Bill Maher Takes Big Meat to Task for Hiding the Truth from Consumers
Breaking news: Last Friday, Bill Maher aired a segment on his weekly show Real Time with Bill Maher entitled “The United States of You Don’t Wanna Know,” in which he slams American Republicans for supporting legislation that severely inhibits consumers’ rights to know about the origins and content of their food (you can view the video here; content warning: video contains profanity). His tirade comes in the wake of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives’s decision last week to repeal the “country of origin” meat labeling law that had ruffled feathers with our international neighbors to the north and south, who felt that the law was “discriminatory.” Maher wittily points out that this move isn’t deregulation, it’s “reverse regulation,” protecting corporations from people rather than the other way around.
Maher also ranted against ag-gag laws, like the one proposed in North Carolina that has grabbed headlines lately, and voters’ rejection of GMO labeling bills in the US, saying that at the root of all these measures to make consumers less informed is the corporate interest of protecting profit margins:
“Your right to know something is always going to be outweighed by [corporations’] right to hide it from you, because in America, you can be armed, just not with the facts.”
