20071221
To Restore Democracy: First Abolish Corporate Personhood
Thomas Paine said it best.
“It has been thought,” he wrote in The Rights of Man in 1791, “…that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”
Thus, Paine and others of the Revolutionary Era reasoned, any institution made up by and of humans - from governments to churches to corporations - must be subordinate to individual living people in terms of the rights and powers held by the institution.
Because of the unique frailties and depths of passion unique to humans, just after the United States Constitution was ratified Thomas Jefferson and James Madison began a campaign to amend it with a 12-point explicit statement that would clearly and unambiguously place humans - who had created government - above their creation. This was the birth of what would become the Bill of Rights, and it originally had twelve - not ten - protections for citizens’ rights.
On December 20th, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said, bluntly, that it was deficient in several areas. “I will now tell you what I do not like,” he wrote. “First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.”
Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t just be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
The following year, Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Mr. A. Donald, on February 7th, 1788, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights: “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.”
Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the constitution as an amendment, which would guarantee liberties for citizens, prevent companies from growing so large they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people’s government, and reduce the possibility of the nation being taken over by a military coup.
On February 12th, 1788, he wrote to Mr. Dumas about his pleasure that the US Constitution was about to be ratified, but also expressed his concerns about what was missing from the Constitution. He was pushing hard for his own state to reject the Constitution if it didn’t protect people from the dangers he foresaw.
“With respect to the new Government,” he wrote, “nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.”
By mid-summer of 1788, things were moving along and Jefferson was helping his close friend James Madison to write the Bill of Rights. On the last day of July, he wrote to Madison: “I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion, and monopolies.”
But on the issues of banning a standing army and blocking corporations from gaining monopolistic control over industries, Jefferson was getting resistance. The nation had just fought a bloody war against England, and there was little sentiment for completely dismantling the army. And the Federalists who were in power - a party largely made up of what Jefferson called “the rich and the well born” - were opposed to government constraints on business activities.
Thus only ten of his twelve visions for a Bill of Rights - all except “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and his concern about a permanent army - were incorporated into the actual Bill of Rights, which James Madison shepherded through Congress and was ratified as the first ten amendments to the constitution on December 15, 1791.
Monopolies as persons
As the new country grew, so did its institutions. Trading companies, banks, and eventually railroads all used the corporate form to conduct business, reduce shareholder liability, and accumulate profits. America boomed through the early 19th Century, then experienced a severe economic depression in the decade just before the Civil War, then boomed again, starting in the post-war years of the late 1860s.
And then a curious thing happened.
The stage was set when, just after the Civil War on July 9, 1868, three-quarters of the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution as part of a set of laws to end slavery.
The intent of Congress and the states was clear: to provide full constitutional protections and due process of law to the now-emancipated former slaves in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment’s first article says, in its entirety:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Along with the Thirteenth Amendment (“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude … shall exist within the United States”) and the Fifteenth Amendment (“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”), the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that freed slaves would have full access to legal due process: “equal protection of the laws.”
Corporations aspire to personhood
During this same period, because everybody understood Paine and Jefferson’s argument that human-made institutions must be subordinate to humans themselves; virtually every state had laws on the books that regulated the behavior of corporations.
The corporate form is, after all, just a legal structure to facilitate the conversion of products or services into cash for stockholders. As Buckminster Fuller wrote in his brilliant essay The Grunch of Giants, “Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys-legally enacted game-playing-agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.”
Thus, states made it illegal for corporations to participate in the political process: politicians were doing the voters’ business, and corporations couldn’t vote, so it didn’t make sense they should be allowed to try to influence votes. States made it illegal for corporations to lie about their products, and required that their books and processes always be open and available to government regulators. States and the Federal government claimed the right to inspect companies and investigate them when they caused pollution, harmed workers, or created hazards for human communities, even if in the early years that right was unevenly used.
These constraints and oversights had been a thorn in the side of the barons of trade and industry from the earliest days of the new American republic. But what to do about it?
With the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the owners of the what were then America’s largest and most powerful corporations - the railroads - figured they’d finally found a way to reverse Paine’s logic and no longer have to answer to “we, the people.” They would claim that the corporation is a person. They would claim that for legal purposes, the certificate of incorporation declares the legal birth of a new person, who should therefore have the full protections the voters have under the Bill of Rights.
It was an amazing irony, given that one of Jefferson’s original proposed Amendments was an explicit ban on corporations becoming so large as to gain monopoly power and be able to easily crush or stifle small, local entrepreneurs. But, setting the irony aside, the railroads threw massive resources into their new campaign to be given full human rights.
Acting on behalf of the railroad barons, attorneys for the railroads repeatedly filed suits against local and state governments that had passed laws regulating railroad corporations. They rebelled against restrictions, and most of all they rebelled against being taxed.
The main tool the railroad’s lawyers tried to use was the fact that corporations had historically been referred to under law not as “corporations” but as “artificial persons.” Based on this, they argued, corporations should be considered “persons” under the free-the-slaves Fourteenth Amendment and enjoy the protections of the constitution just like living, breathing, human persons.
Using this argument for their base, the railroads repeatedly sued various states, counties, and towns claiming that they shouldn’t have to pay local taxes because different railroad properties were taxed in different ways in different places and this constituted the creation of different “classes of persons” and was, thus, illegal discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment.
For almost twenty years, these arguments did not succeed.
In 1873, the Supreme Court made its first explicit comment on the Fourteenth Amendment. The Amendment’s “one pervading purpose,” Justice Samuel F. Miller wrote in the majority opinion, “was the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”
The railroads, however, had a lot of money to pay for lawyers, and railroad lawyer S. W. Sanderson had the reputation of a pit bull. Undeterred, the railroads again and again argued their “corporations are persons” position all the way to the Supreme Court.
The peak year for their legal assault was 1877, with four different cases reaching the Supreme Court in which the railroads argued that governments could not regulate their fees or activities, or tax them in differing ways, because governments can’t interfere to such an extent in the lives of “persons” and because different laws and taxes in different states and counties represented illegal discrimination against the persons of the railroads under the Fourteenth Amendment.
By then, the Supreme Court was under the supervision of Chief Justice Morris Remick Waite, himself a former railroad attorney. Associate Justice Stephen Field, who was so openly on the side of the railroads in case after case that he annoyed his colleagues, also heavily influenced the court. In each of the previous four cases, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended to regulate interstate commerce and therefore not applicable. But in none of those cases did Waite or any other Justice on the court muster a majority opinion on the issue of whether or not railroad corporations were “persons” under the constitution, and so Miller’s “one pervading purpose” of the Fourteenth Amendment (to free slaves) prevailed, and year after year, the railroads were told that they’re not persons.
Having lost four cases in one year took a bit of the wind out of the sails of the railroads, and there followed a few years of relative calm. The railroads continued to assert they were “persons,” but states and localities continued to call them “artificial persons” and pass laws regulating their activities.
For twenty years corporate personhood was debated. Across America, politicians were elected repeatedly on platforms that included the regulation of corporations, particularly the railroads. But the legal fight continued - and in 1886 the railroad hit paydirt.
The Supreme Court ruled on an obscure taxation issue in the Santa Clara County vs. The Union Pacific Railroad case, but the Recorder of the court - a man named J. C. Bancroft Davis, himself formerly the president of a small railroad - wrote into his personal commentary of the case (known as a headnote) that the Chief Justice had said that all the Justices agreed that corporations are persons.
And in so doing, he - not the Supreme Court, but its clerical recorder - inserted a statement that would change history and give corporations enormous powers that were not granted by Congress, not granted by the voters, and not even granted by the Supreme Court. Davis’s headnote, which had no legal standing, was taken as precedent by generations of jurists (including the Supreme Court) who followed and apparently read the headnote but not the decision.
What is especially ironic about this is that Davis knew the Court had not ruled on this issue. We found a handwritten note in the J.C. Bancroft Davis collection in the Library of Congress, from Chief Justice Waite to reporter Davis, explicitly saying, “we did not meet the constitutional issues in the case.” (In other words, the Court had decided the case on lesser grounds, which it always prefers to do when possible.)
Yet Davis wrote that the constitutional issue of corporate personhood had been decided, and his headnote was published the year Waite died, most likely after Waite’s death. The railroads were persons, he wrote (in the headnote), implying that they’re entitled to the same rights as persons. And Davis attributed this new legal reality to Chief Justice Waite who had specifically, in writing, disavowed it (although that note wouldn’t become public for over a hundred years - it’s now on my website).
Another great irony of this event is that the Bill of Rights was designed to protect human persons because of their vulnerability in relations with other human persons who may be much more powerful. But corporations are bestowed with potential immortality, can change their identity in a day, or even tear off parts of themselves and instantly turn those parts into entirely new “persons.” Yet regardless of all these superhuman powers, corporations are now considered persons.
These non-living, non-breathing persons are now, according to the pronouncements of their own attorneys and spokespeople who cite the headnotes of the Santa Clara County case, fully entitled to the protections that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote into the Bill of Rights to shield human persons from abuse by such powerful institutions as governments. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, in a recent and misguided effort, argued before the Supreme Court that corporations should have the free speech right to lie (or say anything else they want) that’s granted to humans by the First Amendment.
A few of the world’s largest corporations referenced Santa Clara and successfully claimed the protection of the First Amendment, then lobbied Congress and the FCC to relax local ownership rules so they could take control of our media. Once that was done, they claimed First Amendment free speech rights to tell us whatever serves their interest and call it “news” without consideration of its truthfulness or having to worry about giving fair and equal time to other viewpoints. They claim the protection of the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) so they can prevent the EPA and OSHA from inspecting factories for environmental or labor violations without first obtaining the corporation’s permission - which they say can be withheld for any reason.
They now have the protection of the Fifth Amendment so they are protected from double jeopardy and don’t have to answer questions about their own crimes. They now have the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment so they can sue local towns or counties or states that try to pass laws to protect local small businesses against their predations.
The structure for this displacement of humans by corporations under the constitution has been in place since 1886, but only since the 1980s have our largest corporations aggressively used the courts to claim human rights. (Interestingly, small and medium-sized corporations almost never use this argument: to them if corporate personhood vanished nothing would change.)
But a human backlash is now developing.
In ten Pennsylvania townships, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has helped local governments pass ordinances denying corporate personhood in order to block large corporate factory farms from setting up in areas previously the sole territory of family farms. In the city of Point Arena, California, voters passed a resolution declaring corporate personhood a threat to democracy, and encouraging a debate on it by other communities.
The Woman’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), America’s oldest and most prestigious women’s rights group (founded in 1919 by Jane Addams, with two Nobel Prize Winners as past presidents), declared at their July, 2002 annual meeting the kick-off of a three-year “Abolish Corporate Personhood” educational and legislative campaign.
And elected officials across the nation are discovering that meaningful campaign finance reform, effective environmental protections, and human-friendly health-care will only happen when corporations can no longer use the extraordinary power of the Bill of Rights to insinuate themselves into politics and legislation.
An internet search on the phrase “corporate personhood” will find thousands of sites discussing or devoted to the topic, and models of legislation to remedy the error of 1886.
But the first step, as always, is awakening people to the root cause of the problems we face - the use of corporate personhood by a handful of the world’s largest enterprises to insinuate themselves into governments and seize control of legislative and regulatory agendas. As enough voters learn the history and realize the consequences of this, the solution - ending corporate personhood - will become more and more possible, and Paine’s and Jefferson’s original idea of democracy representing “we, the people” will come back to life.
Senate Bill 1959 to Criminalize Thoughts, Blogs, Books and Free Speech Across America
by: Mike Adams
The end of Free Speech in America has arrived at our doorstep. It's a new law called the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, and it is worded in a clever way that could allow the U.S. government to arrest and incarcerate any individual who speaks out against the Bush Administration, the war on Iraq, the Department of Homeland Security or any government agency (including the FDA). The law has already passed the House on a traitorous vote of 405 to 6, and it is now being considered in the Senate where a vote is imminent. All over the internet, intelligent people who care about freedom are speaking out against this extremely dangerous law: Philip Giraldi at the Huffington Post, Declan McCullagh at CNET's News.com, Kathryn Smith at OpEdNews.com, and of course Alex Jones at PrisonPlanet.com
This bill is the beginning of the end of Free Speech in America. If it passes, all the information sources you know and trust could be shut down and their authors imprisoned. NewsTarget could be taken offline and I could be arrested as a "terrorist." Jeff Rense at www.Rense.com could be labeled a "terrorist" and arrested. Byron Richards, Len Horowitz, Paul Craig Roberts, Greg Palast, Ron Paul and even Al Gore could all be arrested, silenced and incarcerated. This is not an exaggeration. It is a literal reading of the law, which you can check yourself here: http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc110/h1955_rfs.xml
The bill states:
‘...ideologically based violence’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs...
Note that this means the "planned use of force to promote a political or social belief" would be considered an act of terrorism. This all hinges on the definition of "force," of course. Based on the loose use of logic in Washington these days, and the slippery interpretation of the meaning of words, "force" could mean:
• A grassroots campaign to barrage Congress with faxes
• A non-violent street protest
• A letter-writing campaign that deluges the Senate with too much mail
• A sit-in protest that blocks access to a business or organization
• A grassroots e-mail campaign that overloads the e-mail servers of any government department or agency
You get the idea. "Force" could be defined as practically anything. And since the "planned use of force" would be considered a criminal act of terrorism, anyone who simply thinks about a grassroots action campaign would be engaged in terrorist acts.
If you stopped someone on the street and handed them a Bible, for example, this could be considered an act of terrorism ("...use of force to promote the individual's religious beliefs...")
If you sent a barrage of angry letters to Washington about global warming and the destruction of the environment by the U.S. military, this could also be considered an act of terrorism ("...to promote the individual's political beliefs...")
If you believe in same-sex marriage and you wrote a letter threatning a sit-in protest in front of your state's capitol building, this could also be considered an act of terrorism, even if you never carried it out! ("...planned use of force to promote a social belief...")
The United States is on the fast track to fascism, and the Congress is working right alongside this nation's traitorous leaders to criminalize any thoughts, words or speeches that disagree with current government policies regarding war, terrorism, domestic surveillance and civil liberties. Simply speaking out against the war on Iraq could soon be labeled a crime. Merely thinking thoughts against the war on Iraq could be considered a criminal act.
Statement Introducing the Free Competition in Currency Act
Rep. Ron Paul, M.D.
Madame Speaker, I rise to introduce the Free Competition in Currency Act. This act would eliminate two sections of US Code that, although ostensibly intended to punish counterfeiters, have instead been used by the government to shut down private mints. As anti-counterfeiting measures, these sections are superfluous, as 18 USC 485, 490, and 491 already grant sufficient authority to punish counterfeiters.
The two sections this bill repeals, 18 USC 486 and 489, are so broadly written as to effectively restrict any form of private coinage from competing with the products of the United States Mint. Allowing such statutes to remain in force as a catch-all provision merely encourages prosecutorial abuse. One particular egregious recent example is that of the Liberty Dollar, in which federal agents seized millions of dollars worth of private currency held by a private mint on behalf of thousands of people across the country.
Due to nearly a century of inflationary monetary policy on the part of the Federal Reserve, the US dollar stands at historically low levels. Investors around the world are shunning the dollar, and millions of Americans see their salaries, savings accounts, and pensions eroded away by rising inflation. We stand on the precipice of an unprecedented monetary collapse, and as a result many people have begun to look for alternatives to the dollar.
As a proponent of competition in currencies, I believe that the American people should be free to choose the type of currency they prefer to use. The ability of consumers to adopt alternative currencies can help to keep the government and the Federal Reserve honest, as the threat that further inflation will cause more and more people to opt out of using the dollar may restrain the government from debasing the currency. As monopolists, however, the Federal Reserve and the Mint fear competition, and would rather force competitors out using the federal court system and the threat of asset forfeiture than compete in the market.
20071220
Lakota Indians Withdraw Treaties Signed With U.S. 150 Years Ago
WASHINGTON — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States. "We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,'' long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means said. A delegation of Lakota leaders has delivered a message to the State Department, and said they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the U.S., some of them more than 150 years old. The group also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and would continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months. Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free - provided residents renounce their U.S. citizenship, Mr Means said. The treaties signed with the U.S. were merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists said. Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said. "This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution,'' which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said. "It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent,'' said Means. The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence — an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England. Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because "it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row,'' Means said. One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples — despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws. "We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children,'' Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference. The U.S. "annexation'' of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of white people,'' said Means. Oppression at the hands of the U.S. government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies - less than 44 years - in the world. Lakota teen suicides are 150 per cent above the norm for the U.S.; infant mortality is five times higher than the U.S. average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website.
Humans Aren't Much Smarter than Dogs
Two new studies of animal intelligence caught my attention last week because they prove that humans are no better than dogs and monkeys. This is something I've always felt to be true on an anecdotal level, and now cognitive science backs me up.
A researcher in Vienna, Austria, trained dogs to sort photographs into two categories: pictures of other dogs and pictures of landscapes. This is big news because it means that dogs not only recognize what's happening in symbolic visual representations (photos) but can also figure out how to translate an abstract concept ("dog") into a category of pictures. Previously, nobody thought dogs could categorize photographs or even abstract concepts other than "food" and "enemy."
The other study is even better, partly because it's called "Basic Math in Monkeys and College Students" (oh, those zany editors at PloS Biology). In this study, cognitive scientists gave monkeys and college students a series of very simple tests to determine how quickly and accurately they could add up the number of dots on a screen. On average, the monkeys and students answered in the same amount of time. The students were 94 percent accurate in their answers, while the monkeys were 76 percent accurate. So monkeys are nearly as good as humans at adding dots, even without the benefit of a college education.
What struck me first on contemplating these studies is that cognitive science has taken us in an unforeseen direction. This is a field that promises to study consciousness as if it were a machine, to look at thoughts as electrical impulses and biological structures rather than sublime metaphysics. It would seem, therefore, to run the risk of dehumanizing us, of converting all of our crazy, ambivalent feelings into mere blips on a chart. Instead, what cognitive science has done, at least in these studies, is show us how deeply connected we are to the living creatures around us.
By breaking down our thought processes into their component parts -- pattern recognition, counting -- we are able to see that the building blocks of thought are not unique to Homo sapiens. Dogs and monkeys are doing this shit too. In fact, there is a monkey out there who can add better than a college student (some of the humans did in fact score lower than some of the monkeys in the study).
So what do we do now that we know dogs and monkeys are capable of humanlike intelligence? Shall we test more animals and discover what we already knew about elephants and dolphins having language? I hope so.
If nothing else, this should teach humans to be a lot more damn humble about our supposed niftiness.
Of course, there are dangers in taking this scenario too far. Instead of seeing ourselves as having something in common with animals, we might use this information to make animals into better slaves. Science fiction author David Brin's Uplift series is partly about this. He describes humans using biotech and genetic engineering to "uplift" chimps and dolphins, giving them human-equivalent intelligence. The creatures become fully intelligent, but socially they remain second-class citizens.
The two transformed species are in a constant struggle to prove themselves to the humans, and often fail; Brin portrays the dolphins as liable to slip back into incoherent animalness when threatened.
Still, we have not yet appointed ourselves uplifters. Humans are at a moment in our history when we are still in awe of animals who can think the way we do. Now we have to figure out the appropriate next steps.
Obviously, we need to test more animals for intelligence, using a variety of methods.
Probably the most oddly hopeful news to come out of all of this is the fact that both of these tests were done without any killing or brain invading. The researchers who did the dog test even invented a special paw-operated touch-screen computer for the dogs to use. I like that. Not only have we discovered that dogs are like us, but we've also invented the first dog-friendly user interface. What next? Wii for dogs? That would pave the way for true interspecies bonding.20071219
FBI Investigates After Officer Uses Taser On Pregnant Woman
Etter said his officer spoke with the woman as she held on to the child outside the police department."
(He) attempted to obtain information on both the mother and the child, at which time the mother refused to give any information and became very agitated," Etter said.
Surveillance video from the police department shows the woman try to leave with the child. The officer then grabs her coat in an effort to get her to stop. Etter said the officer was doing what he thought was in the best interest of the 1-year-old boy.
The video shows the woman struggle with the officer, who then takes the child from her and gives the boy to another officer. The first officer then forces the woman down on her stomach, and he then deploys a Taser on her neck.
Etter said the officer did not know the woman was pregnant."She did not disclose, even after she was arrested, that she was pregnant," Etter said. He said the woman was wearing a large winter coat and had her child on her lap when she was talking to the officer.
Etter said the department is cooperating with the FBI investigation, and there is also an ongoing internal investigation to see if the use of force was warranted for the situation.
Etter said the officer involved is still on duty.Trotwood's use of force policy states officers should "greatly evaluate each situation with discretion when anticipating the deployment of the Taser on young children, elderly persons, and pregnant females."
News Center 7 spoke with the woman involved in the case, but she declined the opportunity to make a statement, saying only that she feels "unjustly served."
Officers said the 1-year-old boy was put into the custody of a family member after the incident.
20071218
U.S. built with NO religion
The most unpopular people in Madison this time of the year have got to be the folks who operate the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
They've taken it upon themselves, most notably through their leader Annie Laurie Gaylor, to police religious symbols and observances on government property, insisting that to invoke religion in places that belong to all the people is a usurpation of the Founding Fathers' insistence that church and state be separate. They sue to get Nativity scenes removed from municipal parks and demand that evergreen trees displayed in state capitols be called something other than a Christmas tree.
I don't always agree with the tactics the group uses. Often, it needs to choose its targets more selectively instead of using a shotgun when a rifle would do. But, judging from the letters I read and the e-mails I get, many people completely misunderstand the organization's motives.
Far as I know, neither Gaylor nor any of her colleagues in the foundation are opposed to religious observances or symbols. What churches, people or businesses do on their own property is perfectly fine with them. Yet they unfairly get blamed when a business takes it upon itself to wish folks a happy holiday instead of Merry Christmas, perhaps out of deference to its customers of varied faiths.
What the Freedom From Religion Foundation people do object to -- in fact, what most Americans, including those with devout religious beliefs, ought to object to -- is when public property and resources are used to push a religious cause.
Although a surprising number of people believe so -- perhaps they missed that part during American history classes -- the United States was not founded as a Christian nation. We're not Saudi Arabia, Iran or any of the many other countries that do, indeed, have a state-sponsored religion. That's a difference that even Mitt Romney, the Mormon who is running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, doesn't understand.
Last week in his much ballyhooed press conference to explain how his Mormonism won't dictate how he acts as president, he claimed that "our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people."
No, Mitt, it wasn't. The U.S. Constitution contains not one word in favor of religion.
As columnist Steve Chapman pointed out in the Chicago Tribune last Sunday, John Adams, who was instrumental in putting together that Constitution, stipulated in a 1796 treaty he signed as president that the United States government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Further, the national charter says that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office."
Many of those original Americans ran away from Europe because they were told how to worship. They came here to worship as they pleased -- or to not worship at all if that's how they felt. Government could just keep its nose out.
And that's as it should be. Every American is free to be just as Christian or Jewish or Muslim or agnostic or atheist as he or she likes. Those who contend candidates need to pass a religious test or that city halls ought to display Merry Christmas banners or a Nativity scene quite frankly don't understand the principles on which this country was founded.
There are too many countries in this world, after all, that do demand religious obedience on the part of their leaders and their people. Last I looked they have terrible track records dealing with their neighbors or the rest of the world.
There's nothing politically correct about supporting the separation of church and state. It's simply what it has always meant to be an American.
Great Moments in SWAT Team Fuckuppery
Posted by: Emperor Misha I
Will somebody, for the Love of G-D outfit those moronic goons with a GPS or, failing that, perhaps sticking handles on their helmets might help? (Link via LC & IB Bill Quick):
A Minneapolis police SWAT team kicked in the wrong door yesterday during an early morning raid,
AGAIN? Will we ever see a week pass by without a bunch of cluelessly lost ninja-clad chimpanzees kicking in the wrong door? Is there something in their genetic makeup, perhaps one of their three Y chromosomes, that makes it impossible for those police state fuckups to accomplish a simple task that thousands of pizza delivery drivers carry out without a hitch day and night in all kinds of weather?
Really. I seriously want to know. What the fuck IS it with those dense knobs?
prompting the man of the house to grab his gun and open fire on the officers who entered the house.
Good for him. Or not, as the case might turn out to be:
Police haven’t decided whether they’ll try to charge Khang with a crime. KMSP-TV says the Khang family is consulting with a civil attorney.
Charge him with what, pray tell? Protecting his wife and six kids, none of whom were hurt, thank G-d, against unknown intruders kicking in his door in the middle of the fucking night? The only one with legitimate grounds for a lawsuit here is Mr. Khang, who ought to sue the fucking city until they have to declare bankruptcy and start peddling miniature screwdrivers on street corners for a living.
Of course that’s never going to happen. The gummint can do whatever the fuck they please to us peons and they will never, EVER have to face the music for it.
KARE-TV reports that Vang was detained at the scene and released a few hours later. Police say there may have been a “language barrier” between the residents and the officers.
Oh sure. Blame the fucking victim, why don’t you, you flatfooted gumshoe piece of pig shit? The only “barrier” here is the one stuck permanently between the sensory input apparatus of your fuckheaded stormtroopers and whatever it is that resides between their ears in lieu of an actual brain. If that barrier hadn’t been there, then perhaps they’d have been able to read a fucking map.
“It was some bad information that was received on the front end that kind-of trickled all the way through,” police Sgt. Jesse Garcia tells the station. “It’s unfortunate because we have officers that were hit by gunfire
Pardon me if I don’t rush out to get the Kleenexes just yet, officer cocknozzle. Kick in somebody’s door in the middle of the night and whatever the fuck happens to you is your own damn fault, says I.
and this truly, truly could have been a much worse situation.”
You’re damn straight it could have. Your SS goons could’ve managed to hurt Mr. Khang or his family in the shootout that ensued once your marmosets found themselves under fire.
Fortunately, their marksmanship is as deplorably fucking pathetic as their ability to perform simple tasks such as getting to the right address.
Thatisall.
Firefighters asked to report people who express discontent with the government
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
It was revealed last week that firefighters are being trained to not only keep an eye out for illegal materials in the course of their duties, but even to report back any expression of discontent with the government.
A year ago, Homeland Security gave security clearances to nine New York City fire chiefs and began sharing intelligence with them. Even before that, fire department personnel were being taught "to identify material or behavior that may indicate terrorist activities" and were also "told to be alert for a person who is hostile, uncooperative or expressing hate or discontent with the United States."
Unlike law enforcement officials, firemen can go onto private property without a warrant, not only while fighting fires but also for inspections. "It's the evolution of the fire service," said a Phoenix, AZ fire chief of his information-sharing arrangement with law enforcement.
Keith Olbermann raised the alarm about the program on his show Wednesday, noting that "if the information-sharing program works in New York, the department says it will extend it to other major metropolitan areas, unless we stop them." He then asked Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now with the ACLU, "This program seems to be turning [firefighters], essentially, into legally protected domestic spies, does it not?"
"That's the entire intent," German replied, noting the serious legal issues involved. "There is actually still a fourth amendment," he pointed out, "and what makes a firefighter's search reasonable is that it's done to prevent a fire. If now firefighters are going in with this secondary purpose, that end run around the fourth amendment won't work, and it's likely that they will find themselves in legal trouble."
Olbermann, however, was most strongly concerned about the implications for civil liberties. "Is what disturbs you and the ACLU the same thing that just jumped off the page for me?" he asked. "That one phrase, 'look for people who are expressing hatred of or discontent with the United States?' Discontent?"
German agreed that there are serious first amendment issues raised by the focus of the program on constitutionally-protected literature, such as books that might be considered "terrorist propaganda."
Olbermann asked in conclusion whether firefighters could be used under this program to plant evidence. German agreed that the way it is defined "really plays to people's prejudices and gives them the opportunity to do damage to someone."
Text Privacy Issue Heats Up at Colorado School
by Kirk Siegler
It all began when a student at Monarch High School in suburban Denver was hauled into the principal's office on suspicion of smoking cigarettes on school grounds. The principal searched the student's backpack and pockets but did not come up with any evidence of improper activity, says Mark Silverstein, legal director at ACLU Colorado.
"It's the next step that went too far. After administrators found nothing in the backpack, found nothing in the pockets, they took the student's cell phone and began reading the text messages," Silverstein says.
After finding mentions of marijuana, the administrators confiscated the cell phones of several of the student's friends as well. Some of the information obtained from the texts landed in the students' discipline files.
School officials won't confirm or deny this version of events. The situation has infuriated many students; one even opted to destroy her phone rather than share its contents, says Matt Menezes, a Monarch sophomore.
"She knew that that had been happening to a lot of her friends, so she smashed it rather than give it up," he says. "It's not like they have any justification for it at all. … I'd probably break my phone, too."
Other students say that while the principal may have had good intentions, the ends did not justify the means.
"If he had seen some sort of security threat or had some issue he wanted resolved, he could have read the text messages, but I feel he just took the whole issue too far," says Andrew Locke, a junior at the school.
Exactly how far is appropriate for schools to go in such matters is murky terrain. A landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1985 established that schools have more latitude to search students than police officers do.
But can the schools go so far as to search text messages? Boulder Valley School District spokesman Briggs Gamblin says yes.
"We believe reasonable suspicion existed to seize the cell phone, and to transcribe the information in the cell phone," he says.
University of Colorado law professor Paul Ohm sees it differently.
"Schools can't look in backpacks or purses based on completely a lack of suspicion, and nor will a court say they can look in a cell phone with no suspicion," Ohm says.
If the case were to go to court, Ohm says, the school district would have to explain thoroughly why it did what it did. If it was a frivolous search, he says, the ACLU has a case. Colorado has a history of taking privacy matters seriously: State law prohibits the recording of electronic communication without the consent of the sender.
At the very least, the search violates state law, the ACLU says. Youngsters today treat cell phones as personal diaries, the organization says, and thereby the administrators overstepped the line.
"There's just so much more potential when searching a cell phone or an e-mail archive, to uncover information that has no relevance to the object of the search, but yet could reveal many private and personal matters," Silverstein says.
The ACLU is demanding that the school adopt a policy that prohibits administrators from searching cell phone text messages. Both sides say they want to avoid going to court, but some privacy advocates say they hope that's exactly where the case is headed.
"I think it's a very good issue for a court to consider, and I think it's important to draw some lines with new technology," says Mark Rottenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.
Whether or not it is sued, the district will likely adopt a definitive policy governing cell phones, Gamblin says.
"You know five, six years ago, with cell phones, we were simply worried about conversations going on when kids should be listening in class, phones ringing and disturbing the teacher while they were trying to teach, but we weren't worried about pictures, we weren't worried about text messages," he says.
Some schools have banned phones, but he says he doubts Boulder Valley's new policy will go that far.
New Symbol for European Elite Force: Castrated Lion!
The Nordic Battlegroup, a 2,400 soldiers-strong rapid reaction troop, lost a legal battle over its army and was forced to castrate the overtly male heraldic lion:
The proud motto of northern Europe’s crack rapid-reaction force is ad omnia paratus. Prepared for everything, everywhere. But the heraldic lion above the Latin tag now sends a less plucky message – he has just been digitally emasculated and, though technically still a lion rampant, he does not seem to be ready for anything, anywhere.
The change was implemented after a group of women Swedish soldiers protested that they could not identify with such an ostentatiously male lion on their army crest. A complaint of sex discrimination was then lodged with the European Court of Justice.
“We were forced to cut the lion’s willy off with the aid of a computer,” Christian Braunstein, from the Tradition Commission of the Swedish Army, said.
Now the Nordic Battlegroup, a force of 2,400 soldiers, is looking deeply embarrassed. For sceptics who already consider the Nordic Battlegroup to be something of an oxymoron – it is led by the Swedes, who were last in battle in 1809 – the operation on the lion is not an auspicious omen.
“A castrated lion – the perfect symbol for European defence policy,” an American military blogger sneered.
20071216
The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
There has been a long tradition of fear-mongering legislation in the United States directed against groups and individuals believed to threaten the established order. The first such measures were the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Congress in 1798 during the administration of the second president of the United States John Adams. The Acts, consisting of four separate laws, made it more difficult to become a citizen, sought to control real or imagined foreign agents operating in the United States, and also gave the government broad powers to control "sedition." Sedition was defined as "resisting any law of the United States or any act of the President" punishable by a prison sentence of up to two years. It also made illegal "false, scandalous or malicious writing" directed against either the government or government officials. The next President, Thomas Jefferson declared that three out of the four laws were unconstitutional and pardoned everyone who had been convicted under them.
Early in the last century, hysterical fear of anarchists resulted in the conviction and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti 1927 despite clear evidence that the two men were innocent. A few years later, in 1934, a Special Committee on Un-American Activities was set up by Congress to monitor the activities of fascists in the United States. Ironically, the two congressmen who were most instrumental in the establishment of the committee, Samuel Dickstein of New York and Martin Dies of Texas, both Democrats, were themselves tainted by activities that might reasonably be described as Un-American. Dickstein was himself a paid agent of the Soviet NKVD intelligence agency and Dies regularly spoke at Ku Klux Klan rallies. After the Second World War, the committee was renamed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and focused almost exclusively on communists, continuing to do so until it was incorporated into the House Judiciary Committee in 1974. Concurrent with HUAC on the Senate side, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican, became the public face of anti-communism in the early 1950s, with his frequent claims that communists had infiltrated the US government at various levels. Few of the claims could be substantiated, however, and McCarthy eventually fell out of favor and was censured by the Senate.
More recently, there has been the post 9/11 creation of a virtual avalanche of legislation and commissions designed to protect the country at the expense of the Bill of Rights. The two Patriot Acts of 2001 and 2006 and the Military Commission Act or 2006 have collectively limited constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association, freedom from illegal search, the right to habeas corpus, prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and freedom from the illegal seizure of private property. The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in the Bill of Rights have all been disregarded in the rush to make it easier to investigate people, put them in jail, and torture them if necessary. A recent executive order of July 17th, 2007 goes even farther, authorizing the President to seize the property of anyone who "Threatens Stabilization Efforts in Iraq." The government's own Justice Department decides what constitutes "threatening stabilization efforts" and the order does not permit a challenge to the information that the seizure is based on.
One would have thought that the systematic dismantling of the Constitution of the United States would have been enough to satisfy even the most Jacobin neoconservative, but there is more on the horizon, and it is coming from people who call themselves Democrats. The mainstream media has made no effort to inform the public of the impending Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act. The Act, which was sponsored by Congresswoman Jane Harman of California, was passed in the House by an overwhelming 405 to 6 vote on October 24th and is now awaiting approval by the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which is headed by Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. It is believed that approval by the committee will take place shortly, to be followed by passage by the entire Senate.
Harman's bill contends that the United States will soon have to deal with home grown terrorists and that something must be done to anticipate and neutralize the problem. The act deals with the issue through the creation of a congressional commission that will be empowered to hold hearings, conduct investigations, and designate various groups as "homegrown terrorists." The commission will be tasked to propose new legislation that will enable the government to take punitive action against both the groups and the individuals who are affiliated with them. Like Joe McCarthy and HUAC in the past, the commission will travel around the United States and hold hearings to find the terrorists and root them out. Unlike inquiries in the past where the activity was carried out collectively, the act establishing the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Commission will empower all the members on the commission to arrange hearings, obtain testimony, and even to administer oaths to witnesses, meaning that multiple hearings could be running simultaneously in various parts of the country. The ten commission members will be selected for their "expertise," though most will be appointed by Congress itself and will reflect the usual political interests. They will be paid for their duties at the senior executive pay scale level and will have staffs and consultants to assist them. Harman's bill does not spell out terrorist behavior and leaves it up to the Commission itself to identify what is terrorism and what isn't. Language inserted in the act does partially define "homegrown terrorism" as "planning" or "threatening" to use force to promote a political objective, meaning that just thinking about doing something could be enough to merit the terrorist label. The act also describes "violent radicalization" as the promotion of an "extremist belief system" without attempting to define "extremist."
As currently envisioned, the Commission will not operate in perpetuity. After the group has done its work, in eighteen months' time, a Center of Excellence for the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism will be established to study the lessons learned. The center will operate either out of the Department of Homeland Security or out of an appropriate academic institution and will be tasked with continuing to monitor the homegrown terrorism problem and proposing legislation and other measures to counter it.
As should be clear from the vagueness of the definitions, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act could easily be abused to define any group that is pressuring the political system as "terrorist," ranging from polygamists, to second amendment rights supporters, anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, and peace demonstrators. In reality, of course, it will be primarily directed against Muslims and Muslim organizations. Given that, there is the question of who will select which groups will be investigated by the roving commissions. There is no evidence to suggest that there will be any transparent or objective screening process. Through their proven access both to the media and to Congress, the agenda will undoubtedly be shaped by the usual players including David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Steve Emerson, and Frank Gaffney who see a terrorist hiding under every rock, particularly if the rock is concealing a Muslim. They and their associates will undoubtedly find plenty of terrorists and radical groups to investigate. Many of the suspects will inevitably be "anti-American" professors at various universities and also groups of Palestinians organized against the Israeli occupation, but it will be easily to use the commission formula to sweep them all in for examination.
The view that 9/11 has "changed everything" is unfortunately all too true. It has unleashed American paranoia, institutionalized mistrust of foreigners, and created a fantasy universe in which a US beset by enemies must do anything and everything to counter the alien threat. If it were a sane world, it would be difficult to imagine why anyone would believe that a Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act is even necessary. The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in strengthening law enforcement and intelligence capabilities against terrorists and has every tool imaginable to investigate and make arrests. It has created a whole new bloated and dysfunctional branch of government in the Department of Homeland Security. What is not needed is groups of congressionally empowered vigilantes roaming the country at will looking for "homegrown terrorism."Judge removed after jailing entire courtroom
By Katie Franklin A commission on judicial conduct recommended Judge Robert Restaino be struck off, saying he had "snapped" and "engaged in what can only be described as two hours of inexplicable madness" while hearing a domestic violence case at Niagara Falls city court in 2005. The strange incident began when a mobile phone rang and an angry Mr Restaino demanded to know who it belonged to. "Every single person is gong to jail in this courtroom unless I get that instrument now. "If anybody believes I'm kidding, ask some of the folks that have been here for a while. You are all going." Despite the threat, no one came forward and the judge ordered that the group be taken into custody. Fourteen people were unable to pay their bail money and were shackled and bussed to Niagara County Jail. The judge released the defendants later that afternoon after the media began showing interest in the bizarre episode.
A US judge has been removed from the bench for jailing 46 people after none of them admitted responsibility for a ringing mobile phone in his courtroom.
When no one owned up, Mr Restaino told the court: "Everyone is going to jail".
In defending his actions, Mr Restaino told the commission he had been under stress in his personal life.
Banning Wikipedia at school: good idea or missed opportunity?
Banning books has a long and storied history, but it's not nearly as much fun as burning them in midnight bonfires. (Wikipedia knows all about this.) With so much text moving online, though, burning has lost much of its practicality. Have you ever tried to burn a server? Not very exciting.
Banning, though, is very much alive, and Wikipedia knows about it too, but for different reasons. The online encyclopedia has been on the receiving end of many a ban hammer; China isn't too thrilled about the service or its penchant for hosting articles on troublesome topics like Tiananmen Square, and the Dutch Justice Ministry wants its 30,000 employees to stop making Wikipedia edits from government computers. But educators, well, they love it. Right?
Not all of them. Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's Express-Times reported on a local school librarian who put up her own "Just Say No to Wikipedia" signs in the computer lab. The entire Warren Hills Regional School District in New Jersey has also blocked access from all school computers. The basic problem, according to officials, is that Wikipedia's unverified accuracy and ease of use are making it too tempting for students to use as a primary source.
Wikipedia officials certainly don't dispute that characterization and have never held the site up as a tool for academic work, except as a jumping-off point. But the New Jersey response is interesting in that it represents an extreme response to the problem.
Perhaps it's a necessary one, though. I checked in with my wife, a college professor who assigns plenty of papers to her students. Despite an unceasing stream of comments about how Wikipedia cannot be used as a scholarly source, students without fail will use it every semester and cite it in their work, even in upper-level classes. The site is just so easy to use that the temptation to do so can be overwhelming... especially when it's 1 AM and the library has closed.
These are bright kids, and they're in college. Middle-school and high-school students may need even more "encouragement" to avoid sources like Wikipedia.
Turning Wikipedia into a learning opportunity
But banning may not be the best way to do that. The issue goes beyond Wikipedia and concerns over accuracy, for one thing. Britannica isn't a viable source for most high school or collegiate work, either; should we ban it for students' own good? And what about textbooks? They offer an introduction to new ideas but are rarely appropriate sources for academic papers; indeed, their best use in such cases is as a jumping-off point.
Besides, Wikipedia is easily available from home and personal computers, so maybe what's needed is more "source literacy" and media education instead. Banning Wikipedia also gives it the sweet scent of forbidden fruit as well, and it invites the same sort of circumvention techniques that students have used to get around MySpace blocks.
Denise Gonzalez-Walker, writing yesterday on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's education blog, argued for making Wikipedia a learning opportunity. "It's a shame that the teachers and librarians quoted in the article didn't take advantage of the situation—finding inaccurate information on Wikipedia—by having their students revise the Wikipedia site with their own research, or engage in broader discussions about how authority and truth will be staked out in new media," she said.
It's a great idea, but are students in places like the Warren Hills Regional School District really going to fact-check every stat they dig up from Wikipedia? And if they do so, why use Wikipedia at all?
Still, teaching kids how to critically analyze information sources is an increasingly valuable skill in an information economy. If teachers want to use Wikipedia as a way to talk about this, more power to them.
Should Spanking Your Child Be Illegal?
Massachusetts lawmakers say a proposed measure that would ban parents from spanking their children, even in their own homes, is a way to protect kids from abuse. But many parents believe it's an example of government run amok.
In all 50 states, parents are legally allowed to spank their children. But in 29 states it's illegal for a teacher to practice corporal punishment, including spanking.
A Massachusetts nurse is hoping to change that and make the state the first in the nation to ban corporal punishment at home.
"I think it's ironic that domestic violence applies to everyone except the most vulnerable children," said Kathleen Wolf, who wrote the bill.
Massachusetts lawmakers will consider the bill today.
The very idea of the bill has stirred huge controversy, because many parents say the state is trying to take away what's been a tried and true method of child-rearing. As many a mom has said, "Spare the rod, spoil the child."
"We don't spank her, but I think that ought to be a parent's choice," one Massachusetts father said of the bill.
And one mother echoed the sentiments of many, saying, "I don't want the government telling me how to raise my children."
Nineteen countries have banned corporal punishment, and some child-rearing experts believe one day the United States will do so as well.
"I don't know if it's an idea whose time has come. But it's possibly one whose time is coming," said Lisa Berlin, a professor at the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy.
Wolf has children and said she has "swatted my kids a couple times."
She says she's not recommending that parents who spank their kids should face jail time, as they do in Sweden, or fines as they do elsewhere.
"I don't think the idea is to punish people. I think the idea is to give them the support that they need," Wolf said.
Our Decrepit Food Factories
The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”
Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?
To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.
For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.
The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.
Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics — in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick — would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.” Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven’t looked yet.
Scientists have not established that any of the strains of MRSA presently killing Americans originated on factory farms. But given the rising public alarm about MRSA and the widespread use on these farms of precisely the class of antibiotics to which these microbes have acquired resistance, you would think our public-health authorities would be all over it. Apparently not. When, in August, the Keep Antibiotics Working coalition asked the Food and Drug Administration what the agency was doing about the problem of MRSA in livestock, the agency had little to say. Earlier this month, though, the F.D.A. indicated that it may begin a pilot screening program with the C.D.C.
As for independent public-health researchers, they say they can’t study the problem without the cooperation of the livestock industry, which, not surprisingly, has not been forthcoming. For what if these researchers should find proof that one of the hidden costs of cheap meat is an epidemic of drug-resistant infection among young people? There would be calls to revolutionize the way we produce meat in this country. This is not something that the meat and the pharmaceutical industries or their respective regulatory “watchdogs” — the Department of Agriculture and F.D.A. — are in any rush to see happen.
he second story is about honeybees, which have endured their own mysterious epidemic this past year. Colony Collapse Disorder was first identified in 2006, when a Pennsylvanian beekeeper noticed that his bees were disappearing — going out on foraging expeditions in the morning never to return. Within months, beekeepers in 24 states were reporting losses of between 20 percent and 80 percent of their bees, in some cases virtually overnight. Entomologists have yet to identify the culprit, but suspects include a virus, agricultural pesticides and a parasitic mite. (Media reports that genetically modified crops or cellphone towers might be responsible have been discounted.) But whatever turns out to be the immediate cause of colony collapse, many entomologists believe some such disaster was waiting to happen: the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.
You need look no farther than a California almond orchard to understand how these bees, which have become indispensable workers in the vast fields of industrial agriculture, could have gotten into such trouble. Like a great many other food crops, like an estimated one out of every three bites you eat, the almond depends on bees for pollination. No bees, no almonds. The problem is that almonds today are grown in such vast monocultures — 80 percent of the world’s crop comes from a 600,000-acre swath of orchard in California’s Central Valley — that, when the trees come into bloom for three weeks every February, there are simply not enough bees in the valley to pollinate all those flowers. For what bee would hang around an orchard where there’s absolutely nothing to eat for the 49 weeks of the year that the almond trees aren’t in bloom? So every February the almond growers must import an army of migrant honeybees to the Central Valley — more than a million hives housing as many as 40 billion bees in all.
They come on the backs of tractor-trailers from as far away as New England. These days, more than half of all the beehives in America are on the move to California every February, for what has been called the world’s greatest “pollination event.” (Be there!) Bees that have been dormant in the depths of a Minnesota winter are woken up to go to work in the California spring; to get them in shape to travel cross-country and wade into the vast orgy of almond bloom, their keepers ply them with “pollen patties” — which often include ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and flower pollen imported from China. Because the pollination is so critical and the bee population so depleted, almond growers will pay up to $150 to rent a box of bees for three weeks, creating a multimillion-dollar industry of migrant beekeeping that barely existed a few decades ago. Thirty-five years ago you could rent a box of bees for $10. (Pimping bees is the whole of the almond business for these beekeepers since almond honey is so bitter as to be worthless.)
In 2005 the demand for honeybees in California had so far outstripped supply that the U.S.D.A. approved the importation of bees from Australia. These bees get off a 747 at SFO and travel by truck to the Central Valley, where they get to work pollinating almond flowers — and mingling with bees arriving from every corner of America. As one beekeeper put it to Singeli Agnew in The San Francisco Chronicle, California’s almond orchards have become “one big brothel” — a place where each February bees swap microbes and parasites from all over the country and the world before returning home bearing whatever pathogens they may have picked up. Add to this their routine exposure to agricultural pesticides and you have a bee population ripe for an epidemic national in scope. In October, the journal Science published a study that implicated a virus (Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus) in Colony Collapse Disorder — a virus that was found in some of the bees from Australia. (The following month, the U.S.D.A. questioned the study, pointing out that the virus was present in North America as early as 2002.)
“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”
We’re asking a lot of our bees. We’re asking a lot of our pigs too. That seems to be a hallmark of industrial agriculture: to maximize production and keep food as cheap as possible, it pushes natural systems and organisms to their limit, asking them to function as efficiently as machines. When the inevitable problems crop up — when bees or pigs remind us they are not machines — the system can be ingenious in finding “solutions,” whether in the form of antibiotics to keep pigs healthy or foreign bees to help pollinate the almonds. But this year’s solutions have a way of becoming next year’s problems. That is to say, they aren’t “sustainable.”
From this perspective, the story of Colony Collapse Disorder and the story of drug-resistant staph are the same story. Both are parables about the precariousness of monocultures. Whenever we try to rearrange natural systems along the lines of a machine or a factory, whether by raising too many pigs in one place or too many almond trees, whatever we may gain in industrial efficiency, we sacrifice in biological resilience. The question is not whether systems this brittle will break down, but when and how, and whether when they do, we’ll be prepared to treat the whole idea of sustainability as something more than a nice word.
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