bridge, I looked over at the water and said, oh my God, look at that. That is disgusting. And it’s like, why is that river lime green? So I, I got on Google Maps and started doing some, uh, GIS surveys. And what I discovered is the Wabash comes out of Ohio and, um, comes out of western Ohio. And so I started tracking the waterways, and I started tracking CAOs. There are some people who pronounce them CAOs. And I started tracking them. And you can see ’em in the, um, you can’t see ’em necessarily from the road, but you can see ’em on Google Maps. They’ve located themselves just off highways, uh, but close to waterways so that they can, um, when you have these large amounts of animals, chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, et cetera, living in a very small space, they, the urine and feces that they let go of during the day goes into a great, which goes underneath the concrete floor of these CAFOs.
Speaker 1 00:10:02 And then our, uh, by tile sent out to manure lagoons, which is what they call ’em. It’s a big giant lake of feces and urine. And getting rid of that is a difficult chore because the local farmers around there may want to utilize that as fertilizer, but it has a horrendous smell that the, uh, residents will, uh, complain about. Um, veraciously, <laugh>, once that’s sprayed, I mean, it, it, it makes your eyes, uh, bad. It is, it is awful. It will cause all kinds of asthmatic issues. And so, uh, getting rid of these, these, uh, manure and, uh, urine is a chore. They like to spray it on farms because that makes them a little money. And sometimes they’ll do it for free, but, uh, they have to get rid of it. And, uh, what the, uh, states have done, especially here in Indiana, uh, through Mitch Daniels and the Right to Farm acts that he, he put out the devil. Speaker 1 00:11:32 And the details are you can, uh, submit, uh, the discharge from these lagoons into our waterways. And so, uh, this discharge makes its way into the rivers. And when the water warms up, um, it creates algae blooms. And that’s the line green look you see in the rivers, creeks, streams, and eventually lakes. And, uh, eventually it, it goes through Ohio, and it goes through the Mississippi and the enters. On the Gulf Coast, we have several miles, hundreds of miles, probably of the dead ocean, where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf Coast. And it’s all because of this contaminated, uh, water. Some of it’s from animals, some of it’s from plastic, some of it’s from medicine, whatever it’s from. It’s private industry polluting our waterways. And that’s, you know, as I mentioned earlier, that’s where the hypocritical part comes in, is the Republicans are, are, uh, chief operators of this. Speaker 1 00:13:04 They’re, they’re supposedly the proponents of, you know, conservation and, uh, uh, the right to hunt and the right to farm, and all these rights that they want their constituents to have. But yet, the constituents are hunting and fishing, and they can’t even eat the fish. There’s only so much fish you can eat from the rivers, the contaminated rivers before it contaminates you and makes you sick. And, um, that’s just ludicrous. There. There are some creeks in Indiana that would be filled with trout just south of where I live, here in Mune, uh, as Bell Creek. And Bell Creek would be a fantastic creek to, um, go fly fishing in. Uh, it’s cold enough. There’s a lot of underground wells that flow into it, so it could, uh, produce, uh, and did produce plentiful trout. But when the CAOs come in and the cold water, you can’t see it, but in the warm water, when it heats out, and the sun sits on it, that’s when the algae blooms.
Speaker 1 00:14:27 That’s when, uh, all the contaminants flip over, and you can see ’em and spot ’em pretty easy. And, uh, one of the things I’ve volunteered to do is become a water ranger where I go out and, uh, test the water, uh, to get a baseline and then see, uh, what’s going on, um, upstream. And you can, they’ve got the CAOs. And if you guys could see the picture of the number of CAOs in Indiana, it’s disgusting. It paints the state red, basically. And we are underwriting that, you know, we are subsidizing that every time you go out and get a bacon, lettuce and tomato or a pork chop, uh, or a steak, think that you’d be paying, uh, $30 for a steak and for pork chops, but you’re paying less than that to allow them to pollute your water. Well, anybody that wants to fish or go out and recreate on the water, even swimming sometimes becomes a hazard.
Speaker 1 00:15:47 You can’t swim. Even the local lake, uh, they call it a reservoir, but it’s really just a big lake. Prairie Creek here in Delaware County has the same problem in the summer. You know, there’s only so much you can do without getting that contamination on you, pollution on you, and it causes problems. And there was a, there was a group of local farmers, not, not the big industrial farms, but local farmers called the Hoosier CAFO Watch. And these folks tracked the CAFOs and other CFOs, confiding confined feed operations. They would track those and report them to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. And they would let me know about it because I started asking questions of why the rivers and streams were so disgusting. And I got turned onto to these folks. And what they would do is they would track with, uh, water samples, and they would take, uh, fly little private planes over the top of these feed operations.
Speaker 1 00:17:18 And you can see them all over Google maps, but they’ve located them behind the tree line, and you can’t see them from the roads very well unless you’re driving on the back roads. If you’re driving on the highways, you can’t see all the Turkey CAFOs that they got in Ohio. Uh, they’ve neatly located them behind the tree line, so you can’t see ’em. So anyway, you could fly in drones, you could fly, uh, airplanes over, and they were getting that data and turning it into I D M. And so then the, um, uh, Republican lawmakers in the state and in Indianapolis, what they would do was they would then pass a law and add it to the right to work more of the devil. And the details, they would add that to those laws making it illegal to fly planes or drones over private land. Speaker 1 00:18:24 And we thought it was bad, because back in the day, journalists would, uh, lie on their applications and get hired to take, uh, so they could take videos in these CAOs of the animals being abused and, uh, using forklifts to pick ’em up because they’re, you know, they’re, they’re grown in such tight spaces that they don’t use their legs and, uh, some of them can’t walk. And, uh, so when it’s time to slaughter them, they literally use, um, trucks and forks to lift them and take them to the, uh, to the trucks that are there and to line them up for the slaughterhouse. And it’s disgusting to watch while the journalists are doing that. And so were, um, animal activists, they were doing that as well. But, um, when people saw that they would, they’d join the protest, they said, you know, that’s ridiculous.
Speaker 1 00:19:39 That’s, it’s, it hurts us. You know, they get on Facebook and they see that, and it makes them sick. It’s like, I can’t eat an animal that’s being treated like that. So instead, instead of our government, which it was tasked to do, um, of holding these CAO operators accountable for what they were doing to our waters and to our animals, they eliminated the opportunity to clack dag data. Uh, so they made it illegal for people to get in there and take pictures and videos. So all of a sudden, there’s nothing on Facebook or Twitter about this. And therefore, people could ease up and go back to normal and eat their meat and not feel guilty about it because there were no pictures of it. Well, that’s not why, that’s not why we formed our government. Our government was tasked to hold the private sector accountable. Speaker 1 00:20:48 Um, and we, they figured out that, you know, we don’t want to pay $30 for pork chops a thick steak, and, um, you know, chicken wings. We want those plentiful, and we don’t want to pay a lot of money for them. So we all, um, we all take our guilt and remorse from killing and slaughtering these animals in confined spaces. I mean, pigs, are one of the most social animals on the planet. You know, we wouldn’t let these operations treat our dogs and cats this way, but for some reason, it’s okay to treat our food this way. And if you don’t think that our food knows it’s being abused and passed along to us, you’re wrong. You know, there’s plenty of studies if you get on the internet to show that these abused animals, you know, you are what you eat, right?
Speaker 1 00:21:57 Well, if the, the meat that you’re eating had been, has been abused and, uh, has fretted and freaked out for, you know, the six to nine months it’s alive in these confined animal spaces, uh, that, uh, trauma gets passed along to you. And, uh, you can read about it. It’s pretty simple to read about. So, you know, this is all going into the, um, you know, it’s, it’s pretty much the same as a military-industrial complex. You know, I’ve got picture after picture. I found the, uh, in Salano, Ohio. It’s one of the biggest lakes in, uh, Ohio, a beautiful lake. There’s no recreation on it whatsoever because of all the farms in eastern Ohio, or, uh, carrying all the feces and urine into this lake. And it’s settling at the bottom, and it’s basically one big manure trap. And there are no boats. Property values have declined dramatically.
Speaker 1 00:23:23 There’s, uh, lake activists over there that have, uh, talked to me about it. Um, so the, these, these complexes, these oligarchs are running the politicians. When I hear conservatives saying, we’ve got our government’s too big, it’s, it’s doing too much. You know, we can’t afford ’em. Well, yes we can, and yes, we need our government, but we need our government to do its job, not be sitting there looking for handouts from all these oligarchs, you know, but they do. I mean, and job killers that are not, they’re not killing many jobs. As a matter of fact, most of these meat packing places are using, uh, children, uh, underage children and illegal immigrants, you know, the ones that were yelling, uh, for our government to keep off of our southern border. Uh, these farms are collecting them. I mean, even in Indiana where all these CAOs are, the egg pickers and the meat packers are, uh, the ones working in these CAFOs and CFOs are pretty much all migrants or immigrants, uh, because Americans don’t want to work in there. Speaker 1 00:25:04 You know, it’s the modern-day slave industry. They don’t pay them anything. And the exchange with them is we won’t deport ’em, we won’t, uh, worry about their, uh, income. If they’re making $5 a bushel, we won’t tax it. Uh, they can be paid with cash, and these farmers do that. They are the worst oper you must remember; they were the worst operators in Europe. And Europe kicked them out because of what they did to the meat in that country. That’s why when you go over to Europe, you pay more because they’re not, uh, their pollution’s not being subsidized. They, they figured out that Europe is more democratically socialized over there and they don’t want ’em. So they moved North Carolina in a few places here in the United States, and then when, uh, they figured out that too many of these dirty operators were doing what they did, they kicked them out.
Speaker 1 00:26:15 Well, Mitch Daniels was standing there and brought them in when he was governor. And then he goes on to Purdue, which is an agricultural college, which just kind of makes you laugh at the hypocrisy that’s going on. So, um, that’s pretty much it from the animal industrial complex. It’s just another oligarchy. I’ll have some more coming on here pretty soon. But it’s just another oligarchy that spends his time, um, buying up politicians, buying the government just as Thomas Jefferson Warren, just as Albert Einstein pointed out in the forties, just as Dwight Eisenhower pointed out in the sixties with the military-industrial complex. They’ve located themselves in districts across the United States, so the politicians have to play ball with them. And they, they, uh, the devils in the details. They spend all that money to get the political backing they can.
Speaker 1 00:27:30 And that’s what influences our government. So when conservatives or Republicans say the government’s too large, they really don’t understand what they’re talking about. They need to look specifically at what the government’s doing and what it’s not doing. It’s not, what it’s not doing is their job. What they are doing is working for, uh, oligarchies. And, uh, you’ll see is I keep rolling these out, these recordings out, uh, one after another. It’s corporate corporatism, whatever you want to call it. I call it oligarchies. And, um, when I comment on Sheila Kennedy’s blog that she’s got down in Indianapolis, you know, I wish all of you could hook up to that because there’s a lot of wise people sharing a lot of good information. It’s at, uh, sheila kennedy.net. Uh, and any research you do here in Indiana or any place else on K f o ca, fo o s and cf o s, you’ll find it.
Speaker 1 00:28:52: There’s plenty of research on the internet, but most Americans completely deny what’s going on so that they can eat their meat and play with their pets without guilt. But if you open your eyes and actually look at what’s going on, you’re paying for the abuse out of pocket in multiple ways. You’re paying to have your waterways polluted so that you can’t eat the fish or go out to fish in these areas, because the fish can’t live in them. You’re destroying the waterways. You’re actually using our waterways not for recreation as it was intended, but as dump sites that go literally out to the ocean. You carry away all the pollution downstream, and all the states lining up on the Ohio in the Ohio Valley, and Mississippi are all experiencing the consequences of our pollution. And we do it freely and we applaud it. When we speak up about it, 95% of the time, we don’t know what we’re talking about. So, that’s it for now. I will talk to you soon about another oligarchy that I see interfering in daily life. That’s all I got. Thanks for joining in. Goodnight.