Some Pigs are More Equal Than Others

Animal rights group Mercy For Animals, won a victory for sows after releasing a video showing gestating hogs kept in cramped, cruel conditions that leave pigs with very little room to move, let alone turn around. The sows are forced to stand or lay, unable to turn, walk or move in any way, supposedly to keep them safe from harm.

Costco has added its name to the list of retailers and restaurants calling for a ban to phase-out the inhumane practice of gestation crate cruelty from its suppliers. Wal-mart on the other hand, continues to support some of the worst suppliers in the pork and chicken industry, mainly Tyson and Hormel.

Mega corporate pork producers claim the crates, standard equipment for at least two decades, keep sows from fighting each other. But pressure from animal rights groups -- often accompanied by undercover videos -- has helped prompt many major restaurant chains and food companies have called to halt the use of gestation crates, particularly over the past year.

McDonald's folded under pressure after Mercy for Animals released a video of workers abusing chickens meant to be used in the making of chicken-mcnuggets, a menu item popular with children.The video would give most children nightmares, as if Ronald McDonald isn't scary enough.
The video marks the second surreptitious recording in Minnesota by Mercy For Animals within the past year. In November, the group released a video of conditions in hen houses owned by Litchfield-based Sparboe Farms, one of the nation's largest egg producers.

Only public pressure can change the ways of these factory farming sociopaths, who practice animal cruelty as a business model.

Let's hope Karma is real.

Our Recovery

Now for news about another kind of pig;

Our economic recovery is going into the D-zone (Depression)

The recovery that never was is creeping ever-so-slowly towards the edge of the financial cliff. Enough unexpected bad news happened last week that analysts and experts are back-pedaling their cheerful pro-recovery glee, while the corporate media, all crowing how "America is back!" have fallen mysteriously silent with foot-in-mouth disease.

The latest manufacturing index shows manufacturing to be contraction rather than expansion, with an increase in temporary workers, pushing permanent employment expectations over the edge. A report from the National Association for Business Economics scrapped any hope for hope, as the survey showed companies have cut their hiring plans.
39% of the respondents intended to add jobs in the next six months back in March, as of June that number slipped down to 23%. Another unexpected 0.5% drop in retail sales didn't help either.

This cheery scenario of course does not consider the big ugliness lurking in the wings, like a Eurozone crisis of some sort or an attack on Iran, or the threat of drought throughout the major food growing regions that could lead to massive crop failures.

La-la-la.....I can't hear you..............The recession is over, the recession is on, the recession is over, the recession might come back”

Out here in 99% Reality Land, we have been in a Depression since Oct. 2008, at least, and it has never stopped, and is just slowly getting worse. It must be the “Hush-hush Depression”, because individuals do not want to discuss their personal financial crises. Most people are hanging on by a thread, if not quietly flaming out entirely.

Just because the MSM and their enabling nit-wits with their fancy analyses and hog-washed charts keep the con going, doesn’t mean that the facts aren’t known by the rest of us.

At some level “recession” is defined as the economy actively getting worse. So the “recovery” starts as soon as thing stop getting worse.

Bear in mind that US financial pigs have a much stronger commitment to class war than to economic recovery. The compulsion to destroy wages and any remaining social rights is overwhelming, and will ensure the decline continues.
In particular, truly wealthy pigs are strongly motivated to protect their own trough in a bad economy, even at the expense of a recovery. Only very serious externalities, such as the fear of a public uprising, can focus their attention. So don't look to them for answers.

The proven method for optimum profits has always been through labor deflation. Just fire people and don't replace them (arbitrage) or send jobs overseas. It's a neat-and-tidy way to ax human beings into tiny bits without spilling a drop of blood.

Gore Vidal summed up the blood-thirsty financial vampires best when he said;
“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” 

It’s actually about relative to absolute power not wealth or its creation. Vidal’s maxim neatly captures the bankrupt mentality of  banksters and sociopaths, whose wealth and power requires the dispossession and dis empowerment of others. They use the creative destruction of disaster capitalism, turning the economy into a war zone. Where winning the war isn't enough- they poison the wells and kill the livestock so future generations suffer as well.

The very idea of shared prosperity is blasphemy to them, for they are blinded by narcissism. They can't imagine a world where there is no us or them, to believe so would dis-empower the self created myth that they are superior (some pigs are more equal than others)

Looking around at the mass hysterical blindness afflicting a vast percentage of Americans, it appears we’ve achieved Orwell’s dystopian doublethink:


“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies." Is it no wonder you walk around feeling confused?

Political pigs pretend to care about the economy, but are actually engaged in a large scale class warfare where the rich attack the non-rich and the non-rich have hardly mounted a defense. The administration, except for some negligible lip service, participates in the attack.

 Kunstler said it all with this;

 “As the reality of total, comprehensive bankruptcy simmers up, perhaps a critical number of citizens stop forking over their quarterly taxes – since it would be the same thing as pounding sand down a rat-hole. Then, things really go south governance-wise. The next revolution in North America could make 1793 Paris look like an Ace of Cakes episode. Lamppost lynchings will seem too merciful.”

Not a bad idea no? Since money equals power- the only weapon we have to defend ourselves is to stash our cash under the mattress and exercise our right to cut the greedy pigs off from their money addiction.

Costco got the message, and so can the financial hogs over-feeding at the trough.

BTW, Spain is repeating the same failed policy as the U.S. by bailing out the banks.

The Spanish translation for pig is "cerdos" As in some "cerdos" are more equal than others.

ickenittle