When USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue visited South Dakota last month, he left before a publicized media availability event, apparently to avoid talking to South Dakota ranchers concerned about his decision to kill new GIPSA rules. When ranchers caught Secretary Perdue on his way out the door and got a word in edgewise about the GIPSA rules that would have helped them fight anti-competitive practices by the big meatpacking corporations that dominated the market, Perdue told them to build their own packing plant.
Next, expect Secretary Perdue to tell ranchers to build their own GIPSA office. Perdue announced Tuesday he will eliminate the Grain Inspection and Packers and Stockyards Administration as a standalone agency and assign its functions to new deputy administrators for Fair Trade Practices and Federal Grain Inspection Service under the Agricultural Marketing Service, the same office that runs the commodity checkoff programs and has its own issues with oversight and favoring industry over producers. The Organization for Competitive Markets outlined issues with AMS in September, when Perdue first floated the GIPSA move:
For years, USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) has failed to do its job to provide basic safeguards for the nearly $750,000,000 in farmers’ and ranchers’ checkoff tax dollars. OCM has fought for over five years for the release of USDA documents related to a 2012 AMS audit of the beef checkoff program following the discovery of over $200,000 in wrongdoingduring the equivalent of a nine-day period. The egg checkoff constructed an illegal effort to persuade government regulators and retailers to halt sales of “Just Mayo” brand products, and the pork checkoff funneled $60 million in tax dollars to the National Pork Producers Council to fuel prohibited lobbying activity under the guise of paying for a trademark that is no longer in use [Organization for Competitive Markets, press release, 2017.09.20].
The OCM says eliminating the standalone GIPSA will hurt farmers and ranchers:
We are stunned that Secretary Perdue continues to erode farmers’ and ranchers’ anti-monopoly protections, as this action further weakens the marketplace safeguards we need to compete in an ever consolidating industry. America’s farmers and ranchers can’t take much more abuse by large multinational and foreign corporations, nor the facilitation of that abuse by the department that Abraham Lincoln once called ‘the people’s department’ [Organization for Competitive Markets, press release, 2017.11.06].
Ranchers, remember, Perdue and Trump don’t care about your bottom line. They want their friends to get richer, the big guys to get bigger, and you little guys to keep waving your flags as you serve your masters.
What the republican claim they want are yeoman farmers by definition, a man holding and cultivating a small landed estate; a freeholder. What the republicans like Perdue and his class prove time after time what they want by definition, is a servant in a royal or noble household, ranking between a sergeant and a groom or a squire and a page. Wake up ranchers and farmers, republicans are not into to you for your needs, they are only into you for your votes to keep yourselves down like frogs in a bucket.
You may hate a Democrat, but the Democrat always has your back. Clearly ranchers and farmers have seen the poorest examples of leadership from the republican party sent to Washington in years. The last good piece of legislation happened when Democrats from South Dakota had real representation like when we got rural water, rural electricity for a couple of major examples. Hint, ranchers and farmers will not see a damn thing in regard to their well being for the foreseeable future until you put Democrats there to represent your interests. Send that feller Tim to do battle for you. That man was a judge so he knows bullpuckey when he sees it and when he smells it. His opponents, have that one the inside of their boots.
Clearly another example of our rights being trampled by an authoritarian regime
A clear example, again, of voting against ones interest. Let the mule kick them one more time.
The result of the people we elected to Congress looking after our best interests. I think NOT. So what shall we do now?? Suppose they will be elected again. I heard it said that a form of insanity was “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”
Ranchers strike me as practical, no-nonsense folks. Ranchers should take a practical, no-nonsense look at the people they’ve been voting for and reconsider which candidates and which party might better serve ranchers’ interests.