Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
The author of the widely acclaimed book on Postville’s growing pains with immigration says the raid at a packing house there Monday reveals “one of the worse-kept secrets in the state.”
Stephen G. Bloom is the author of “Postville,” a book published in 2000 which examines a cultural calamity in the small, predominantly Lutheran town after Lubavitcher Jews settled there to run the local slaughterhouse, resurrecting the local economy but shaking up life for the rural Iowans who already lived there.
The Agriprocessors slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant is the largest Kosher facility of its kind in the nation, and Monday it was the site of the most sweeping illegal immigration raid in Iowa history
“For years and years, meat-packing plants like Agriprocessors have been hiring thousands of undocumented workers,” Bloom told Iowa Independent.
“It’s been one of the worse-kept secrets in the state. All a prospective employee needed to do was show up at the employment window with a fake Social Security card and he’d be working on the killfloor within hours. Politicians, managers, owners, workers, locals all knew this. The only way the meat-packing industry could operate in Iowa was this way, since fewer and fewer Iowans want to work for minimum wage, doing such back-breaking work with such few benefits (if any),” he said.
“The question wasn’t whether the raids were going to happen. It was when.”
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