Sirota: America's piggish capitalism

Even if you don't dig on swine, it has become impossible to avoid them. If you're not pummeled by television reports about Wall Street oinkers, you're bombarded by talk-radio rants about congressional pork and newspaper dispatches about swine flu.

These seemingly unrelated story lines share a common bond: They are each part of what might be called piggish capitalism — an economic theory that mixes subsidization, consolidation and deregulation and that now endangers us all.

Take the pandemic scare: The Associated Press says scientists suspect swine flu began in a Mexican town that "has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm" partially owned by the Smithfield company. That's the same Smithfield that used three decades of lax anti-trust enforcement and corporate welfare to become one of the few mega-corporations now controlling global agribusiness.

Whether or not swine flu is ultimately attributed to this company is less important than the justifiable reason factory farming is a suspect. As Pew Charitable Trusts documented in 2008, researchers have long warned that industrial agriculture means high concentrations of waste, overuse of antibiotics and "continual cycling of viruses and other animal pathogens in large herds" — all factors that increase the possibility of diseases like swine flu.

Yet, Congress has repeatedly rejected bills to mandate vigorous health inspections, stop agribusiness consolidation and halt subsidies underwriting that consolidation, meaning these companies are now so huge and unchecked that they can pose a worldwide threat when livestock-borne disease strikes. It's easy to understand why: A virus that might have been constrained by small herds in our family-farm-dominated past can now exponentially metastasize in our factory-run present.

Unregulated, taxpayer-subsidized oligopoly spreading risk . . . sounds familiar, right? It should, because at the very moment agribusinesses were vertically and horizontally integrating themselves, so too were financial firms.

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