The Chris Moeller Archives

Gettin' the permits

It's fun sometimes to try to read behind the headlines of a story. In this Des Moines Register story from Tuesday, a Granger, Iowa farmer is defending his initiative to build two large-scale hog confinement facilities in rural Dallas County after the state Environmental Protection Commission rejected his building permits first approved by the D-N-R.

What are we to make of some of the buried details in this story? A local, "fifth-generation" farmer (as the paper's anonymous reporter kindly fellates) is bidding to get the neighbors' clearance on the construction of the confinement units, but the multi-national food conglomerate Cargill, headquartered out of state, owns all the hogs that would be in residence. Is this how the industry operates today? Cargill enlists an area man to do their bidding, and all they have to do in return is provide enough manure to serve as fertilizer for the farmer's 7,000 acres. In any case, I can't think of a better metaphor for modern farming-- the corporation gets the hogs, and the local man- along with his neighbors- gets the hogshit.

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It's all well and good for one to question the editorial decision by the "non-profit" (yet somehow corporate-sponsored) Commission on Presidential Debates to have three old white guys moderate the televised presidential debates between Barack Obama and John McCain, but we have only Democratic and Republican party bosses to blame since they comprise the makeup of the commission in its entirety. As Harry Truman once said, "If you're getting beaten on the head, it's probably a good idea to look up and see who's beating you." Does it really matter who's lobbin' the softballs anyway? They should just bring in the guy who was throwing to Josh Hamilton during the Home Run Derby at Yankee Stadium. The real obscenity thumbed towards "the potent richness of the electorate" is that only two candidates were invited to answer the moderators' questions.

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The New Yorker's David Remnick on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Putin.

posted by CM @ 8:40 PM