Stuff I was going to post on the main board... but I didn't, as not to offend posters...

[AvgMSUJoe]

Is a Second Round of Stimulus Checks for $2,000 Each Month in Our Future?

Some Rs are all of a sudden concerned with the deficit when it comes to giving money to real people... so I'm not holding my breath.

Yet, trump socializing the Oil industry is AOK???
Waiting for the "SOCIALISM" horror from the right...

[Robert J Sakimano]

they don't care about Americans... or even America.

it's really that simple.

[Floyd Robertson]

Yang already gave us the playbook. Start closing corporate tax loopholes and implement the national corporate transaction tax on the data rich.

Oh wait, can't do that while Republicans in the charge of the Senate.

[Floyd Robertson]

This isn't so much offensive as it is disturbing and depressing.

Meat Plant Closures Means Pigs Are Gassed or Shot Instead

These are dark days on many American pig farms. Coronavirus outbreaks at meatpacking plants across the Midwest have created a backlog of pigs that are ready for slaughter but have nowhere to go. Hundreds of thousands of pigs have grown too large to be slaughtered commercially, forcing farmers to kill them and dispose of their carcasses without processing them into food.

And yet, around the United States, scores of people are struggling to find enough to eat, lining up at food banks after losing their jobs in the economic fallout of the pandemic. Distribution issues have caused grocery stores and fast-food restaurants to run low on meat. Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the United States, is limiting the amount of ground beef and pork that customers can buy at some stores. Costco has placed a three-product cap on purchases of fresh beef, poultry and pork. Wendy’s has run out of hamburgers at hundreds of locations.

The waste of viable pigs at a time of great need is causing both deep economic loss and emotional anguish across the nation’s pork industry.

“There are farmers who cannot finish their sentences when they talk about what they have to do,” said Greg Boerboom, a second-generation pig farmer in Marshall, Minn., who is trying to find ways to avoid killing a backlog of more than 1,000 pigs.

“This will drive people out of farming. There will be suicides in rural America.”

The number of pigs being slaughtered but not used for food is staggering. In Iowa, the nation’s largest pork-producing state, agricultural officials expect the backlog to reach 600,000 hogs over the next six weeks. In Minnesota, an estimated 90,000 pigs have been killed on farms since the meat plants began closing last month.

[Robert J Sakimano]

That's pretty f'd up.

And, as I keep saying, it didn't have to be like this.

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