Oh My Gosh You Guys

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Entry posted by Arpy February 13, 2011

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Our news media has failed us in a way I'm not sure I can begin to describe. It's blatant. It's egregious. You can yammer on all you want about bias toward one side or the other, or about journalistic integrity versus sensationalism, or the treatment of classified information, but my chief grievance with the media is that they did not make it absolutely certain that I found out about this:

BRUSSELS — October 5, 2009

After months of complaints by European dairy farmers angry over low prices, protesters in Brussels on Monday poured milk onto the streets, hurled eggs and other missiles, and started fires that filled the air with black smoke.

Police helicopters hovered overhead as hundreds of tractors — and some cattle — blockaded the area outside the European Union’s headquarters while agriculture ministers met in an emergency meeting.

The gathering of ministers, convened after pressure from France, failed to produce any breakthroughs apart from a decision to set up a committee to report on the dairy industry in June.

Monday’s protest was the latest by farmers who dumped around three million liters of milk on fields in Belgium last month.

“There’s a very serious crisis in the milk sector,” said the Swedish agriculture minister, Eskil Erlandsson, who headed Monday’s discussion. “We didn’t take any decisions today, but we identified areas where the future policy needs to concentrate on.”

The protest organizers, the European Milk Board, said that more than 1,000 tractors and 5,000 people took part on behalf of “more than 80,000 dairy farmers”.
...
Harald von Witzke, professor of international agricultural trade and development at Humboldt University in Berlin, said the protests were the symptom of the pain caused by a gradual reform of rigid controls on the dairy sector.

“The system has postponed the pain being felt, but now the pain is even greater,” he said adding that making concessions to the farmers “would make matters worse in the long run.”

I love our wacky world.