http://mariemarie0000.free.fr/fichiers/images/meatrix.swf
count me in
You may laugh, but this is exactly why Iām an herbivore.
Thanks emm! 
Just a tad naive. It was consumers preferring to pay factory farm prices that killed small, family farming operations. For some reason I donāt completely understand, it seems that most people refuse to double or triple their grocery budgets for the sake of maintaining the illusion of family farms. How sick, twisted and evil of them, the little money groping consumers.
djm
Well yes, itās pretty much always consumer-driven.
Sorry, Emm, I was referring to the cartoon and associated web site, not to you. Everything is the fault of big scary multinational corporate agribiz, according to them. They donāt conceive of the consumer playing any role in this. Besides higher prices at the farm gate, who is going to spend the gas dollars to drive out to these few remaining noble bastions of family farmerdom? Not many, I suspect.
djm
Itās interesting how, over the years, differents goods and services have different proportional prices. Although the recent gas price increases have affected them, I think food is cheaper now that it has ever been relative to the overall cost of living, probably because of NAFTA/GATT, agribusiness etc. Since the lifting of textile restrictions on Chinese imports, clothing has gotten super cheap.
It seems like its health care, and what I call administrative costs, like insurance, government taxations and taxes masked as fees, like vehicle registration, pollution checks, etc. that really swallow my dollars. Our way of living has never been more expensive and defined by government, yet food and basic clothes are cheap.
But the fact is that we should be paying more, owning less and not living on the toil of near-slave labor around the world for our food and clothing. But internal discipline is not big in this age, so we have what we have.
The cartoon is simplistic agit-prop and basically dehumanizes and demonizes corporations as though they are not of men, but robots. Naive but useful, I guess. And kind of funny but less so as it goes on.
Much as I hate to agree with a reactionary rightieā¦I do. 
Itās hard, though. When the first Target opened in Salinas and I realized that virtually every product in the store was made in Chinaāand this during a time when concern about the use of prison labor in China was at its peak, I refused to shop there.
But where do you go now to find clothing or tech gadgets that arenāt made using cheap foreign labor? My $46.00-a-pair-list-price Levis were made in the Dominican Republic. Most of the components in my Macintosh were made in Mexico, Sri Lanka, Singapore, the Philippines, etc. The internals of my Japanese digital camera were made in China and various Third World countries.
The only place Iāve found where I have much control is that I can buy my green coffee beans from [u]Sweet Mariaās[/u], where they truly care about small coffee growers and do their best to support [u]āethical coffeeā[/u].
I donāt want to sound like a Free Marketeer, but there is a potential for improvement in this area, if Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are reliable indicators. When I was a kid, the label āMade in Japanā meant āshoddyā. By the time I was married, āMade in Taiwanā and āMade in Koreaā had taken its place.
At the time I was married, my wifeās brothers and brothers-in-law in Taiwan were earning the exchange equivalent of US$15.00 per month as construction workers. Only a few very rich people owned automobiles. Even motor scooters and motorcycles werenāt common.
Now cars are commonāand they swim through curb-to-curb rivers of (mostly Italian) motor scooters. Taiwanese living standards and wages have risen to the point that maids are imported from the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and jobs are exported to China. My wifeās cousin was complaining that he had to move his factory to China, because Taiwanese are no longer willing to work for next to nothing. Her younger sister now lives in a large house with a marble staircaseāthe result of her husband and his brother taking their earnings from hand-assembling electrical components in their living room and starting their own factory manufacturing the same items.
My daughter-in-law sells imported goods made in Korean factoriesālocated in China.
My point here is that even being a source of cheap labor can raise a countryās standard of living. Once the process starts, local entrepreneurs appear, and wages rise. Obviously, this process will vary quite a bit from place to place, with culture and governmental systems playing a major part.
Without this kind of process, how would the economies of poor countries ever change at all? It would be great if charity could do the job, but I donāt foresee that happening. Iām willing to pay a bit more for my goods to speed up the process, but Iām afraid little more would filter through to the ānear-slaveā laborers. I wonder what percentage of the price of a pair of Levis ends up as money circulating in the economy of the Dominican Republic.
The problem for those of us living in ādevelopedā countries is that there seems to be some kind of entropic principle at workāperhaps our standards of living have to decrease in order for those of other countries to rise. The Free Market faith says that, on balance, total productivity should rise, leading to eventual economic paradise. Chairman Mao predicted that when the capitalist countries run out of Third World economies to exploit, capitalism will finally have to face up to its inherent inefficiency. I doubt that either side has it completely right. I donāt think that things are ever as simple as the ideologues would have us believe.
I have always wondered about this method of changing the market. For example, I bike instead of drive to work. I have taken myself out of the market for vehicles and so no vehicle will be made to suit my needs. I wonder if I did drive and purchased a small fuel-efficient vehicle if that would encourage vehicle makers in that direction.
When I purchase meat, milk, eggs, etc, Price is not my primary concern, and lately, there seem to be better choices for food.
Nothing against Vegans, there are many reasons to go with that diet, just a comment.
Darwin, I think you are on the right track. Japan, then Korea, then Mexico, no w China; whenever a country improves its standard of living to the point that they are no longer willing to work for next to nothing, the market shifts to somewhere that wants the jobs. We have a long way to go before we exhaust Chinaās potential. Thereās still much of the Indian subcontinent, and no-one has really tapped Africa or South America yet. Its easy to bemoan the terrible practise of exploiting others less fortunate, but who, in reality, is going to start paying local prices when imports are a quarter of the cost? Better to go with the flow and allow these countries some hope of a future, than to stop buying from them for our short-term consciencesā sake.
djm
Iāve no sound card so I tried to lip read the pig and the cow. All I got was āBob, bob, bob, bob, bob, bob, bob, bob, bob, bob, bob, bob, ā¦ā
So whoās this Bob guy?
Et tu, Darwinus?
You know me not, even though weāve met.
But seriously, for every penny we save, we (the āadvantagedā countries consuming the near-slave labor stuff) are running up a storehouse of the OPPOSITE of good will. I just donāt know if three squares in an Elbonian dormitory is gonna endear us to those who wake up and smell the coffee.
So near-slave labor will not be ultimately cheap at all, to my way of thinking and like Jefferson before, I ātrembleā at the the thought of retribution somedayā¦ Maybe it will be diffused by encroaching prosperity but like Mao said, at some point we will have run out of inferior economies to mineā¦
to get back to the topic of corporate farmsā¦
I grew up in an area that was mainly farms, some residential. Itās now all housing or retail or office space.
Sure, part of the reason the farms are no more is things like labor costs (although growing up, all the ālaborā was provided by the family) and gas prices. But the real reason (at least here) is the price of land. The real estate developers are paying HUGE amounts for this farm land (and then building huge houses and selling them for huge amounts).
My dad bought 2 acres in 1955 for $1400.
A quarter acre lot in the same area is going for over $100,000 today.
I have no notion that Iām going to change the market by not buying factory-farmed meats. I just canāt, in good conscience, contribute financially to their nasty practices. I recognize that there are plenty of admirable people who are stalwarts in other fine causes who donāt give a second thought to this one. Thatās fine, Iām not an evangelist.
Sorry, that emoticon should have been: 
But seriously, for every penny we save, we (the āadvantagedā countries consuming the near-slave labor stuff) are running up a storehouse of the OPPOSITE of good will. I just donāt know if three squares in an Elbonian dormitory is gonna endear us to those who wake up and smell the coffee.
So near-slave labor will not be ultimately cheap at all, to my way of thinking and like Jefferson before, I ātrembleā at the the thought of retribution somedayā¦ Maybe it will be diffused by encroaching prosperity but like Mao said, at some point we will have run out of inferior economies to mineā¦
Hey, our mission is not to be loved; itās to make the world a better place. 