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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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Stop Trump and His Supreme Court From Tightening the Circle of Personhood
The right-wing Supreme Court, in rulings on Trump administration policies, has done its best to murder what's left of civil rights in the United States.
Sep 26, 2025
Warning: dangers in the mirror are often closer than they may appear. In other words, the next few paragraphs may seem to be hyperbole but are, in fact, expressions of reality (animated by a cold fury).
On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court did its best to murder what’s left of civil rights in this country. As Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported, in an unsigned 6-3 ruling, it overturned a lower court’s order forbidding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol in Los Angeles from stopping, interrogating, and detaining people based on any of four factors: “apparent race or ethnicity; the fact that they speak English with an accent or speak Spanish; their presence at particular locations like farms or pickup sites for day laborers; and the type of work they do.”
Those six conservative justices might as well have stood in front of the court and set fire to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation and discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin in a wide variety of venues and actions, including public accommodations, education, the provision of government services, housing, transportation, and voting. The Civil Rights Act outlawed exactly the kind of racial profiling now being practiced—and permitted by our highest court—in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants.
While they were at it, those six robed arsonists might as well have burnt the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which outlaws unreasonable searches and seizures and requires a court-issued warrant for arrests. They could have added the 14th Amendment to their bonfire, which was one of three passed and ratified during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Those three amendments established full citizenship rights for emancipated Blacks and future generations of US denizens, regardless of race. The 13th Amendment, of course, outlawed slavery, and the 15th secured voting rights for all (male) citizens regardless of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. The 14th Amendment, while establishing birthright citizenship, also guarantees “all persons” (regardless of citizenship status) due process under the law—including those suspected of being in the country illegally.
Centuries of Struggle Undone
No one gave us those rights. Successive generations of Americans fought for them, starting in the late 1780s and in the 1791 passage of the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to our Constitution. That’s when the Fourth Amendment established the rights that centuries later would be invoked to prevent people from being stopped for “driving while Black” or seeking work while looking Latino. (It’s also when, thanks to the First Amendment, we secured freedom of speech and the press, which gives me the right to state publicly, even in the wake of his despicable assassination, that the founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, built his organization on explicit contempt for women, especially women of color, and LGBTQ people.)
It took a civil war and the deaths of almost 700,000 soldiers on both sides to end legal slavery in this country and give us those three Reconstruction amendments, passed between 1865 and 1870.
As we’ve seen repeatedly, the hard-won legal remedies for racism are now being turned against both the historic and present-day targets of racism.
And it took decades of mostly nonviolent struggle and sacrifice (and more deaths) to win passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Those two laws essentially reiterated the same rights that had been secured back in the 1860s but had been denied in practice in the Southern states of the former Confederacy. “Denial” is a weak word for the life-destroying discrimination and segregation that was then systematically enforced by state-sponsored terrorism (all too often in the form of lynching) against those accused of violating the Jim Crow regime of that era.
The Supreme Court had already torn the guts out of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, deciding in Shelby County v. Holder that states with a history of race-based voter suppression would no longer have to seek “preclearance” from the Department of Justice for changes to their voting procedures. The court’s argument was essentially that voting discrimination no longer exists in the states named in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, observing that ending preclearance was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
The fact that a storm of suppression was indeed still raging became clear almost immediately, as affected states began passing laws making it more difficult for people of color to vote. Ironically, US President Donald Trump’s crew hasn’t yet completely purged the Department of Justice’s website of support for voting rights. You can, for instance, still find there a 2023 blog post by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke lamenting the depredations of Shelby and praising the Biden administration’s support for the—never passed—John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act as a remedy.
Now, in a one-paragraph decision, the six right-wing justices, appointed by a series of Republican presidents including Trump, have made another contribution to his administration’s all-out attack on race and gender equality. Justice Brett Kavanaugh found it necessary to amplify the court’s decision in a lengthy concurrence. In words untethered from the real world, he wrote:
The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”
Let me repeat that: “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.” Tell that to Kilmar Abrego García.
Oh, California
In the last few decades, some very bad ideas have come out of my own state, California. This may surprise readers who think of Californians as living in a great blue expanse on the country’s “Left Coast.” They may think our governor, Gavin Newsom, is an avatar of liberalism. (Despite my criticisms of the man, I will admit that his recent trolling of Donald Trump’s ALL-CAPS MEDIA STYLE is pretty funny.)
Nevertheless, some seriously bad ideas have triumphed as ballot propositions here. In 1978, there was Proposition 13, which made it all but impossible to raise taxes in the state—especially property taxes, which provide almost half the funding for our public schools. That “taxpayer revolt” (as it came to be known) spread rapidly to other states. Then, in 1994, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson transformed his flagging reelection campaign by inflaming white anxiety about immigration in California. He launched a series of TV ads with the tag line “they keep coming,” a reference to people crossing the Mexican border looking for work in my state. Weaponizing white anxiety was something Donald Trump would borrow when he ran for president in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
To ramp up his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, Wilson endorsed the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, or “Save Our State” initiative. And Californians then indeed did reelect him, while passing the proposition, which outlawed the provision of any government services—including healthcare and education—to any undocumented immigrant. Government employees at any level were required to report anyone (including schoolchildren) they suspected of being in the country illegally. In language forebodingly similar to the rhetoric of both of Trump’s presidential campaigns and his two administrations, Proposition 187 began:
The People of California find and declare as follows:
That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused by the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.
What happens in California doesn’t always stay in California. As the Washington Post reported 25 years later, “Since 1994, 65 initiatives and referendums to change state immigration laws were attempted via direct democracy mechanisms.”
Almost immediately, federal courts prevented the implementation of most parts of Proposition 187. Three decades later, however, the Supreme Court has effectively validated Proposition 187’s premise, permitting the use of racial profiling to identify possible “illegal aliens.”
The right wing wasn’t done with legislating racism in my state. In 1996, Proposition 209, also known by the (completely unironic) ironic title its proponents gave it, the “California Civil Rights Initiative,” outlawed affirmative action at any level of government in the state, including access to public colleges and universities.
Though it faced legal challenges, Proposition 209 remains in force today. There’s no doubt that earlier Supreme Court decisions, including the 1978 finding in University of California v. Bakke, had indeed laid the groundwork for it. In it, a 30-year-old white man had challenged his rejection by the medical school at the University of California, Davis. He sued and was eventually admitted. In his case, the court upheld the principle of affirmative action to address racial or other discrimination against protected classes of persons, but outlawed specific numerical quotas.
By 2023, however, an ever more right-leaning Supreme Court had ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that affirmative action violates the equal protections guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. As we’ve seen repeatedly, the hard-won legal remedies for racism are now being turned against both the historic and present-day targets of racism.
Then, in 1998, another ballot initiative outlawed most bilingual education in California public schools (though it was finally repealed at the ballot box in 2016).
Disparate Impact
By 2003, however, in part because of changes to the demographic makeup of the electorate, California voters had had enough of legally weaponizing white anxiety. They roundly rejected Proposition 54, known as the “Racial Privacy Initiative,” which, as the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California put it, “would have banned most agencies from collecting data on race, ethnicity, and national origin, with disastrous consequences for health, education, public safety, and civil rights.”
But in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the right-wing strategists for a second Trump presidency made it very clear that their plans included implementing a national version of the Racial Privacy Initiative. The author of the section on labor advocated prohibiting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere existence of such data, he wrote, “can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?
I used to suggest to my philosophy students that you could view the last 2,000 years of “Western” history as a gradual widening of the circle of beings who count as full persons.
It seems that Donald Trump agrees. In April 2025, he issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.” In it, he noted that “disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.” Trump and his handlers don’t see taking systemic racism and contemporary bias into consideration as a solution to a problem. Such consideration is the problem. “It not only undermines our national values,” says the order, “but also runs contrary to equal protection under the law and, therefore, violates our Constitution.”
Whatever Trump may decree, current employment law (as implied in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, affirmed in 1970 by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., and codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act passed under the presidency of George H.W. Bush) supports the use of disparate impact. As of now, plaintiffs can still seek to prove discrimination by demonstrating the disparate impact of a company’s “facially neutral” hiring, firing, or promotion policies. How long will it be, however, before this Supreme Court reverses decades of progress in equal employment?
We’ve already seen the “disparate impact” of Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency’s destruction of the federal workforce, which has disproportionately affected Blacks, and especially Black women. It’s a major factor explaining why 300,000 Black women have lost jobs since Trump took office.
If you have any doubt whether race (and sex) bias continues to exist at the highest levels in this administration, consider the words of a man Trump thought of as “sort of like a son,” the recently assassinated right-wing firebrand Charlie Kirk:
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
And about a list of prominent Black women, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Kirk said: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Circling Backwards?
I used to suggest to my philosophy students that you could view the last 2,000 years of “Western” history as a gradual widening of the circle of beings who count as full persons. At first, that circle contained only high-born men. Centuries of struggle saw the inclusion of men without noble birth, and later without property. Racial concepts, themselves a human invention, long excluded men who were not deemed white. Eventually, fitfully, they, too, were admitted to the circle of personhood. Most recently, women seem to have become persons, and with that addition, people of a variety of genders and sexual orientations have also joined the circle.
But right now, six people on the Supreme Court, along with the Trump administration, are doing all they can to tighten that previously ever-widening circle of personhood and Donald Trump is on board in a big-time way. Let us hope that we can stop them from turning that circle into a noose.
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AOC Joins Battle Against GOP Rigging US House Maps for Trump
"Donald Trump is redrawing election maps to force through a Congress that only answers to him, not the people," the congresswoman says in a new video ad promoting California's Proposition 50.
Sep 24, 2025
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez waded into the national fight over 2026 congressional maps on Tuesday, endorsing Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom's proposal to redraw his massive state's districts to counter GOP gerrymandering.
"California, you know we don't back down from a fight, and this November, the fight belongs to you," Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said in a video endorsing California's Proposition 50, which would swap the state's current map, drawn by an independent commission, with one that could give Democrats up to five more seats in the US House of Representatives.
Newsom introduced the effort in response to Texas Republicans redrawing their state's districts ahead of next year's midterms in hopes of securing five more House seats—at the request of President Donald Trump. Other GOP officials are now pursuing similar efforts, including in Missouri, where the new map awaits the governor's signature.
"Donald Trump is redrawing election maps to force through a Congress that only answers to him, not the people," Ocasio-Cortez says in the Yes on 50 video. "If he gets away with it, all bets are off, for our healthcare, our paychecks, and our freedoms. With Prop 50, we can stop him."
Ocasio-Cortez also appeared in a Spanish-language edition of the advertisement. According to The Sacramento Bee, "Newsom's campaign said the spot would run online and on broadcast television."
Newsom, who is widely expected to run for president in 2028, shared the English version of the video on social media Tuesday.
Responding to that post, the progressive congresswoman—who is also considered a future presidential or US Senate candidate—wrote: "YES on 50 helps balance the scales nationwide. Our country needs you, and I stand with you."
The special election is scheduled for November 4. CalMatters noted Monday that "so far, two polls show Californians are gearing up to approve Prop 50, though many are still undecided."
Top Democratic officials in states such as Illinois and New York are weighing similar moves to combat Republican redistricting.
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