Thread: EGG KINGPIN- SALMONELLA AND ILLEGAL ALIEN REPEAT OFFENDER

Egg Kingpin Linked to Salmonella Scare Has History of Violations - EMPLOYS ILLEGAL ALIENS

FOX NEWS


Shown here is Austin "Jack" DeCoster. (Sun Journal)

The egg mogul linked to the widespread salmonella outbreak is considered by government officials a repeat offender, and the allegations and violations at his farms go far beyond sanitation to illegal immigration , unsafe workplace conditions and sexual abuse of female employees.

Though the recent recall is the first time conditions at his farms have drawn such heated and nationwide scrutiny, Austin "Jack" DeCoster has been cited for violations dating back at least to the early 1990s.

DeCoster has been a force in the egg world for decades, with companies and locations under various names operating in Maine, Iowa and elsewhere. His Wright County Egg is one of two Iowa farms directly linked to the salmonella scare, and his Quality Egg supplies chickens and feed to both farms involved.

DeCoster's farms have continued operating despite spending nearly two decades under the watchful eye of state and federal officials and facing lawsuits and millions of dollars in fines for other reasons.

DeCoster's farms started gaining national attention in late 1995, when a local newspaper in Maine wrote an expose about his farm conditions.

After months of protests and a federal investigation, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined him $3.6 million for workplace violations -- investigators claimed workers were handling dead chickens and manure with their bare hands, according to a newspaper report at the time. Their living quarters were comparably squalid.

Then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich said at the time the workers were being treated like animals and that the conditions were "among the worst" he'd seen.

Mercy for Animals conducted a hidden-camera investigation on Quality Egg of New England last year, which resulted in state-issued animal cruelty charges. The investigation captured footage of hens thrown in trash cans, rotting corpses in the same cages with live hens and other shocking images.

Daniel Hauff, director of investigations for Mercy for Animals, said that when animal cruelty is prevalent, worker abuse usually follows. Hauff said when state investigators raided the farm in 2009, three were hospitalized from breathing the fumes that the workers inhale every day.

"They were appalled by what they saw," he told FoxNews.com. "It is a human rights issue as well as an animal rights and animal welfare issue."

DeCoster's son Peter, who operates the farms, declined to answer questions when approached by Fox News. He denied that the Food and Drug Administration claims his family's farms are unsafe.

But Iowa's attorney general in 2000 officially classified DeCoster a "habitual violator" of state environmental laws. Two years later, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission fined DeCoster Farms more than $1.5 million in an employment discrimination case. The case was brought on behalf of women, mostly Hispanic immigrants, who said they suffered harassment, abuse and rape at the hands of DeCoster's supervisors in Iowa, according to an EEOC statement.

The EEOC said the supervisors harassed and assaulted the women, some of whom were undocumented, and threatened to retaliate if they complained.

Additionally, immigration raids have been a fairly common occurrence at DeCoster's farms. Fifty-one workers were arrested in a 2007 raid on six of DeCoster's farms in Wright County, Iowa. The employees reportedly included juveniles. That followed a string of other raids over the past decade in which dozens of workers were arrested.

It's unclear whether the Obama administration has targeted DeCoster's properties for employer audits. A call to the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not immediately returned.

But the administration has shifted from illegal immigrant roundups at workplaces to conducting so-called "silent raids," in which the federal government conducts audits of businesses to check on whether illegal immigrants are working there. The number of arrests and deportations at work sites has gone down since President Obama took office, but the audits are up 50 percent and fines have tripled to nearly $3 million.

Agriculture officials now say that tougher federal regulations -- some of which went into effect last month and some of which are still being considered by Congress -- could have enabled authorities to catch the salmonella symptoms before the problem got out of hand. But even when he was flagged by officials, DeCoster just paid the fines and kept on going.

Key members of Congress are now seeking more information about the two farms linked to the salmonella outbreak, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight panel, announced Monday he was launching an investigation. He and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., sent letters to both farms requesting information regarding when they first learned about the contamination and when they reported it.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the farms involved in the recall "were not operating with the standards of practice that we consider responsible."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08 ... iolations/

The egg mogul linked to the widespread salmonella outbreak is considered by government officials a repeat offender, and the allegations and violations at his farms go far beyond sanitation to illegal immigration , unsafe workplace conditions and sexual abuse of female employees.

Shown here is CRIMINAL Austin "Jack" DeCoster - one of the thousands of PROTECTED illegal alien employers across the United States

Let Me See If I Get This Straight . .

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-209968-straight.html

IF YOU CROSS THE NORTH KOREAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET 12 YEARS HARD LABOR ..

added to homepage

http://www.alipac.us/article5600.html

I never would have guessed an IA just might be the root cause.

(Sarcasm Alert)

Maybe they were getting paid to do this to the egg supply.

Migrants killed for refusing to be assassins, teen says



MEXICO CITY — The sole survivor in the massacre of 72 illegal immigrants headed to the U.S. has said a notorious drug gang gunned them all down after they refused to work as assassins, according to a source at the prosecutor's office for the state of Tamaulipas quoted in Mexican media.

The teen — an Ecuadorian who escaped and stumbled wounded to a military checkpoint on a highway — told authorities that his captors had identified themselves as Zetas, a drug gang whose control of parts of the northern state of Tamaulipas is so brutal and complete that even many Mexicans avoid traveling its highways.

The 19-year-old staggered to the checkpoint with a bullet wound in his neck and face, saying he had played dead to escape from Zetas gunmen at a ranch in San Fernando, just 100 miles south of Brownsville, Texas.

He told investigators that Zetas gunmen intercepted the migrants as they moved toward the border, then took them blindfolded to the ranch where they were told to hand over cash, the source said.

The migrants had little cash, the teen reportedly said, and the gunmen then told them they could work as Zetas assassins and get paid $2,000 a month. It was not clear if they were supposed to work in the United States.

When the migrants refused, the gunmen opened fire, the source described the teen as saying.

While the teen's name had been reported earlier, msnbc.com has decided to remove it given concerns he could be targeted.

President Felipe Calderon vowed to investigate how his name was leaked, saying he "personally gave the order to shield the witness' identity."

The Zetas gang, started by former Mexican army special forces soldiers, is known to extort money from migrants who pass through its territory.

Violence along the northeastern border with the U.S. has soared this year since the Zetas broke with their former employer, the Gulf cartel. Authorities say the Gulf cartel has joined forces with its once-bitter enemies, the Sinaloa and La Familia gangs, to destroy the Zetas, who have grown so powerful they now have reach into Central America.

It was the third time this year that Mexican authorities have discovered large masses of corpses. In the other two cases, investigators believe the bodies were dumped at the sites over a long time.

Zetas spies in shelters
The Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, who runs a shelter in the southern state of Oaxaca, where many migrants pass on their way to Tamaulipas, said the Zetas have put informants inside shelters to find out which migrants have relatives in the U.S. — the most lucrative targets for kidnap-extortion schemes.

He said he constantly hears horror stories, including people who "say their companions have been killed with baseball bats in front of the others."

Solalinde said he has been threatened by Zetas demanding access to his shelters.

He said the gangsters told him: "If we kill you, they'll close the shelter and we'll have to look all over for the migrants."

If confirmed as a cartel kidnapping, the Tamaulipas massacre would perhaps be the most extreme case seen so far and the bloodiest massacre of Mexico's drug war.

Calderon said cartels are increasingly trying to recruit migrants as foot soldiers — a concern that has also been expressed by U.S. politicians demanding more security at the border.

He insisted that such activities indicated the cartels have been battered by thousands of troops and federal police battling them in their strongholds, and are desperate for alternate means of income.

Calderon frequently makes that argument, while critics counter that Mexico's cartels have only gotten more powerful and brutal since the government launched its offensive against the cartels in late 2006.

The drug gangs "are resorting to extortion and kidnappings of migrants for their financing and also for recruitment because they are having a hard time obtaining resources and people," Calderon said in a statement Wednesday night.

Bodies to be ID'd
Authorities said they were trying to determine whether the 72 victims in Tamaulipas were killed at the same time — and why. The government was taking the bodies from the ranch to the small town of San Fernando for identification and will have to move in refrigeration equipment that the local authorities lack, said Ricardo Najera, a spokesman for the federal Attorney General's Office.

Investigators believe the migrants were from Ecuador, Brazil, El Salvador and Honduras.

Migrants running the gauntlet up Mexico to reach the United States have long faced extortion, violence and theft. But reports have grown of mass kidnappings of migrants, who are forced to give the telephone numbers of relatives in the United States or back home who are then required to transfer ransom payments to the abductors.

Teresa Delagadillo, who works at the Casa San Juan Diego shelter in Matamoros just across from Brownsville, Texas, said she often hears stories about criminal gangs kidnapping and beating migrants to demand money — but never a horror story on the scale of this week's massacre.

"There hadn't been reports that they had killed them," she said.

In an April report, Amnesty International called the plight of tens of thousands of mainly Central American migrants crossing Mexico for the U.S. a major human rights crisis. The report called their journey "one of the most dangerous in the world" and said every year an untold number of migrants disappear without a trace.

Mexico's government has confirmed at least seven cases of cartels kidnapping groups of migrants so far this year, said Antonio Diaz, an official with the National Migration Institute, a think tank that studies immigration.

But other groups say migrant kidnappings are much more rampant. In its most recent study, the National Human Rights Commission said 1,600 migrants are kidnapped in Mexico each month. It based its figures on the number of reports it received between September 2008 and February 2009.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38867434/ns ... s-americas