Month: September 2009

Food, Inc.

We saw Food, Inc. the other night. We left not wanting food of any kind. But that was no surprise. People had warned us that the movie would sap our appetites.

The movie was not widely seen – we lived in Bozeman when it came out, and it never graced the local theater. We saw it here in Boulder on the local campus as part of an International Film Festival.

Anyway, what can we say about slaughtering cows and pigs and chickens? It has to be done, and done on a massive scale to feed 330 million people. It’s not pretty.

What can be said about NAFTA? The union members who once worked the packing plants have been supplanted by low-wage workers? That is including millions of Mexican corn growers driven out of business by cheap subsidized American corn? Thanks, Bill Clinton. We’d be better off had you stuck to cigars and other preoccupations.

What can be said about high fructose corn syrup? It’s subsidized, it’s cheap, and is at the center of our obesity and Type II diabetes epidemic. (Most people in movie, other than Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, were notably overweight).

Food, Inc. is about all of that, for sure. It is about a wide range of subjects, including the inhumane treatment of animals. Growers keep them confined, not even allowing chickens to enjoy a ray of sunshine during their 49 day life. Cattle are fed corn when their evolutionary path made them grass eaters. Harmful bacteria grow in the bellies of corn-fed cows – a diet of grass for a few days before slaughter would kill 80% of this bacteria, according to Pollan.

But that’s not cost-efficient. Instead, meat producers load the corn mash with antibiotics. The bacteria have grown tougher, and disaster in the food supply chain looms. E. coli outbreaks are common in this century, and Pollan thinks that worse, much worse is yet to come.

I left the movie depressed, feeling helpless. It wasn’t about the cows who can’t graze or chickens who never get to move around or even see light or pigs who never get to root or enjoy being pigs. It wasn’t about loss of good-paying union jobs or wild immigration.

It was about oppression – concentrated corporate power that cannot be dislodged. Just a few corporations now control most of our food supply – ConAgra, Monsanto, Cargill, and IBP. They behave as all people behave when given monopoly power – they clamp down, squeeze, push, take everything the can. They have armies of lawyers fighting for them at every turn, and their executives swarm in and out of government, usually ending up regulating themselves.

That is the nature of “public service” in America. It’s all about self interest.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was once an attorney who worked for Monsanto. Later he wrote the majority opinion in the Pioneer Hi-Bred International v. J.E.M Ag Supply case, which upheld lower court decisions allowing large agricultural companies to patent seed strains. The film intimates that Thomas was rewarding a former employer, but that’s not likely. It is simply part of the mindset of right wingers that government should not involve itself in the affairs of commerce … that things usually work out for the best.

Here’s how it worked out for Monsanto and soybeans: Monsanto patented a strain of seed that is “Roundup ready” – that is, that it is not affected by Roundup, Monsanto’s pesticide. At the time of the patent, Monsanto seeds comprised about 2% of the U.S. domestic market. It is now over 90%.

Monsanto does not force farmers to buy its seed, and makes it available through many other companies (but profits from every Roundup Ready seed sold). Here’s the catch – because it was allowed to patent the seed, Monsanto requires that anyone who uses that seed buy new supplies from Monsanto every year. This, in effect, outlaws the common practice of “seed cleaning”, whereby farmers set aside a portion of each year’s crop for planting the following year.

This requirement has set in motion onerous enforcement mechanisms, and Monsanto has a team of undercover spies roaming the country to make sure that farmers are not reusing seed. The result is a regime of oppression, farmers spying on each other, costly lawsuits, and in the end, castration and submission to power. Monsanto now owns the soybean crop.

Monsanto, of course, treats this all as normal, and defends its activities as legal, which of course, they are. But when corporations have the power to make their own laws, operating within the law is quite easy. Farmers, on the other hand, have no choice but comply or be put out of business.

Monsanto defends itself here.

The film makes one claim that the company did not address, however. It’s “GMO” (“genetically modified organisms”) seeds spread naturally – it is impossible for farmers who do not use them to keep them out of their fields. Monsanto has sued farmers whose fields have been involuntarily infected with their product, forcing them to stop seed cleaning, and forcing them under the regime.

No surprises here, and I do not have anything against Monsanto. It is merely behaving as power behaves, which is why we used to regulate power. The problem in part is the legal concept that allows patenting of of essential elements of our food supply, like soybeans. It’s an aberration, a departure from normal practice in American history.

Most agricultural research was once done at our land grant colleges, and scientific advances that came about were made freely available to everyone. Research was a public domain, and we all benefited. It was a free society.

Land grant colleges still do publicly funded research, and still leave all their advances in the public domain. But more and more corporations are funding university research and patenting the results for private use. Corporate oppression has invaded the colleges.

The real bottom line is something far afield from the mistreatment of animals, secrecy and oppression. It is the lack of enforcement of our antitrust laws. Monsanto has too much power. Too much of our food supply is in the hands of too few companies. Farmers have become serfs on their own land, and patent law, as it stands, acts against the public interest by allowing monopolistic practices to flourish.

And that’s why I walked away from the movie depressed – there is so much concentrated power now in the corporate sector, so much corporate control of government, that it is unlikely anything will be done until we have some catastrophe to reawaken the public. The beast will not soon be put back in its cage.

In the meantime, eat organic food, avoid high fructose corn syrup. Avoid fast food. Avoid monopolies and oligopolies. (That’s humor – by definition, we cannot avoid them.)

And by all means shop at Whole Foods or Wild Oats, two organic food outlets. They are in healthy competition with one another, forcing prices down.

Oh, wait. Hold on. Whole Foods bought out Wild Oats. The merger was approved by the FTC. Never mind.

Shop farmers markets – while they are there. Soon they will too be outlawed.

PBS goes all Baucusy on us …

Public broadcasting took a hard shot on the integrity-chin the day they took their first corporate dollar.

National Public Radio has a founding charter that says its mission is to “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.” What a joke that is, unless those unheard voices belong to people with car problems, investors, people who like word games, or fans of the fluffy interview. I think of NPR as being just like ABC, but with better production values. (How many interviews have you heard on NPR with gurgling brooks or birds singing in the background?)

Back in the 1990’s, NPR did some good investigative work on the Archer Daniels Midland lysine scandal so well covered in the current movie The Informant. ADM did the logical thing – it started giving NPR money. End of problem.

Public Broadcasting System is to TV what NPR is to radio. It is mostly an investors’ network where Ken Burns gets to try out his stuff. They have done some good work in the past, and Bill Moyers has had slot there, and the Frontline show was once a solid investigative program.

T.R. Reid is a documentary film maker who did a show called Sick Around the World that took a close look at health care systems in France, The U.K., Japan and Taiwan. Frontline asked for a follow-up, and Reid made Sick Around America.

But if you watched the Frontline show on PBS, nowhere in the credits will you see T.R. Reid’s name. He pulled out and split with Frontline before it aired.

The reason: Reid noticed that other countries that have successful universal health care systems have outlawed for-profit insurance for basic care. Frontline would not let him air that fact.

Since that was pretty much the whole thrust of the documentary, that for-profit health insurance is at the heart of our problem, Reid decided that he could not be associated with it, nor ever again with Frontline.

Russell Mokhiber writes about this at Counterpunch. Amazingly, PBS went beyond merely undermininig Reid’s message. They completely contradicted it, airing instead the following interview with Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States.

Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can’t work here.

Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it’s quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in.

Moderator: That’s what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized.

No mention of outlawing for-profit insurance everywhere else in the world – instead, and American health insurance lobbyist pushing what would months later become the Baucus plan – mandated coverage without a public option.

The United States is badly in need of a public health care system, and a public broadcasting outlet, one that “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.”

Wisdom vs knoweldge

This is a great exchange, from the Wall Street Journal on line (of all places) regarding the place of religion in our lives.

You can’t make people who don’t “believe” into believers. But there is something more to it than that. There is something there that “believers” who have gotten beyond virgin births and resurrections realize: We make our rules for ourselves. But if we do not look beyond ourselves, if we do not vest authority in something higher than ourselves, then we have no rebuttal to those who say that only the strongest shall survive.

In other words, we need something bigger than us. If it is just us, then we are no more than wolves.

Richard Dawkins has his appeal. He routinely smunches creationists with his background in biology, his erudite speaking manner, his inquisitive nature. No doubt he is right. There is no God, at least not one that we can discern with our limited abilities.

And yet, he has come to annoy me. He doesn’t respect his opposites. He doesn’t see their wisdom, even if they do not understand the evolutionary path we are on. They know nothing of the science of biology, and yet they know more than him.

It’s a question of wisdom. Not knowledge.

On pacifism and self-interest

I’ve been reading Reinhold Niebuhr for a while now – actually, I finished a collection of his essays, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, some time ago. My habit is to to use little 3M flags to highlight interesting passages of a book as I read it, and then later to transcribe those passages into quotation files on my computer. I may never look at them again, but there is something about typing out the words that allows them to penetrate deeper into my conscious brain. Such as it is.

Anyway, my late Friday afternoon is that process, and I realized as I typed that Niebuhr had in two short paragraphs very effectively dealt with a passion of the left, pacifism, and one of the right, the sanctity of self-interest.

To wit, pacifism:

It was inevitable that this [the scene at the cross] ultimate illumination should be mistaken again and again in human history for proximate forms of moral illumination and thus lead to pacifist illusions. According to such interpretations, the goodness of Christ is a powerless goodness which can by emulated by the mere disavowal of power. In such interpretations the tragic culmination of the cross is obscured. It is assumed that powerless goodness achieves the spiritual influence to overcome all forms of evil clothed with other than spiritual forms of power. It is made an instrument of one historical cause in conflict with other historical causes. It becomes a tool of an interested position in society; and a bogus promise of historical success is given to it. Powerless goodness ends upon the cross. It gives no certainty of victory to comparatively righteous causes in conflict with comparatively unrighteous ones. It can only throw divine illumination upon the whole meaning of history and convict both the righteous and unrighteous in their struggles. Men may indeed emulate the powerless goodness of Christ; and some of his followers ought indeed to do so. But they ought to know what they are doing. They are not able by this strategy to guarantee a victory for any historical cause, however comparatively virtuous. They can only set up a sign and symbol of the Kingdom of God, of a Kingdom of perfect righteousness and peace which transcends all of the struggles of history.

I suppose conservatives and libertarians will say that they embrace the following words, but my impression is that they believe that there are no bounds to the fruitful rewards of unregulated self interest.

In this country, and in spite of all our weaknesses, our pride and pretensions, certainly there is life. Our national life is based on the vitality of various interests balanced by various other interests. This is the heart of the free enterprise doctrine. These self-interests are not nearly as harmless as our conservative friends imagine them to be. Here we have to violate the parable, and provisionally make judgments and say, “This form of self-interest must be checked.” Or, “This form of self-interest must be balanced by other interest.” Otherwise we will not have justice if the powerful man simply goes after his interest at the expense of the weak.

Finally, a word for both sides – what goes around comes around:

Must we not say to the rich and secure classes of society that their vaunted devotion to the laws and structures of society which guarantees their privileges is tainted with self-interest? And must we not say to the poor that their dream of a propertyless society is perfect justice turns into a nightmare of new injustice because it is based only upon the recognition of the sin which the other commits and knows nothing of the sin which the poor man commits when he is no longer poor but has become a commissar?

To Rusty with love

In the comments below a post down below, 30,000 angry, suggestible victims, Swede links us to a photograph and an inspirational quote by Sam Adams very similar to one by Margaret Mead.

I suggested to Swede that he had linked to a faked photo of the 9/12-13 Teabagger protest in Washington. Right wing media all over the country misreported the attendance, and circulated a photograph at least ten years old claiming it was of the event. Their objective in saying there were two million there (when it was more like 20-30,000) was apparently to beat the attendance at the Obama inauguration.

That they can get away with shit like that in the age of Twitter and security cameras everywhere is a demonstration of the power of the right wing media.

Anyway, Rusty Shackleford asked if I could offer evidence that the photo was a fake. He could do it himself, I suppose. I wondered how he could miss something so widely covered on the Internet, but then realized that right wingers really, honestly, stay queued in their little domains.

Anyway, Rusty, the photo was exposed by a web site called Politifact. It’s pretty much foolproof – a building that was constructed in the last ten years, the National Museum of the American Indian, is absent in the photo given us by Swede. According to Politifact, the purported Teabagger photo is actually one of a 1997 gathering of the Promisekeepers.

That too is troubling.

Anyway, this is well-covered and all over the place. I’m just putting this up for Rusty’s benefit.

American journalism at its best …

From the New York Times, March 17, 1968:

The operation is another American offensive to clear enemy pockets still threatening the cities. While two companies of United States soldiers moved in on the enemy force from two sides, heavy artillery barrages and armed helicopters were called in to pound the North Vietnamese soldiers.

Quoting one participant, a Colonel Frank Barker,

The combat assault went like clockwork. We had two entire companies on the ground in less than an hour.

That was My Lai, by the way, that they were journalizing about.

Lest we think things have changed, during the invasion of Iraq, seventeen marines died in friendly fire in one incident – a PR disaster. The Pentagon searched around for a cover story, a diversion for the leashed media, a doggy bone to toss to them to keep them away from a real story.

The result: The Ballad of Jessica Lynch.

A right wing dichotomy

I am still mouth-agape as I peruse the comments following Rob Natelson’s post yesterday at Electric City Weblog, Using Your Money Against You. It brings out in the open one of the major defects in right wing thinking. It is a false dichotomy – there is us (dissipated citizenry), and them (government). Here’s Natelson:

The outrageous practice of using taxpayer money to lobby ought to be illegal in Montana, as it often is elsewhere. If public officials think a subject is so important they want to lobby on it, they should have to do what everyone else does – visit Helena at their own expense or take up a collection from like-minded people to finance the trip.

The dichotomy is further delineated in the comments. Gregg:

it frankly pisses me off that I have to take virtually a whole day off to go give my 10 minute blurb to a yawning committee, while the regulatory folks camp out with our legislators all day, propose language for the bills, and talk with them before and after hearings…all on our nickel. It’s supposed to be government for the people, not government for the bureaucrats.

Gregg, independent citizen-lobbyist. Gregg’s elected local government representatives: Bureaucrats.

A commenter, Ken Thorton, introduces the 800 pound gorilla

… that would be the special interest, industrial and the like private lobbyists.

Enter Dave Budge, Natelson sympathizer in this thread and candidate extraordinaire for the disjointed train of thought award:

Limit lobbyists … which part of the 1st Amendment do you what to throw out next?

Got that? Private industry lobbying is a protected first amendment right. Lobbying by elected officials is “using your money against you.”

Budge further adds

There’s no reason that citizens of any given municipality can’t band together to form a lobbying arm to go vent their spleens. But I don’t think you can ask anyone else to pay for it since lobbying our representatives locally can be done with a phone call or a letter…

This is right wing thought on parade, replete with disjointed suppositions and cognitive dissonance. Citizens of any given municipality have already banded together to form a lobbying arm. It’s called “local government.” For so long as those governments are elected by a majority of the citizenry, what they and their appointees and hires are doing in lobbying the legislature is called “representative government”. Corporate lobbyists are, or should be known as “special interests.-

Those damned wait times …

This is from the headline story in yesterday’s Denver Post: 1 in 6 uninsured in Colorado:

The Census Bureau figures found Aurora and Denver had the highest uninsured rates, 23.3 percent and 22.6 percent, respectively.

The rates are not a surprise to Aurora health care providers.

The wait time for a new patient to see a doctor at one of Aurora’s three community health clinics for the uninsured is nearly six weeks.

“Thousands of people are trying to get in, and we don’t have the capacity to serve them,” said David Myers, chief executive of the Metro Community Provider Network, which is receiving 8,000 phone calls per month from new patients.

The network includes 10 clinics in Denver’s suburbs to provide medical care for needy people.

Each of the system’s 25 doctors see 15 to 17 patients per day, including four to six new patients, said John Reid, vice president of development. Hundreds are turned away.

The majority of people who call the clinic seeking appointments are from Aurora or Arapahoe and Adams counties, he said. The network recently estimated there are 60,000 uninsured people in Aurora.

“If they don’t get an appointment at MCPN, you can rest assured that nine out of 10 will go to hospital ERs and wait there until they get treated,” Reid said.

The major driver appears to be low income. Insurance is not really a choice. Non-unionized retail clerks and shelf stockers can’t afford major medical policies, not even the high-deductible ones currently favored by the insurance industry.

Gary Horvath, managing director of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, said Aurora also has more lower-paying retail jobs that may not include insurance.

By contrast, Boulder has IBM and Jefferson County has Lockheed Martin as major employers, he said.

This is definitely a society where we have insiders and outsider, where insiders receive excellent care, where outsiders get little or no care and have to endure long wait times.

Denver city bus drivers, and area teachers, sanitation workers, police and fire fighters, though they are in relatively low-paid professions, have the advantage of being unionized and employed by government, and are therefore better insured than the average low-pay worker.

Funny or Die: Never, ever ‘single out’ corporate royalty

Saying things that are true will keep you off Time Warner subsidiary CNN.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

CNN, ever the corporate toadies, refused to run the above ad because it “singles out” one executive.

Here’s a Funny or Die video that singles out the insurance industry for special praise.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Arapahoe County man not afraid of stuff …

An amazing report over the weekend from the Littleton (CO) Courier, says that a local man is not afraid of stuff.

Jason Blantonhawk, a Littleton native, reports taking out his garbage at night, having his windshields washed at busy intersections by African Americans, getting on airplanes and walking through crowded Hispanic areas of nearby Denver without fear. Further, he reports hiking the previous summer in Rocky Mountain National Park, and not being afraid of either mountain lions or bears.

When asked about getting on airplanes, Blantonhawk said “They’re pretty safe. Pilots are well-trained, the equipment has been flying thousands of hours, and nothing bad has happened.” He was asked about the possibility of terrorists on airplanes, and amazingly said “Pretty rare, really. When you think of all the people who are going to die this year from smoking cigarettes or not being able to get health care, terrorists on airplanes is really way, way down the list.” He later added “When I fly I read books and listen to my IPod, and when we land, I get my bag and go where I have to go.”

Local authorities, asked about Blantonhawk, referred reporters to the local department of health, where a psychiatrist had been assigned the case. Citing confidentiality, Dr. James Gelfan only said “I’ve heard of this happening outside the United States, and I’ve read some New England Journal stuff about a guy up in Seattle, but I’ve not personally encountered any American who are not afraid of a lot of stuff. This is really unusual.”

Blantonhawk’s background is unusual too. He was a student at Columbine High School in Littleton in 2009 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed or injured 36 students and teachers. Asked about this, Blantonhawk said “You know, that really affected me. I lost friends that day, and I knew Dylan. I realized at that time that events are pretty much random, and what happens happens. Since that time, I’ve pretty much accepted that I can only control a few things. So I relax.”

“But what about 9/11! What about terrorists? Aren’t you scared about that?”, a reporter asked? “No, not at all,” he replied. “That was a crazy day, for sure, and I’m glad I wasn’t on those airplanes. But I don’t much think about it. I see people on airplanes with turbans and I figure they are from the Middle East somewhere, and I think that’s pretty cool that we’re not scared of them.” He later added “You know, every day there about 25,000 flights in the U.S., and like 1.5 million people who fly. The odds of something bad happening, even on 9/11, were really, really slim.”

Blantonhawk’s case first came before authorities when at Denver International Airport he publicly questioned the need for airport security. He was said to have complained about having to give up a bottle of shampoo, and was heard to mutter when he took off his shoes to be xrayed “This is bull****.” He was arrested that day, and later, when testifying before the local FISA court, said “All of this airline security is just to make us afraid. There’s no reason to have to go through all of that.”

Blantonhawk was fined, and ordered to attend sensitivity sessions with Dr. Gelfan. He is currently under house arrest.

Blantonhawk’s neighbors say that they never would have guessed him to be a thought-crimer. “He seems normal in every way”, said one. “He mows his lawn, comes home with groceries, and smiles at people when he meets them. Who would have guessed? Right here in our neighborhood, right under our noses.”