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Opinion
Big Pork Lobby’s War on Farmers, Consumers, and Democracy
Inside the National Pork Producers Council absurd, years-long crusade to kill Prop 12, California’s landmark ballot initiative banning the sale of pork from pigs locked in extreme confinement.
Oct 03, 2025
When Patrick Hord, vice president of the National Pork Producers Council, testified before Congress this summer, he proudly described himself as a fourth-generation hog farmer who produces pork fully compliant with California’s Proposition 12. Then, almost in the same breath, he argued against the very law he already follows.
That contradiction captures the absurdity of the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC’s) years-long crusade to kill Prop 12, California’s landmark ballot initiative banning the sale of pork from pigs locked in extreme confinement. Passed by nearly 63% of voters in 2018 and upheld by the US Supreme Court in 2023, Prop 12 is both a democratic mandate and a proven market success. Farmers across the country have adapted to it, retailers have embraced it, and consumers continue to buy pork without complaint. Even giant corporations like Hormel, Tyson, and JBS have quietly moved on.
Yet the NPPC remains stuck, lobbying Congress to pass the so-called “EATS Act” or its rebranded cousins, which would not only overturn Prop 12 but could wipe out hundreds of democratically enacted state laws protecting animal welfare, food safety, public health, environmental safeguards, and consumer rights—undermining both states’ rights and voter-driven initiatives. They’ve fought in the courts, at the ballot box, and in Congress. They’ve lost every time. So the question is worth asking: Who are they even fighting for?
Prop 12: A Win for Farmers and Consumers
For all the NPPC’s fearmongering, Prop 12 has not devastated farmers. Quite the opposite: It has given them stability, opportunity, and new markets.
Thousands of farms, ranches, and gardens nationwide—including more than 500 hog farms—have publicly urged Congress to reject efforts to undermine Prop 12. Ahead of the Agriculture Committee’s hearing in July, more than 150 producers submitted testimony in support of the law. None of them were invited to testify in person, while 2 of the 6 invited witnesses were NPPC representatives.
Farmers deserve better than a trade group that wastes its energy on obstruction instead of building a stronger, more resilient future.
These farmers describe Prop 12 as a safeguard against corporate consolidation. One Missouri hog farmer called it “one of the best things, economically, that’s happened to us in a very long time.” The mid-size Clemens Food Group declared it is “vehemently opposed” to overturning the law. Others say the NPPC is “out of touch” and “struggling to justify its existence.” Many producers have invested in Prop 12-compliant barns and now rely on the premium market it created. Rolling back the law would directly harm their businesses.
And the NPPC’s doomsday predictions about shortages and skyrocketing prices? They simply never happened. Pork has been on California shelves throughout full enforcement, now over two years. Prices rose only about 9.5% since 2023—less than half the average 19% increase in overall food prices. Consumers barely noticed, except to feel better knowing their purchases align with basic decency.
It’s Time to Move Forward
The NPPC’s argument has collapsed not only among family farmers but also within the industry’s biggest corporations.
Tyson, JBS, and Seaboard all now offer Prop 12-compliant pork. Hormel has been selling it since 2022 and continues to supply California fully. Even Smithfield—despite its CEO’s grumbling about costs while pocketing nearly $15 million a year in salary—announced it would comply and has already converted barns.
Tellingly, none of these companies has publicly supported the NPPC’s EATS Act. They’ve moved on, because Prop 12 has opened a premium market and won the favor of retailers and food-service companies eager to meet consumer demand for crate-free pork. National chains now advertise their compliance as part of their corporate responsibility goals.
Demonstrating how out of touch the NPPC is with its customers, public support for Prop 12 remains strong within California, and a 2022 survey found that 80% of American voters would support a similar law in their state.
In other words: the sky never fell. The industry adapted. Consumers are satisfied. And the companies making billions are quietly profiting from progress.
Farmers Deserve Better
So why is the NPPC still fighting a battle it has already lost? At this point, its resistance looks less like advocacy and more like sore-losership.
Instead of helping producers secure contracts, access grants, or provide technical resources for optimizing operations under crate-free systems, the NPPC has funneled resources into endless lawsuits, lobbying campaigns, and even gimmicks like handing out free breakfast sandwiches to members of Congress. Imagine if that money had gone into farmer support, research on higher-welfare systems, or strengthening supply chains.
By clinging to pride instead of progress, the NPPC is standing in the way of the very farmers it claims to defend.
Worse, the NPPC’s message insults the very farmers it claims to represent. By insisting compliance is impossible—even while its own vice president complies without issue—the NPPC portrays pork producers as fragile, incapable of meeting basic updates to industry standards. That narrative undermines the credibility of hardworking farmers who have already adapted, and who see Prop 12 as an opportunity, not a threat.
The courts, the voters, the retailers, and even the producers themselves have accepted the law. The only ones still protesting are the NPPC-backed lobbyists. Farmers deserve better than a trade group that wastes its energy on obstruction instead of building a stronger, more resilient future.
NPPC’s Pride Over Progress
There’s a difference between losing and refusing to learn. Learni ng is honorable; doubling down on disproven claims is childish.
So who exactly is the NPPC fighting for?
- Not farmers—they’ve embraced Prop 12 as a market advantage.
- Not voters—they passed Prop 12 in a landslide and still support it.
- Not customers—they welcome the shift to higher standards.
- Not retailers, courts, or the country—every one of whom has accepted the law.
The only answer left is: themselves.
Prop 12 didn’t destroy the pork industry. It’s making it better, despite NPPC’s refusal to accept the future. What threatens the industry now isn’t higher welfare standards—it’s a lobbying group too stubborn to admit it was wrong. By clinging to pride instead of progress, the NPPC is standing in the way of the very farmers it claims to defend.
As one NPPC spokesman notoriously put it: “So our animals can’t turn around for the 2.5 years that they are in the stalls producing piglets. I don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around …” I guess we can’t expect much from an industry whose spokesperson says this.
The path forward is clear. Farmers, voters, and customers have already shown that higher standards are not only possible but profitable. The future of farming will be built on resilience, fairness, and humane practices—not on the stale politics of obstruction. It’s time to stop fighting progress and start leading with it.
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This Government Shutdown Is Not Normal
Democrats finally have some bargaining leverage. They should use it.
Oct 03, 2025
I’ve been directly involved in government shutdowns, one when I was secretary of labor. It’s hard for me to describe the fear, frustration, and chaos that ensued. I recall spending the first day consoling employees—many in tears as they headed out the door.
In some ways, this shutdown is similar to others. Agencies and departments designed to protect consumers, workers, and investors are now officially closed, as are national parks and museums.
Most federal workers are not being paid—as many as 750,000 could be furloughed—including those who are required to remain on the job, like air-traffic controllers or members of the US military.
So-called “mandatory” spending, including Social Security and Medicare payments, are continuing, although checks could be delayed. (President Donald Trump has made sure that construction of his new White House ballroom won’t be affected.)
Were Democrats to vote to keep the government going, what guarantee do they have that Trump will in fact keep the government going?
There have been eight shutdowns since 1990. Trump has now presided over four.
But this shutdown—the one that began Wednesday morning—is radically different.
For one thing, it’s the consequence of a decision made in July by Trump and Senate Republicans to pass Trump’s gigantic “big beautiful bill” (I prefer to call it “big ugly bill”) without any Democratic votes.
They could do that because of an arcane Senate procedure called “reconciliation,” which allowed the big ugly to get through the Senate with just 51 votes rather than the normal 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster.
The final tally was a squeaker. All Senate Democrats opposed the legislation. When three Senate Republicans joined them, Vice President JD Vance was called in to break a tie. Some Republicans bragged that they didn’t need a single Democrat.
The big ugly fundamentally altered the priorities of the United States government. It cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act—with the result that health insurance premiums for tens of millions of Americans will soar starting in January.
The big ugly also cut nutrition assistance and environmental protection, while bulking up immigration enforcement and cutting the taxes of wealthy Americans and big corporations.
Trump and Senate Republicans didn’t need a single Democrat then. But this time, Republicans couldn’t use the arcane reconciliation process to pass a bill to keep the governing going.
Now they needed Senate Democratic votes.
Yet keeping the government going meant keeping all the priorities included in the big ugly bill that all Senate Democrats opposed.
Which is why Senate Democrats refused to sign on unless most of the big ugly’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act were restored, so health insurance premiums won’t soar next year.
Even if Senate Democrats had gotten that concession, the Republican bill to keep the government going would retain all the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations contained in the big ugly, along with all the cuts in nutrition assistance, and all the increased funding for immigration enforcement.
There’s a deeper irony here.
As a practical matter, the US government has been “shut down” for over eight months, since Trump took office a second time.
Trump and the sycophants surrounding him—such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and, before him, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficnecy—have had no compunctions about shutting down parts of the government they don’t like—such as US Agency for International Development.
They’ve also fired, laid off, furloughed, or extended buyouts to hundreds of thousands of federal employees doing work they don’t value, such as at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (The federal government is already expected to employ 300,000 fewer workers by December than it did last January.)
They’ve impounded appropriations from Congress for activities they oppose, ranging across the entire federal government.
Wednesday, on the first day of the shutdown, Vought announced that the administration was freezing some $26 billion in funds Congress had appropriated—including $18 billion for New York City infrastructure (home to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries) and $8 billion for environmental projects in 16 states, mostly led by Democrats.
All of this is illegal—it violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974—but it seems unlikely that courts will act soon enough to prevent the regime from harming vast numbers of Americans.
Vought is also initiating another round of mass layoffs targeting, in his words, “a lot” of government workers.
This is being described by Republicans as “payback” for the Democrats not voting to keep the government going, but evidently nothing stopped Vought from doing mass layoffs and freezing Congress’ appropriations before the shutdown.
In fact, the eagerness of Trump and his lapdogs over the last eight months to disregard the will of Congress and close whatever they want of the government offers another reason why Democrats shouldn’t cave in.
Were Democrats to vote to keep the government going, what guarantee do they have that Trump will in fact keep the government going?
Democrats finally have some bargaining leverage. They should use it.
If tens of millions of Americans lose their health insurance starting in January because they can no longer afford to pay sky-high premiums, Trump and his Republicans will be blamed. Months before the midterms.
It would be Trump’s and his Republicans’ fault anyway—it’s part of their big ugly bill—but this way, in the fight over whether to reopen the government, Americans will have a chance to see Democrats standing up for them.
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Trump, the Hell-on-Earth President, Has Made the United States Worse Than It's Ever Been
In significantly less than a year of his second term in office, Donald Trump has succeeded in steering what not so long ago was the greatest power on planet Earth to the planetary margins in a big-time, possibly even historically unique fashion.
Oct 03, 2025
Ours would be the normal story of imperial powers rising and falling on Planet Earth — nothing new there, of course — if it weren’t for one thing: the fact that this world, too, is now falling. Unfortunately, nothing is truly normal about this planet of ours anymore, as the slow-motion equivalent of atomic weaponry goes off in our already distinctly overheating atmosphere. And though he’s seldom thought of that way, President Trump, the — who would once have believed it? — second time around, should be considered an all-too-literal embodiment of some mad human urge to turn this planet into a (once almost unimaginable) disaster zone. He would, in fact, be truly unbelievable, if what’s happening to this planet at this very moment weren’t even more so.
We’re distinctly in a twenty-first century from hell and yet “our” president continues to act as if this were still the twentieth (if not the nineteenth) century. Under other circumstances, it might seem little short of amusing, but not on this planet, not in 2025, not in a world drying out at a remarkably rapid pace, not on a planet to whose atmosphere we humans have “added about 200 billion more tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases” just between 2020 and 2024. (And if you’re already sweating, I don’t blame you!)
If you want to know what century Donald Trump is in, check out his recent visit (his second!) to — yes! — Great Britain to meet King Charles III and Queen Camilla. And what a dinner the king and queen threw for him with “some of the wealthiest, most influential, and best connected people in the world all together at one long table inside a nearly-thousand-year-old castle.”
It was so wonderfully twentieth, if not nineteenth, century! Of all places to pay the only visit of his second term in office so far, Donald Trump chose to travel back in time, which is, of course, no small thing, to an era when Great Britain and its royalty mattered globally in order to offer an imperial bow to a planet that functionally no longer exists.
But honestly, you shouldn’t have been surprised. Though you might not have noticed — few have made a point of it — Donald Trump is indeed living in the wrong century. In his brain, I suspect, he’s still in the era when, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, this country became the planet’s sole superpower. He’s still in the century in which Elvis was king. He’s still in the time when tariffs (“I am a Tariff Man“) actually mattered.
Oh wait, wasn’t that the nineteenth century of President William McKinley who, as Trump has claimed, “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent”?
Admittedly, the president did go to Great Britain accompanied by AI executives, and that certainly made him look reasonably modern, but don’t be fooled, not for a second. Strange as he may be in some deeper sense, he distinctly is Donald J. (Been There, Done That) Trump. And in retrospect (if, of course, there even is a retrospect), I think it will be all too clear that, by identifying with Big Oil, Big Gas, and Big Coal, and turning his back on climate change and the twenty-first century, while putting tariffs from another age on much of other nations’ economic dealings with the United States, he will have turned this very planet of ours over to the place — China — that’s producing twice as much green power as the rest of the world combined and madly developing the equipment to produce more of it (not to speak of electric vehicles), while already starting to sell its green products around the world. Phew!
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has essentially declared war on green energy and, in doing so, has in his own strange fashion declared war on the American people, modernity, and the future of this country, not to speak of this planet. And yet, all too sadly, doing exactly that got him elected president a second time. After all, he ran his winning presidential campaign in 2024 on, above all else, a slogan that couldn’t have been blunter about his vision of the future — “drill, baby, drill“ — and he now seems intent on ensuring that the world-record profits of the five big oil companies and the estimated investment by banks of almost $7 trillion in the fossil-fuel industry since the Paris Climate Agreement went into effect in 2016, will indeed remain a, if not the, crucial part of our future, not our past. (Only recently, at the United Nations, he called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” while praising “clean, beautiful coal.”) And that should be considered his way of turning that very future over to China.
He’s also using tariffs from another age, in his own striking fashion, to reject and cut the U.S. off economically from much of the rest of this planet, while giving China the economic edge it needs to thrive — at least to the degree that anyplace can thrive on a world that’s literally going to hell in a handbasket (even if in relatively slow motion). Long ago, in 2017, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested, however tongue-in-cheekily, that Donald Trump might actually be a Chinese agent. He pointed out then that, in his first weeks in office, the president had already taken his “Make China Great campaign to a new level… by rejecting the science on climate change and tossing out all Obama-era plans to shrink our dependence on coal-fired power.”
The Drill-Baby-Drill Presidency
Now, more than eight years later, he seems, if anything, intent on doubling down when it comes to rejecting any thought of dealing with climate change, while still focusing remarkable energy (and I use that word advisedly) on helping the oil, natural gas, and coal industries prosper. Think of the drill-baby-drill president as, in his own way, a satanic force (since the result will be heat of an unparalleled nature). China, on the other hand, continues to put striking amounts of money and (again, excuse the word) energy into the creation of a green-energy economy. Yes, I know that it also continues to produce and use staggering amounts of coal at record rates (though its use of carbon energy is expected to peak soon), but it’s already beginning to sell green-energy equipment — wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars — globally in a fashion not faintly equaled by any other country.
In that sense, it visibly represents the future (if there is to be any future) on planet Earth, while Trump’s version of America represents an increasingly devastating past. Typically, for instance, while doing his damnedest to get rid of wind power in this country, President Trump only recently made a deal with the European Union in which he forced those countries to agree to buy another $750 billion of American natural gas and oil by the end of his second term in office (and while such sales may, in the end, prove something of a fantasy, the point remains).
If the American people had declined Donald Trump the second time around, we might be in a somewhat different situation, but (explain it as you will) no such luck. Whether we realize it or not, we Americans are, it seems, still living somewhere in the twentieth century in energy (and perhaps other) terms. Yet you may not even know it, since he’s so intent on making the free press into the freeze press, both by working hard to restrict what information reporters can get from his world and by suing anyone who writes something that displeases him. Add to that his functional takeover of the Justice Department (which past presidents had given a certain level of independence) and you know that we’re in a new world in a sense that no one who once used that phrase to describe America would recognize.
So, welcome to an American present and future that’s functionally a terrifying version of the past, Trump-style. In fact, get used to it, since over (minimally) the next three years and three months, if you’re living in the United States, we’re going to have quite a ride ahead of us. (And remember, he’s never ruled out a third term in office. To hell with the Constitution!)
Donald Trump Is Only Beginning… And Who Knows What’s Ending?
Give us all the credit we deserve. We humans are distinctly strange creatures. We’re creative in so many ways and yet, historically speaking, we seem to have been and continue to be incapable of not making war on one another. And bad as that may have been once upon a time, it’s even worse today, since militaries, even at peace but especially when making war, pour startling amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Keep in mind, for instance, that a 2024 study indicated “the U.S. military’s carbon output as of 2022 exceeded that of nearly 140 national governments.”)
And don’t think that Donald Trump is an exception to the rule (any rule) on planet Earth right now when it comes to creating future atmospheric chaos. After all, at this very moment, there are three major wars occurring that have relatively little to do with the United States. There’s Russia’s war on Ukraine, Israel’s war on Gaza and surrounding areas (admittedly, heavily supported by the Trump administration, which is now planning to send another $6.4 billion in weaponry to that country), and a disastrous civil war in Sudan (largely ignored by the rest of the world). Worse yet, none of them show any signs of ending any time soon. Only recently, of course, India and Pakistan also briefly went to war with each other. And if you want to ensure that this planet grows ever hotter ever faster, there’s hardly a better way to do it than by making war, since such conflicts pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at a remarkable rate.
And of course, President Trump is cementing his singular power in place in ever more significant ways. They range from deploying at least 35,000 National Guard and other troops to American cities and the border with Mexico to going after seemingly random ships in the Caribbean Sea and blowing them to smithereens, while gathering American naval and air power there in preparation for a possible war on Venezuela — and who knows where else?
In short, in a remarkable fashion, in significantly less than a year of his second term in office, Donald Trump has succeeded in steering what not so long ago was the greatest power on planet Earth to the planetary margins in a big-time, possibly even historically unique fashion. And count on this (but take a breath first): with at least three-plus years to go, he (or do I mean He?) is only beginning. Yes, this is just the start of… well, who really knows what? The only thing you can truly count on is that, whatever it may be, it’s already guaranteed to be a historical disaster of the first order for this country (and, unfortunately, the rest of the planet, too).
It’s hard even to imagine having a president at this very moment who is literally incapable of taking in the most dangerous and devastating thing that may ever have happened on or to planet Earth. I mean, honestly, just try to take that in yourself for a moment.
Think of Donald Trump (though he’d hate it!) as the Surrender President who, in his own striking fashion, is turning the U.S. into a distinctly declinist power on a distinctly declinist planet.
And all of this is indeed and all too literally something new under — yes! — the sun (and nothing but the sun). Welcome, in short (or, given the nature of climate change, do I mean “in long”?), to Donald Trump’s (ever)hot(ter) world. Think of him, in fact, as both the surrender and the hell-on-earth president.
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Boycott T-Mobile—and All Trump Collaborators
Let's make it clear not just to T-Mobile but all of corporate America: There are costs to siding with this authoritarian government.
Oct 03, 2025
Ever since the Irish Land League organized community members in County Mayo to band together and refuse to serve, work for, trade with, or even deliver mail to the English land agent, Captain Charles Boycott, the boycott has become a staple in activists’ toolkit. And nearly 160 years since Captain Boycott was effectively ostracized—as US President Donald Trump and his cronies assail American democracy and send troops into our cities and masked goons onto our streets—it's a tool that’s gaining a renewed prominence once again.
After Target dropped its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) targets in February, Black faith leaders, including Pastor Jamal Bryant, called for a boycott of the company. “What we learned from the Montgomery bus boycott is that racist America doesn’t respond to speeches, it responds to dollars,” Pastor Bryant told his parishioners at his 10,000-member megachurch in Atlanta.
In the months that followed, Target’s sales, foot traffic, and stock price tanked. By August, Forbes was announcing that the boycott had cost the Target CEO his job and the company’s investors $12 billion.
After Elon Musk started his attempts to destroy the US government earlier this year, including bragging about putting USAID into the woodchipper, an act that may have killed half-a-million people so far, thousands committed to boycotting Tesla as part of the #TeslaTakedown movement.
If a company like T-Mobile believes that there are no economic consequences to siding with authoritarianism, they are much more likely to do it.
In the midst of the boycott, Tesla sales collapsed, the stock price cratered, and before long Musk was out of the government and engaging in a very public bitching session about President Trump.More recently, after Disney suspended Jimmy Kimmel for comments following the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, a boycott of Disney grew so rapidly, with tens of thousands of cancellations of Disney, Hulu, and ESPN, that it forced the company into reinstating the comedian.
Attempting to build on this, the labor union, the Communication Workers of America, the Tesla Takedown campaign, and the climate coalition I held lead, Stop the Money Pipeline, have launched the T-Mobile Boycott.
In the fight to save democracy, T-Mobile has chosen the wrong side: It’s hosting Trump Mobile on its network, despite the conflicts of interest being so great they may amount to corruption. T-Mobile is also partnering with Elon Musk’s Starlink, pouring billions into the far-right extremist’s pockets, and it lobbied in favor of Trump’s deadly budget bill, which will strip healthcare from millions of Americans. T-Mobile has also engaged in years of union busting so vicious it recently became the first telecommunications company to be added to the AFL-CIO’s boycott list.
We’ve set a goal of 10,000 T-Mobile customers canceling their contracts between November 14-16. In the process, we hope to build on the energy of the Target, Tesla, and Disney boycotts and make it clear not just to T-Mobile but all of corporate America: There are costs to siding with this authoritarian government.
If you’re a T-Mobile customer, you can take the pledge to hang up on T-Mobile here.
Even if you’re not a customer, we encourage you to take the pledge to boycott T-Mobile. The boycott is happening right before the holiday season, when a lot of people switch carriers—tens of thousands of people pledging to never switch to T-Mobile at this time of year is an important part of the campaign.
But I also want to be honest with you, I don’t know if this campaign will work. While we’re urging people to cancel en masse next month, I recently completed a test run and canceled my contract with T-Mobile and switched to Visible (saving more than $60 on my monthly cell phone bill in the process).
As economically advantageous as it was however, it took me about 45 minutes to switch from T-Mobile, including a call to the company to get a “port out pin.” In the grand scheme of things, 45 minutes isn’t an eternity, but it’s also not nothing. It took me less than four minutes to cancel my Disney+ subscription after Kimmel’s suspension.
I have no idea if we can get 10,000 people to do something that might take them nearly 45 minutes, even if we can convince them it is a small but important act in the fight to save democracy.
But I do know this, in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century, Timothy Snyder’s first lesson was, “Do not obey in advance.” And not only is T-Mobile obeying in advance, it's actively courting the administration, even as the horrors pile up: the attacks on free speech, the naked threats against political opponents, the vanishing of countless human beings into a gulag in El Salvador.
So, in this time of grave peril for this country and the world, let us use our money to build the world we want to see.
From Target to Tesla to T-Mobile, let us boycott the collaborators.
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