To the editor:
News has reached Bob Cratchit's Christmas dinner table that working families pay the price for corporate greed. The elite media has naive Americans transfixed on gender issues, while greedflation goes mostly unreported and costs the Upper Ohio Valley workforce more than ever.
Tyson Foods' billionaire board chairman is a Republican. While party registration at the local courthouse grows deeper red, it is President Joe Biden's Democrat Department of Justice that is fighting the price fixing.
Tyson Foods has brought higher prices to the greengrocers, which has meant higher profits for chicken producers. Tyson, the largest producer of chicken in the U.S. and one of the largest producers of beef and pork, doubled its profits in the final quarter of 2021 and then reported record sales and earnings in 2022.
With prices high, demand high and feed costs falling, it would be reasonable to think companies would expand production. The opposite seems to be true, and certain companies are restricting supply to drive prices even higher. The DOJ recently initiated a lawsuit that suggests almost the entire chicken, turkey and pork industry is engaged in price-fixing. JBS USA Holdings Inc., which owns 78.5 percent of Pilgrim's Pride, the second-largest chicken producer in the U.S., saw its net revenue increase by 53 percent between 2019 and 2022. Do not let the name fool you: It is a Brazilian multinational corporation.
Businesses can inflate prices and profits by eliminating competition and coordinating with competitors to raise prices. The chicken industry has been accused or found guilty of doing that in recent years.
Before you register with those Republican scoundrels, don't fall into the elite media trap. My grandparents were among those who walked union pick lines at companies like S. George Paper Mill in Wellsburg to fight for unemployment benefits. My grandfather received no pension after working faithfully from the time he was 15 to the age of 75. Nor did my grandmother, aunt or mother -- for more than 100 years they toiled, and not one red cent of pension money. We have seen the well-educated Legislature do these families' bidding voting to take away unemployment benefits in Charleston in recent years. My father stood in the cold as one of the union strikers who walked out at Pillsbury in Wellsburg and his children did without. I remember: With the sweat of their brows, they labored only to find they were betrayed in Charleston and Washington.
I never had a union to protect me. I had to grit my teeth and smile for 46 years at the children of Beacon Hill. The Republicans have been seeking to return the workers to the years before the first inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 4, 1933, with the New Deal, no pension at the workplace and no health insurance, cutting Social Security and Medicare. It is the Democratic Party that has stood for food, clothing and shelter for the masses.
Sharing with you the Cratchits' Christmas goose, I wish you a Merry Christmas.
Michael Traubert
Wellsburg