A few days ago the Washington Post ran a lengthy feature story about how the Brazilian-owned meat giant—JBS—was getting federal taxpayer dollars as part of an agricultural bailout from the Trump Administration.
Of course the premise of the story, which featured the obligatory photo of the President, was that Trump was somehow responsible for a foreign-owned company ripping-off the US consumer by consolidating its holdings in America and creating a monopoly.
This is JBS headquarters in Greeley, CO Photo credit: Me! Taken on my 2016 tour of US meatpacking towns that have been changed by refugee labor.
It sure does look like JBS has a growing share of the meat industry.
The Washington Posttells us that JBS’s growth has been rapid following its first purchase of a US meatpacking business in 2007:
In 2007, JBS bought pork and beef producer Swift and Co. In 2008, it purchased the beef operations of Smithfield Foods. In 2009, it acquired poultry producer Pilgrim’s Pride. In 2015, JBS bought Cargill’s pork division. And in 2017, the company purchased poultry producer GNP Co.
But in the extremely long and damning expose there is not one word about JBS’s voracious appetite for immigrant labor that includes refugee workers provided to the company by the US State Department’s resettlement contractors!
As longtime readers know I have been interested in the role BIG MEAT plays in changing the character of American towns with its use of low wage immigrant labor since I saw a report in 2008 about how Bill Clinton brought refugeesto Iowa to make his meatpacker pals happy.
Lobbying for labor
And, I need to mention that thenSenator Jeff Sessions fingered meatpackersin the lobbying gang pushing for that ‘Gang of Eight’ so-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill that passed the Senate in 2013.
As I had reported at the time, the refugee resettlement contractors were also pushing for passage of the ‘Gang of Eight’ amnesty bill that ultimately failed to make it through the House of Representatives.
Lutherans were being paid to find refugee labor for JBS!
Then I got the shock! I had always assumed that it was just happenstance that some of the nine refugee resettlement contractors hired by the US State Department to place refugees in US towns and cities had a casual relationship with industries looking for cheap and compliant labor, but I never dreamed there was a direct financial connection until this news broke in 2017.
(LOL! as I write this I sure am glad RRW has been recovered.There is a lot of history filed here!)
Foreign-owned Big Meat hires Lutherans to help them find and retain refugee labor
That is the crux of this story and not in my wildest dreams did I think that money was directly changing hands between the meat industry and a federal refugee contractor, in this case Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service headquartered in Baltimore, MD.
LIRS is headquartered here in Baltimore. This is their own description: The Lutheran Center (LIRS headquarters) is a six-story structure constructed in 1999 on property owned by Baltimore’s historic Christ Lutheran Church. The building is located near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in the historic Federal Hill neighborhood, a charming area rich with history and an eclectic array of eateries and shopping venues.
I always assumed it was an informal relationship where the largely federally-funded ‘religious’ charity (LIRS is 96% funded by you and not via the collection plate) just happened to be bringing immigrant workers to small town America.
Now we learn that there is a formal (secret!), contractual arrangement planned for pilot projects in four states with JBS USA a Brazilian-owned company. And, it makes me wonder if this isn’t new and whether similar arrangements are being made with others of the nine federal refugee contractors.
The four states targeted for pilot projects in 2017 were Georgia, Texas, Iowa and Michigan.
Read it all! An insider at LIRS had revealed internal documents obtained by Leo Hohmann at World Net Daily.
To make a long story short:
A foreign company buys up major meat producing companies in the US then lobbies for and obtains refugee laborers with the help of a fake ‘religious’ charity funded largely by you, the taxpayers.
The immigrant laborers aren’t paid decent wages so they depend on welfare to make ends meet all the while disrupting the social and cultural make-up of small US towns and cities.
And, you, the US taxpayers, are paying for it all as they change America, one small town at a time.
Someone should write a book!
Heck, a lot of the research is done already! See my enormous archive on Meatpackers here.
