In this past Friday’s TLO Dumpster Fire, I briefly touched on the recent threat made by Tyson Foods to shutter its Oklahoma chicken production factories if Attorney General Gentner Drummond won’t drop a decades-long lawsuit against the company for turning the Illinois River into a frothy freshwater bird cage liner.
The threat, which is the equivalent of dumping toxic trash in your neighbor’s yard for years and then threatening to move when they finally ask you to stop, is supposed to scare Oklahoma into folding, but all it makes me want to do is volunteer to help the company pack their bags.
Well, that is if they can’t find forced prison slave labor to do it for them!
Seriously, outside of the oil industry, hog farming industry, private prison industry, evangelical ministries industry, arts and crafts industry, marijuana industry, public school privatization industry, and blogging industry, is there a more evil, greedy, and net-harmful industry in this state than big poultry?
Sure, they may provide some jobs and GDP metrics, but they’re awful and we’d be better off not having them. If they want to leave our state and go pollute – and dick over farmers somewhere else – feel free!
Probably false threats aren’t the only methods poultry companies are employing to try and convince the public they’re the real victims and shouldn’t pay the heavy fines and verdicts issued against them.
For example…
As part of what is obviously a choreographed campaign, a “concerned poultry farmer” emailed Gentner Drummond to express their fear and frustration over Tyson’s threat.
In Gentner’s response, he was basically like, “No big deal. Some other polluting chicken company will come take their place.”
Because the “concerned farmer” was likely an industry plant, the email exchange made it into the hands of Simmons Foods. They quickly fired off the following newspaper-style ad to “fix” Gentner’s response.
That’s cool. For some reason, the red text edits don't mention a thing about Simmons owing Oklahoma $27 million in fines dating back to the 1990s for polluting the Illinois River. I guess they wanted to forget about that!
Not surprisingly, the ad made it into the hands of Gentner’s chief rival – Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt.
Sensing one last opportunity to be on the wrong side of an issue, he’s shared it on social media and criticized Drummond in the process:
Question for Tyson, or Simmons, or whatever other company is going to leave now. When you hop into the U-Haul and hit the road, can you take Kevin Stitt with you?
Sure, he may steal some chickens and enter them into local cockfights, but as long as you keep his family off the road, he really is harmless.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see just how big of an issue this will become in the gubernatorial campaign. The poultry industry has the money and power to make it one and buy off some politicians in the process, but they really are such an unpopular industry with both city dwellers and rural folk alike that it’s hopefully all for naught.
Either way, we’ll continue to follow it and keep you updated.
Stay with The Lost Ogle. We’ll keep you advised.
