Random Politics & Religion #00

Right back at you.

Don't you find it odd that everyone who converses with you sooner or later you always end up calling them names or acting like a 5yr old when they don't agree with anything you "don't say".

Regulation is needed to a degree and not all of it is negative, never in my rant did I ever say that the current regulation at the time was burdensome or unneeded. Its when government starts messing with things that have worked for years and years, then DRASTICALLY change or make new ones.

Disclaimer: If you are at all interested in the dairy industry and my experience with it please feel free to read on.

1. Each state has the option of having different property laws when dealing with bankruptcies. Also, how your company was set-up limits or increases your asset exposure. I was not going to assume anything about your farm, state, or company liability.

2. The reason your cell count needed to go down is due to the eventual trade treaty that is being negotiated with the EU to sell to 500+ million consumers. The EU requires the milk to be 400,000 cells/ml in order to be apart of the "european health certification program".
http://www.nmpf.org/washington_watch/labeling/SCC?theme=mobile

The US has been trying to sell more agriculture goods to the EU but the EU has stricter standards and will not allow certain items (e.g. beeffrom the US that has hormones). The US has gone to the WTO several times about EU trade regulations.

The regulation is not random, there is a reason. Whether you think it is a good reason or not, there is a legitimate one.

Here is a UK website explaining the requirements of SCC for the EU.

Personally, I say that if EU is having such a fit over what we sell over here in the US, then either they need to change or the US doesn't need to sell over there.

It's not like farmers will be making a profit either way. Only the megafarms would be, since that's where all the food come from.

Behind that pure, wholesome, nourishing glass of milk, there's an insurgency.

The price of raw milk paid to farmers has dropped to its lowest level in 40 years. Dairy farms are going under across the country, and a few dairymen have grown so desperate they've taken their own lives.

As the crisis deepens, criticism grows that dairy giants are trying to monopolize the industry, to the detriment of independent farmers and consumers.

Farmers Squeezed On Prices

Most of what we know about the dairy business is in the supermarket: gallon jugs of whole, 2 percent and organic milk; blocks of cheddar, Swiss and Monterey Jack; cartons of chocolate chip ice cream.

Shorty Miller owns a small dairy in central Texas. Like nearly every other dairy farmer in America, she's angry. Milk prices in the supermarket have come down only slightly, but the price she gets for the raw milk from her Holsteins has dropped nearly in half.

Borden milk is $3.99 a gallon. Oak Farms, which is bottled locally, is $3.49 a gallon, and that's a sale price," Miller says, pointing to cartons of milk in the dairy case at Brookshire's Grocery in McGregor, Texas.

How long can Miller's dairy hold out being squeezed the way it is?

"Depends on how long the bankers will work with us. If we want to put up everything we've worked 40 years for, we can hold out a little longer. But do we want to?" Miller says. "I don't think the American public realizes where the milk comes from. Or what they're going to do if we don't have fresh milk."

As the dairy industry concentrates into fewer and fewer players, some farmers complain it's killing off independents and reducing options for consumers who want to buy locally.

And they're speaking out.

A Tight Grip On Milk Market

Earlier this month, distraught dairy farmers packed a room in Tomah, Wis., to implore their elected representatives to do something. Their comments were broadcast on local radio station WCOW — Cow 97.

Rebecca Goodman and her husband run a 120-year-old dairy in Sauk County, Wis.

"We all worship at the altar of the free market — that's what we're taught as good Americans," Goodman said on the air. "But I don't know what is free about a handful of companies controlling the process from beginning to end."

Two entities have come in for the harshest criticism.

Dairy Farmers of America, or DFA, based in Kansas City, Mo., is the nation's largest dairy cooperative. It buys milk from 18,000 farmer-members and says it tries to get them the best price. DFA controls about a third of the nation's raw milk supply.

Dean Foods is a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Dallas. With brands like Horizon Organic and Land O'Lakes milk, Dean buys from DFA and bottles more than a third of the nation's milk.

Pete Hardin is publisher of The Milkweed, a monthly dairy marketing and economics report.

In the 30 years Hardin has been writing about the dairy industry, he has chronicled the decline of the family farm and the rise of "Big Milk." Hardin believes the fundamental problem with the dairy industry is a lack of honest competition and too little government oversight.

"That's why we have reached, in my opinion, the point we have reached, where farm prices are so abysmal," Hardin says. "And we know the money is in the marketplace — we see what the consumer's paying for these dairy products. If the farmer would get a fair share of that, we wouldn't be having this discussion."

As Farmers Flounder, Dean Foods Prospers

Let's take a minute to see how milk gets from the barn to your kitchen.

Raw cow's milk is gathered in a tank. Then a milk hauler takes the farmer's milk to a fluid milk plant, where it is pasteurized and bottled. Or, he trucks the raw milk to a different plant that makes it into cheese, butter, yogurt or ice cream.

The processor then wholesales the milk or dairy products to the supermarket, where you buy it.

The place in our cow-to-consumer chain that's causing the most grief these days is the processor: the middleman.

As businessmen, they want to buy raw milk at the cheapest price from the co-op and sell it at the highest price to the grocery store.

"Dean Foods, which is the largest fluid processor in the U.S., at their last annual meeting said, 'Hey, we've got super profits because we're buying the milk so cheap,' " says Texas dairy farmer Miller.

Dean's fluid milk profits jumped 35 percent in the first two quarters of this year. In a teleconference with analysts in May, Dean's CFO bragged that cheap raw milk had created "the perfect sunny day" for the $12 billion corporation. This, at a time when Miller is losing 45 cents on every gallon of milk she sells from her cows, because she's making less than the cost of production.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose home state of Vermont has lost 32 dairy farms so far this year, has gone on the offensive.

"Dean Foods controls about 90 percent of the milk supply in Michigan, 80 percent in Massachusetts, over 80 percent in Tennessee and 70 percent in northern New Jersey. That's not a free market." Sanders says.

Dean And DFA: Goliaths Link Arms

Marguerite Copel, vice president of corporate communications for Dean, insists it is a free market. There are lots of milk buyers besides Dean, and the price of raw milk is set by the marketplace, not by one company, she says.

But there's no denying that Dean is the embodiment of corporate bovinity.

Over the past decade, through mergers and acquisitions of co-ops and dairy processors, both Dean and DFA grew bigger and bigger. Then, the goliaths linked arms: DFA entered into a 100 percent, full-supply agreement with Dean.

So as Dean came to dominate regional markets, any dairyman who wanted to sell to one of Dean's 50 brands had to go through DFA, whether they wanted to or not.

Think Elsie the Cow as Gordon Gekko.

A group of dairymen are suing DFA, Dean Foods and others in federal court for allegedly engaging in anti-competitive and predatory behavior. The lawsuit claims that DFA has effectively created an illegal milk cartel in the Southeast.

John Harrison, owner of Sweetwater Valley Farm, an 800-cow operation near Philadelphia, Tenn., is one of the 17 dairymen bringing suit.

Harrison says the industry was different before DFA came into existence in 1998.

"Prior to that, it was kind of a beautiful market in our area, because you could pick up the phone today and go somewhere else tomorrow. "There was still a lot of competition," Harrison says. "Well, as DFA came in and began tying up all those supply contracts, those things disappeared. The net effect was that you had no other option. If you were dissatisfied or wanted to make a change, you had no option to go sell your milk."

Rather than enjoy the benefits of being part of a farmer-owned co-op, Harrison says DFA has artificially depressed prices for raw milk.

"The milk market does not function in the Southeast as a true market," Harrison says.

The observation is echoed by Peter Carstensen, an antitrust expert at the University of Wisconsin law school who closely watches the dairy industry.

"Where there is a competitive market for buying milk, dairy farmers are paid more. When DFA comes to dominate a market, then farmers are paid less. Monopolists behave like monopolies," Carstensen says.

Dairymen are not saying all their problems can be traced to the consolidation of their business. Farming is more complicated than that. Prices for animal feed, equipment and land have gone through the roof. And most significantly, today there's a surplus of milk on the market, most agree, because of too many milk cows and a shrinking export market.

Rick Smith, the CEO of the Dairy Farmers of America, laments the desperate straits his members are in, but he says some context is in order.

"In 2007, we had record prices. Farmers had record income. What we're really seeing is how this volatility in this industry at both ends is very destructive," he says.

Smith says there has been no collusion with Dean Foods; he says Dean has been a good customer for DFA's members. Smith also says DFA does not force dairymen to join the co-op. But he agreed that when he took over the co-op in 2006, it was time for a change.

"We recognize that in some places — not in all — our image needs work," Smith says. "I think the size and scope of DFA in some quarters was perceived as threatening. And thus, in the last few years, we have worked very hard at being more collaborative and much more transparent."

On The Trail Of Big Milk

Milkmen have been gaming the system for years.

Back in the 1980s, prosecutors in two dozen states got 100 convictions or guilty pleas for milk processors who were charged with bid-rigging on school milk contracts.

Last year, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined DFA and two top former executives $12 million for trying to inflate cheddar cheese prices. The scene of the crime: the dairy pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The antitrust division of the Justice Department spent two years investigating anti-competitive conduct in the dairy industry. Congressional and legal sources tell NPR that in 2006, investigators recommended charges be filed against Dairy Farmers of America and Dean Foods, among others, for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Under President Bush's Justice Department, the case was shelved. Earlier this month, three senators sent a sharply worded letter asking the new antitrust division to re-energize that investigation.

The call for government oversight comes most urgently from independent farmers like Harrison, the Tennessee dairyman and plaintiff. He says they filed their civil lawsuit against the dairy giants because the Justice Department wouldn't file its case.

"We need to be ensuring that there are functioning markets everywhere. And a functioning market to me means multiple buyers and multiple sellers," Harrison says. "And that's what DOJ is charged with doing. And we don't have that."

Several sources quoted in this story say they're being interviewed by Justice Department lawyers as they collect information and decide whether to reopen the case against Big Milk.

Hope you don't mind me saying this AO, but you're sounding a bit like a lib there.

Yet there's no political party or politician that wants the combination of those things, the GoP/teaparty loons want big corporations, and the other side (doesn't really want big government) but wants regulation to protect the individuals.

Both major parties are very pro fascism as well, so there's always that.

The more I learn about Rand Paul and the literal lack of any other possible choice makes me think he would be a decent bet.
http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Rand_Paul_Corporations.htm

Not perfect, but nobody agrees 100% on every topic.

Never heard of a lib that wanted government cut down to the most basic elements possible.

A huge difference exists between the Big corporations and the rest of business. Government is more likely to bail out a Big corporation than a struggling small business. That is what needs to change. Help everyone or help no one, stop making the playing field unfair.

If Altimaomega is a liberal then I'm the prime minister of South Africa.

I'm the King of England as well !


@HenryXXXIX or Instagram: the_real_king_of_England

People tend to act conservative until it becomes an issue that effects them personally; then they turn liberal. IE: Senators who are anti-gay until they find out their son is gay, then they turn pro-gay.

Once you push out all the brain washing the mass media pushes onto you, the only difference between liberals and conservatives are our ability to feel empathy.

I can sit here, listen to AO go off and sympathize with him, even though his story doesn't effect me personally in any way. If I were to ask the same of conservatives, and it was regarding some poor person they've never heard of before, people like KB, Nausi, etc; would be completely unable to do the same, and just tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

That is exactly what the main stream media is pushing onto everyone.

Liberals think the government should fix everyone's problems no matter what because they feel bad for the less fortunate and think they deserve a leg up. Its easy to be a liberal because truly little thought is involved.

Conservatives think the government should get out of everyone's lives (people and business) because they are the main root of the problem. Conservatives feel the same way as liberals do about the less fortunate, the main difference is we think instead of enabling a welfare/nanny state to take care of them (while only running up our debt) . They should get a leg up by learning a trade and being beneficial to society.

The old: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, Teach him to fish and he can feed his family for a lifetime. Kinda thing.