The Oil Drum

This is very strange.
1. How can the same meat plant produce both "kosher" and "non-kosher" meat? That would seem on the face of it to violate kosher laws.

2. There are allegations that some of it has to do with immigration issues and some of it to other illegal activity -- drugs? Money laundering? The comments at the ends of the articles are interesting.

3 "Cheap" meat to eat (what Americans have come to take for granted) means without question that you can not really value a man or a beast's life at anything other than at a vegetable level. Who is going to work in those conditions except human beings who have been denied all reasonable options -- mainly the new immigrants, legal or illegal? And who would own or manage such a plant except someone who is either totally amoral or completely desperate him/herself?

4. And why, knowing that this is the way things work, would the government suddenly undertake a "surprise" raid -- except to advance someone's political career?

This is all old news -- Upton Sinclair exposed all this almost 100 years ago, and guess what? nothing much has changed.

There is a free market, of course. It exists between the anode of the sun and the cathode of the cold, dead granite of the Earth's crust. Captitalism is just one of many ways to exploit and distort that ineluctable energy flow -- it is merely a literary device, a sort of conceit, to call it a "free" market. But only fools and the young believe that, and so we must move on.