AFF Sentinel Vol.4#7

Before exploring gory details revealing R-CALF's true character - some general conclusions.

There is a huge contrast here in "making a difference:" i.e. between, "You're free to go out there and get what's there to be gotten," and "You must fight the forces of evil. There is a conspiracy robbing you of your just rewards."

That's the bottom-line difference between mainstream cattle groups and R-CALF. The same philosophy distinguishes free-market capitalists from the populist, big government socialists in economics and politics.

Most of R-CALF leadership left are "The Litigators" - those who believe only force will solve problems. "The Negotiators," who believe that litigation is not the solution to every problem, that lobbying and negotiating can sometimes be useful, have mostly resigned, been purged or are about to be, like a purge amongst the Bolsheviks.

Swifthorses.com has revealed that many of the things we had glimpsed or deduced about the R- CALF "personality" were not only true - but to a devastating degree even we didn't think possible.

R-CALF never earned the right to shape the course of the beef industry. They took it - temporarily - by force, by litigation. What they envisioned as a crusade against evil, against hidden conspiracies, were really emotional reactions to a changing world by people incapable of creative business reactions. They remind me of a Michigan auto worker I saw interviewed. After roughly 20 years at a major auto plant, he was faced with losing his job. His father, also on camera, had worked 40 years at that plant and the son had expected the same. Neither had expected change in their industry over 80 years time.

Capitalism is predicated on people being free to react as they wish in the marketplace, within their means. Wresting control from the consuming public by legal instruments is not fair to consumers. It also distorts signals from consumer to producer. We need more explicit messages, more streamlined feedback systems from consumer to producer. We do not need the polarization between market segments, the hoarding of information, the concentration on production efficiency not tied to customer needs that R- CALF was trying to bring back from the past. We have been too slow in reducing those production chain flaws. Instead, R-CALF draws inspiration from turn-of- the-century populist, socialist models that have been disproven worldwide.

The longtime, mainstream organizations in the industry are not perfect. But they have evolved into relatively efficient, responsive organizations, utilizing the same democratic republic mechanisms as America the nation. Grassroots input doesn't mean a full membership vote for every paper clip purchase. But the means for addressing member concerns are there and they work.

That the radical positions of R-CALF members acting within other organizations never became policy, they blamed on organizational structure or on perceived "packer domination" of cattlemen's groups. They never saw it as deeply held disagreement with their ideas. Or they assumed disagreement was based on mainstream cattlemen's stupidity, or gullibility, of their ignorance of the production chain's big players' plans to strangle cattlemen. Suspicious to the core, R-CALFers could never see that processors, retailers and restaurateurs depend on supplies of raw material in a fundamental way, that a big business that doesn't nourish their suppliers disappears.

The same mistrust was characteristic of their relationships with other R-CALF zealots. The revelations on Swifthorses makes one wonder how they fooled so many people for so long into thinking they were a legitimate, normally functioning organization. Individuals whose focus is "I'm right, everyone else is wrong," and "Everyone else is evil or suspect," are not good candidates for leadership in an organization - or industry.

We're not sure what's going to happen to R- CALF. An all-litigation-all-the-time strategy is expensive. Will some of the consumer activist groups in the LAG*, who have been working with R-CALF, step in to help - loath to lose their rancher partner's suppposed credibility? Have they already done so in the past and now increase their assistance? With battles on COOL, trade, cattle ownership restrictions and contracting looming, minds may be working feverishly on a support line for R-CALF. Washington law firms have brought R-CALF allies on issues and provided access for them in D.C. Will the saga continue?

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