Word: rico
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...threatening kidney syndrome. The new President, in office for only two days, expressed his shock. The Agriculture Secretary, Mike Espy, ordered an investigation to trace the outbreak's cause, a mystery never conclusively solved. In the midst of that emergency, Espy found time to intervene in an obscure Puerto Rico dispute of great concern to the U.S. poultry industry, and especially to Tyson Foods, the world's largest chicken producer and the No. 1 poultry exporter to the island commonwealth...
...story of Espy's role in the Puerto Rico issue, which TIME has assembled from dozens of interviews and documents, emerges at a time when the White House has been struggling to refute allegations that Tyson enjoys undue influence with Clinton and his staff. As Arkansas' Governor, Clinton had close ties with Tyson, the state's largest employer. Several company executives helped finance Clinton's many campaigns. Tyson general counsel Jim Blair guided Hillary Clinton's fabulously successful commodities trades. Tyson was also the second largest contributor to a $220,000 fund Clinton used to pursue his Arkansas political agenda...
...require the importer's name on consumer-size packages, Watts urged the department to assert the primacy of federal law. Just nine days after Clinton's Inauguration, when the Administration had barely appointed enough staffers to run the department, a career USDA lawyer drafted a letter to Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Rossello, making that rather technical argument. Espy signed it three days later, on Feb. 1. That night, at a National Governors' Association meeting in Washington, Espy urged Rossello to release the embargoed chicken. Two days later the regulation was suspended. The chicken...
...Tyson wasn't satisfied with that. Having pressured Puerto Rico to ditch the labeling requirement, the chicken giant struck for more. The Broiler Council began an attempt to craft new regulations even more favorable to the mainland producers. At a Feb. 18 meeting in San Juan attended by Puerto Rican officials and poultry-industry representatives, Tyson momentarily dropped the pretense that the industry group was doing the lobbying. While the Broiler Council had requested the session, records reviewed by TIME show clearly that it was a Tyson vice president, Mike Morrison, who described in detail the many rules Tyson wanted...
...always been very helpful to the Puerto Rico community," Santiago agrees. "He promised to help Puerto Rico to ensure whether [it will achieve] statehood or commonwealth...