Once upon a time, about 20 years ago, the attorney general of Oklahoma sued Tyson Chicken and 10 other chicken farms for filling the Illinois River with so much chicken shit that it actually smelled, the fish were asphyxiated, and it started to affect drinking water in the area. How much chicken shit you ask? An estimated 354,000 to 528,000 tons of chicken shit, per year. If you are as bad at conceptualizing measurements as I am, that is 13 Statues of Liberty of chicken shit to 19 and a half Statues of Liberty of chicken shit. Or 55,000 to 80,000 elephants worth of chicken shit.
That, friends, is some shit. Personally, I would think the mere thought of this would make anyone gag. But not Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt! No, what really got him was the lawsuit — which Tyson and the other chicken companies lost just last year. He was so upset about this that last week, he signed a new bill into law that would allow poultry farms to pollute to their heart’s content, so long as they don’t break any pre-existing state laws.
“You can’t have a business have a permit, doing what they’re supposed to do and then come in and let a frivolous lawsuit take place and somehow put them out of business. That’s un-American. It’s not going to happen in Oklahoma,” said Governor Stitt, according to KFOR. “We had a former attorney general that sued the chicken industry even though they were following all the rules at the time, saying they should have done something different. Hopefully this will settle this once and for all.”
I don’t know that I would categorize a literal River of Shit as frivolous, would you?
Stitt told the poultry farms that as long as they adhere to a lawful nutrient management plan, they cannot be held criminally or civilly responsible for anything horrible that happens to anyone or anyfish as a result of their polluting.
Don’t think there won’t be consequences, though! There will be! The new law does make it a misdemeanor to not follow safety guidelines vis-à-vis chicken waste pollution, whatever those are, for which the punishment is no less than $500 a day, with a maximum of $10,000 a day, if they actually get caught and anyone bothers to charge them with anything. But if they find a new and exciting way to harm people or rivers or fish, then there will be no consequences at all!
The ironic thing is that the whole previous setup was actually very American. You see, it’s very difficult to regulate businesses and large corporations in these here United States, especially as it concerns pollution, because conservatives will throw a temper tantrum. The invisible hand of the market is supposed to fix things like this, by choking the life out of all the people who might complain. Also the fish.
So instead of normal regulations, we have lawsuits. In America, we always like to do things as ass-backwards as humanly possible, in order to put the onus on the harmed person to sue after being harmed, rather than put the onus on a business to not harm them in the first place.
For instance, we don’t tell McDonalds, “Hey, how about you don’t make your coffee hot enough to give someone third-degree burns and require them to undergo skin grafting and two years of medical treatment?” because that would just be super rude and possibly cost them money! No, we just wait until an old lady spills some in her lap and then spend years making fun of her for suing because “Duh! It’s coffee! Obviously it’s hot!” and then complaining about “frivolous lawsuits” that aren’t actually frivolous as well as “the need for tort reform.”
Ideally, there would be some kind of mix. Where we’d have regulations for the obvious things and then lawsuits to cover the less obvious or less predictable things. But that would probably make too much sense.
That’s how this works. But now, in Oklahoma, these chicken companies will be able to do anything they want without fear of being sued by those they harm, so long as it’s not already illegal.
What could possibly go 45 Statues of Liberty of chicken shit wrong?
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