Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America

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He is a frequent commentator in the financial press, and has written for: The Wall Street Journal Europe, Wired, Trader Monthly, Maxim, and Smartmoney.com. [3] He has also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Institutional Investor, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and was recently [ when?] named one of The Chicago Sun-Times Thirty Under Thirty and Crain's Forty Under Forty. If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger. Donate

Where did all those ‘capitalist pigs’ go? - The Spectator World

The Effects of Dietary Inclusion of Mulberry Leaf Powder on Growth Performance, Carcass Traits and Meat Quality of Tibetan Pigs.

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O ne unnerving version of that future appears in Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic gem Oryx and Crake (2004). In the novel, a biotech-dominated community promises its residents extended life through an unlimited supply of transplantable organs from “pigoons,” transgenic pigs holding multiple “humanized” kidneys. Fourteen years after Oryx and Crake , a New York Times Magazine piece proposed that genetically engineered pigs could make the “donor-organ shortage… a thing of the past.” As one Vox article put it, “It’s Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, and we’re just living in it.”

Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America - Goodreads

However, they did it, America’s most successful capitalists have learned the lesson some previous generations of capitalists did not — how to preserve their wealth, privilege and economic power and avoid such derisive terms as ‘capitalist pig’. Capitalist Pigs is well-researched and the broad chronology of the book provides a sweeping view of the influence of the hog on American culture and development throughout the centuries, giving needed context to historians of all stripes. Anderson is at his most compelling when he includes the voices of marginalized people and his sections on indigenous populations, enslaved people, and the Civil Rights movement are among his best. For urban and environmental historians, the discussion of the role of hogs in reshaping the landscape and the transition of urban spaces to exclude them, even as they continued to operate as waste disposal systems, will be of particular interest. Twentieth century historians, particularly agriculture historians, will be impressed by his discussion of the industrialization of hog production and marketing from the 1940s on. Yet when PBS Frontline asked David H. Sachs, the former director of Mass General Hospital’s xenotransplantation project, how he conceptualized the ethics of his work, his answer was revealing: “[O]ur societies have determined that it’s all right to use pigs as a source of food. And it’s hard for me to understand how it would be unreasonable to use a heart from a pig, for example, to save someone’s life, if it’s all right to use the pigs to produce bacon and pork sausages.” The future of xenotransplantation, in other words, is a carnivorous one, with the edibility of pigs justifying their utility as living organ banks. Vegetarians, vegans, and the potential displacement of pork’s cultural centrality are, in the view of many researchers, irrelevant to the social good that pig organs might bring. If hogs are destined for the plate, they might as well give their organs in other ways, too. This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.In the industry, fetal pigs are considered “by-products” of pork production, but that terminology obfuscates the truth that they are neither inevitable by-products nor chance accidents. Fetal pigs are not allowed a birth in the first place, because a system premised on maximizing meat cannot afford the delay. And while they initially seemed like little more than a useful piece of good fortune for educational institutions, the little swine could not escape further capitalization. “Capital sees waste as the final frontier for commodification,” writes scholar Todd McGowan, and the nascent laboratory supply industry cornered the market as mass suppliers of high-quality classroom “specimens” by the mid-twentieth century. The Capitalist Pigs are a community of entrepreneurs who mastermind together and pursue investments together. And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong— or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves. Between 2014 and 2015, members of the 8chan messageboard /leftypol/ began using Porky as a symbol for capitalist actors, i.e. bosses, CEOs, politicians, etc. While these threads are no longer available, anecdotal evidence (the formation of /leftypol/ and mentions on 4chan) put Porky's usage as beginning at this time. J. L. Anderson teaches history at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. Prior to his academic appointment, he was a museum educator and administrator, cultivating a personal and professional interest in swine at the agricultural museums where he wor