CommentsACCORDING TO LIZ - One of the cases being considered by the Supreme Court this term epitomizes the greed and self-serving interests of the ruling class.
Last month, the Court heard arguments in an attempt to overturn the California law aimed at preventing egregious animal abuse in favor of the profit of a very few, very wealthy corporations.
Currently on most factory farms female pigs are confined to gestation crates measuring two feet wide by seven feet long, just large enough to lie down or stand up but not to turn around.
California law requires a minimum of 24 square feet per pig, almost doubling the footprint of each cage – an increase that opponents claim would cause financial hardship to the mega-farms that each house thousands of breeding sows.
How can we incentivize those who voted for repealing Roe v. Wade to care about pigs over profit?
The Basics
Two thirds of female pigs used for breeding the pork on people’s tables are owned by approximately 40 corporate producers in just a few states – those that continue to permit the rampant environmental, labor and animal abuses prevalent within the industry.
Smithfield Foods alone has an estimated 530 company-owned farms and 2,100 contractors which produce about 18 million pigs a year. This includes over a million sows whose progeny are destined for the slaughterhouse.
Just four meatpackers – JBS, Tyson, Smithfield, and Hormel – control 70 percent of the market; close to 75% of pigs raised in the United States are owned by these companies, not the farmers.
Production contracts with farmers direct exactly how these pigs are to be raised from birth to pre-slaughter to maximize corporate profit. Those farmers who do not obey these dictates do not get paid. If they don’t get paid they lose their land.
California, first in 2008 and then in 2018, passed propositions that threatened the profit-above-all approach by corporate livestock producers.
More History
Proposition 2 was a ballot measure to prohibit the confinement of pregnant pigs, calves raised for veal, and egg-laying hens in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. On November 4, 2008 it was approved by over 63% of voters.
In 2010, legislators here passed Assembly Bill 1437, mandating that the animal rights provisions embodied in Prop 2 would apply to all producers selling pork, veal and egg products in California. However, producers in other states took advantage of language that required space be what was needed for an animal’s “natural behavior and movement” and claimed a hen needed little more area than a letter-sized sheet of paper.
On November 6, 2018, Proposition 12 was passed by almost 63% of California voters. It gave further teeth to animal protections by prohibiting the confinement of animals in cages below a specific number of square feet, and banning the sale of veal, pork, and eggs when animals are confined to areas below the minimum square-foot requirements.
Prop 12 was supposed to come into effect in 2022 but when corporate agricultural interests in other states recognized that they would have to comply to continue to reach the lucrative California market, they attacked, invoking the Commerce Clause in their efforts to overturn it.
The plaintiffs argued that the Prop would force them to pay more in production costs to access California consumers thus impacting interstate commerce. But are they being forced to sell to the California market?
The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states” and has repeatedly been invoked to protect profitable activities that some feel are dangerous or put the interests of a few before the needs of the many.
People for and against slavery, Prohibition, monopolies, gun laws, marijuana growing, have all called on the Commerce Clause in efforts to sway the Supreme Court.
Lower courts have upheld numerous challenges to Prop 12 as not in violation of the Commerce Clause, or simply refused to hear appeals.
After the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation, the plaintiffs filed a brief with the Supreme Court challenging its constitutionality.
These plaintiffs are not family farmers, those of our schoolbooks who are, as the American Farm Bureau Federation’s President puts it, “dedicated to caring for their animals.”
These are the Wall Street-backed factory farmers notorious for their environmental despoliation, air and water pollution, labor infractions and tax manipulation in addition to well-documented animal abuse.
Big Ag corporate behemoths have commodified living animals with total disregard to their health, comfort and well-being, whereby only the bottom line is king and “how can we do it for less” is the driving force to increase return on investment.
In re: the Interests of Congress and the Supreme Court
Between 1995 and 2020, 33 members of Congress and their immediate families received nearly $16 million in federal farm subsidies.
And for decades the pro-property rights Federalist Society has stacked the Supreme Court, starting with an eminently undistinguished federal judge by the name of Clarence Thomas.
The Clarence Thomas who has never show respect for women, or their rights. The Clarence Thomas who said he would have granted hearings to an appeal of the most recent challenge to AB 1437 which the Supreme Court declined to hear in 2019.
John Roberts, who was nominated and then confirmed as Chief Justice in 2005, joined Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito as the conservative wing of the Supreme Court. During the reign of Trump, they were joined by Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, making Roberts comparatively more a moderate and swing vote until Amy Comey Barrett’s confirmation which moved the majority significantly to the right. All six are Federalist Society members.
Despite claims to being institutionalists, the focus of the Roberts Court has been to advance corporate and Republican power by making aggressively political “judicial law” decisions. These include rulings such as Citizens United which sold out democracy to corporate interests with deep pockets, and gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Pay-to-play has become the law of the land with billionaires, primarily on behalf of right-wing corporate interests, leveraging their obscene assets to control both the government and court decisions.
This current Supreme Court majority may pay lip service to strict interpretation of the law but in its first session has revealed a commitment to overturn established protections and use legal innovation to rewrite the law of the land in order to reform our political system in its own hyper-conservative image and entrench Republican rule.
The Impact of Industrialization on Animal Husbandry
Research by the advocacy group Food and Water Watch has shown that corporate agriculture takeovers have consistently hurt rural Americans. In Iowa, they have:
“…wreaked severe economic and environmental damage. Iowa lost nearly 90 percent of its hog farms between 1982 and 2017, as factory farms squeezed out smaller, family-scale operations… Farmers are earning less (in today’s dollars) per pound of pork produced, while processors and retailers capture more profit. Meanwhile, factory hog farms pollute Iowa’s waterways and contribute to climate change.”
“Larger farms make fewer local purchases, reducing the “multiplier effect” of wealth circulating in a local economy. While Iowa experienced an estimated 2 percent decline in total retail businesses between 1982 and 2017, the counties with high hog sales and large farms saw extreme declines — 40 percent and 33 percent, respectively.”
Big Ag is an acknowledged villain today, across the United States and around the world. It contributes excessive amounts of pollution, promotes farming practices that destroy the productivity of arable land, reduces the quality of food, and manipulates the food supply chain for its own profit.
While family farms tend to care for their animals as individual living creatures, factory farms are automated to the Nth degree possible. And even tasks that cannot be done by machine – castration and killing – tend to be done at such a rate and without basic anesthesia that they have roboticized workers.
How can such a demeaning job hurting screaming piglets not have an effect on the men who trade it off for a paycheck to buy the beer to bring oblivion?
Truth or Consequences
Big Ag spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually lobbying for laws that benefit their bottom line at the expense of independent farmers and consumers, advocating and bribing lawmakers to maintain and expand the current exploitative system which cruelly serves corporate interests at the expense of the quality of American lives. And those of animals.
Corporate America and the mega- rich don’t pony up such extravagant levels of cold cash because they believe in Equal Justice Under Law.
“Equal Justice Under Law” being the inscription above the main doors of the Supreme Court. But, for too long, Equal Justice has been more equal for those who can pay – corporate interests looking for more profits, NOT your average American struggling to scrape by.
One would have hoped that the New Testament verse so loved by higher education would also have been the mantra of the American judicial system: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:42).
But to what extent do the Supreme Court justices strive for truth? Do they select and argue the finer points of law over truth? Or are they looking for the next precedent they can set, the tit for the tat of a case decided or lost long ago, professional gain or to satisfy a personal agenda?
On October 11th, the business-bought Supreme Court heard oral arguments on California’s Prop 12.
And the Biden administration has drunk the corporate Kool-Aid to come down on the side of pork farmers, claiming that no single state should be allowed to upend pork production in other states.
But what about the rights of the 63% of Californians who felt strongly that even a pig deserves to be treated humanely?
And that Prop 12 passed based, at least in part, on the fact that abuse of factory farm bred animals contributes in no small part to human health issues?
The justices raised questions of conflicts between the states and of morality. And of profit.
Automakers objected to the cost of adding seatbelts but would anyone buy a car now that does not have them in front and in back?
How can we make the Federalist Society members of the Supreme Court understand how horrible life can be for those who are not like themselves – wealthy Americans insulated from the suffering of ordinary people?
Ordinary people who really care about the living conditions of farm animals than how much more corporate executives can expect in year-end bonuses if they keep cutting care for the animals raised on their factory farms.
Should we require those executives to spend a season stacked by the thousand in one of their two foot by seven foot gestation crates?
A ruling could come at any time between now and June of 2023, the end of the current Supreme Court session.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
