Brazil: JBS and another BIG MEAT company raided in
tainted meat scandal, by Ann Corcoran
3/18/17
So how does this affect you in
America? It doesn’t directly, but it gives me another opportunity to educate
new readers! The story, which I first heard on my
regular early morning scan of CNN, is about JBS, the Brazilian meat giant that
is changing American small cities because of it voracious desire for refugee
labor! Meatpacking companies get the cheap labor. American towns get the
cultural upheaval.
I took a photo of JBS headquarters
in Greeley this past summer on my 6,000 mile tour of refugee-overloaded towns.
JBS is a Brazilian owned company benefiting from cheap refugee labor. Our tax
dollars (welfare) subsidize those wages, so our meat is not cheap!
For new readers I have contended for years that the US Refugee
Admissions Program is more about supplying large global corporations with
cheap/captive labor than it is about ‘humanitarianism.’ Wages are low and we (taxpayers) subsidize the workers’
families through welfare. What a business model!
JBS (BIG MEAT) and other companies
it owns (BIG CHICKEN) are changing towns like Greeley, Colorado where a large
influx of Somalis have moved to the area to work for the global corporation, or
have been directly resettled there by federal refugee resettlement contractors.
Be sure to see this story by Bloomberg about
BIG MEAT and the Trump refugee slowdown. Although this happened in Brazil, it
places, once again, front and center the question of our food safety! From
the New York Times (emphasis is mine): Brazil’s Largest Food Companies Raided in
Tainted Meat Scandal
RIO DE JANEIRO — Federal agents raided the operations of Brazil’s
largest food companies on Friday over accusations that their employees oversaw
a scheme that included bribing inspectors to allow rotten meals to be served in
public schools and salmonella-contaminated meat to be exported to Europe.
The investigation by Brazil’s
Federal Police, an agency similar to the F.B.I., deals yet another blow to the
country’s business establishment, which is struggling to recover from colossal
graft scandals around Petrobras, the national oil company, and Odebrecht, a
huge construction company.
In the newest corporate scandal, investigators said that employees at two food-processing giants, JBS
and BRF, paid federal inspectors to ignore the adulteration or expiration of
processed foods.
Inspectors also falsified sanitary
permits, and bribes were channeled to the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party
of President Michel Temer, according to the authorities.
Rafael Cortez, a political scientist
at Tendências, a consultancy in São Paulo, called the meatpacking inquiry “one
more element that will add to the picture of political instability.” Brazil’s
political establishment was already reeling from an array of other graft cases.
The meatpacking investigation also
casts doubt on Brazil’s agribusiness industry, a relatively resilient pillar of
the nation’s weak economy. JBS is one of the world’s largest meat producers,
with the United States chicken processor Pilgrim’s Pride among its foreign
subsidiaries. BRF
is a major exporter of meat to the Middle East and Asia.
See my tag ‘meatpackers’ for many
more stories on the industry that once paid a decent salary and employed
Americans.
You should know that then Senator
Jeff Sessions (now Trump AG) called out meatpacking lobbyists behind the ‘Gang
of Eight’ amnesty legislation in 2013, here.
Endnote: If you live in a state with a lot of meatpackers/ refugee
labor, be sure to investigate how much your elected officials are getting in
campaign donations from the meat/poultry companies.
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