A 100 percent guaranteed actual publicity photo -- not Photoshopped or otherwise altered -- of Pilgrim's Pride founder and former CEO Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim, the dead-chicken mogul who drove his company into bankruptcy (and who once employed Abu Ghraib starlet Lynndie England.)

Today's WSJ front-pager on the depressing impact of the closure of a Pilgrim's Pride chicken plant on a small Georgia town has great detail and good human-interest angles. But "At Chicken Plant, a Recession Battle" could have at least mentioned a major point and a big-time human-disinterest angle about the chicken-shit company.

The major point: Bernie Madoff, supposedly the big bad symbol of our times, had nothing on Pilgrim's Pride when it came to hubris. Pilgrim's Pride, in fact, is more symbolic than Madoff of the excessive greed that led to the global economic crash. Madoff didn't cause the crash; the crash exposed his Ponzi scheme.

Meanwhile, self-righteous religionist Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim and his family ran around like chickens with their heads cut off as they siphoned money from their publicly traded company in all kinds of murky self-dealings before it landed in bankruptcy last December. Their behavior was typical of the excessive greed that caused the Wall Street meltdown.

At the time Pilgrim's Pride crashed, its execs blamed low meat prices and high feed costs. Not likely the full story. 10-Q Detective David Phillips told the meat of the Pilgrim's Pride tale that the WSJ didn't even mention this morning. In his piece last January, "Pilgrim's Pride -- Embarrassing Case of Hubris and Greed, Phillips parsed the company's 10-Q and concluded that "(a) senior executives [were] more interested in self-enrichment and (b) a self-serving board of directors failed to safeguard shareholders' interests and minimize opportunistic behavior on the part of management." Phillips then details the excessive money-grubbing by the Pilgrim clan.

Now the company has drastically cut its workforce, though it says those slashes are done with. And its new bankruptcy-court-approved CEO, Don Jackson, tries to comfort the small-town folk (like those in Douglas, Georgia) whom the company has abandoned: "I do not mean to 'pluck the heart' out of Douglas or any other community. All of my 58 years have been spent in agriculture. Thirty of it in the chicken business."

Pilgrim's maintains that it wants to sell the Douglas plant to another producer. Yeah, pluck this. As the WSJ's Lauren Etter writes:

Just as a side note in a tale about who's a notorious symbol of what, another symbol of another disaster — Abu Ghraib's Lynndie England — got her training at a Pilgrim's Pride plant before becoming a poster girl for the Iraq War's worst excesses.

Before sneering at Iraqi prisoners' cocks and leading the prisoners around in leashes at Abu Ghraib, England was a "marinator" in a West Virginia Pilgrim's Pride factory ("A Chicken in Every Plot," May 10, 2005). PETA caught her fellow workers stomping chickens to death, just for fun — a good example for her dehumanizing behavior later in Iraq. If she'd had the education, this modern marinator might have recalled the ancient mariner's tale after he needlessly killed a bird. Remember how the mariner's shipmates were pissed at him for killing their good-luck albatross?: "Ah, wretch, said they / the bird to slay / that made the breeze to blow."

Click on the video below (about Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure) to refresh your memory about how that wretch Lynndie England wound up with a dead-albatross necklace.