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After having decimated and demonized the unions. How long before the forty hour work week and time and half are back on the table? G.W. Bush made an attempt
http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-07-15/news/union-of-lost-souls/1/
and it won't be long before that and the minimum wage are targeted as "job killing regulation" , check your watch.
Do a search on "ending the forty hour work week", there are a lot of recent articles pushing just that. Goodbye dignity and hello $0.61 per hour.

There are many more rulings like this, killing endangered sea turtles is one that sticks out, but the inability of a nation to even enact their own environment protections, safety protections just takes the cake.

Anyone notice one the U.S. joined the WTO the nation has been on a steady downward spiral for the most part? So, it's not exactly helping the American people economically for the most part.

All of these trade agreements need to be cancelled, renegotiated to real trade that puts the nation and people of the nation first.

I've not been one to call for WTO withdrawal as others have been but this one takes the cake.

Add to that, I found Snakes on the Plane to be so ridiculous, so absurd, so out of the planet by any stretch of representational government, I fear what this Congress would do generally.

It seems our government is either corrupt, crazy or both. We have a jobs crisis so bad it's bringing down the entire economy and these people are holding hearings on snake & reptile imports. America has plenty of snakes in the grass and most of 'em are slithering around in the halls of Congress.

She notes this story was buried (although markets obviously knew about it), while the rogue trader at UBS got the headlines. More ass-backwardness of course.
commentary here on the Fed's yet another EU bail out move.

But we've seen this over and over where TARP funds, U.S. Fed is bailing out other countries banks. Right, nationalism, sovereignty and putting U.S. citizens first is a joke to these people, U.S. citizens are dead last in their concerns. I don't think anyone can say a nation which has a GINI index below many African nations is 1st world. The income inequality is so high, the U.S. is really 3rd world, the majority of us anyway.

As an American I want to know the country of origin of all of my food. And I want to know if tuna I buy was harvested using dolphin-safe methods.

Just like I want to know the ingredients in my food, and whether it was grown organically, I want to know what country it was produced in. This is so important because many countries don't have the high level of food safety standards that America has. It could be unhealthy to say the least to eat food produced in these countries.

America must leave the WTO. How Americans want their food labeled is none of the WTO's business.

Very well said.

Our government wants to take care of all world problems but our own. It forgets its very own citizens.

Where do American citizens go when their own government forgets them? Will any other nation in the world accept them and provide economic opportunity?

It seems like it's endless, when you have the US version of Rome, in which we pay tribute to our vassals and they have healthcare, pensions and other social services no one here even dreams of. Now we're going to add to the list by backing up the European banking system. Another self-sacrifice by the US. I only wish we had our own version of Uncle Sam -- but unfortunately, we do not.

Of course we, as a First World nation, end up the beneficiaries of the general transfer of resources from poorer countries to richer countries, so I guess we can't pretend not be exploiters.

But within the family of nations, we have to be the world's biggest masochist. We've paid a king's ransom to keep Europe safe since 1940s and 1950s and have stood by while they've dodge their obligations to defend themselves. The situation with Japan and Korea is similar except they put more money into their developing their economies vs social services than Europe did.

In addition to the people who are still "over there", there's the enormous and unfair burden of those "over there" who came over here.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't whatever "peace dividend" we get by the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- plus trillions more? -- end up getting plowed right into taking care people here due to excessively high immigration levels (both legal and illegal) since the 1980s?

One way or another we'll end up legalizing the illegal, so there's another 10 million plus their citizen descendants to take care of -- forever. Add that to the 1 million plus green cards and work visas handed out each year and the decrease of jobs and wages for the average American and we're on the road to God only knows where.

None of us average folks will get back much of anything for all the money -- our money -- that will be spent to provide education, healthcare and social services to all these former citizens of other countries who came here "to find a better life."

Where do Americans who are losing everything they used to have, in terms of security, jobs and peace of mind, go to find a better life? You know, the life that's no longer obtainable in the US by average people whose families worked and fought to make America what was in 1980?

The idea of us volunteering to take on another burden right now is really upsetting to me. Are we even going to make any interest on what we're lending?

Why are we so good at saying Yes to other countries and No to ourselves?

Robert Oak asked question in comment at August 2011 PPI -- "Co chickens have cycles?"

That question can be definitively answered: "Yes ... but maybe it doesn't matter."

The question further is about increases in price of baked goods and how that relates to wholesale eggs. To answer that question, we would have to find numbers for powdered eggs versus fresh eggs.

Of course, no baker worth his salt would admit to using powdered eggs ... and, if you've ever tried powdered eggs, you'll understand why. I suspect that in this instance, wholesale eggs price changes are about two factors: weather and related energy costs, and, imports from Canada.

I'm thinking that if you have severe heat in your egg factory in Texas, it's going to cost a lot to keep your artificial environment going, and you just have to raise your bottom-line price. Or, buyers could decide to buy from Canadian producers instead, but the price would still be up a little.

Some years ago (of course) I used to buy eggs by the small truckload at what was considered to be a more-or-less natural or humane egg factory. (Contradiction in terms, I know.) The layers were batteried but not to the extremes of most 'factory farms'.  The farm claimed to have better eggs than other (less naturalistic) factory farms. For sure they did not artificially color the yolks or anything like that. They also claimed that by giving the hens more room to move, cannibalism was reduced and they did not need to feed them so much in the way of anti-biotics. Their layers actually had two legs each! Light was partly natural, so the layers molted in the natural cycle, that is, in the fall.

MOLTING AND SUPPLY CYCLE

Like their wild ancestors, free-range and backyard layers molt in the fall, which means in March or April in the great Down Under. So, if it's worth it to import eggs from across the world, you could offset the natural cycle. (I'm not sure what happens in the tropics.)

Mainly though, eggs store easily for 60 days, so cyclic effects aren't all that significant, although there has long been an annual price cycle reflecting supply cycle.

Of course, what happens in USA  (in the factory farms) is forced molting. That's a huge topic in poultry farming. Also, there's all kinds of genetic modification going on, especially about bird flu -- which was a big scare a couple of years ago. It's a complicated public health topic. It may be that there's a trend toward increasing eggs prices exactly because of the bird flu thing. All that research and experimentation has to be paid for.

LOCAL EGGS

I have friends who raise chickens for eggs to sell at farmers' markets locally. There's a pretty good and probably increasing demand for "local eggs" that short-circuit the normal food distribution supply chains. Most egg farmers who go the more natural food route, plan on a fall molt and slaughter many birds at that time. That's definitely what typical backyard growers do, but some small-medium-size operations bring in specialists to do the slaughter and butchering. The real deal is fertilized eggs, with real roosters. Now that's free range!

EGG IMPORTS

There's a huge program ongoing to regulate importation of hatching eggs, which are considered as live poultry imports. This has to do not only with bird flu but also with other poultry diseases or poultry-vectored pathogens.

USDA on hatching eggs imports

There's a hue-and-cry about animal rights activists who would like to illegalize the battery-system (factory-farm or, euphemistically, "caging") system of egg and poultry production. The industry responds with the globalization defense:  "It would drive some egg production to countries like Mexico without such a ban, and result in imports of eggs produced under different food safety, welfare and environmental standards."

Obviously, USA gave away all regulatory authority at the Uruguay Round years ago

See, UnitedEgg PDF

I haven't found a neat source for egg imports up to date, but generally, 90% of USA imports of eggs and egg products is from Canada and that totaled some 22.4 million pounds in FY 2010. So, USA imports something like 2 million pounds of eggs and egg products every month, mainly from Canada.

That means that wholesale egg price numbers are influenced by exchange rate of USD versus CanD -- or expectations of exchange-rate changes.