“Last Week: Tonight” host John Oliver chose a surprising topic for his righteous crusade on Sunday night: chicken farmers.
“It’s like an agricultural Glengarry Glen Ross,” he said of the industry, “or, Hengarry Hen Ross, if you will.”
Ninety-seven percent of chickens are produced by “contract farming,” in which a handful of big companies outsource almost the entire process and turn a profit while piling the costs onto small farmers.
The chicken companies exploit independent farmer, drive some out of business, and threaten those farmers who try to speak out.
Oliver was aghast at one company spokesperson’s response to hearing that small famers were being driven to the poverty line by his bosses.
“Which poverty line are you referring to? Is that a national poverty line, is that a state poverty line?” the spokesman asked rhetorically.
“The poverty line is like the age of consent,” Oliver responded. “If you find yourself parsing exactly where it is, it you’ve probably already done something very, very wrong.”
With a vote coming up in Congress to give industry regulations some teeth, Oliver walked over to a TV screen displaying the members of Congress who have the chance to change the situation.
Over the same kind of jangly guitar used by the big chicken companies’ ads, Oliver advocated branding any legislator who voted against the regulations a “chicken-fucker.”
“Unless they want that chicken-fucker label to follow them for the rest of their lives, they may want to think extra carefully about which way they are going to vote,” he said.
“Because chicken-fucker accusations do not come off a Wikipedia page easily,” Oliver added.
Watch the clip, courtesy of HBO:
Simply awesome!
Here’s the list of the House’s members on the Appropriation Committee. If your House member is listed here write them about the “Chicken’s Will Make You Rich,” scheme or scam run by the major chicken producers!!
http://appropriations.house.gov/about/members/
The following is the list of top chicken-producers in the country!
Maybe the Feds ought to look at the RICO statutes to see if laws have been broken, since all these company’s cross state lines in doing their chicken rip-off business!
I work for a company that makes equipment the poultry companies use to process the chickens once they are taken from the farmers. And I can say that I hear stories of how rich the poultry company owners are, multiple big houses, boats, planes that they fly to big sporting events etc. We’re busy as we can be trying to make enough equipment to keep up with the production rates, we get paid very well for what we build as I’m sure the poultry upper level managers, engineers, accountants and maintenance folks do too. Seems like the other folks getting screwed by the poultry companies are the workers in their processing factories. I’m betting many of them live at very low income levels doing monotonous work living in rural areas that don’t have many other job options and I know there is a very high turnover rate. Many are folks from poor countries outside the US. Guess what race I don’t see much in the production level…just sayin’…I’d kind of describe it as a stateside sweatshop operation.
And they will probably move farming and process operations offshore to get away with paying the farmers and workers even less if they can find a cheap way to ship it stateside “fresh”.
Wish Oliver had been chosen as Stewart’s replacement.
This is what the left should be doing rather than standing around showing off their degrees, using fifteen syllable words and saying how “above it all” they are. I’m a liberal and I’m not above it all.
By any means necessary.