Riding Herd Saying things that need to be said. August 15, 2021 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 63 • No. 8
Pulling a Fast One LEE PITTS
Y
ou’d think ranchers would have highly developed B.S. alarms and “fake news” detectors by now. But recently several ag groups fell hook, line and sinker for one of the biggest “fake news” stories of the year.
Biden On Mount Rushmore?
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
Let’s start with the press release from President Biden/ Obama outlining their Executive Order which, according to them, will “promote competition in the American economy, lower prices for families, increase wages for workers, and promote innovation and even faster economic growth.” Sounds almost utopian doesn’t it? Do you really believe that will be Joe Biden’s legacy? Your first clue that Biden’s Executive Order is a misdirection trick can be found in the first sentence of the administration’s press release: “The economy is booming under President Biden’s leadership. The economy has gained more than three million jobs since the President took office—the most jobs created in the first five months of any presidency in modern history.” While that may be true, it’s certainly not because of any action that Biden took but because people were finally going back to work because of the development, production, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Then Biden attempted to create his public persona in the image of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. The press release continued, “When past presidents faced similar threats from growing corporate power, they
Take care of yourself as well as you do your horse and you’ll both be healthy.
took bold action. In the early 1900s, Teddy Roosevelt’s Administration broke up the trusts controlling the economy—Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan’s railroads, and others—giving the little guy a fighting chance. In the late 1930s, FDR’s Administration supercharged antitrust enforcement, increasing more than eightfold the number of cases brought in just two years—enforcement actions that saved consumers billions in today’s dollars and helped unleash decades of sustained, inclusive economic growth.” Biden would have you think he’s going to break up the giant tech companies, Big Pharma and the Big Four meat packers that helped get him elected. Bloomberg reported, “In a sweeping, 72-point executive order on competition, the Biden Administration announced it was taking dead aim at the heavily concentrated multinational companies that increasingly
dominate markets for crops, chemicals, seeds, and meat.” Is it time to start chiseling Biden’s image on Mount Rushmore?
Biden Forgets Biden may be forgetting something, which would be nothing new. In Teddy and Franklin’s day the companies broken up were American companies, whereas in today’s world companies are multinational. How do you break up the Big Four meat packers when JBS is 100 percent owned by Brazilian crooks and Marfrig/National is 51 percent owned by Brazilians? Marfrig is the second largest Brazilian food processing company after JBS with its headquarters in Sao Paulo. The company has an operational base in 22 countries, exporting to over 100 and is the second-largest beef producer in the world. How do you break up the largest pork packer in the world,
Climate Alarmists Call for Global ‘Eco-Dictatorship’ BY H. STERLING BURNETT
E
very so often the truth seeps out that significantly reducing global greenhouse gas emissions will require enormous sacrifices, meaning profound losses of welfare on people’s part. Bear that in mind when you hear politicians’ promises of “net zero by X date” or “50 or 80 percent carbon dioxide reductions by year X.” In the Western world, the energy cuts and lifestyle changes required to hit net zero will mean going back to early-1800s levels of emissions. This will force enormously negative economic growth and giving up modern conveniences (and the freedoms they have created) that people in developed countries have come to take for granted over the past century. For people in developing countries the news is even worse. They will have to be kept from developing, which will consign even more generations to premature deaths and abject penury due to energy poverty and food privation. Oh well, climate alarmists whisper (usually in secret), you’ve got break a few eggs to make an omelet. Socialist writer Naomi Klein has written at least two books calling on us to overthrow capitalism and restrict free choice in order to fight climate change.
Smithfield, when you let the American company be sold lock stock and barrel to a Chinese firm controlled by communists? The time to put a stop to this was when the very same politicians signed off on selling some of America’s crown jewels to foreign firms. And we keep doing it, allowing JBS, the world’s largest beef packer to buy Pilgrim’s Pride, an American chicken firm. And how could we possibly let the Chinese buy up TWO BILLION dollars’ worth of America’s best farmland? and membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) that Congress, including Joe Biden, rubber stamped. Biden says he plans on achieving this ‘never-ever land’ by allowing more than a dozen federal agencies “to promptly tackle some of the most pressing competition problems across our economy.” In other words, more BIG government. He plans on corralling Big Meat by issuing new rules that will define the “Product of the USA” label on beef, develop a plan to increase opportunities for producers to sell their product in fair, transparent, and competitive markets and by directing continued on page 2
In 2015, Christiana Figueres, then the executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, acknowledged the goal of the organization’s climate efforts is not really to save the world from an ecological catastrophe. The true goal is to put global elites in control of the world economy, directing producers’ and consumers’ choices to goals chosen by those same elites. “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” Figueres said when discussing the Paris climate agreement then being developed. “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.” In 2019, Saikat Chakrabarti, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff at the time, said the Green New Deal (GND) is not about fighting climate change but instead about remaking the economy, contrary to what many people supposed. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti reportedly told Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a howdo-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” Because the underlying goal of leading clicontinued on page 4
by LEE PITTS
The Testes Test
Y
ou aren’t going to believe this one. One of the many benefits of being a syndicated columnist is I get to read many of the fine publications that carry my column. The Livestock Weekly out of San Angelo, Texas is a good example. One of the columns I read religiously in that great paper is The Computer and The Cowboy by C.A. Rodenberger, PhD. According to one of C.A.’s columns, “Scientists have developed a method to produce male pigs, goats and cattle that pass along desired genetic traits from a donor rather than their own genome in their offspring.” This means that scientists have figured out a way to use a scrub bull to breed your cows because the bull is not passing along his traits but those of the very best bull in the world! According to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Scientists edited a fertility gene in the embryo of surrogate mice, then translated stem cells from a male donor into the surrogate’s testes” (OUCH!), “so that offspring would carry only the donor’s genetic material, acting as surrogate fathers.” You know what this means, don’t you? The worst bull imaginable, a light muscled, structurally incorrect mongrel of a crossbred bull when mated to your cows could produce the very best calves in the world! You could buy a Holstein x Corriente x Marchigiana bull out of the slaughter run at your local sale barn for $700 and have this procedure performed on said bull and he would be passing along the genes of your choice of the finest multi-trait leading bull of any breed. Can you imagine the replacement heifer calves you’d get? At this point I can’t say what effect this procedure will have on purebred producers. When I first started writing for livestock publications 48 years ago it was generally thought that in a few short years every commercial cowman in the country was going to be using artificial insemination. Didn’t happen. And this “testes test” may turn out to be just
continued on page 4