Becoming China's Pigsty

Shuanghui International, a Chinese company, is going to buy Smithfield Foods, the largest American pork producer,  for $4.7 billion. Chinese demand for pork is ratcheting up and they're going to want it as cheap and fast as possible. Which portends disaster on several fronts.

First, corporate corruption in China is endemic. There isn't a week that goes by without a story of a Chinese official going to jail for accepting bribes.

Then there's the Chinese penchant for placing profits above the health and even lives of their customers. It was just 2008 when a Chinese company intentionally put melamine in baby formula to boost its protein content to fool a quality test, sending 50,000 babies to the hospital with kidney damage and killing at least six. Several Chinese corporate executives have been executed for such crimes.

Then there are disease outbreaks. The first case in the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic was in La Gloria, Mexico, near a Smithfield Farms' Mexican subsidiary. Animal husbandry practices in China already make it the perfect breeding ground for diseases like SARS and bird flu. With a Chinese corporation in charge of the largest pork operation in the world the 1918 flu pandemic may soon look like a case of the sniffles.

Then there's the callous Chinese disregard for environmental quality, most obvious in the noxious pall of coal pollution that constantly shrouds Chinese cities like Beijing. Recently a Chinese company dumped thousands of dead pigs into the Huangpu River in Shanghai. American factory farms and slaughterhouses already have a terrible record when it comes to the environment, with massive repeated spills from manure lagoons that kill millions of fish.

The Texas House and Senate recently passed a law that prohibits citizens from using drones. You would think concerns over geeks spying on women sunbathing in their backyards would have prompted this. But no: a Texas slaughterhouse was recently caught dumping pig blood into a creek by a guy playing around with a drone. This resulted in fines from the EPA and indictments from a Dallas County grand jury. And it prompted the Texas legislature to prevent citizens from monitoring the illegal activities of corporations.

There are laws on the books in several states making it illegal to videotape operations on factory farms and in slaughterhouses after a spate of bad publicity and fines levied on businesses that were caught breaking the law by undercover activists. Crazily, these states have made it illegal to record evidence of illegal activities.

Then there is immigration: Smithfield Foods has already been charged numerous times for violation of immigration laws. The vast majority of its slaughterhouse employees are foreign workers. To increase pork production to meet Chinese demand the new owners are going to need more workers. And they're not going to want to pay them very much. So they'll have to import them. Probably from Mexico and Central America. Combine those captive workers with Chinese labor practices like FoxConn's, and we'll have an epidemic of severed fingers, hands and arms from overworked meat packers. The inevitable squalid conditions in these slaughterhouses will become the perfect vector for introducing E. coli infections and communicable diseases into our food supply.

To keep all these problems under control and to get the laws changed to suit their needs the new Chinese owners will have to exert political power. And the Supreme Court's incredibly naive Citizens United decision gives them the perfect vehicle. The tax-exempt "social welfare" organizations at the heart of the IRS scandal provide will allow Chinese corporations to anonymously affect policy and buy influence in American elections.

If Chinese executives have no compunctions about poisoning Chinese babies, do you think they'll give a damn about breaking campaign finance laws in a foreign country where the only punishment their flunkies will face is just a fine and a slap on the wrist?

Executives of multinational corporations have historically shown a callous disregard for the health and welfare of the people in the countries where their foreign operations are conducted. American corporations have acted with impunity in banana republics for centuries, but with incidents such as the BP oil spill the tide has turned against us.

The usual business cheerleaders who tout how wonderful it will be having a new export market neglect to mention that all the profits will be heading to China. Won't it be great when the United States is China's pigsty?