Editor, The Smithfield Times:

Your article “Smithfield Foods unaffected by ‘foreign adversaries’ law, company, state say” (April 12) contained an astounding quote by Jim Monroe, the company’s vice president for corporate affairs: “We are not impacted because we are not owned or controlled by a foreign government.”

In the same article you make it clear what everybody else already knows. “Smithfield Foods announced its merger with WH Group, then known as Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd., the U.S. Senate Committee … (heard testimony) …that Shuanghui was a ‘Chinese state-controlled company.’ ”

What’s going on here? Why does “Foods” mock us all by flying Old Glory at its corporate headquarters instead of the blood-red revolutionary banner of its foreign state controllers, the so-called “People’s” Republic of China? 

Why are we so deliberately ignoring facts we can all see with our own eyes? Am I missing something here?

 

Albert P. Burckard Jr.

Carrollton