Farmers, Consumers, Taxpayers Protest at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Shareholder Meeting to Expose Runaway Corruption, Greed, and Speculation by the 1%

Posted on May 22, 2012 by admin

For Immediate Release                                       5/22/12

Wed. May 23rd 4:30 pm Thompson Center (Randolph & Clarke) in Chicago

On Wed. May 23rd Family Farm Defenders will be joining Stand Up Chicago and other allies for a protest outside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to expose its sordid track record of racketeering, commodity speculation, tax evasion, and corruption.

Specifically, FFD will be denouncing the rampant dairy price rigging that occurs at the CME and hurts farmers and consumers across the U.S. and around the world.  In 2008 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) found Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) guilty of price rigging at the CME and levied an unprecedented $12 million fine. Yet, these illegal trading practices continue at the CME.  One of the worst perpetrators is another corrupt cooperative, Land O Lakes, which openly colludes with Kraft, Sargento, and other dairy giants.

“The CEO of Land O’Lakes believes that farmers only exist to serve the market.  He needs to understand that farmers work hard to pay their bills and support their families first, and only serve the market second,” noted Joel Greeno, dairy farmer and vice president of Family Farm Defenders.  “It is especially disturbing that as the rest of the world celebrates the U.N. Year of the Co-op, we have an outfit like Land O Lakes acting more like a corrupt corporation, violating federal law and hurting its own members.”

Despite being the most profitable business in Chicago, posting nearly $1.9 billion in profits last year, the CME is also a notorious tax dodger, threatening to move out of IL if it did not get $77 million per year in state tax breaks.   Far from being a responsible corporate neighbor, the CME has become just another parasite feeding off Illinois taxpayers and Chicago residents.

“It is disgusting to find out that Craig Donohue, the ex-CEO of the CME, has been racking in millions as part of his bloated executive compensation while he allowed criminal racketeers to bankrupt family farmers at an institution for which he supposedly had fiduciary responsibility,” added John Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders.  “We look forward to the Dept. of Justice taking aggressive anti-trust enforcement action against him and other elites who are now facilitating illegal and corrupt trading at the CME.”

For more background read below:

CME – Corporate Auction Block for Global Free Trade

Ever wonder who really sets the “free market” price for your food? Why would people in Brazil, South Africa, Japan, India, or Australia, care so much about what a handful of traders are doing in Chicago?

What is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)?

Founded in 1898 as the non-profit Chicago Butter and Egg Board, the CME has since grown into the world’s largest private trading clearinghouse. Each day an elite group gathers at the CME in downtown Chicago to swap commodities such as cheese, carbon credits, timber, feather meal, soy oil, and fertilizer. Within seconds this “thin” market reverberates around the globe, affecting farmgate prices and grocery bills for billions of people.  In 2002 the CME went public, issuing its own stock, and in 2007 acquired the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) for $8 billion as one of its designated contract markets (DCMs).  In 2008 the CME Group bought out another rival, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) for $8.9 billion, and in 2009 also acquired the Dow Jones Indexes.  In 2008 the CME reported revenues over $2.5 billion, handling over a billion contracts worth $1,000+ trillion dollars.  While some human shouting still occurs in the pit, over 70% of CME trading happens quietly behind the scenes through its Globex electronic platform.  Beyond its headquarters in Chicago, the CME also has offices in New York, Houston, Washington DC, Sydney, Singapore, London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.  Craig Donohue, who recently stepped down as the CEO of CME Group, took home $6.9 million in salary and stock options in 2010, placing him well within the Forbes wealthiest 500.  Despite being Chicago’s most profitable business, the CME recently threatened to move out of IL if they weren’t given $77 million per year in state tax breaks.

CME – Insider Trading Cloaked in Secrecy

Because the CME is a private corporation, it is not subject to the same transparency and accountability rules governing public agencies. While the CME often fondly invokes the public trust doctrine, its primary fiduciary responsibility is to its private investors. In this respect, the undemocratic character of the CME fits well with that of other global free trade entities such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) – all of which are run by unelected officials who ostensibly police themselves. According to the CME’s own mission statement, “Integrity and openness are critical. We expect the highest ethical standards from our employees and market participants. We rigorously regulate our markets.” Many of those who have been victimized by the CME would beg to differ. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is charged with overseeing the CME, but since much of the manipulation involves commodity cash trading, the CFTC can only intervene if this corruption trickles over into futures markets.  In 2004 the Dept. of Justice in conjunction with twenty three State Attorney Generals began an anti-trust investigation of collusion by the dairy giants at the CME, but this effort was stymied by the Bush White House and has yet to be fully pursued by the Obama administration.  In 2008 the CFTC found Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) guilty of price rigging at the CME and levied a $12 million fine.  Unfortunately, much more needs to be done to free farmers, consumers, and taxpayers from the corporate greed that now pervades the CME in Chicago.

How Can You Help Restore Fair Trade and Moral Integrity to the CME?

Contact the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to demand more government oversight of the CME:   CFTC, 1155 21st St. NW, Washington, DC 20581  tel. #(202) 418-5000

Contact the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to demand a thorough Congressional and U.S. Dept. of Justice (DoJ) investigation of unfair trading practices at the CME:

Patrick Leahy – Judiciary Cmte chair (D-VT), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Dick Durbin (D-IL)

Congressional Switchboard tel. #202-224-3121

Dept. of Justice Comment Line  tel. #202-353-1555

Posted in Food Sovereignty | Comments Off on Farmers, Consumers, Taxpayers Protest at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Shareholder Meeting to Expose Runaway Corruption, Greed, and Speculation by the 1%

America’s Mad Cow Crisis

Posted on April 26, 2012 by admin

By:  John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy, co-author of Mad Cow USA

Published on Thursday, April 26, 2012 by Common Dreams

Americans might remember that when the first mad cow was confirmed in the United States in December, 2003, it was major news.  The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been petitioned for years by lawyers from farm and consumer groups I worked with to stop the cannibal feeding practices that transmit this horrible, always fatal, human and animal dementia.  When the first cow was found in Washington state, the government said it would stop such feeding, and the media went away.  But once the cameras were off and the reporters were gone nothing substantial changed.

In the United States, dairy calves are still taken from their mothers and fed the blood and fat of dead cattle.  This is no doubt a way to infect them with the mad cow disease that has now been incubating here for decades, spread through such animal feeding practices.  No one knows how the latest dairy cow was infected, the fourth confirmed in the United States.  Maybe it was nursed on cow’s blood.  Perhaps it was fed feed containing cattle fat with traces of cattle protein.  Or perhaps there is a mad cow disease in pigs in the United States, which simply has not been found yet, because pigs are not tested for it at all, even though pigs are fed both pig and cattle byproducts, and then the blood, fat and other waste parts of these pigs are fed to cattle.

All these U.S. cattle feeding methods are long banned and illegal in other countries that suffered through but eventually dealt properly with mad cow disease.  Here, rather than stopping the transmission of the disease by stopping the cannibal feeding, mad cow is simply covered up with inadequate testing and very adequate public relations.  US cattle are still fed mammalian blood, fat and protein, risking human deaths and threatening the long term safety of human blood products, simply to provide the U.S. livestock industry with a cheap protein source and a cheap way to get rid of dead animal waste.

I began researching this issue around 1989, long before the disease was confirmed to have jumped from cattle to the people eating them, as announced by the British government in 1996.  In 1997 I co-authored <http://www.prwatch.org/books/madcow.html> Mad Cow USA, warning that the disease was likely already here and spreading, since the animal cannibalism that caused its outbreak in Britain and spread it to other countries was actually more widespread in the United States than anywhere.

Some years ago responsible U.S. beef companies wanted to test their animals for mad cow disease and label their beef as being disease free, but they were forbidden under penalty of law from doing so.  Only the USDA can test for mad cows in America.    In 2004 and 2005, after two additional mad cows were discovered in Texas and Alabama, the United Sates government declared that obviously mad cow wasn’t much of a problem and gutted it’s anemic testing program.  Today only about 40,000 cattle a year are tested, out of tens of millions slaughtered.  It’s amazing that the California cow was even detected given this pathetic testing program that seems well designed to hide rather than find mad cows.

The prevention of mad cow disease is relatively  simple.  If your country has it, test each animal at slaughter to keep the diseased animals out of the food chain.  Cheap, accurate and easy tests are now available in other countries but illegal here.  Testing cattle both identifies the true extent of the disease, and keeps infected animals from being eaten in your sausage or hamburger.  In this manner countries like Britain, Germany, France and Japan have controlled their problem through testing and a strict ban on cannibal feed.

Once mad cow disease moves into the human population of a country, all bets are off as to what could happen next.  It’s a very slow disease, it develops invisibly over decades in someone who has been infected, and it is always fatal.  We’ll know a lot more in fifty years, but the future looks worrisome.  In Britain people are dying from mad cow disease, people who never consumed infected meat.  They used medical products containing human blood, and that blood was infected because it was from infected people.  There is no test to identify infectious prions, the causal agent, in blood.

Almost none of this information appeared in news stories about the California mad cow.  Instead the headlines and the talking heads fed us the line that the United States fixed this problem long ago, and the fact that only 4 mad cows have been detected so far is proof of our success.   Oprah Winfrey once tried via her talk show to warn about this, way back in 1996,  but Texas cattlemen dragged her and her guest Howard Lyman into court and she had to spend many millions of dollars defending herself from the supposed crime of slandering meat.

Oprah won her case, which was probably unfortunate for the rest of us because had she been convicted the ensuing appeals court trial might have gotten enough attention to wake up Americans to the truth.  Instead Oprah learned her lesson – shut up and you won’t get sued.   Other media learned too that if the government and industry can silence Oprah, they can muzzle anyone. (One of the 4 confirmed U.S. mad cows was later found in Texas, appropriately enough.)

There are a handful of dedicated activists such as Howard Lyman who have been sounding the alarm on this.  They include the ecologist Dr. Michael Hansen of Consumers Union and Dr. Michael Greger, a physician.  Terry Singletary Jr., whose mom died of a version of the human form of mad cow disease, has been a relentless, unpaid activist on this issue.

Despite their dedicated work,  there is no indication that anything is going to change here in America.  The U.S. government refuses to implement the feed ban and the animal testing necessary.   It doesn’t matter if the President is named Clinton, Bush or Obama because their bureaucrats in the USDA and FDA stay the course and keep the cover up going.  Docile, eating what they are fed, trusting the rancher all the way to the  slaughterhouse.  Is that just the cows, or is it us too?

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ALL OUT FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PEASANT STRUGGLE – April 17th & 18th in Chicago!

Posted on April 10, 2012 by admin

Following the massacre, on April 17, 1996, of 19 landless workers during a march in Brazil for agrarian reform, Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) in conjunction La Via Campesina declared April 17th the International Day of Peasant Struggle.


Family Farm Defenders will be joining our allies in Chicago for a series of events on Tues. April 17th and Wed. April 18th to mark this day of struggle.

Tues. April 17th:

STAND UP CHICAGO TAX DAY ACTION: Meet at 3:30 PM at Federal Plaza (Adams and Dearborn) for a rally against tax handouts to corporations and the 1%, followed by a march to the Board of Trade. Rally and march against wealthy corporations not paying their fair share of taxes, including the $665 million tax dodge by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY POTLUCK: 6:30 PM, Jane Addam’s Hull House, 800 S. Halsted. Come and share food with local activists and learn about the food sovereignty movement and the International Day of Peasant Struggle. Presentations by Family Farm Defenders, Friends of the MST, Stand Up Chicago, and others.

Wed. April 18th

PROTEST AGAINST THE FOOD GIANTS AND COMMODITY SPECULATION: Noon at Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 141 W. Jackson St. Rally against speculation in food commodities that produces adulterated food, immense profits for speculators and ruin for family farmers. Includes a press conference revealing a notorious food price speculator.

To download a poster for these events, click here: Chicago April 17 flyer

And stay tuned for more details!

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Free Trade is NOT Free – Why We All Need to Oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)

Posted on March 19, 2012 by admin

By: John Kinsman, president, Family Farm Defenders

Published on Monday, March 12, 2012 by www.commondreams.org

Reposted by the CapTimes on March 17, 2012  www.madison.com

There are always winners and losers in free trade.  The winners are the 1% – the wealthy at the top – the losers are the 99% – that means the rest of us.

The latest free trade deal which is now being rushed by Pres. Obama through Congress is known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).  Thirty years the first free trade deals were enacted under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and these were followed by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Australia U.S. Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA), and many more.  During this time, the global economic crisis accelerated at an alarming rate with only the 1% reaping the profits.   This ongoing crisis will not end until these destructive free trade agreements are repealed and fair trade becomes the norm.

Most recently, the Korea U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) was signed, over the objections of many labor, farm, and consumer groups in both countries.  According to the Feb. 8. 2012 edition of the Korea Times, the leader of the Democratic United Party (DUP) vowed to nullify this deal with the U.S. once in power, and it is predicted the DUP will win this year’s general election.  In an open letter to Pres. Obama, Vice Pres. Biden, and House Speaker Boehner, the DUP called upon the U.S. “to reconsider the KORUS FTA in order to truly strengthen the long term relationship between our countries.  If our cordial and earnest request is overlooked by your administration, we will have to take all measures possible to freeze the implementation of the KORUS FTA.”

Why would anyone expect anything but another race to the bottom in terms of farm prices, worker wages, environmental standards and human rights with passage of the TPP?  We need only look at what happened in the years following NAFTA:  over two million Mexican farmers driven off their land by subsidized U.S. corn dumping.  Risking their lives, they migrated across the border in search of work – families torn apart as fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters disappear.  Some died in the desert, others were murdered by traffickers (coyotes) and rightwing vigilantes.  So devalued as human beings, their lives were not even worth counting.  Similarly, in the U.S. and Canada thousands of family farmers and small business owner s have seen their livelihoods sacrificed on the altar of greater corporate profit.

Those in the 1% who are now pushing the TPP hope to take advantage of the huge supply of cheap labor and natural resources to be found in the Pacific Rim.  The recent expose of the Chinese sweatshops behind Apple’s iPhones, where workers regularly commit suicide by jumping off factory rooftops, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the horrific conditions that are spawned by these free trade deals.

Who else will lose under the TPP?   U.S. dairy farmers fear they will go bankrupt as cheap foreign powder imports like milk protein concentrate (MPC) flood the domestic market.  U.S. consumers will likely face more contaminated products – whether it is pet food laced with melamine or children’s toys coated with lead paint.  U.S. pharmaceutical giants are poised to undermine access to generic drugs by imposing their expensive patents on Australia and New Zealand where people currently enjoy better and more affordable healthcare than is found here.  Japanese farmers and consumers will be forced to accept genetically engineered crops and hormone tainted meat exported by U.S. agribusiness that they do not even want.  So much for freedom under free trade.

As Congress considers the TPP, we need to express our opposition – not only to convince our elected officials that this will just lead to more economic chaos on top of the current crisis, but to also let our friends across the Pacific know that they are not alone in opposing free trade deals that are only designed to profit the 1%.   Those of us in the 99% will end up losers if we do not repeal KORUS and stop the TPP.  We could ALL be winners if we worked together in constructive cooperation for a new global economic system based upon fair trade instead.

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Family Farm Defenders Declares its Solidarity with International Longshore Workers – Denying Workers The Right to Organize is a Gross Violation of Food Sovereignty

Posted on January 23, 2012 by admin
For Immediate Release Jan. 22, 2012
Contact:  John E. Peck, executive director  #608-260-0900
Family Farm Defenders, a national organization based in Madison, WI expresses its solidarity with International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) Local 21, and strongly condemns all attempts to deny workers their basic right to organize.

“Similar strategies of collective action have been successfully used by farmers and workers for centuries in their struggles against corporate robber barons and the fight being waged today on the docks in Washington State, pitting unionized longshore workers against greedy grain exporters, is really no different,” notes John E. Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders.  “It was this historic solidarity that brought ILWU members all the way from the West Coast to bolster the ranks of the hundreds of thousands of protesters outside the state capitol in Madison during the Cheddar Uprising last spring, and which is prompting workers and farmers in Wisconsin and across the nation to express our support for their effort now.  An injury to one is an injury to all.”

As an active member of La Via Campesina, the largest umbrella organization for family farmers in the world, Family Farm Defenders is a staunch advocate of food sovereignty. One of the underlying principles of food sovereignty is that ALL workers deserve a living wage, dignified working conditions, and the right to organize.   This guarantee extends to everyone working in the food/farm system – not just farmers and farmworkers, but also meatpackers, retail clerks, restaurant servers, truck drivers, and dockworkers.
The union-busting corporation, EGT Development, which is now hiring scabs to replace ILWU workers, is hardly unfamiliar to family farmers as its dominant partner, Bunge North America, has a notorious reputation for commodity price fixing and taxpayer subsidized dumping.   Bunge is among the world’s top three grain traders and saw its profits jump by 77% in the last quarter of 2007 thanks to speculation on the global food crisis.    By the end of 2010 Bunge saw its revenues balloon to $45.7 billion with $2.35 billion in reported profits.  As a major peddler of livestock feed and agro fuels, Bunge is also responsible for environmental destruction, industrial factory farm expansion, and biotech contamination worldwide.
“This crude attempt by EGT to consolidate its control over West Coast export facilities is clearly designed to take advantage of the latest round of bad trade deals such as the Korea U.S. Trade Agreement (KORUS) and the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP),” continued John E. Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders. “To be honest the ILWU will be doing U.S. taxpayers a huge favor, too, by blocking any load of scab grain headed overseas, since these cheap exports are only made possible by denying farmers a fair market price and larding massive subsidies onto outfits like Bungee.”

Family Farm Defenders will also be urging its members and allies to contact Pres. Obama to express their outrage that the White House is directing the U.S. Coast Guard to support EGT Development against the ILWU in this labor dispute.

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