This article was first published in Alternet.

Editor’s Note: The shocking transfer of public wealth to Wall Street’s pockets is illustrated vividly in Mark Ames’ article below, which covers some very disturbing recent events in Alabama, where billionaires and banks are squeezing the locals so hard that they’re literally going bankrupt just for flushing their toilets, where violence and the threat of violence are reaching a boiling point and where even the Posse Comitatus Act is under threat.

One of this year’s more disturbing stories that were ignored was the illegal Army occupation of Samson, Alab., in March following a shooting spree that raged across two towns by a disgruntled worker, leaving 11 people dead.

As I wrote at the time, Michael McLendon, 27, went on a killing rampage following years of relentless corporate exploitation and harassment against him, his mother (whom he mercy-killed), and the entire rural Alabama region, which suffered like so many parts of rural America at the hands of billionaire goons like chicken oligarch Bo Pilgrim of Pilgrim’s Pride notoriety.

One of the creepiest details to emerge in the shooting rampage were reports that troops from nearby Fort Rucker were brought into Samson and other surrounding areas to patrol the streets. This is a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, every freedom-loving American’s worst nightmare.

And now, finally, the Army officially agrees that its occupation of the Alabama streets was illegal, according to an internal report the Associated Press got a hold of, following a Freedom of Information Act filing:

An Army investigation found that soldiers should not have been sent to man traffic stops in a small Alabama town after 11 people were killed in March during a shooting spree.An Army report released to the Associated Press on Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request said the decision to dispatch military police to Samson from nearby Fort Rucker broke the law. But an Army spokesman said no charges have been filed following the Aug. 10 report.

The report from the Department of Army Inspector General found the use of military personnel in Samson violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal troops from performing law-enforcement actions. The names of those involved were redacted from the report.

According to the report, the officer’s “intent was to be a good Army neighbor and help local civilian authorities facing a difficult, unique tragedy affecting the local community. There were no apparent adverse collateral effects to the support provided.”

Indeed. For a lot of Americans, the sight of troops occupying their towns is their worst nightmare come true — part of the reason that America came into existence was to create a country where this sort of thing would never happen, even if the Army’s sole intent was to be a good neighbor and help old ladies cross the streets.

Strangely enough, there was almost no media coverage of the occupation — you had to rely on various right-wing outlets like CNSNews.com, whose article I blogged at the time, or the left-wing Democratic Underground.

But what even the right-wing anti-government people won’t report is the true reason why the Army was called out in the first place, something that goes right back to the cause of the shooting rampage: billionaire exploitation of the local Alabamans, not just by the chicken oligarch, but from higher up the predator food chain — Wall Street banking behemoth JP Morgan Chase.

You see, thanks to a combination of corporate-tax holidays (which reduce local revenues), billionaire greed like the sort that bankrupted Pilgrim’s Pride, and Wall Street investment-banking scams on places like Alabama that result in corrupted local officials and bankrupted municipalities, counties and states — now, there’s no money left to fund local police forces, as the U.S. Army report reveals:

The soldiers arrived in the hours after the shootings, which stretched the town’s tiny police force and county officers to the limit with several different crime scenes. The report said troops were dispatched after the Geneva County Sheriff’s Office and Samson Police requested assistance from Fort Rucker to relieve law enforcement at traffic checkpoints around the crime-scene area.

As I wrote earlier this year, Pilgrim’s Pride hooked up with Wall Street to leverage itself into bankruptcy while enriching the executives’ family and a handful of insiders at the expense of tens of thousands of Americans workers:

In 2006, Pilgrim’s Pride, then the second-largest chicken processor in the world, made a huge gamble that will seem familiar to anyone who’s been following the financial crash: the company borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars, leveraging itself well beyond its means, in order to acquire a rival company and become the nation’s No. 1 chicken processor, slaughtering 45 million chickens per week.

That might have given the executives a nice, big hard-on, but it also meant they would have to come up with more money to pay for all that debt. So the company did do what every post-Reagan company has done and gotten away with: it made the workforce pay for the executives’ bonuses.

That meant squeezing lower-middle-class workers for more work for less pay, or in Pilgrim’s case, more work for no pay: In August 2007, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Pilgrim’s Pride accusing it of grossly undercompensating its employees. That same year, 10,000 Pilgrim’s Pride employees launched a class-action lawsuit demanding compensation for their work.

The damage extended well beyond Pilgrim’s Pride’s plants. With bankruptcy came huge unpaid local tax bills, leading to further layoffs and reduced services for the already-beleaguered locals:

Suwannee County could be out about $2 million if Pilgrim’s Pride doesn’t pay its property-tax bill, according to property appraiser Lamar Jenkins.

The biggest taxpayer in the county filed for bankruptcy protection Dec. 1. Now it’s not clear when — or if — the bill will be paid.

“It’s certainly going to put a hurt on the budget of the county,” Jenkins told the [Suwanee] Democrat by phone Thursday. Jenkins said the unpaid bill represents 7.4 percent of the money local schools get from property taxes; 5.3 percent of county funds from that source; and 8 percent of the money the Suwannee River Water Management District receives from local property-tax revenues.

A spokesman for Pilgrim’s did not respond to a request for comment.

Bo Pilgrim, the head of Pilgrim’s Pride, once told his Texas church that he was worth over $1 billion before the market crash, and he’s still worth hundreds of millions.  His rapacity was boundless, and in the end it was the undoing of Pilgrim’s Pride — not the Pilgrim family, mind you, which is still filthy disgusting rich, but the company is through.

Last month, 64 percent of Pilgrim’s Pride was sold to JBS, a Brazilian beef giant, making it the largest meat company in the world, topping America’s Tyson. The American cattle industry tried to block the deal, which it says could result in the destruction of the American beef industry, but the Justice Department already approved JBS’ takeover.

In the billionaires’ Third World model for America, it makes awful sense that a Brazilian meat company would take control of a bankrupt, corrupt American chicken company. For Wall Street and the billionaires, the more they destroy in America, the richer they get, consequences be damned. And anyway, it’s not like Pilgrim’s Pride was a model of corporate responsibility while under American ownership; just read some of the comments on this recent Reuters article:

Gilmer, Texas, Sep. 8, 2009 — working as a supervisor in mt pleasant plant use to be injoyable, but lately they expect you to work 50/70 hours for no extra pay. pilgrims pride does not care about family life just their money. Everyone is afraid to say anything, because upper management may let you go with no warnning because you voiced your oppion

robert, Carrollton, Ga. — i work carrollton,ga former goldkist plant we were goldkist 1 plant now we fill like we in pure hell working for pilgrim pride these people want you to kiss there ass and work three times hard for same money no rasied in two years old chicken farmer

Doddridge, Ark. — While I was raising chickens for Pilgrim’s Pride, I became friends with many lower management employees of the company. The manner in which they were terminated was just simply unmerciful. While the growers had the brunt of the financial devastion, many that were nearing retirement were left with no prospects of employment in the near future. I know some that have had to uproot their families and settle for a considerable more modest lifestyle with their retirement benefits in doubt after a number of years of employment. It is just a shame that Bo Pilgrim has pocketed the money of many hard working people. I still believe Bo needs to be in the jail cell next to Bernie Madoff.

The comments section is where you’ll find the real, unvarnished, ungrammatical rage among America’s cheated majority, because for the most part, people are too desperate and afraid to complain in public.

Bo Pilgrim’s statue of himself at Pilgrim’s Pride headquarters.

But here’s the rub: Selling Pilgrim’s Pride to a Brazilian meat monopoly doesn’t mean things will get better for Alabamans. Just weeks after the buyout was announced, Pilgrim’s Pride closed another plant, this one in northern Alabama. According to the AP:

A chicken-processing plant owned by Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. is shutting down this week after almost six decades, putting more than 600 people out of work and creating ripples that will be felt all over town.

The city of almost 20,000 is preparing for the end of a relationship that began in 1952 when James Beasley founded Sweet Sue Poultry, which originally ran the plant. Owners included Beatrice Foods and ConAgra before Pilgrim’s Pride purchased the business in 2003.

Which looks a lot like an even more depressing Pilgrim’s Pride story from a few months earlier, this from rural Arkansas. The town of Clinton filed a lawsuit in June against Pilgrim’s Pride, accusing it of turning the town into a “ghost town”:

“With its largest and sole remaining employer, Pilgrim’s, now evacuated, the city faces a crisis of revenue, bond payments and economic devastation, and as a result of the Pilgrim’s evacuation is threatened with becoming a modern-day ghost town,” the lawsuit filed by the city said. “This serious economic situation is, however, a direct consequence of Pilgrim’s illegal purpose in shuttering the Clinton plant and operations.”

This story is repeated all over the rural South. So guess who put together the deal that bankrupted Pilgrim’s Pride? Lehman Bros., the king of bankruptcy.

On the other side of the deal, serving Gold Kist, was Merrill Lynch, which also collapsed last year. But Merrill’s banker in the Pilgrim’s Pride acquisition is still doing well, thank you very much. In fact, he was recently hired by JPMorgan Chase as vice chairman of mergers and acquisitions.

Which makes perfect sense, because JPMorgan Chase has been laying waste to Alabama on a level that makes Pilgrim’s Pride’s destruction look downright humanitarian. JP Morgan Chase has plundered so much wealth from one county in Alabama, using a complex derivatives scheme and old-fashioned bribery, that some locals are calling it “Armageddon.” According to Bloomberg:

In its 190-year history, Jefferson County, Ala., has endured a cholera epidemic, a pounding in the Civil War, gunslingers, labor riots and terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan. Now this namesake of Thomas Jefferson, anchored by Birmingham, is staring at what one local politician calls financial “Armageddon.”

The spectacle — a tax struck down, about 1,000 county employees furloughed, a politician indicted over $3 billion in sewer debt that may lead to the largest municipal bankruptcy in history — has elbowed its way up the ladder of county lore.

“People want to kill somebody, but they don’t know who to shoot at,” says Russell Cunningham, past president of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Jefferson County’s debacle is a parable for billions of dollars lost by state and local governments from Florida to California in transactions done behind closed doors. Selling debt without requiring competition made public officials vulnerable to bankers’ sales pitches, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for borrowing gone awry.

[T]he county bet on interest-rate swaps, agreements that a representative of New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. told commissioners could reduce their interest costs. Instead, the swaps — covering more than $5 billion in all — blew up during the credit crisis after ratings for the county’s bond insurers fell.

JPMorgan, through spokeswoman Christine Holevas, declined to comment for this story.

Yeah, why bother commenting to the public when you own the bastards? JPMorgan, which took $25 billion in direct bailout money and tens of billions more in backdoor subsidies and handouts, just posted a massive $3.6 billion quarterly profit, and has set aside at least $11.1 billion for management bonuses. Meanwhile, Alabamans can’t afford to flush their toilets.

This is what inequality looks like. From Wall Street, it must look extremely appealing; for the rest of America, it’s a nightmare that’s only getting worse.

So far, it’s clear that Birmingham and the entire Jefferson County are following the wretched script of a typical Third World scenario, where the Wall Street bankers corrupt the politicians and eventually bankrupt the place and then, while the corpse is still warm and the bankruptcy deals are cut, Wall Street makes sure it’s first in line to profit off the chaos it created, while its corrupt local shill (in this case Birmingham’s mayor) takes the fall for the crime of accepting the JP Morgan bribes … and the locals get screwed worst of all, paying off the bill for years or decades.

Just this week, it emerged that Goldman Sachs, employer of Brian “Inequality Is Good” Griffiths, bilked the state of New Jersey using a similar scheme involving interest-rate swaps on bonds that don’t even exist. According to Bloomberg, New Jersey is considering raising its gasoline tax to pay the $1 million a month they have to pay out to Goldman for the scam — a regressive tax that once again takes from the struggling middle class and poor, and puts in thepockets of the billionaires.

Meanwhile, over in Jefferson County, Ala., there’s so little left to steal from the impoverished locals that Wall Street has been forced to come up with a new, grotesquely evil plan to line their pockets: taxing the local residents for taking a shit:

In August, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., as trustee for owners of about $3 billion in sewer warrants, filed suit in Jefferson County Circuit Court seeking an appointed receiver for the sewer system. The receiver should have authority to raise rates enough to meet the debt service, the bank said in the complaint, which is pending. The sewer system is already charging customers about 300 percent more to drain bathtubs or flush toilets than a dozen years ago.

By one county estimate, average annual bills are now about $750, compared with the national average of $331, according to a 2007 survey by the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Clean Water Agencies, a coalition of utilities.

It’s impossible to boost them enough without putting them beyond the means of many residents, County CommissionerJim Carns says. “We’re like a guy making $50,000 a year with a $1 million mortgage.”

In Wall Street’s eyes, Alabamans really do shit gold.

The thing now will be to convince the locals to use their toilets rather than, say, gas to heat their homes.

As I wrote a few months ago, Jefferson County residents have become so desperate that they’re being forced to choose between water and heating, as this article shows:

As nighttime temperatures plunged in Birmingham, Ala., last October, Dora Bonner had a choice: either pay the gas bill so she could heat the home she shares with four grandchildren, or send the Birmingham Water Works a $250 check for her water and sewer bill.

Bonner, who is 73 and lives on Social Security, decided to keep the house from freezing.

“I couldn’t afford the water, so they shut it off,” she says.

Bonner’s sewer bills have risen more than fourfold in the past decade. So have those of others in Jefferson County, which has 659,000 residents and includes Birmingham, the state’s largest city.

The logical outcome of the billionaires’ plundering of Alabama is the same thing that happens all over the Third World: violence, fear and calling in the troops, the only way to secure the billionaires’ dirty profits:

In August and September … Jefferson County residents got a taste of what bankruptcy might look like. As the county began putting about 1,000 workers on leave without pay, one disgruntled employee allegedly e-mailed bomb threats to officials and was promptly arrested, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

Lines soon formed outside the courthouse as such tasks as renewing driver’s licenses slowed.

A kind of legal civil war broke out when three county agencies — the sheriff’s department, an indigent-care hospital and the tax-assessor’s office — sued the county commission to stop the budget cuts on the grounds that they posed a danger to public safety.

Bettye Fine Collins, the commission president, declared the situation, “our Armageddon.”

The state’s response is right out of the Central America banana republic playbook: When there’s no money left for the people, send in the troops.

The cuts in the sheriff’s department budget were so severe that he was planning to call in the National Guard to keep order:

The sheriff in Alabama’s most populous county may call for the National Guard to help maintain order, a spokesman said Tuesday, as a judge cleared the way for cuts in the sheriff’s budget, and lawmakers reached a compromise they hope will end the budget crisis.

In light of all of this, the Army’s brief, illegal occupation of a string of towns in Alabama this past spring no longer looks like a freak one-off, but rather a logical progression in the ongoing billionaire plunder of America.

It gives new meaning to what MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan is calling “corporate communism.” Not only are banking billionaires on permanent state wealthfare, but even worse, as the wealth available becomes increasingly scarce and there isn’t enough left to satisfy the billionaires’ grotesque appetites and regular citizens’ needs to flush their toilets or heat their homes, we’re heading to the point that all Third World countries come to — calling out the troops to ensure that the peasants pay their tithes to their absentee masters in New York and Connecticut and don’t get all uppity like those Europeans.

Now you can see why Alabamans are loading up on so many weapons. That makes sense. Now they need to understand who the real enemy is. Not the make-believe liberal bogeymen of their nightmares. Rather, Alabamans should focus their anger on the real-world billionaires who are making this country a living hell.

This article first appeared in Alternet. Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!

Mega-Statue Of Chicken Plutocrat Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim

The killing spree in Alabama fits a well-worn pattern of workplace-driven massacres that we’ve seen since the “going postal” phenomenon exploded in the middle of the Reagan revolution.

In spite of the fact that these killings have gone on unabated for over 20 years, most of the country doesn’t want to know why they’re happening — least of all the people in power.

If we study the motive for Michael McLendon’s shooting rampage Tuesday, which left 11 bodies across three towns in southern Alabama, and we look at the bizarre way that the causes of the shooting are being hushed up, you begin to understand why this uniquely-Reaganomics-inspired crime started in the United States, and continues to plague us.

But of all the inexplicable circumstances surrounding the murder spree, one of the oddest has to be the way Alabama authorities went from focusing hard on solving the shooter’s motive to suddenly dropping the issue like a hot potato and running away from the scene of the crime, as if they didn’t like what their investigation produced.

On Wednesday night, investigators announced that they had discovered the motive, and they would reveal it to the world on Thursday morning.

Investigators close in on motive of Alabama gunman
by Donna Francavilla
SAMSON, Ala. (AFP) — Alabama investigators said they were closing in on a motive for the U.S. state’s deadliest-ever shooting, in which a man killed his mother, grandmother and eight others before taking his own life. The Alabama Bureau of Investigations said there had been “very recent developments that we believe may direct us to a motive” for the grisly rampage, but ABI was quick to dismiss earlier reports that a hit list had been found in the house of the gunman, identified as Michael McLendon.

But then something funny happened on Thursday. Alabama investigators completely reversed themselves: They were now claiming there was no way to find out the motive for the killings, and in fact, no motive ever existed in the first place.

“There’s probably never going to be a motive,” Trooper Kevin Cook, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Public Safety, said Thursday.

Even the list that provided so many obvious clues as to what sparked the shooting is now no longer the “hit list” or list of people who had “done him wrong,” but rather, “the kind of list you’d put on a magnet on the refrigerator door,” according to Cook.

Which is odd, because just the day before, Cook told reporters, “As to motive, what we do know is that his mother had a lawsuit pending against Pilgrim’s Pride.”

Why the bizarre about-face? We may never know, because Alabama investigators abruptly closed the investigation at noon on Thursday, sending home almost the entire team. Nothing to see here folks, keep moving along.

This raises a new question: What was it about McLendon’s motive that officials wanted hushed? Or better yet: What did Pilgrim’s Pride do that could have incited a man described by all as nice, quiet and respectful to unleash a bloody killing spree?

On the surface, the horrific details seem to suggest a straightforward case of a lone psychopath unleashed: Michael McLendon, 28, shot and killed execution-style his own mother and four dogs, then set their bodies on fire before driving to other relatives’ houses and killing them; he killed a deputy’s wife and baby, along with bystanders; and like so many rampage massacres over the past 20 years, he ended his life inside of his former workplace: Reliance Metal Products, in the small town of Geneva, Ala.

Authorities say they discovered a list — presumably a hit list — of people and companies whom McLendon felt had done him wrong. Popular culture tells us that the hit list and his grievances are themselves signs that he suffered from a persecution complex, like so many Charles Mansons. No need to actually look into who was on that hit list and why — the mere discovery of such a list should be enough to indict him, case closed.

But nothing’s solved, nothing’s closed; and if we’re serious about understanding the “why” of this massacre, as everyone claims to be, then that list is the best place to start.

As with so many of these rage massacres from the past 20 years, the more you look at Tuesdays’ killing spree, the more you see that the system we’ve been living under since Reaganomics conquered everything has created all kinds of monsters and maniacs, from the plutocrats who’ve plundered this country for three decades straight, down to the lone broken worker — McLendon — who took up arms in a desperate suicide mission against the beast that crushed him.

Michael “Doughboy” McLendon

So far we’ve learned that McLendon’s hit list names the three companies he had worked for since 2003 — Reliance Metals, which makes construction materials; Pilgrim’s Pride, the nation’s number one poultry producer, where his mother also worked, until she was suspended from her job last week; and Kelley Foods, a smaller family-owned meat-processing company from which McLendon apparently quit just last week.

Even more striking to someone who has studied these workplace massacres, it appears that McLendon was bullied and abused at work. One clue as to why he’d end his spree at Reliance, where he hadn’t worked since 2003, could be that he was trying to kill the source of the pain: workers at Reliance used to taunt him incessantly, giving him the nickname “Doughboy.” Which basically means “fatso” and “faggot” combined: McLendon was 5 feet, 8 inches tall, but he weighed roughly 210 pounds.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but “Doughboy” is the exact same nickname that workers at Standard Gravure, a printing plant in Louisville, Ky., gave to a guy named Joe Wesbecker back in the 1980s.

Like McLendon’s case against Pilgrim’s Pride, Wesbecker also was locked in an ongoing labor dispute with his company, whose top shareholders had gone on an eight-year plundering spree, leaving little for the workers; the government backed Wesbecker’s case against Standard Gravure, and he “won” his dispute, but it was irrelevant.

By 1989, the culture had changed, all power went to the CEOs and major shareholders. Standard Gravure’s senior executives ignored the arbitration rulings and continued to treat Wesbecker however they felt, slashing his pay under a different pretense, which would require a whole new round of arbitrations.

Joe “Doughboy” Wesbecker finally cracked: on Sept. 14, 1989, he unleashed America’s first private workplace massacre, pitting aggrieved worker against vampiric company, borrowing from the numerous post office shootings that had erupted a few years earlier. The result: seven killed, 20 wounded, and the death of the company that drove him to the brink. And an unending string of workplace massacres by “disgruntled employees” ever since.

Next time any asshole calls a kid or a co-worker “Doughboy,” put the bully and the bullied on the top of your next Ghoul Pool list. Bullying in the workplace, like bullying in the schoolyard, is only now being recognized as a serious problem, with devastating psychological consequences — and the occasional rampage massacre.

Conventional wisdom used to say that victims of bullying should “deal with it” since it was “just the way things are”; nowadays, after all the workplace and school shootings, anti-bullying laws and codes are becoming increasingly common.

But let’s go back to Pilgrim’s Pride, the company that the Alabama investigator first named as the possible motive for the massacre. You might have heard of Pilgrim’s Pride before, not only because you’ve bought their chicken, but because of the notorious undercover video shot in one of the company’s chicken slaughterhouses in 2004.

When you look back at that video, and you place future-rampage-killer McLendon and his mother in that environment, the gory, sadistic details take on new meaning:

PETA says its investigator witnessed workers “ripping birds’ beaks off, spray painting their faces, twisting their heads off, spitting tobacco into their mouths and eyes, and breaking them in half — all while the birds are still alive.” In one shot, workers jump on live chickens with their entire body weight, sending blood and innards splashing on the lens of the hidden camera.

Mostly, the workers appear to have been acting either out of sheer boredom with their jobs or out of anger with management, sometimes for making them work too many hours. One sequence filmed on 6 April this year [2004], shows workers amusing themselves by throwing 114 birds against a wall, their stunned bodies collecting beneath it. At one point, a supervisor walks past and shouts “Hold your fire” so he can safely pass. Once out of the way, he tells the workers to “carry on.”

So this is the vicious world that McLendon spent some two years working in, and his mother far longer. The way the company treats its chickens is a good metaphor for how Pilgrim’s Pride treats its workers, shareholders and American taxpayers.

In 2006, Pilgrim’s Pride, then the second-largest chicken processor in the world, made a huge gamble that will seem familiar to anyone who’s been following the financial crash: the company borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars, leveraging itself well beyond its means, in order to acquire a rival company and become the nation’s No. 1 chicken processor, slaughtering 45 million chickens per week.

That might have given the executives a nice, big hard-on, but it also meant they would have to come up with more money to pay for all that debt. So the company did do what every post-Reagan company has done and gotten away with: They made the workforce pay for the executives’ mistakes. That meant squeezing them for more work for less pay, or in Pilgrim’s case, more work for no pay: In August 2007, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Pilgrim’s Pride accusing them of grossly undercompensating their employees. That same year, 10,000 Pilgrim’s Pride employees launched a class-action lawsuit demanding compensation for their work.

And this is where McLendon comes in: In 2006, the year of the acquisition, McLendon and his mother filed lawsuits and claims against the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Enterprise, Ala., charging the company with illegally denying them pay for the time it takes for workers to get suited up for the dangerous factory lines, and the time to take the protective gear off. Pilgrim’s Pride had decided to stop classifying that time at the job as “work,” now that they had a bunch of Wall Street bondholders to pay off. Other lawsuits also allege that the company forced workers to work overtime but only paid them regular hourly wages.

While all of this “cost-cutting” was ravaging thousands of workers at the bottom of Pilgrim’s wage pyramid, at the very top, things were very different for chairman Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim and his little pack of plundering wolves.

Despite the chairman’s disastrous acquisition, which eventually brought the company to bankruptcy in December 2008, and despite slashing the workforce’s already-low pay, Pilgrim rewarded himself handsomely for a job well done: in 2007, Bo Pilgrim paid himself $3.2 million and $2.1 million in 2008 for his work as “senior chairman” of the board. Pilgrim’s Pride also paid Bo $1.01 million for a contract with another firm he owns, meaning he signed on both dotted lines of the contract — a clear conflict of interest that is now the subject of a shareholder-fraud lawsuit.

There’s more: In 2008, Bo Pilgrim directed Pilgrim’s Pride to pay an egg-production facility that Bo owns $775,000 in rental fees; Bo’s son, Ken Pilgrim, was paid over a half-million dollars in both 2007 and 2008 as “co-chairman” of the board; another son, Pat Pilgrim, and a daughter, Greta Pilgrim-Owens, were paid a total of over a million dollars in 2007-08 by the Pilgrim-controlled board, and little Pat Pilgrim seems to have learned a thing or two from his father, earning himself an extra half a million dollars thanks to sweet contracts between Pilgrim’s Pride and his other company.

The only reason we know about all of this corporate malfeasance — so typical in the post-Reagan economy — is because of a shareholder lawsuit filed last year. Indeed, the trajectory of Pilgrim’s wealth-plunder is a microcosm of what went on all across corporate America: first Bo Pilgrim squeezed all he could out of the workforce, and when they were squeezed dry, he fleeced his own shareholders, the unter-plutocrats, before finally crying “bankruptcy” and turning to the American government and legal system to protect him and his loot.

Thanks to the “voluntary bankruptcy,” Pilgrim’s Pride is in a much better position against all the lawsuits against it. In fact, it’s in such a good position that the bankruptcy court even allowed Pilgrim family members to be hired back as restructuring “consultants,” on company pay. And in case they were having revenue problems to pay Bo, Ken, Pat and the other vampires, the USDA handed Pilgrim’s a contract worth tens of millions of dollars in January.

How did Pilgrim’s pay back the taxpayers for this little bailout? If you’ve read the news, you’ll know the answer: A few weeks later, Pilgrim’s Pride announced mass layoffs at three plants, devastating those communities. Local reports in rural American communities complain of huge tax bills owed by Pilgrim’s Pride left unpaid now that they’re protected by the bankruptcy, multiplying again the number of ways that the Pilgrim clan are fucking rural America:

Suwannee County could be out about $2 million if Pilgrim’s Pride doesn’t pay its property tax bill, according to Property Appraiser Lamar Jenkins.

The biggest taxpayer in the county filed for bankruptcy protection Dec. 1. Now it’s not clear when – or if – the bill will be paid.

“It’s certainly going to put a hurt on the budget of the county,” Jenkins told the Democrat by phone Thursday.

Jenkins said the unpaid bill represents 7.4 percent of the money local schools get from property taxes; 5.3 percent of county funds from that source; and 8 percent of the money the Suwannee River Water Management District receives from local property tax revenues.

A spokesman for Pilgrim’s did not respond to a request for comment.

If you’re wondering what the Reaganomics concept of “wealth transfer from the employee class to the plutocrat class” looks like, this is it. Multiply this story by just about every corporation out there today, and there you have America.

McLendon’s killings holds few similarities to that other massacre that transpired this week in a school in Stuttgart, Germany.

One major difference between the Europe’s and America’s school shootings is that they happen all the time in America, with a frightening regularity, whereas they’re still incredibly rare in Europe — two school massacres in Finland and two in Germany, all of them unusually bloody by American standards, but none of them appear to have sparked an unstoppable trend in Europe’s schools.

That’s what makes America’s modern-day school shootings so unique — they happen so frequently and predictably (and for every shooting you hear about, there are dozens of averted shootings, shooting plots, kids caught with hit lists and duffel bags, etc., much of it covered up because they’re minors). This was exactly what the most famous school shooters, Columbine’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, hoped for when they attacked their school: “We need to fucking kick-start a revolution here! We need to get a chain reaction going!”

But whereas they’ve found a huge cult following among American kids devastated by a culture that coddles the bullies, pushes them to the limits to compete and succeed, and pumps them full of prescription drugs because mommy and daddy are themselves being crushed at the workplace — outside of America, Columbine’s influence has been sparse, as a culture like Germany’s is different from ours on so many levels.

For one thing, Germany is much more humane to its citizens than America is: its teachers are much more respected than in America, where “people who can’t do teach,” while all citizens have free health care and certain employee rights — like, for example, mandatory paid vacation time (America is the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country not to mandate paid vacation time to workers).

The difference between a common maniac’s murder spree and crimes that result from intolerable conditions and injustices is that the maniac’s killings take place in a kind of vacuum, resulting in shock but not widespread sympathy and an unstoppable ongoing movement. In that sense, the two school shootings in Finland and the two in Germany don’t seem to be anything like what we have here.

Which brings me back to McLendon. Last week, Pilgrim’s Pride suspended his mother, 52-year-old Lisa McLendon, from her job. Pilgrim’s Pride won’t say exactly why they suspended her from her night shift, except to darkly note it was a “very serious matter.” So serious, in fact, that they told her she could come back to work in a week if she “resolved” the matter to their satisfaction.

So again, what was she suspended for? This is where the corporate sadism gets surreal: According to one report, she was suspended for overstating her work hours on her time card. In other words, given her lawsuit (now no longer such a threat to Pilgrim’s while it is “restructuring” under American courts), she very likely decided she couldn’t wait for the courts anymore and decided to clock in her time spent putting on and taking off the required protective gear.

Suspending her in such a case would be a classic example of illegal corporate retribution against a worker with a labor dispute — but what can a small-town Alabama hick do, with so little money and only so much resources, against a many-headed corporate beast like Pilgrim’s Pride? The fact that Michael McLendon had the names of so many lawyers written down on lists in a spiral notebook shows that he tried going the legal route, but I mean, really, who’s fooling whom? You think a small-town Alabama chicken-plucker has a chance in hell of fighting these oligarchs in the courts?

The lead attorney in the class-action suit against Pilgrim’s Pride explained the dilemma this way:

“What has been difficult for these workers, both because of the raids and that there’s been a lot of press about layoffs at Pilgrim’s Pride, a lot of workers are afraid of retaliation for coming forward, afraid of losing their jobs,” [Jenny Yang] said. “We are trying to make sure people are aware federal laws protect them against retaliation for participating in the case.”

But anyone who understands company-labor relations since Reagan knows that companies routinely flout these laws and retaliate at will, suffering at worst a minor slap on the wrist, usually getting away with it completely.

Now that the company is under bankruptcy protection, with the same Pilgrims running the show, what’s the worst that would happen for punishing a lowly worker who made a claim? Another lawsuit? Yeah, right.

So now we can start looking at the “motive” that Alabama investigators first broke, then hushed up: Last week, Pilgrim’s Pride suspended McLendon’s 52-year-old mother from her grim night-shift job as retribution for her demands to be paid in full for her work. Almost the same time that his mother was suspended from Pilgrim’s Pride, McLendon abruptly quit his job at Kelley Foods, a meat-processing company a few towns over. Add to this another corporate attack on the locals: In mid-February, Reliance Metal Products, the place where McLendon worked until 2003 and where he ended his killing spree, quietly started laying off its workers and pushing the lucky few who still had jobs into working longer hours.

You can glean some of the anger and frustration in unofficial forums, but there’s little information in the official realm: According to a report dated Feb. 18 from a local TV station, WTVY:

Local Prefabricated Metal Manufacturer Lays Off Worker

At one time, Reliable Corp., based in Geneva, Ala., employed 800. We’re being told by those who work there that fellow employees have been receiving their lay-off notices. Reliable Corp. has been manufacturing prefabricated metal products for more than 50 years. Over recent days, News 4 has received several calls from those who’ve been laid off.

They haven’t been told if it’s temporary or if it’s a permanent job loss. In one correspondence, we’ve learned that those who’ve been laid off will meet with a delegation of company and state officials early next month in Geneva. Following the loss of a body-armor company late last year, Geneva Mayor Wynnton Melton says any loss of jobs for his city is tragic.

News 4 was unsuccessful in getting a statement from reliable officials in Geneva. In the 1990s, Geneva lost more than 2,000 textile jobs as they went to overseas’ countries. At this time, we’re not being told if the layoffs are due to the national recession. We will continue to follow this story as details become available.

As the local news crew reported, it’s almost impossible to find out any news about the layoffs because Reliable was keeping quiet. You get some clues to the answer via the three lonely comments at the bottom of the WTVY story:

Posted by: Rudy Location: New York on Feb. 18, 2009 at 4:28 p.m. — My heart goes out to the layoff victims of Reliable Corp. I found immediate advice and strategies in an iTunes app called “Pink Slip.” It helped me know my rights and keep my head during and after the meeting with HR.

Posted by: Gwynn Location: Westville on Feb. 18, 2009 at 7:56 a.m. — I have been laid off from Reliable. I have not been informed of any meetings. We were told that the layoffs were due to lack of work and that if work picked up, we would be called back to work. If work orders didn’t, we would be terminated at the end of the month.

Posted by: RELIABLE WORKER on Feb. 17, 2009 at 10:35 p.m. — Company laying off employees and giving overtime to other workers is more of a losing battle either way you look at it! Employees were told if they were called back by March 2nd, they would have a job, if not, they no longer had a job! Cut out overtime and put people back to work, not only are you hurting your employees but the city of Geneva as well. Loss of income is a loss of sales for the city. Not many jobs in the city makes people seek new jobs elsewhere. Makes you think we should have voted wet on the wet dry ballot. That would have been a lot of tax money for the city, which is now being lost by loss of jobs!

What these commenters reveal is the same Reaganomics corporate approach at work as with Pilgrim’s Pride, only scaled down in size. Everywhere it’s the same: the company only exists as a vehicle for the top half a dozen or so executives and major shareholders to plunder as many suckers — workers, investors, taxpayers — as they can soak. We know a lot less about Kelley Foods, the last place McLendon worked before his killing spree. Divorce papers from 2003 reveal that the wife of Charles Kelley, one of the principal owners, accused him of having “engaged in domestic violence” against her.

Watch Bo Pilgrim’s insane vanity video

We also know that, like Pilgrim’s Pride, Kelley Foods earns a substantial amount of money from American taxpayers: $1.36 million in food contracts with the Defense Department in just three years, 2005-07. For Kelley, that’s a huge amount.

So now we can go back to the question of motive, a question that Alabama investigators are running away from: rapacious corporations that cheat their workers and plunder the company wealth, a systematic bullying that extends all the way down to the way workers treat each other, and the sadism in the way they treat the chickens. It’s a snapshot of a vicious law-of-the-jungle world, and yet it’s just plain flat reality for most Americans.

Put in this context, McLendon seems a lot less like a maniac, and more like a victim of maniacs, who finally snapped and lashed out — killing many of the “wrong” people, although judging by his list and what authorities had said earlier, he had plans to kill the right people, too.

But this isn’t something Alabama authorities would want to expose: It would pissing off a serious company which is in the middle of choosing which plants to close, and it would mean creating some very confusing and potentially dangerous sympathy for McLendon.

While much of the massacre details are a repeat of similar “going postal” attacks over the past 20 years, the way he killed his mother and family suggests that a new pattern is emerging to go with the Great Depression 2: Now, killers take their families down with them.

In today’s rampage, the shooter began by killing his mother and torching her home, then driving to where other family members lived and killing them, before ending it all at his former employer Reliable Metals. This sequence strongly resembles a couple of other recent high-profile family slayings: one in Los Angeles, which left seven family members dead in January, and another in Ohio a few weeks later, leaving three dead. In those killings, the shooter and his family were left financially devastated by the Great Depression 2.

It’s interesting that McLendon began his attack by taking out his family, but ended it attacking the source of the pain — inside the company premises, where he ended his life. McLendon’s family murders were a bit more complicated than those in Ohio and Los Angeles, however: It appears that he was very careful and respectful with the bodies of his mother and four dogs after he killed them, placing the dogs at his mother’s head and feet the way ancient civilizations buried their leaders, before setting their bodies on fire as if in a funeral pyre — as if he loved her too much to have her endure not only the aftermath of his planned attack, but a world in which she was constantly being crushed by a vampiric corporation, and a culture that nurtured such corporations.

On the other hand, he seems to have had genuine scores to settle with other family members across town, whom he shot on their porch — reports coming out indicate that a nasty divorce some years earlier had led to deepening disputes with this side of McLendon’s family, suggesting that unlike his mother, they were killed for retribution.

For years, these shootings were considered “random acts” committed by people who “snapped for no reason.” Now, hundreds of dead victims and a massive financial collapse later, we know better: They’re reactions against corporate oppression. If the super-rich and the corporations constantly squeeze their workers of time, money and health, a few of their victims are naturally going to “snap” and fight back with guns. Call it a small price to pay for looting everyone’s wealth.

Will it end? With the current economic crisis, there’s a chance the playing field might even out a little, that our culture might finally learn to stop humping the plutocrats’ legs while they plunder us and instead start biting them to get our fair share.

Watch PETA’s undercover video inside Pilgrim’s Pride

LATE NOTE: Reader Doug sent a letter pointing out that Abu Ghraib model/scapegoat Lynndie England worked briefly at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in West Virginia but quit because she was too horrified by what she saw. According to the American Prospect:

England noticed that unhealthy-looking chicken parts were being sent down the line. She told her supervisors, but they ignored her. Her sister recalls her walking over to her station and taking off her smock.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’” Klinestiver says. “‘We’ve only been at work for an hour.’ She said, ‘I quit,’ and walked out the door.”

“I didn’t like the way management was doing things,” England explains. “People would take the good chicken off and put the bad chicken on. Management didn’t care.”

This article first appeared in Alternet. Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

Click the cover & buy the book!