cross-posted at La Vida Locavore and the EENR progressive blog

My son just started kindergarten in the Des Moines public system. His school has a wonderful and caring staff, and he is having a great time, as he did in the pre-school program there.

Unfortunately, like almost all public schools these days, this school relies on fundraising by the parents’ group to pay for essential school supplies.

The parents’ group decided years ago not to have our kids sell chocolate or wrapping paper or some other overpriced product to raise money, and I appreciate that.

They have opted this year to participate in the Tyson Project A+ label collection program, which is sponsored by Tyson Foods, Inc.

A sheet went home with my son encouraging parents to clip and save Tyson Project A+ labels, which are worth 24 cents each for the school:

Through this program, we can raise as much as $12,000 for our school this year! The money we raise can go towards buying books or computers, making improvements to our buildings, or anything else that we want.

Here is a list of 53 Tyson chicken products with labels I can clip and collect for the school.

Most Tyson chicken products contain meat from birds that have been treated with antibiotics, which may be a leading contributor to drug-resistant bacteria.

Tyson fired several employees earlier this year following reports of excessive cruelty at two of its factories.

Two years ago, Tyson had to pay $1.5 million in back pay for hiring discrimination. In 2002, the U.S. Department of Labor sued the company for pay practices that violated the Fair Labor Standards Act. In 2005, Tyson Foods paid the state of Kentucky $184,515 to settle six cases related to worker safety, including one that stemmed from a fatal accident.

Tyson also has a history of profiting from the employment of illegal immigrants. In fact, some of its managers were involved in recruiting illegal immigrants to work at Tyson factories, which led to a

36-count federal indictment that prosecutors obtained against Tyson in December 2001. The company was charged in U.S. District Court in Chattanooga with having, among other things, engaged in an elaborate seven-year scheme to recruit hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala for its poultry plants in at least 12 states. Six of Tyson’s mid-level executives or plant managers were also indicted. But in the end, even though Tyson was benefiting from illegal workers laboring in its plants, the executives avoided conviction.

It was the most ambitious criminal immigration case ever against an employer. Prosecutors demanded $100 million as a forfeiture penalty that they said represented the company’s ill-gotten gains. The transcript for the six-and-a-half-week trial ran 5,464 pages. On March 26, the jury rendered its verdict: not guilty on all counts.

The sting had caught several Tyson managers or their assistants on audiotape and videotape plotting to recruit and hire illegal aliens for several plants, including the one at Shelbyville. Seven Tyson employees, whom the company eventually fired, had quietly pleaded guilty to immigration-related offenses.

During the late 1990s, Tyson employed 67,000 workers at 55 poultry plants. Court testimony established that a number of those workers were illegal, some hired directly and some through temp agencies.

I buy chicken directly from sustainable farmers or from the Wholesome Harvest coalition of small organic family farmers, which has been endorsed by the Organic Consumers Association. I don’t like feeling pressure to buy Tyson chicken products in order to pay for classroom supplies and school improvements.

Inadequate funding for public schools is the root of this problem. The parents’ group organizes several fundraising projects during the year, including a chili supper and silent auction which is always a success. But it’s not easy to raise significant funds without urging kids to sell products people don’t need. A concert for the school, featuring a famous children’s artist, lost money two years ago.

Programs like Tyson Project A+ probably seem like a good deal to parents who would be buying some of these foods anyway. For my part, I plan to donate $50 directly to the parents’ group. I’d have to buy more than 200 Tyson products to raise an equivalent amount through this label collection program.

UPDATE: Thanks to ragbrai08, who noted that I forgot to mention Tyson’s settlement with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in November 2006 “for $871,000 on behalf of black workers who alleged that they were racially harassed and retaliated against at a chicken processing plant in Ashland, Alabama.”

The owners of Agriprocessors have invited Governor Chet Culver to visit the Postville meat-packing plant he strongly criticized in his guest editorial for the Sunday Des Moines Register.

The invitation was part of a guest commentary from Agriprocessors, which the Register published on Monday. In that piece, the company’s plant manager, Chaim Abrahams, denied most of the allegations concerning labor and safety violations at the plant.

Culver’s office said the governor will not accept the invitation.

In related news, someone asked Barack Obama about the federal raid at the Agriprocessors plant when he was in Davenport on Monday, and he was quite critical of alleged use of child labor without mentioning Agriprocessors by name. An attorney for Agriprocessors issued an angry response to Obama’s comments. The company’s owners have donated primarily to Republican politicians in the past.

Did anyone go to the Iowa Democratic Party’s state convention today?

Use this as an open thread to talk about what happened there.

UPDATE: John Deeth liveblogged the convention for Iowa Independent.

Chet Culver donated $100,000 from his campaign committee to the “coordinated campaign” that will get out the vote for all Democrats in Iowa this November.

The organized labor community is still mad at Culver for vetoing the collective bargaining bill this spring, as this curtain-raiser by the AP’s Mike Glover confirms.

The solution is to elect more Democrats to both chambers of the legislature, which the coordinated campaign will help do. With solid Democratic majorities, another collective bargaining bill can be passed in 2009, with a more open legislative process than what occurred this year.

The leaders of the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers appeared in Cleveland on Friday with Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown to endorse Barack Obama for president.

The joint endorsement and accompanying press release emphasized Obama’s support for “a clean energy economy,” which would create jobs while protecting the environment.

It’s a welcome contrast to John McCain’s energy policy, which calls for investing $2 billion in so-called “clean coal” and constructing 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030.

The Sierra Club and United Steelworkers created the Blue Green Alliance in June 2006. The alliance has sought to draw attention to “economic opportunities that could come from a serious investment in renewable energy.”

This work is very important for the progressive movement. Too often the labor and environmental communities have found themselves on opposite sides of controversial issues. We saw that in Iowa earlier this year, when key labor groups backed plans to build a new coal-fired power plant near Marshalltown.

The full text of the Sierra Club’s press release on the Obama endorsement is after the jump. In addition to Obama’s energy policy, Sierra Club drew attention to:

-his opposition to further oil drilling in the Arctic Naitonal Wildlife Refuge;

-his opposition to storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada;

-his promise to undo many of George Bush’s bad executive orders on the environment;

-his support for more regulation of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs); and

-his efforts to reduce children’s exposure to lead.

It’s hard to keep up with all the reasons to oppose John McCain. Last night I wrote about his opposition to a bill that would make it easier for victims of job discrimination to seek legal redress.

If you care about that issue, you can sign the petition on “Equal Pay for Equal Work” at Momsrising.org.

Meanwhile, I learned from this diary by TomP that Friends of the Earth Action is running an ad against McCain on CNN. The ad highlights McCain’s support for the nuclear power industry:

TomP’s diary also includes this great quote from Friends of the Earth Action president Dr. Brent Blackwalder:

You know how self righteous John McCain can be when he talks about corporate pork and earmarks, but do you know why he opposes the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill?  He plans to vote against it not because it could lavish $1 trillion on the profitable oil, gas and coal industries, but because he wants to add hundreds of billions of dollars more in earmarks for the nuclear industry!

On a related note, I got an e-mail today from the Sierra Club slamming McCain’s proposal to suspend the federal gas tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The Sierra Club notes that the real effect of that policy would be to

[r]aise oil company profits by another 18 cents per gallon — by eliminating the federal gas tax without guaranteeing that Big Oil won’t just keep prices high and take the difference to grow their record profits even more.

The Sierra Club also has an online petition you can sign, which sends this message to McCain:

The best way to deal with high gas prices is to cut, not expand, giveaways to Big Oil. Please vote to end taxpayer-funded subsidies and tax breaks for Big Oil and use that money to invest in clean, renewable energy.

Earlier this week, I got the latest newsletter from Smart Growth America, which also blasted McCain’s proposal to declare a summer holiday from the federal gas tax:

An artificial and temporary reduction of gas prices will simply guarantee that absolutely no money goes towards having suitable roads and bridges for those filled-up cars to drive on – not to mention alternatives to congestion, like commuter rail and transit. Instead, we can send the full price of gasoline directly into the pockets of oil companies. (An estimated $10 billion in transportation revenue would be lost, or enough to fully fund Amtrak rail service for 6 years or so.) Meanwhile, we fall farther behind in maintaining our infrastructure: Rust doesn’t take the summer off.

But that’s not all. To coincide with McCain’s photo-op in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward today, Moveon.org Political Action launched its own online petition calling on McCain to reject the endorsement of right-wing pastor John Hagee. I knew about Hagee’s anti-Catholic bigotry, but I wasn’t aware that Hagee once said, “Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.”

Surely there couldn’t be any more shameful news about McCain to emerge within this 24-hour period, right? Wrong. I learned from Natasha Chart’s post at MyDD today that during a recent visit to Alabama, McCain’s campaign used free prison labor to get out of paying to set up for a private fundraiser.

I guess a campaign that is way behind its Democratic rivals in fundraising has to save money wherever it can.

But it would be more honest for McCain to curtail all campaign spending between now and the Republican National Convention this summer, because he is not complying with limits imposed by his decision to take public financing last year.

If I’ve missed any recent disgraceful behavior coming from the McCain camp, please let me know in the comments section.

I received an e-mail alert from The Interfaith Alliance Iowa Action Fund today.

Apparently the House Labor Committee is considering a very bad bill in an effort to look “tough” on immigration.

The full text of the action alert is after the jump. It summarizes the main features of the bill and provides talking points you can use with legislators, along with the relevant contact e-mails and phone numbers.

My opinion is that a phone call from a constituent is harder to ignore than an e-mail message.

UPDATE: This article about the bill ran on the front page of the Des Moines Register on Tuesday:

http://www.desmoinesregister.c…