ArcaMax

Let's say you like shrimp. Whether you go for a chain restaurant's happy hour shrimp boil or a pricey plate of "shrimp a la grandioso" at President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort -- a good question to ask is: Where do they get their shrimp?

Even if the restaurant has an ocean view and a shrimp boat out front, chances are its crustaceans come from industrial aquaculture farms thousands of miles away in India, Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia. Astonishingly, our country now imports 94% of the shrimp we eat!

Astonishing, because our oceans have an abundance of top-quality shrimp, and we are blessed with highly skilled shrimping families. Worse, those foreign industrial operations, financed by Wall Street and global profiteers, are infamous for using forced labor, banned antibiotics and destructive environmental methods. Then they dump their grossly cheap product into the U.S. market, pushing out our superior-quality domestic product and devastating entire shrimping communities.

Yet, restaurant and supermarket prices for shrimp are at historic highs, with no disclosure to us consumers of where the product is from. The import industry effectively bribes lawmakers to avoid exposing, much less punishing, this multibillion-dollar swindle of American producers and eaters alike. The bait-and-switch conspiracy is now so pervasive that at last year's National Shrimp Festival, four out of five vendors were - Shhhh -- quietly serving industrially-raised imported shrimp.

Of course, corporations have no conscience, but our tough-on-crime political leaders are so pusillanimous that they won't even stand up for their own local shrimpers. A recent Louisiana law, for example, "boldly" requires restaurants to disclose if they're peddling imported shrimp. But, the legislature meekly provided "no penalty" if violators ignore the law. So ... they do.

For information on real reform, connect with SanAntonioBayWaterKeeper.org.

RIGHT-WINGERS TO WOMEN: STAY HOME AND HAVE BABIES!

The right-wing routinely demonizes family-friendly policies of liberals as "social engineering."

But look out! Here come those same politicians, putting on MAGA hard hats and firing up their political bulldozers to push one of the most arrogant and intrusive social schemes imaginable. They intend to re-engineer the American family! These "pronatalists" want families to conform to a Christian Nationalist family structure -- specifically, a dominant man married to a subservient stay-at-home woman, having beaucoup children. Not a couple of kiddos but six, 12 or more!

For example, extremist MAGA senator Josh Hawley has become a cheerleader for a federal policy to entice women to quit work, stay home and have more babies. He proposes a tax credit of $5,000 per child, gushing that this would cause working families to exclaim, "Oh, my gosh, we can actually raise our kids."

Well, "gosh" right back at you, Josh! Just giving birth can cost more than $5,000 -- and raising a child is multiples above that every year. So, you want to take away a mom's job and her income, and add thousands in costs to the family budget -- in exchange for a government tax credit? The slickest loan sharks aren't that diabolical.

Oh, wait. Right-wing pronatalists have another government incentive to jack up birth rates. Incredibly, Trump officials have proposed a "National Medal of Motherhood" for women who have six or more children! Wow, what should that medal look like, be made of and say? And when and where should it be worn? Also, will un-medaled women be socially ostracized?

If right-wingers actually wanted to help families, they'd be backing family-level wages, free childcare and Medicare for all. Everything else is political BS.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

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