AlterNet

9 Things You Should Know About the New Farm Bill

Patty Lovera, Food and Water Watch — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:56:00 -0700

The House and Senate will vote soon on the new bills -- but there are important differences.

This week, both the House and Senate Agriculture committees adopted their versions of the 2013 Farm Bill. This is the latest move in the long-running attempt to pass a “normal” 5-year farm bill to replace one that was last passed in 2008. Several attempts to pass a farm bill in 2012 were unsuccessful and the farm bill that is currently in effect is a short-term extension that expires in September 2013.

There are some significant differences between the House and the Senate, in both what their bills actually contain and in the process used to get them through the committee. Both sides had an abbreviated process, skipping the normal step of conducting a series of hearings to explore various issues before writing the bill. But the Senate Agriculture Committee took the streamlining even further, managing to discuss, amend and pass its version of the bill in a little under three hours on Tuesday. The House Agriculture Committee finished theirs in a marathon session that took most of the day, wrapping up just before midnight Wednesday night.

Now each bill (HR 1947 and S 954) has to go to the floor for the whole body to vote on. The Senate is going first, with leadership claiming they will do the Farm Bill as early as next week. The full House may see their bill in June.

Here are some key differences between the two versions and things to look out for when the bills are on the floor:

1. Fair Markets for Farmers: It’s been a long battle to get the USDA to stop the abusive practices used by meatpackers and chicken processors to cheat ranchers and livestock producers raged on in this round. The 2008 farm bill directed the USDA to write rules to address commonplace abuses in the meatpacking and poultry sector, and the meat industry has been on the attack ever since. After years of fighting to get those rules in effect, the House Ag committee’s version of the Farm Bill repealed the few provisions of the “GIPSA Rule” that remained, which prohibited some of the most abusive things chicken companies do to contract poultry growers. The amendment also prohibits USDA from taking any action to curb emerging abuses in the meatpacking and poultry sector. The Senate bill does not contain this provision to repeal the rules.

2. Country of Origin Labeling: Just like livestock fairness rules, the meat industry has been out to kill country of origin labeling ever since it was included in the 2002 Farm Bill. Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) and Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) each introduced amendments to repeal mandatory country of origin labeling, using the flimsy excuse that the World Trade Organization decision last year meant the program must end. The USDA is poised to release a technical change to COOL requirements that address the WTO decision, and there is no need for Congress to get involved in COOL at this point. The amendments were withdrawn in committee (probably because the enemies of COOL did not have the votes to win), but this issue will very likely come up again when the bills goes to the floor.

3. Food Safety: The 2008 Farm Bill shifted catfish inspection from the Food and Drug Administration to the USDA. U.S. consumers and catfish farmers wanted to replace the FDA’s lackluster inspection regime that allowed too many dangerous imports, hurting catfish’s reputation in the marketplace. Ever since, seafood importers have been trying to stop this from happening because they don’t want imported catfish to have to undergo the more rigorous inspection that would come with a USDA program. The House version of the bill repeals the catfish inspection program at the USDA and would move it back to FDA.

4. Organic: Organic agriculture fared much better in the Senate version of the bill, which restores funding for several “stranded” organic programs that expired last year, including data collection about organic agriculture, organic research funding and a cost-share program for newly certified organic farms and processors. Only the research program is funded in the House bill.

The biggest news on the organic front is that while critical organic programs have struggled to survive the last year’s craziness in the farm bill, both the House and Senate bills include language that would allow the creation of an organic “checkoff” program. The USDA-created checkoff programs fund research and promotion efforts for specific commodities (like cattle, hogs, eggs, etc.) by collecting a mandatory fee from farmers when they sell their products. Checkoff programs have paid for some famous advertising efforts like “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner” and “Got Milk?”

Problem is, many farmers hate the checkoffs because they think the funds (which come from their sales) are not spent on things that actually help them but instead fund trade associations that are often dominated by meatpackers and processors. The USDA has a long history of poor oversight of the funds, which allows a lot of industry mischief that doesn’t benefit farmers. Creating a checkoff program for all organic products is controversial and we and many farmers oppose it.

5. Nutrition Safety Net: Not surprisingly, both committees took big swipes at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) that provides a nutrition safety net for lower-income people. More than half of the overall savings found in the House bill were created by cutting SNAP by $20 billion. These cuts were five times bigger than the still-too-large $4 billion cut by the Senate committee. The cuts would squeeze people off SNAP largely by making it harder for people to qualify for the program. This was a topic of fierce debate in the House committee and will be a major issue on the House floor. Last year, the full House never voted on the Farm Bill, in large part because of controversy over food stamps.

6. Commodity Programs: Both the House and Senate bills end direct payments to farmers raising commodity crops and shift them towards crop insurance instead of government commodity programs. There was a big fight in the House committee over the dairy program, one that is sure to continue when the bill goes to the House floor. The House committee’s bill includes a program designed by Ag Committee Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-MN) that creates a program to pay dairy farmers when the margin between the price of their milk and the cost of the feed they buy drops below a set level. It also has mechanisms to discourage overproduction of milk when prices are low. Dairy processing companies that love buying cheap milk from farmers hate this program and fought hard to get it out of the bill but were unsuccessful. The Peterson program is more popular with dairy farmers, but doesn’t actually do enough to ensure that the price farmers receive for their milk reflects their total production costs, according to family dairy farmers.

7. Conservation: Conservation programs to protect fragile land, like the Conservation Security Program, have taken a beating in the last several rounds of budget cutting and Farm Bill extensions. This hasn’t really improved in either the House or Senate bills; both sides reduced funding for conservation by combining or eliminating existing programs. The Senate bill includes a requirement that farmers receiving government support to pay crop insurance premiums must be in compliance with conservation standards (conservation compliance was already required for the commodity programs). The Senate bill also added a focus on protecting bees and other pollinators and includes veterans to the list of types of farmers with designated conservation programs.

8. Beginning Farmers and Local Food: There were some improvements in programs for beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers, including a measure in the House bill to create a Socially Disadvantaged Farmer and Rancher Policy Center and support in both the House and Senate bills for the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which provides funding to help site retailers selling fresh food in underserved communities.

9. House Amendment Attack’s States Ability to Regulate Food and Agriculture: An amendment by Rep. Steve King (R-IA) would effectively overturn state laws that set food and agriculture standards that are higher than federal rules. The broad measure is an attack on laws passed by states to establish more humane livestock rules (the purported aim of the amendment) but would also prevent states from setting stronger food safety rules, agriculture product standards, protections against invasive pests or livestock diseases or conceivably even efforts to label GE foods. Federal law should set a floor not a ceiling on what local citizens want in the food and farming systems; this language must be removed as the Farm Bill moves forwards.

We’ll have more news next week about when the full Senate will vote on the Farm Bill and what you can do to make the bill better.

12-Year-Old Girl Raped, Video Posted to Facebook by Alleged Attackers

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:49:00 -0700

Three teenagers are accused of raping a 12-year-old girl and then posting the attack on Facebook.

Did three Chicago youth attack and rape a young girl and then videotape it for the world to see? That’s what prosecutors in Illinois are alleging.

The Associated Press reports that three teenagers are accused of raping a 12-year-old girl and then posting the attack on Facebook.

Three boys--15-year-old Kenneth Brown and 16-year-old Justin Applewhite and Scandale Fritz--allegedly brought the girl down to the basement of Fritz’s home. Fritz was identified because his face showed up in the video taken.

The video was first posted on Brown’s Facebook account, but was eventually posted to all three of the boys’ pages. They were ordered to be held last Friday for aggravated criminal sexual assault.

Towns' Latino Community Totally Unsurprised That Police Beat Man to Death for No Reason and Tried to Cover it Up

Sandy Close and Raj Jayadev, New America Media — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:46:00 -0700

This is only the latest in egregious police abuse in Kern County.

BAKERSFIELD, CA. -- Abusive behavior by law enforcement officers in towns across Kern County and neighboring Tulare County has generated distrust and resignation, especially among Latinos who make up the majority of the region's population.

But national media coverage of the alleged beating death by deputies of David Silva, a 33 year old Latino father of four, in downtown Bakersfield may finally break community apathy, according to some two dozen attendees at a health care fair here interviewed by New America Media.

Less than a week after Silva was beaten allegedly by eight or nine deputies and highway patrol officers, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and Fox News had all reported on the incident as well as on an apparent attempt to cover it up when Bakersfield police confiscated the cell phones of several bystanders who had videotaped it.

So had the Spanish-language news outlet Univision, which ran a segment titled "Worst Police Beatings of Latinos."

"This is a really conservative community. Most people will think something like this was bound to happen -- it's been happening in other places. But the country's eye is now on Bakersfield and that could make the difference," said Amy Lopez, 22, a student of dental hygiene at Cal StateBakersfield.

Bill Phelps, who works with South Kern's low-income health plan program HMC, said news of the beatings had "accelerated a huge mistrust of law enforcement across all sectors of the community. Thanks to national media coverage, Kern County is now on the public radar."

Hilary Meeks, a reporter for the Visalia Times, noted that the incident hadn't occurred in a vacuum. "There've been five shootings over the last four years in neighboring Tulare County ... A sheriff's deputy ran over someone two years ago and nothing was done about it. We had a guy killed in Porterville. The court case ended in a hung jury. That was one or two years ago."

At least a third of those interviewed by NAM at the fair, held at the Kern County Fair Grounds on Saturday, had not heard about the Silva incident, although it's been front page news for the Bakersfield Californian's daily website, and on local TV. But recession-related closures of all but one Spanish language news weekly, along with Univision's Bakersfield bureau, has turned the city into something of a media desert, especially for non-English speakers.

"Local awareness will build with more local, state and national media coverage," said El Popular publisher George Comacho, who plans to report on the story next week, especially in the wake of Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood's request on May 14 for an FBI probe into Silva's death.

Linda Vasquez, a 27 year old Cal State Bakersfield student, was as agitated by the cover up as the beating itself. "The part that makes me angry is how they took the phones, because they've done that before." She told a story of how her brother was harassed, and the phone of another family member who recorded the incident was taken by law enforcement. She was not sure whether it was city police or the sheriff's department.

Ali Morris, CEO of the local Black Chamber of Commerce, thinks that even if public pressure mounts over the Silva case it's going to take a lot of time and education to change things for the better. "We have a broken system. In theory everything should work right. We can start attacking it here or there, but it's the system that's broke. It should have never gotten to this point.”

The solution, Morris says, has to come with changes in perception on both law enforcement's side and on the public's side.

"I think both sides are responsible," Morris observed. "The whole police force is at the mercy of one bad officer. At the same time, the police officer wonders why he is putting his life in jeopardy when the people here don't want him there...

"We have to go at this whole thing piece by piece," Morris concluded. "If I didn't have a spiritual foundation I couldn't get through it."

Pablo, another Cal State Bakersfield student who is studying to become a police officer and didn't give his last name, learned about the Silva incident from his criminal justice professor. "There have been a lot of shootings and beatings by law enforcement officials. They should train the police to use non violence or non lethal force," he commented.

Cal State student Amy Lopez said she was frustrated that there hadn't been more public reaction like a student protest. "Something's got to give. I shouldn't leave it up to another group to say something. I should step up and do something."

Virginia GOP Nominee For Attorney General Would Force Women To Report Their Miscarriages To Police -- Or Face 1 Year in Jail

Ian Millhiser, Think Progress — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:09:00 -0700

Virginia GOP nominee for Attorney General would force women to report their miscarriages to police.

If a woman in Virginia has a miscarriage without a doctor present, they must report it within 24 hours to the police or risk going to jail for a full year. At least, that’s what would have happened if a bill introduced by Virginia state Sen. Mark Obenshain (R) had become law.

And yet, the Virginia Republican Party wants to make Obenshain into the state’s top prosecutor. This weekend, Virginia Republicans selected Obenshain as their nominee to replace tea party stalwart Ken Cuccinelli (R) as the state’s attorney general.

Under Obenshain’s bill, which was introduced in 2009,

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion, the mother or someone acting on her behalf shall, within 24 hours, report the fetal death, location of the remains, and identity of the mother to the local or state police or sheriff’s department of the city or county where the fetal death occurred. No one shall remove, destroy, or otherwise dispose of any remains without the express authorization of law-enforcement officials or the medical examiner. Any person violating the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.

Under Virginia law, a Class 1 misdemeanor carries a maximum sentence of “confinement in jail for not more than twelve months and a fine of not more than $2,500,” so Obenshain’s bill could lead to a woman who decides to take a day to grieve the loss of a pregnancy she’d hoped to carry to term spending a year of her life in jail for that decision.

Even without Obenshain’s bill, Virginia law already treats many miscarriages as potential crimes. Under existing Virginia law, “[w]hen a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion or when inquiry or investigation by a medical examiner is required, the medical examiner shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall complete and sign the medical certification portion of the fetal death report within twenty-four hours after being notified of a fetal death.” Obsenshain, however, would treat many women as if they were criminal suspects at the moment they are confronted with a deep personal tragedy — and imprison them if they would rather deal with that tragedy privately with their family than share the vulnerable moment after a miscarriage with law enforcement.

Just How Many Journalists Is the Justice Department Spying On?

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:06:00 -0700

The U.S. Justice Department put a Fox News journalist under surveillance for reporting on classified information about North Korea.

How many journalists is the government spying on? That burning question just got even more relevant in the wake of revelations from the Washington Post that the U.S. Justice Department put a Fox News journalist under surveillance for reporting on classified information about North Korea. The Washington Postreport comes on the heels of revelations that the Justice Department conducted a broad investigation targeting the Associated Press, seizing two months worth of phone records from journalists at the news outlet.

The Washington Post’s Ann E. Marimow reported yesterday that the Department of Justice had tracked James Rosen, the Washington correspondent for Fox News, as he came and went to the State Department. The department traced his calls to see if their timing matched up with a State Department adviser’s calls. They also obtained a search warrant for Rosen’s e-mails with the adviser, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, who apparently shared secret information about North Korea with Rosen. Kim is one of a number of government officials to be charged with violating the Espionage Act for disclosing information to journalists.

“Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” Charles Tobin, a First Amendment lawyer, told the Post. “That’s a very dangerous road to go down.”

The investigation of Kim and Rosen began in 2009, when the Fox News correspondent reported that U.S. intelligence officials had said that North Korea was likely to respond to more international sanctions with nuclear tests.

Federal Bureau of Investigation officials then went after Kim and Rosen. Court records reveal that one FBI agent said that Rosen himself had broken the law by being “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator”--perhaps the most alarming aspect of the story.

“What makes this revelation particularly disturbing is that the DOJ, in order to get this search warrant, insisted that not only Kim, but also Rosen - the journalist - committed serious crimes. The DOJ specifically argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information - something investigative journalists do every day - Rosen himself broke the law,” The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald commented.

The revelations come shortly after the Associated Pressblasted the government for spying on its own journalists during a government investigation into another leak that was published in the news outlet, this time concerning a terrorist plot in Yemen. It’s all part of what critics have called Obama’s “war on whistleblowers.” The administration has prosecuted more leakers under the Espionage Act than all other administrations combined, Greenwald notes.

Writing in Mother Jones before the Washington Post report was published, Julian Sanchez speculated that the government may be spying on more journalists than the public knows about. So there could more cases like these. How many journalists is the government targeting right now?

Corporations Are Stealing Billions in Tax Breaks, While the Confused, Screwed Citizenry Turn On Each Other

Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:54:00 -0700

International corporations have no national allegiance, they care only for profit. Meanwhile, people all over the world are becoming increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic.

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

I’m in London for a few days, and all the talk here is about how Goldman Sachs just negotiated a sweetheart deal to settle a tax dispute with the British government; Google is manipulating its British sales to pay almost no taxes here by using its low-tax Ireland subsidiary (the chair of the Parliamentary committee investigating this has just called the do-no-evil firm “devious, calculating, and unethical”); Amazon has been found to route its British sales through a subsidiary in low-tax Luxembourg, and now receives more in subsidies from the British government than it pays here in taxes; Starbucks’ tax-avoidance strategy was so blatant British consumers began boycotting the firm until it reversed course.

Meanwhile, At a time when you’d expect nations to band together to gain bargaining power against global capital, the opposite is occurring: Xenophobia is breaking out all over.

Here in Britain, the UK Independence Party — which wants to get out of the European Union — is rapidly gaining ground, becoming the third most popular party in the country, according to a new poll for The Independent on Sunday. Almost one in five people plan to vote for it in the next general election. Ukip’s overall ratings have risen four points to 19 per cent in the past month, despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to wrest back control of the crucial debate over Britain’s relationship with the European Union.

Right-wing nationalist parties are gaining ground elsewhere in Europe as well. In the U.S., not only are Republicans sounding more nationalistic of late (anti-immigrant, anti-trade), but they continue to push “states rights” — as states increasingly battle against one another to give global companies ever larger tax breaks and subsidies.

Nothing could strengthen the hand of global capital more than such breakups.

Pot Opponents' New Plan: Ban Images of Pot, Even Where Pot Is Legal

David Sirota, Salon — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:33:00 -0700

After failing to stop Colorado from legalizing it, pot foes now want to criminalize drug images and media content.

Can the mere image of a green leaf be considered obscene? If you think that’s the kind of navel gazing philosophical question to only be pondered by stoners, you are half right – it does have to do with marijuana. But it isn’t just an abstract and pointless query – it’s an important and relevant legal one thanks to a bizarre effort to criminalize the mere image of the cannabis plant.

The setting for this effort is Colorado. After citizens here overwhelmingly backed Amendment 64 that fully legalizes marijuana, the state is now experiencing predictable attempts to thwart voters’ will. The first of those was an attempt to automatically repeal the amendment if voters didn’t approve a new tax to fund marijuana regulatory enforcement. The second of those has been municipal and state proposals to criminalize images like the cannabis leaf and media content about marijuana, despite the fact that access to the substance is now a constitutionally protected right in Colorado.

The good news is that the former bill died in the statehouse. The bad news is that the latter set of initiatives has already been enacted in the state’s biggest city, and may be soon be expanded at the state level, thus potentially setting a larger First Amendment precedent allowing governments to target industries they don’t like.

The history of this particular free-speech controversy dates back to 2012, when the Denver Post reported that “in a vote that lasted less than a minute” the Denver city council enacted a citywide ban on “all outdoor medical-marijuana advertising in the city” including billboards, posters, bus benches, windshield leaflets and sign twirlers. In this, the Associated Pressnoted the city was joining Delaware, Montana, Vermont and Washington State in regulating speech about marijuana.

Because marijuana was still only officially a medicinal substance in 2012, advocates of curtailing the marketing of medicinal marijuana could at least back then cite America’searlier restrictions on prescription drug advertisements as historical precedent for the pot advertising ban. Referencing that history, they could additionally claim an ad ban wasn’t any kind of broader and unprecedented assault on the deeper principles of free speech.

The same, however, cannot be said today in Colorado. Thanks to the statewide ballot measure in 2012, cannabis is legal not just for medicinal use but also now for recreational use, meaning that new ad bans are trying to curtail speech about a constitutionally recognized consumer product.

Despite that new reality, NBC 9 News reports that at the end of the legislative session, groups supporting the continued Drug War slipped language into a last-minute bill that would force stores to hide behind the counter any magazine “whose primary focus is marijuana or marijuana businesses.” According to the bill language, it would also ban marijuana related pop-up ads on the Internet and also ban ads promoting any “health or physical benefit claims” about cannabis.

Looked at strictly through the prism of drug use, it is shockingly hypocritical that this language sailed through the Colorado legislature and now awaits Gov. John Hickenlooper’s signature.

It is hypocritical because the Colorado that is citing concern about drug use as justification to crack down on marijuana-related speech is also the same Colorado proudly promoting thefar more toxic drug known as alcohol. Yes, among other things, Colorado’s professional baseball field is named after a beer company; its governor brags about building a business career off peddling alcohol; and the state’s craft brewing industry (which, by the way, I love) is promoted by municipal governments as an integral part of the state’s tourism appeal.

On the other hand, considered as a free speech issue, it is no coincidence that this is all happening in Colorado. This state has, after all, displayed an acute hostility to First Amendment principles. In only the last few years, its largest city engaged in mass arrests of protestors at the Democratic National Convention while also trying to confine First Amendment rights to fenced-in “free speech zones”; its state government weapon-brandishing riot police against non-violent Occupy Wall Street demonstrators; and its biggest public university shut down its campus to quash the annual 4/20 protest against the ongoing Drug War.

But, then, even for a place this hostile to free expression, this latest move against marijuana-related content may be a step too far. As the conservative Denver Post editorial page (whichopposed Amendment 64) noted, this new bill is “patently an affront to free speech” that “not only defies normal logic, (but also) defies established First Amendment law.”

Tracing the history of First Amendment jurisprudence, Jacob Sullum, the senior editor of the libertarian Reason magazine, shows that the Post is absolutely right:

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court applies a relaxed First Amendment standard to “commercial speech,” it has overturned much less sweeping restrictions on tobacco advertising…
In the 2001 case Lorillard Tobacco v. Reilly, the Supreme Court overturned a Massachusetts ban on tobacco billboards within 1,000 feet of a school or playground…(the court) said the 1,000-foot rule swept too broadly, barring outdoor tobacco advertising from “a substantial portion of Massachusetts’ largest cities” and in some places amounting to “nearly a complete ban on the communication of truthful information about smokeless tobacco and cigars to adult consumers.”
Based on similar reasoning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit last year overturned the advertising restrictions imposed by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, which banned the use of color or pictures in outdoor ads, indoor ads (except those in adult-only businesses), and print ads carried by publications with significant underage readerships…
Again, these regulations, while also aimed at protecting children, were less restrictive than the regulations that the Amendment 64 task force is recommending for marijuana, which would ban ads pretty much everywhere except “adult-oriented” publications and websites.

From this, Sullum concludes that “it is hard to see how an ad ban as broad as the one favored by the task force could survive judicial review.”

He’s probably – and hopefully – right, though that gets back to the initial point about obscenity. The judicial system has interpreted the First Amendment to not fully protect content that localities deem “obscene.” This, of course, is how municipal governments have been able to regulate stuff like, say, pornography. Now the question becomes: will state and local governments claim that the marijuana leaf deserves the same “obscene” classification – and will the courts uphold such a claim?

Coming less than a year after the Chick-fil-A controversy saw a blatantly unconstitutionaleffort by some local governments to punish the restaurant chain for the (admittedly abhorrent) speech of its CEO, the Colorado quandary poses another serious and potentially far-reaching challenge to the First Amendment. Indeed, because the proposed marijuana ad ban is not a blanket content-neutral prohibition on an entire method or form of speech (like, say, the one on outdoor advertising in Sao Paulo), we could see the response to an inevitable court challenge end up widening the possible definition of obscenity in general; expanding the right of governments to persecute speech on the basis of content; and thus empowering authorities to regulate or even ban content they simply do not like.

That would be way bigger than a narrow challenge to ads with marijuana leaves – it would be a much larger affront to the First Amendment’s prohibition against “abridging the freedom of speech.”

Teen Girl Faces Felony Charge Over Lesbian Relationship, Mom Blames "Religious Zealot Parents"

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:02:00 -0700

Kaitlyn Hunt is facing felony charges of sexual “battery” after the parents of her 15-year-old girlfriend pressed charges.

The case of a Florida teenager being prosecuted after she was in a same-sex relationship with a girl three years younger is generating outrage. Kaitlyn Hunt, an 18-year-old student, is facing felony charges of sexual “battery” after the parents of her 15-year-old girlfriend pressed charges. The case has sparked Internet petitions and and a statement from Anonymous.

Hunt began dating her girlfriend when she was 17. The relationship was reportedly well-known to both sets of parents. When Hunt turned 18, her girlfriend’s parents went to the police and she was arrested on felony charges of “sexual battery on a person 12-16 years old,” according to Think Progress.

Hunt’s mother says the charges are motivated by anti-gay bias on the part of the girlfriends’ parents. “They were out to destroy my daughter, they feel like my daughter ‘made’ their daughter gay. They are bigoted, religious zeolites [sic] that see being gay as a sin and wrong, and they blame my daughter,” Hunt’s mother wrote on Facebook.

Hunt has also run into trouble at the school she attends alongside her girlfriend. The girlfriends’ parents had her expelled, according to Hunt’s mother, despite the fact that a judge refused to order the expulsion. The school board made the decision to keep Hunt out of school for the remaining weeks of her senior year. Hunt is now forced to attend an alternative school for the remainder of the year, though she can attend special senior events at Sebastian River High School.

The state attorney’s office has offered the 18-year-old a plea deal. The deal would result in two years of house arrest and a year of probation, charges that would stay on her adult record. But Think Progress reports that Hunt’s father said his daughter is only willing to plead to a misdemeanor, and that if the State Attorney’s position doesn’t change, “Kaitlyn and her family are prepared to go to trial.”

Facebook groups and Change.org petitions have sprouted up in response to the case. The hacker group Anonymous has also spoken out. They sent a statement to the State Attorney’s office that reads: “Kaitlyn Hunt is a bright young girl who was involved in a consensual, same-sex relationship while both she and her partner were minors. She has a big future ahead of her and there are people, thousands of people in fact, that have no intention of allowing you to ruin it with your rotten selective enforcement.”

Hunt’s mother told a local ABC affiliate that she hopes the outrage will increase the pressure on the State Attorney’s office to drop the charges.

“She's scared to death, she can't sleep,” the mother told the news outlet.

Former "Hero" Cop Accused of Raping Women at Gun Point

AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:00:00 -0700

DeCoatsworth was honored for his valor by the White House.

A former Philadelphia police officer honored by the White House in 2009 faces charges of rape and other crimes, after allegedly forcing women to perform sexual acts at gunpoint.

In 2009, Richard DeCoatsworth was chosen by Vice President Joe Biden to sit next to first lady Michelle Obama during a Presidential address. The officer was praised for his valor. He was shot in the face during a routine traffic stop, but chased down his assailent despite his heavy injury. He retired on disability in 2011, reports WCAU-TV.

DeCoatsworth appears to be charged in two seperate incidents. According to the Daily Mail:

In one case, DeCoatsworth, 27, is accused of holding two women hostage and forcing them to take drugs and engage in sexual acts at gunpoint. In the other case, he’s accused of abusing his girlfriend, police said.

Local Philadelphia news outlets report that DeCoatsworth has been in trouble before. The Philly Post points out that in 2010 University professor Marc Lamont Hill accused DeCoatsworth of violating his civil rights during a traffic stop. Describing his experience, Lamont Hill movingly wrote about the larger significance of his encounter with the former "hero" cop:

Since the incident, I’ve thought about DeCoatsworth. I’ve wondered if he regretted that night, wishing he could take back his actions now that he has been afforded the luxury of time and reflection. I’ve wondered whether his tragic shooting has put him in a permanent state of trauma, causing him to find danger where there is none. I’ve wondered if he was a good cop at heart, who became cynical and overly aggressive after spending a few short years trying to navigate a broken system.

DeCoatsworth also faced charges of witness intimidation, following allegations that he had, "kidnapped, assaulted, and robbed a Port Richmond man who lived two blocks from him over an unpaid debt," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The 4 Big Ways That Insatiable Corporate Hunger for Profits Has Devastated American Life -- and the World Along with It

Paul Buchheit, AlterNet — Sun, 19 May 2013 20:11:00 -0700

Big business is making its way around the world like a modern-day Attila the Hun, pillaging and despoiling the planet.

The damage caused by the relentless corporate drive for profits has become more clear in recent years. In the most important areas of American life, devastating changes have occurred:

Health Care: Almost half of the working-age adults in America passed up doctor visits or other medical services because they couldn't afford to pay. The system hasn't supported kids, either. A UNICEF study places the U.S. 26th out of 29 OECD countries in the overall well-being of its children.

Education: Student loan balances increased by 75% between 2007 and 2012.

Household Wealth: Median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households between 2005 and 2009, mainly because of the mortgage banking collapse. Almost half of Americans have ZEROwealth, with their assets surpassed by debt.

Water and Food: Life-giving seeds and drinking water have been increasingly treated as products to be bought and sold.

All these areas of life have been degraded by a free-market system that has thrived on publicly-funded research, infrastructure, and defense. Yet in a brazen show of hypocrisy, major corporations have ignored all the problems they've caused, choosing instead to cut their taxes in half despite doubling their profits, to hold 60% of its cash offshore, to eliminate workers rather than create jobs, and to reduce the pay of their remaining employees.

An Apple executive explained: "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems."

Calling Themselves 'Multinationals': No Allegiance to Anyone

Big business has found its Utopia, a world in which millions of people are willing to work for a fraction of U.S. salaries.

In this dream world of global capitalism, young people are going from zero income on the farm to a few dollars a day on a 12-hour factory shift, and as a result, based on the World Bank's poverty threshold of $1.25 per day, they're no longer "in poverty." So the media piles on praise for free markets. The Economist proclaimed that "poverty is declining everywhere." The Washington Post gushed that "a billion people have been lifted from poverty through free-market competition."

But the reality is very different. Inequality continues to grow, both between and within countries. Poverty levels haven't changed much in 30 years, with almost half of humanity, up to three billion people, living on less than $2.50 a day. A quarter of the world's children - over 170 million kids under age five - are growing up stunted because of malnutrition.

The World Bank estimates the total cost for a successful attack on malnutrition would be approximately $10.3 to $11.8 billion annually. Apple alone underpaid its 2012 taxes by $11 billion, based on a 35% rate.

It may be time to update the company's quote: "We don't have an obligation to solve the world's problems."

Even if there were no obligation to help solve the world's problems, there IS an obligation to pay for global energy consumption and infrastructure usage and industrial pollution. Yet a review of 25 multinational companies shows clear negligence in meeting that responsibility. The 25 companies, with almost a half-trillion dollars in 2011-12 income, paid just 8% in taxes to the U.S. and 9% to foreign countries. A 35% tax -- paid to ANY country or countries -- would have generated another $90 billion over two years, four times the amount needed to battle malnutrition.

Even Worse Than Not Paying: Making the World Pay for Them

A recent study estimated that toxic pollution affects the health of more than 100 million people, shortening their productive life spans by 12.7 years on average. A related study concluded that in 2010 over 8 million individuals were at risk of exposure to industrial pollutants at 373 toxic waste sites in three low-income countries (India, Indonesia, and the Philippines).

Some of our largest multinational companies hold top positions on the federal contractor misconduct list, which recognizes corporate environmental, ethics, and labor violations. Oil spills are common. Underdeveloped countries like Nigeria have been ravaged by oil production. Big firms are buying up farmland in more than 60 developing countries. Most perversely, multinationals are working hard to pass trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would actually dismantle environmental protections.

Absurd as it once seemed, a 1991 quote from the World Bank's Larry Summers now comes back to haunt us: "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?...I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted."

And as big business makes its way around the world like a modern-day Attila the Hun, pillaging and despoiling, it has the U.S. military covering its back with 900 overseas bases in 130 nations. If one of the countries kicks up a fuss, the corporations can just move on to the next one.

What is Paper Terrorism? Anti-Gov't Nuts File Tens of Thousands of False Docs as "Sovereign Citizens"

Jillian Rayfield, Salon — Sun, 19 May 2013 13:40:00 -0700

Zealots use fraudulent tax returns, liens and foreclosures to evade laws they find illegitimate.

How do you stop one anti-government extremist from coordinating a trillion dollar “paper terrorism” scheme involving a raft of false financial documents, or deal with another who sues prosecutors for allegedly conspiring against him by using poor grammar?

This is the question that state governments and federal agencies are faced with, ever since a surge of people who consider themselves “sovereign citizens” began acting on their belief that all aspects of law and government are illegitimate. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that in 2011 there were approximately 100,000 “hard-core” believers in sovereign citizen ideology, though it’s a tough number to nail down because the movement is so disparate. For the same reason — and because, by their nature, members of the movement don’t believe in laws — it’s also tough to draft legislation to specifically target those crimes favored by sovereign citizens.

Some of those crimes involve filing fraudulent tax returns, liens and foreclosures, frequently known as “paper terrorism.” In fact, insofar as the sovereign citizen movement has leaders, it’s in the form of so-called “gurus” who peddle materials on how to conduct these schemes. One prominent sovereign leader, Tim Turner — who refers to himself as “president” of the “Republic for the united States of America” [sic] — was recently convicted for “attempting to pay taxes with fictitious financial instruments,” among other things. In addition to his own alleged tax crimes, Turner also purveyed a “series of seminars claiming he could help his clients get out of paying mortgages, credit cards and income tax bills using a series of sovereign tricks,” the SPLC reports.

Another sovereign citizen, David Russell Myrland, he of the particularly bizarre grammar-based conspiracy lawsuit, spent around 20 years illegally practicing law and teaching others to cheat on federal income taxes. In 2012, though, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 40 months in prison for threatening to kidnap a mayor in Washington state.

These cases sometimes take years to build, and they don’t address the problems that arise with the more common sovereign practice of filing false tax liens (charges imposed on property to ensure tax payments) against public officials, sometimes worth millions of dollars. Usually, these liens are left undiscovered until the official in question goes to take out a mortgage or a loan and finds their credit effectively ruined. Most of the time, sovereign citizens can exploit loopholes in laws that require clerks to process the filings without asking questions.

One way states are addressing the issue is by passing legislation to close that loophole. Indiana is the latest of at least 15 other states to pass a law to allow clerks and state officials to reject fraudulent filings before they can do any damage.

Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, a Republican, told Salon that Indiana’s new law aims to stop two typical types of filings: harassment and “straw man” filings. Harassment filings are those used “usually for a retaliatory purpose,” Lawson said, against an elected official who has confronted the sovereign citizen in some way. In Indiana, there have been two recent harassment filings made against federal judges and one against a local mayor, amounting to millions of dollars in fraudulent liens. “Straw man filings” simply express a sovereign citizen’s contention that the government is illegitimate, and are easy to identify because they are often in all caps and interspersed with colons, make multiple references to the Bible or the Constitution, and generally contain noticeably odd language and punctuation.

In the past, Lawson explained, her office would be able to identify these fraudulent filings, but they “couldn’t question the content” and were still required to process them. At best, the filings clog up the system. At worst, they can seriously damage an official’s finances. “The most effective way to stop these filings is to do it preventively,” Lawson said.

Some states are hoping to prevent these filings in a different way — by enacting tougher penalties that could serve as a deterrent. In New York, a bill would “ensure that appropriate punishments and deterrent exist in relation to the malicious filing of false or fictitious liens against … police officers and elected officials,” by making filing them a felony. The punishment would be a fine of $10,000 per filing and up to a year in prison.

The bill, which was introduced and deferred to the state judiciary committee back in January, was pushed by Orleans County District Attorney Joe Cardone. Cardone told Salon that he had heard about a federal statute that helped crack down on false liens filed against federal officials, “but there was really nothing at the state level.” Though he says the practice hasn’t occurred much in his area, the bill closes a loophole in the system in which “you might have a forgery statute that might cover the situation, but it won’t have as high an offense as this.”

Bill Fulton, a former confidential informant for the FBI on the Schaeffer Cox militia case, who has continued to work with law enforcement on sovereign citizen issues, argued to Salon that the idea behind the New York bill is not to stop them from filing the liens but to prosecute before they can file multiple liens. Under the current law, Fulton said, by the time officials catch on to the lien scam, there could already be 20 to 30 fraudulent filings in the system — which could amount to multiple fraud felonies.

“They’re not going to follow the law, but what it will do is allow law enforcement to deal with them before they clog up the court system and before they cause additional problems,” he said, noting that “sovereign citizens have convinced themselves that this is all legal and this is all OK.” The law would be like “early intervention,” Fulton said. ”If we can get them early enough to discourage them, then hopefully they won’t continue down that path.”

Georgia implemented a similar law in 2012, which went into effect last July. The law, pushed by state Rep. B. J. Pak, a Republican, made it a separate crime to file false liens, punishable by 1 to 10 years in prison, a fine up to $10,000, or both. Pak told Salon that though the law is pretty recent, he hasn’t heard of any filings since it’s gone into effect. “I’m hoping no news is good news, that it’s becoming a deterrent.” He added that the next step might be targeting sovereign citizens that have been filing false foreclosures on homes, which Pak says is in the “same kind of wheelhouse.”

For instance, in Georgia itself, 12 sovereign citizens were indicted in 2011 on several charges related to an alleged scheme to break into unoccupied homes, file the deeds for themselves, and then file additional fraudulent liens and lawsuits against any law enforcement or public official who tried to kick them out.

In these schemes, the “rightful owner has a hard time getting possession of their house; they have to go through this protracted process to determine which deed is real and which is fake,” Pak said.

Though state governments may be able to effectively utilize deterrence to prevent “paper terrorism,” there are still those more disturbing cases in which sovereign citizens have resorted to violence when confronted with law enforcement. In 2010, for example, two sovereign citizens in Arkansas were killed in a shootout with police officers after the two men opened fire with AK-47s during a traffic stop.

That’s why the FBI has labeled sovereign citizens a “domestic terrorist movement,” and it’s why the White House established a new “Interagency Working Group to Counter Online Radicalization to Violence” in February of this year. The group organizes efforts to crack down on potentially violent individuals and movements, like sovereign citizens, ”who use the Internet to recruit others to plan or carry out acts of violence.”

That’s also why local police departments have been taking additional measures to instruct officers on how to deal with sovereign citizens, including hiring specialized trainers like Detectives Rob Finch and Kory Flowers. Finch and Flowers have been making the rounds across the country, training approximately 15,000 police officers and 5,000 public officials in how to recognize and deal with a sovereign citizen who might, when pushed, resort to violence. ”To them, a police officer is just a man in a Halloween costume,” Finch recently told the Los Angeles Times.

Too Soon to Tell: The Case for Hope, Continued

Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch.com — Sun, 19 May 2013 13:01:00 -0700

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change -- not by magic, but by countless acts of courage, love, and commitment.

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Ten years ago, my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched far away and at home -- and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere, whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists believed the future would look more or less like the present. If there was nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.

A decade later, the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has changed. Not necessarily for the better -- a decade ago, most spoke of climate change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But not entirely for the worse either -- the vigorous climate movement we needed arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from where we are now and where we were then, it’s that the unimaginable is ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.

The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had not stopped the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space. They assumed -- like the neoconservatives themselves -- that those neocons would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and renounced around the world; the Republicans’ demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country; the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies most of our hope and some of our fear.

I’ve seen extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women’s movement, or queer rights movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s). Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn’t even on the table in 2003. San Francisco’s spring run of same-sex weddings in 2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement.

Unstoppabilities

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat, suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that’s not all we have.

There’s the people’s history, the counterhistory that you didn’t necessarily get in school and don’t usually get on the news: the history of the battles we’ve won, of the rights we’ve gained, of the differences between then and now that those who live in forgetfulness lack. This is often the history of how individuals came together to produce that behemoth civil society, which stands astride nations and topples regimes -- and mostly does it without weapons or armies. It’s a history that undermines most of what you’ve been told about authority and violence and your own powerlessness.

Civil society is our power, our joy, and our possibility, and it has written a lot of the history in the last few years, as well as the last half century. If you doubt our power, see how it terrifies those at the top, and remember that they fight it best by convincing us it doesn’t exist. It does exist, though, like lava beneath the earth, and when it erupts, the surface of the earth is remade.

Things change. And people sometimes have the power to make that happen, if and when they come together and act (and occasionally act alone, as did writers Rachel Carson and Harriet Beecher Stowe -- or Mohammed Bouazizi, the young man whose suicide triggered the Arab Spring).

If you fix your eye on where we started out, you’ll see that we’ve come a long way by those means. If you look forward, you’ll see that we have a long way to go -- and that sometimes we go backward when we forget that we fought for the eight-hour workday or workplace safety or women’s rights or voting rights or affordable education, forget that we won them, that they’re precious, and that we can lose them again. There’s much to be proud of, there’s much to mourn, there’s much yet to do, and the job of doing it is ours, a heavy gift to carry. And it’s made to be carried, by people who are unstoppable, who are movements, who are change itself.

Too Soon to Tell

Ten years ago I began writing about hope and speaking about it. My online essay “Acts of Hope,” posted on May 19, 2003, was my first encounter with Tomdispatch.com, which would change my work and my life. It gave me room for another kind of voice and another kind of writing. It showed me how the Internet could give wings to words. What I wrote then and subsequently for the site spread around the world in remarkable ways, putting me in touch with people and movements, and deeper into conversations about the possible and the impossible (and into a cherished friendship with the site’s founder and editor, Tom Engelhardt).

For a few years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe. I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden, as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice versa).

Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly answered, “Too soon to tell.” Some say that he was talking about the revolutions of 1968, not 1789, but even then it provides a generous and expansive perspective. To hold onto uncertainty and possibility and a sense that even four years later, no less nearly two centuries after the fact, the verdict still isn’t in is more than most people I know are prepared to offer. A lot of them will hardly give an event a month to complete its effects, and many movements and endeavors are ruled failures well before they’re over.

Not long ago, I ran into a guy who’d been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great upwelling in southern Manhattan in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a description of how Occupy was over and had failed.

But I wonder: How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and we won’t reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the nonviolent overthrow of the Soviet totalitarian state in that country.

Second, Occupy began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things were said out loud. I can’t say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing -- not enough, not everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter. Occupy didn’t cause those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible -- and gave momentum to the ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens United and abolish corporate personhood.

Third, I only know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by “Occupy” are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that Strike Debt, a direct offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, has relieved millions of dollars in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many lives. I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta to Minneapolis. (Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a “showdown at the Department of Justice” in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their second Debtors' Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)

Fourth, I know people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never imagined they would be involved in, and I’m friends with remarkable people who, but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class, racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement. Like Freedom Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach beyond the moment in which I write and you read.

Finally, there was great joy at the time, the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself. In a sense, it’s worth everything, even if it’s always fleeting, though not always as scarce as we imagine.

Climates of Hope and Fear

I had lunch with Middle East and nonviolence scholar Stephen Zunes the other day and asked him what he would say about the Arab Spring now. He had, he told me, been in Egypt several months ago watching television with an activist. Formerly, the news was always about what the leaders did, decided, ordained, inflicted. But the news they were watching was surprisingly focused on civil society, on what ordinary people initiated or resisted, on how they responded, what they thought. He spoke of how so many in the Middle East had lost their fatalism and sense of powerlessness and awoken to their own collective power.

This civil society remains awake in Egypt and the other countries. What will it achieve? Maybe it’s too soon to tell. Syria is a turbulent version of hell now, but it could be leaving the dynasty of the Assads in the past; its future remains to be written. Perhaps its people will indeed write the next chapter in its story, and not only with explosives.

You can tell the arc of the past few years as, first, the Arab Spring, then extraordinary civil society actions in Chile, Quebec, Spain, and elsewhere, followed by Occupy. But don't stop there.

After Occupy came Idle No More, the Canada-based explosion of indigenous power and resistance (to a Canadian government that has gone over to the far right and to environmental destruction on a grand scale). It was founded by four women in November of 2012 and it’s spread across North America, sparking new environmental actions and new coalitions around environmental and climate issues, with flash-mob-style powwows in shopping malls and other places, with a thousand-mile walk (and snowshoe) by seven Cree youth this winter. (There were 400 people with them by the time they arrived at Canada’s Parliament in Ottawa.)

Idle No More activists have vowed to block the construction of any pipeline that tries to transport the particularly dirty crude oil from the Alberta tar sands, whether it heads north, east, or west from northern Alberta. Each of those directions takes it over native land. This is part of the reason why tar sands supporters are pushing so hard to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Thankfully, the push back is also strong. Our fate may depend on it. As climate scientist James Hansen wrote a year ago, “Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.”

The news just came in that we reached 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the highest level in more than five million years. This is terrible news on a scale that eclipses everything else, because it encompasses everything else. We are wrecking our world, for everyone for all time, or at least the next several thousand years. But “we” is a tricky word here. Some of the people I most love and admire are doing extraordinary things to save the world, for you, for us, for generations unborn, for species yet to be named, for the oceans and sub-Saharan Africans and Arctic dwellers and everyone in-between, for the whole unbearably beautiful symphony of life on Earth that is imperiled.

Part of what sustains me in the face of this potential cataclysm is remembering that, in 2003, there hardly was a climate movement. It was small, polite, mostly believed the troubles were decades away, and was populated with people who thought that lifestyle changes could save the planet -- rather than that you have to get out there and fight the power. And they were the good ones. Too many of us didn’t think about it at all.

Only a few years later, things have changed. There’s a vibrant climate movement in North America. If you haven’t quite taken that in, it might be because it’s working on so many disparate fronts that are often treated separately: mountaintop coal removal, coal-fired power plants (closing 145 existing ones to date and preventing more than 150 planned ones from opening), fracking, oil exploration in the Arctic, the Tar Sands pipeline, and 350.org’s juggernaut of a campus campaign to promote disinvestment from oil, gas, and coal companies. Only started in November 2012, there are already divestment movements underway on more than 380 college and university campuses, and now cities are getting on board. It has significant victories; it will have more.

Some countries -- notably Germany, with Denmark not far behind -- have done remarkable things when it comes to promoting non-fossil-fuel renewable energy. Copenhagen, for example, in the cold gray north, is on track to become a carbon-neutral city by 2025 (and in the meantime reduced its carbon emissions 25% between 2005 and 2011). The United States has a host of promising smaller projects. To offer just two examples, Los Angeles has committed to being coal-free by 2025, while San Francisco will offer its citizens electricity from 100% renewable and carbon-neutral sources and its supervisors just voted to divest the city’s fossil-fuel stocks.

There are so many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we don’t yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake, more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don’t know. Neither do you. Anything could happen.

But here’s what I’m saying: you should wake up amazed every day of your life, because if I had told you in 1988 that, within three years, the Soviet satellite states would liberate themselves nonviolently and the Soviet Union would cease to exist, you would have thought I was crazy. If I had told you in 1990 that South America was on its wayto liberating itself and becoming a continent of progressive and democratic experiments, you would have considered me delusional. If, in November 2010, I had told you that, within months, the autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who had dominated Egypt since 1981, would be overthrown by 18 days of popular uprisings, or that the dictators of Tunisia and Libya would be ousted, all in the same year, you would have institutionalized me. If I told you on September 16, 2011, that a bunch of kids sitting in a park in lower Manhattan would rock the country, you’d say I was beyond delusional. You would have, if you believed as the despairing do, that the future is invariably going to look like the present, only more so. It won’t.

I still value hope, but I see it as only part of what’s required, a starting point. Think of it as the match but not the tinder or the blaze. To matter, to change the world, you also need devotion and will and you need to act. Hope is only where it begins, though I’ve also seen people toil on without regard to hope, to what they believe is possible. They live on principle and they gamble, and sometimes they even win, or sometimes the goal they were aiming for is reached long after their deaths. Still, it’s action that gets you there. When what was once hoped for is realized, it falls into the background, becomes the new normal; and we hope for or carp about something else.

The future is bigger than our imaginations. It’s unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be unstoppable. And here’s what it takes: you don’t stop walking to congratulate yourself; you don’t stop walking to wallow in despair; you don’t stop because your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don’t stop because you won; you don’t stop because you lost. There’s more to win, more to lose, others who need you.

You don’t stop walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you’re moving forward from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to possibility. That’s what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the impossible and that doesn’t stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That’s what makes you unstoppable.

Rebecca Solnit’s first essay for Tomdispatch.com turned into the bookHope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Portions of this essay began life as the keynote speech at the National Lawyers' Guild gala in honor of attorney and human rights activist Walter Riley, whose own life is a beautiful example of unstoppability. Solnit’s latest book,The Faraway Nearby, will be published in June.

Bill Moyers: 12 Ways You Can Avoid Toxic Chemicals

Lauren Feeney, Bill Moyers — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:29:00 -0700

Lead, flame retardants, and BPA are everywhere, but you can limit your exposure.

After watching this week’s interview with Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, you’ll probably be wondering what you can do to protect yourself and your family from toxic chemicals. Perhaps the most important thing you can do is become politically involved – join the fight against both chemicals in our environment and money in our political system. In today’s world, it’s virtually impossible to avoid dangerous chemicals, even in your own home, but here are a few simple steps you can take to limit your exposure to known toxins like lead, flame retardants and BPA.

Lead

If you think that lead poisoning is a problem of the past, or one that only affects the urban poor, think again. While it’s true that lead paint has been illegal since the 70s and leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80s, the highly toxic substance still lurks in old homes, parking lots, water pipes, and in products imported from countries that don’t have the same regulations. And while lead poisoning no longer the killer it once was, miniscule amounts of lead can cause neurological damage and behavioral problems in children. According to the CDC, there are currently half a million children with elevated levels of lead in their blood. Here’s what you can do to protect your family from lead poisoning:

1) Find out if there’s lead in your water. A good place to start is with your local government. website. At NYC.gov, for example, you can order a free testing kit. You can also try contacting your local water company, your landlord or a private lab. You may also want to install an NSF-certified water filter on your water tap. Though the EPA has mandated that water systems be tested for lead since 1991, your home’s own internal plumbing could still contain lead, particularly if you live in an older building.

2) Replace old windows. Though lead paint has been illegal since 1978 and has largely been removed from old buildings, in some cases, it was seen as too costly to replace the windows. To have your windows replaced (or to do any sort of renovation on a building that may still contain lead paint), contact an EPA-certified renovator who has been trained to follow lead safety practices. In some cases, your local government may cover the costs.

3) Throw out colorfully-painted toys that were made outside the U.S. or Europe. They may look innocent, but toys, crayons, ceramic and jewelry, particularly those manufactured in China or Mexico, may contain lead, and as any parent knows, children are likely to put these things in their mouths.

4) Dust or vacuum regularly. Even without any obvious source of lead in your home, there may still be lead in the air, particularly if you live in an industrial area or if a neighbor has been renovating an old home. Dust particles containing lead are especially dangerous to babies who crawl around on the floor. It’s also important to keep toys and hands clean.

5) Test the soil. Urban and suburban yards can still contain contaminants from the days when lead paint and gasoline were widespread. Before planting a garden or even letting your kids run around in the yard, make sure the soil is lead-free. Your local public health department may offer free testing; you can also contact a private or university-run lab.

Flame Retardants

The hazards of flame retardants have been known for some time — brominated tris was banned from children’s pajamas back in 1977. And yet, similar chemicals can still be found in everything from couch cushions to television sets. Studies have linked one group of flame retardants, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, to lower IQs, behavioral problems, early puberty and fertility issues. And the fire-safety benefits of these chemicals are debatable. Here’s what you can to keep toxic flame retardants out of your home:

1) Check the labels on your furniture. The California Furniture Flammability Standard essentially requires that cushioned furniture, children’s car seats, diaper-changing tables and other products containing polyurethane foam are dipped in toxic chemicals. (Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just because you live in one of the other 49 states — because of California’s size, most mass-produced furniture is designed to meet California’s standard). Check the tags for the familiar notice: This article meets the flammability requirements of California Bureau of Home Furnishings Technical Bulletin 117. (The tag is not required though, so just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s safe.) Fortunately, California has proposed changing the rule; until that happens, you can look for products made with wool, cotton or polyester filling instead of polyurethane foam. And if you can’t afford all new eco-friendly furniture, be sure to dust, vacuum and wash your hands regularly — most of the toxins enter the body by swallowing contaminated dust.

2) Check the labels on electronics, too. Flame retardants have long been used in electronic equipment like computers and television sets. Thankfully, that’s slowly changing. As of 2008, the following companies had committed to phasing out all brominated flame retardants: Acer, Apple, Eizo Nanao, LG Electronics, Lenovo, Matsushita, Microsoft, Nokia, Phillips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony-Ericsson, and Toshiba. To find flame retardant-free versions of everything from refrigerators to nose-hair clippers, check this list created by ChemSec, an environmental non-profit based in Sweden.

3) Beware of fleece pajamas. Though one flame retardant, brominated tris, was banned from children’s pajamas, some sleepwear is still treated with another flame retardant called PROBAN which has been linked to genetic abnormalities and cancer. Check the label — children’s pajamas that DO NOT contain flame retardants must have a tag that reads: “For child’s safety, garment should fit snugly” (the snug fit limits the flow of oxygen in order to prevent fire from spreading, an approved alternative to chemical flame retardants). Cotton and polyester products rarely contain flame retardants, but look out for those cozy fleece footed pajamas — they usually do.

BPA

Bisphenol A, or BPA, has been linked to cancer,asthma, obesity and reproductive issues. And yet, until recently, the chemical was found in, among other things, baby bottles. The FDA finally banned the use of BPA in baby bottles and children’s sippy cups in 2012 — three years after major manufacturers had voluntarily stopped using it. But BPA is still found in other hard plastic containers, the lining of metal cans and the paper that receipts are printed on. It’s difficult to completely avoid BPA — 90 percent of Americans have traces of the chemical in their urine. But here are some things you can do to limit your exposure:

1) When purchasing plastic products — particularly those that come into contact with your food, such as food storage containers, plastic plates and cups, look for those that are clearly marked BPA free. Thanks to vocal consumers, many companies are now manufacturing BPA-free products and marketing them as such.

2) Avoid food containers marked with recycling codes 3 or 7, which may be made with BPA. If your food does come in a container marked 3 or 7, don’t microwave it in that container – chemicals are more likely to leak into your food at high temperatures.

3) Limit your consumption of canned foods, or look for cans marked BPA free — they are rare, but do exist. Eden Organic cans have been BPA free since 1999.

4) BPA is often used in the thermal paper that receipts are printed on. Since it’s impossible to know whether or the receipt you’re being handed has contains BPA, don’t take receipts that you don’t need. If you operate a business that uses receipts, switch to a BPA-free paper manufacturer, such as Appleton Paper, which went BPA-free in 2006.

Inside the Controversy Over Man Charged with Murder for Slipping an Abortion Pill to Pregnant Girlfriend

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:36:00 -0700

Florida man told her it was an antibiotic.

John Andrew Welden is charged with the murder of a person who was never born.

As Tampa’s WFTS-TV news reports, Welden is facing first-degree murder charges for allegedly giving his pregnant girlfriend Remee Lee an abortion pill and telling her it was an antibiotic. Welden worked in his father’s Florida clinic, a “specialty infertility practice.” When Lee began bleeding and experiencing cramps, she went to her local hospital, where doctors informed her the container labeled as amoxicillin was in fact the labor-inducing Cytotec. The fetus died in utero. “I was never going to do anything but go full term with it,” she told reporters this week. “And he didn’t want me to.” It’s an appalling tale, which will once again force us to ponder what constitutes a human life — and when one has taken it.

Very different fetal-homicide laws are on the books in roughly 80 percent of American states. In Arizona, for example, the charge can apply toward “any stage of development” for a fetus, while Arkansas limits it to an “unborn child of 12 weeks or more gestation.” South Dakota stipulates the accused must have known, “or reasonably should have known, that a woman bearing an unborn child was pregnant.”

In Welden’s case, he’s being charged under the Protection of Unborn Children Act. His state has tough laws for killing the unborn that also include DUI manslaughter, vehicular homicide and willful killing. In Ohio, where kidnapping suspect Ariel Castro will stand trial, he faces possible charges of aggravated murder. Castro is accused of allegedly beating one of his reported victims until she miscarried the pregnancies she endured in captivity. Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty has said he will pursue “each act of aggravated murder” — and a conviction could lead to the death penalty.

And in Philadelphia, of course, Kermit Gosnell was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder for killing three infants — by severing their spinal cords – who were born live during the late-term abortions he provided. Pennsylvania law has a whole category of offenses, including first- and second-degree murder, for any unborn child “from fertilization until live birth.” What distinguishes the Gosnell case — and has often been lost in all the shouting about it — was that the murder charges were for babies, not fetuses. Yet the issue of what constitutes the taking a life is not always an easy one to discuss or decide.

As much as we need the law to be clear, the reality of life and death is often far more ambiguous. As Jon Hurdle and Trip Gabriel noted this week in the New York Times, much of the furor over cases like Gosnell’s is the question of “why a procedure done to a living baby outside the womb is murder, but destroying a fetus of similar gestation before delivery can be legal.” Remee Lee, meanwhile, was six weeks and five days pregnant when she lost her baby. Should taking a life that wouldn’t have been viable outside the womb carry the same consequences as killing an adult? Would the alleged crime be different if she’d been three months pregnant? Six months? Nine?

I believe that human life begins at conception. I believe that if you force a woman, either by violence or deception, to lose a fetus, you have taken a life. But I also shudder at the prospect of the anti-choice lobby exploiting revolting crimes to prevent women from access to their constitutional right to abortion. We have spent the last several years watching it happen, as abortion opponents have tried to leverage fetal-protection laws to chip away at choice. That’s why we need to continue to be vigilant in articulating the difference between a choice a woman makes and an act of violence against her body and her fetus, an act that robs her of that very freedom she is entitled to. We must be clear that being pro-choice is not tantamount to condoning repulsive, criminal behavior. Remee Lee told reporters this week that she’s grieving because she “dreams of becoming a mom.” And this, she says, “was my chance.”

My Friend, the Murderer

Amy Butcher, Salon — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:47:00 -0700

The Kevin who took a steak knife to his ex's throat is not the Kevin I know.

Here’s what the news reported: An area man murdered his former girlfriend in the upper-level apartment of his split-level home. He sat with her body for 20 to 40 minutes, then phoned the local police, claiming a complete mental breakdown. I don’t know what just happened, he said, but you need to come quick. He waited for police on the sidewalk with his hands behind his head, and officers lowered him into their squad car just past dawn without incident.

What they did not say is this: I was his close friend. He walked me home before it happened. Kevin Schaeffer liked pizza and history and music, and most especially the band Dr. Dog. He wanted to move away — to Nashville, to San Francisco — and in every memory I have of him, he wears a purple sweat shirt, one I’m not certain he even owned. He was president of the college radio station, a Dean’s Honors student, and a history major who also liked writing. He could draw a very convincing Rastafarian. The year prior, he’d attempted suicide by lining a bathtub with electronics, but returned to our college campus just five days later, where we assumed he was receiving treatment. He was not receiving treatment. He had been suffering from long-term, severe depression and suicidal ideation for over a year on the night he killed her, and yet our conversation was pleasant: We talked that night about the Badlands, canine rain boots, an upcoming potluck, a tie-dyed cake. I’d learned how to do it online, I told him — it just involved food dye and a little patience.

“That sounds amazing,” he said, nodding. “I’d eat that cake for sure.”

It was April of 2009, just four weeks before our graduation at Gettysburg College, and we were just 22. I never thought I’d know a murderer. Certainly Kevin never thought he’d be one. My biggest concern that night was packing: how in the world I’d fit a swivel chair into the back of my Toyota Camry.

“That’s easy,” Kevin had told me. “You just put it in on a diagonal.”

Then 12 hours passed, and I sat in my living room, watching “The Price Is Right” in my pajamas, while blocks north, police combed through Kevin’s apartment, stripped him of his possessions, and told him to look into the camera.

“Straight ahead,” they might have said, and then they pressed his inky finger to a pad of paper.

* * *

Kevin and I had been friends at that point for nearly four years, since the first week of freshmen year. Gettysburg College was a private school of just over 2,000 students, and it sat surrounded by the historic battlefields that had once served as the turning point of the Civil War. Forty-six thousand men died on the fields surrounding our private campus, but we ever only knew the college green, the library, an Irish bar, a Dairy Queen. That evening, we’d gone for drinks at a bar that had once been used as a makeshift hospital, but I only joked about the bodies: how undoubtedly their blood once soaked and permeated into the floors.

To me it was funny: the subtext of violence in everything. I couldn’t see the bodies or the men strapped to leather gurneys. I couldn’t hear their cries or the gunfire or the hulking cannons. I ordered a Bay Breeze with extra limes, and then Kevin walked me home.

So when the newspapers announced what happened, I sat down and wrote a letter. He was my friend and was now in prison; everything else seemed arbitrary.

I can’t make sense of what you did,I wrote. I will try to understand, but I obviously wish this hadn’t happened.

This was all I could say — the only things I knew with absolute certainty I would never regret. I knew even then that details might emerge even before Kevin received my letter, and so to say that I’d be there for him, or that I trusted it’d been a mistake — there seemed a risk in each admission.

It took 18 months for defense and prosecuting attorneys to finalize their case, and all the while, I wrote him monthly: a careful letter detailing my life. When finally the lawyers were ready to present their arguments, they chose to settle for a plea bargain, instead. Kevin was sentenced to 27 to 50 years in a maximum-security prison, but this in lieu of an arduous trial, one that would be undoubtedly difficult for everyone involved. He was not obligated to receive mental health treatment, not required to ever talk about what happened. and because there was never a trial, the only information I’ll ever have is what I first heard on the evening news.

* * *

I still write Kevin once a month. I tell him about everything: how I visited the Iowa State Fair, for example, or how I saw an astronaut carved from butter. How I’d eaten the state’s largest pork tenderloin and half of the 50 food items served on sticks. And I think — every time — about asking: What happened that night and how in the world could it?

But instead I say nothing, because I fear I am not equipped. I have no idea how to handle his mental illness, which I know is still ongoing, because every few months — along with his letter — he includes a new graphic story: a woman stabs a man in the neck, or blood oozes into a loaf of bread. He is trying — the best he can — to work through whatever happened, but there are no professionals assisting him along the way, no trained specialists to help him get better. He’ll spend nearly his whole life in prison, safe from society but never himself.

It is tempting — considering recent events — to jump to a grandiose conclusion, to assert what I have learned, to say that my friendship with Kevin Schaeffer has taught me everything, including this world. That in knowing him, I know myself. But the truth is, I’ve learned nothing, and I’m not certain I ever will, except that our society is one of indifference and apathy for the mentally ill. Through Kevin, I’ve learned the facts: that the rate of mental illness in inmates is five times that of the general population, that it’s rising with every year, that we put the sick in prisons because we don’t know what else to do. And in the past three years alone, $2.2 billion has been cut from state mental-health budgets.

“Wishing that mental illness would not exist has led our policymakers to shape a healthcare system as if it did not exist,” announced Paul Appelbaum, president of the American Psychiatric Association, in his inaugural address.

I think even about the media coverage, how the footage is always sensational: the body, the blood, the mother, how she grieves deep into her husband in some suburban, fenced-in yard.

Meanwhile, they keep appearing: I mean here, of course, Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, the Tsarnaev brothers. We hate these men because it’s easy, but we never consider what remains difficult: that mental illness is real and pressing, that if left untreated, it results in violence. That rather than fear or ignore the ill, we should work for treatment and a resolution.

I feel like an animal, Kevin wrote me once. I feel locked inside a cage.

* * *

This month marked the four-year anniversary of all that happened, and still I wait for a letter that comes monthly. The envelopes are always stamped to indicate they originated in a prison, and when I stand in my foyer and hold them, I think, Friend. I don’t think, Crime.

It seems to me someone should be listening to him, even if that person is only me.

So I read with attention about each new cellmate, each new book, each new class, or the radio Kevin’s finally saving for so that he can again listen to music.

A friend or family member asks me what he was like, and it’s all I can do to just be honest. “He was one of my best friends,” I say. “He was normal. He made great salsa.”

The Kevin I know is not the Kevin anyone imagines. They know only the man in a jumpsuit, his hands shackled to his waist. We crave for things to be simple — a case of a bad man who was bad — but Kevin was my friend, and that night, he walked me home. He is both the man I remember and the one who now lives in prison. Our friendship isn’t one documented by the cameras, not by the news anchors or their scripts. Above all, I know this: It is not a switch one can simply turn off.

Write back, Kevin writes, and each month, I always do.

Bill Moyers: Our Media Is Polluted by Toxic Lies About the Risks Posed by Lead

Bill Moyers, David Rosner, Gerald Markowitz, BillMoyers.com — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:43:00 -0700

There’s no safe level of exposure to this dangerous toxin still lurking in millions of homes, but that truth is consistently under attack from industry-funded public relations excecutives.

From BillMoyers.com:

INTRO:Science can be a battleground — witness the politics of climate change, the teaching of evolution, the uncharted terrain of genetic modification and stem cell research, among other contentious issues. But when industries release untested chemicals into our environment — putting profits before public health — our children are the first to suffer. Nowhere is this more troubling than in the ongoing story of lead poisoning.

Bill talks with David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, public health historians who’ve been taking on the chemical industry for years — writing about the hazards of industrial pollution and the neglect of worker safety — despite industry efforts to undermine them. Their latest book, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, is the culmination of 20 years of research. Markowitz and Rosner warn that, for young children, there’s no safe level of exposure to this dangerous toxin still lurking in millions of homes.

The authors discuss thwarted efforts to hold the lead industry accountable, failed attempts to find cheap solutions, and the cost to the future of our children. As long as the chemical industry and its powerful lobbies prevail in blocking efforts to reform outdated laws, Markowitz and Rosner say, we will continue to float in a soup of toxins — inhaling, drinking, and absorbing chemicals that we may learn, years later, have put us all in harm’s way.

***

BILL MOYERS: At the end of a week that reminded us to be ever vigilant about the dangers of government overreaching its authority, whether by the long arm of the IRS or the Justice Department, let’s pause to think about another threat, from too much private power over public policy.

All too often, instead of acting as a brake, government becomes the enabler of corporate power and greed, undermining the very rules and regulations intended to keep us safe.

Think of inadequate inspections of food and those infections which kill 3,000 Americans each year and make many millions sick. Think of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available today. Only a handful have been tested for safety. Think of the explosion of perhaps as much as half a million pounds of ammonium nitrate in that Texas fertilizer plant. People can die when government winks at bad corporate practices.

As long as there are insufficient checks and balances on big business and its powerful lobbies, you and I are at their mercy. Which is why their ability to buy off public officials is an assault on democracy and a threat to our lives and health. Keep that in mind as I introduce you to David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz.

Some years ago, their book, Deceit and Denial, told how the chemical industry tried to conceal the truth about untested and unregulated chemicals in our food, water, and air. Twenty companies responded with a vicious campaign to smear their reputations. That proved hard to do, actually, impossible.

Gerald Markowitz is a distinguished professor of history at both John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. David Rosner is co-director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University where he also teaches science and history.

This is their new book, which revisits a chemical menace you might have thought was behind us, but isn’t: Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children.

BILL MOYERS: Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner, welcome.

DAVID ROSNER: Thank you.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Thank you.

BILL MOYERS: Your book concludes that after all these years, lead is still a problem.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Absolutely. You know, in some ways the story of lead is a great success. We’ve reduced the amount of lead in children's blood and we've gotten lead out of gasoline and we've gotten lead out of paint. But there are still children who have too much lead in their blood. And it is endangering their life chances, endangering their futures.

BILL MOYERS: Does it kill?

DAVID ROSNER: It doesn't kill anymore. It used to send kids into convulsions, into comas and into paroxysms and ultimately killed them up until the 1980s. But we've gotten lead levels down to the point where we're now discovering new, even in some sense, more troubling problems.

BILL MOYERS: What's the most important thing you've discovered about lead since we last talked?

DAVID ROSNER: Well, that in what we would once have considered miniscule amounts lead in children can cause neurological damage, causes behavioral problems, attention deficit disorders, dyslexia. Studies show that children who are exposed in utero can have permanent neurological changes that put them at risk later in life for learning disabilities that lead to failure in school and IQ loss. There are a whole series of problems that we never even thought about in the old days, so to speak.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: It's shocking that we know that children can be prevented from any kind of lead poisoning if they are, live in a home that is lead free. And this is no longer, you know, a priority of the country. We still have many homes millions of homes that contain lead that are endangering our children.

BILL MOYERS: Is it the cost of getting rid of the lead from homes that are already established and we're living in, is that the main barrier?

DAVID ROSNER: For some it is. But the history of public health, and that's what we are, historians, is rife with examples of decisions that are very costly that we decided are necessary for the population as a whole.

But somehow because we have in some sense accepted a definition of what the problem is and who the victims are and we've devalued their lives, we decided not to address this issue because it's quote, “too costly.”

GERALD MARKOWITZ: We really made a morally bankrupt calculation that it is less costly to endanger the health and futures of our children rather than to protect them by paying to remove lead from their homes.

DAVID ROSNER: The message really should be is we need to really think of lead as one symbol, one symptom of this much larger problem of the pollution of our children, pollution of their lives, the pollution of all of us from a whole host of toxic materials that we are, we've grown accustomed to using and tend to put out of our consciousness.

BILL MOYERS: When I first met you, people were saying, scientists were saying, that the smaller the dose of lead, the exposure to lead, the safer it would be.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Scientists now say that it is very likely there is no safe level of lead, that any amount of lead in a child's body, in a child's blood, you know, causes a variety of neurological and intellectual problems. So this is really a sea-change in our understanding of what, the amount of a toxin that causes a problem for children.

DAVID ROSNER: We no longer have children convulsing and going into comas. In other parts of the world they still are from lead exposures. In Africa, in Nigeria, children still are exposed to huge amounts of lead from a variety of sources. And a recent article indicates that we're still selling lead paint, for example, to other countries despite the fact that we in this country no longer use it on our walls. But if you look at where lead poisoning is most prevalent, when you look at the communities that are most affected by lead they're usually communities, poor communities, working class communities, parts of the cities that are more run down because the lead that is dangerous is the lead that comes off of walls of old buildings. And walls of old buildings that are not maintained give off more lead than walls of old buildings that have been recently renovated. It's hard to believe how much lead there is in an old home. I mean, we often think of paint as just a lot of liquid with a little bit of color. But in fact, when you looked at lead paint and you lifted it in your grandfather's garage or, you know, my grandfather's garage, it was very, very heavy. And that's because about, in that can of paint there was 15 pounds of lead. And that was being painted on walls, three coats on each wall, every five to ten years, whatever the renovation took. We were putting literally hundreds and hundreds of pounds of lead, a deadly toxin at that point, that a small fingernail's worth could actually cause convulsions, into the children's environment.

BILL MOYERS: Well, there were ads actually promoting lead paint as the right paint for your home.

DAVID ROSNER: They said that lead paint was a friend of the child and that it could be spread on any surface and it could be fun to do. And they showed these ads in which children are painting their toys, painting their cabinets, painting their walls, painting their furniture with a poison. At the same time when all these cases are appearing in the medical press about lead poisoned children, at the same time when in their own internal documents they're saying, we have these examples, we have, we're being attacked because children and babies are getting poisoned by lead on their cribs.

And so you see this kind of progression of this problem from the 1930s when it once killed children and sent them into comas straight through the early 2000s and now when the CDC says there are a half million children, I mean half million children at risk, a half million children with elevated blood lead levels. This would be a national epidemic, I mean, if this were meningitis, if this were polio. I mean, could you imagine the reaction of the society?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And the industry said over 50 years ago that this was an insoluble problem, it was a problem of, caused by slums, it was a problem caused by who they called uneducable parents. And so that they washed their hands of the problem and they have still washed their hands of the problem. Parents have played, excuse me, paid the cost of lead poisoning. Landlords have even paid the cost of lead poisoning. The government has paid the cost of lead poisoning. The industry has not paid to get that lead off the walls so future generations of children can be protected.

BILL MOYERS: What your critics say is, look, it's like gasoline in cars. We didn't intend harmful effects to come from a product that was fueling America's economy. We found out later and we're trying to cut back on emissions.

This applies as well to lead and other toxins in our environment. Nobody intended it, it proved to be a consequence of, as even you say in here, the enormous amount of material we've taken out of the earth and turned into the engine of our prosperity.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Well, unfortunately they didn't give them the information about the dangers of lead that they had. They knew that lead was killing children in the 1930s. They knew that researchers were uncovering lead and they were fighting those, the diagnoses of lead poisoning in children. They, even into the 1970s and '80s, they went after researchers like Herbert Needleman who were uncovering the low levels of lead that were damaging children. They were not innocent purveyors of a product. They were actively involved in the political dialog attempting to increase their profits at the expense of public health.

BILL MOYERS: I interviewed Herbert Needleman some years ago for a documentary on Kids and Chemicals. Let's take a look.

BILL MOYERS in Kids and Chemicals: In the late 1970s Dr. Needleman studied the baby teeth of healthy schoolchildren in two Boston suburbs […]

DR. HERBERT NEEDLEMAN in Kids and Chemicals: When we looked at the data, we found that children who had high lead in their teeth, but who had never been identified as having any problems with lead, had lower IQ scores, poorer language function, and poorer attention.

BILL MOYERS in Kids and Chemicals: It was a stunning discovery, and no one knew it better than the lead industry. Leaded gasoline was the single greatest source of lead exposure, and as a result of Needleman’s work the Environmental Protection Agency sped up efforts to ban it. The lead industry fought back, denying Needleman’s science.

JEROME COLE in Kids and Chemicals: Lead has been used in gasoline for over 60 years. There’s simply no evidence that anyone in the general public has ever been harmed by this usage […]

DR. PHILIP LANDRIGAN in Kids and Chemicals: The lead industry attacked it viciously and they attacked Dr. Needleman himself. They accused him of scientific misconduct and they actually filed charges against him at his university and at the National Institutes of Health.

DR. HERBERT NEEDLEMAN in Kids and Chemicals: It’s like a death sentence. If you’re found guilty of scientific misconduct you’re out of business; your reputation is ruined; you’re through.[…]

BILL MOYERS in Kids and Chemicals: The assault went on for three years. For three years, Dr. Needleman stood his ground.

DR. PHILIP LANDRIGAN in Kids and Chemicals: Those were tough years in Dr. Needleman’s life. Eventually those charges were shown to be baseless and the people that brought them forward who had portrayed themselves as neutral scientists were, in fact, revealed as consultants to the lead industry. It took several years for the truth to out. But he triumphed.

DR. HERBERT NEEDLEMAN in Kids and Chemicals: I knew I was right. I mean, I knew that the work was good. I knew that my colleagues who worked with me on it were honest people. But I realized that science is not always the polite intellectual activity that it appears to be; that environmental science sometimes becomes something closer to warfare.

BILL MOYERS: So that's why you called this Lead Wars, I assume?

DAVID ROSNER: That's right.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Yes.

DAVID ROSNER: That's where the title comes from. This is one of the, you know, tactics of this industry, of these industries to essentially control the regulators, to find ways of both undermining, in Herb Needleman's case, the integrity or the scientific integrity of the researcher by trying to attack his personality or his research, his data, but also trying to find ways of getting the regulatory agencies in government to see anyone who in any way cast doubt on their product as biased as opposed to a neutral observer. But it wasn't only lead. The more industries we look at, the more like other industries the lead story is.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

DAVID ROSNER: Well, you look at the asbestos story. Our homes are still, you know, covered with asbestos. It's on, in old homes, it's on the shingles that, you know, we use, it's in the floor coverings that, the vinyl that we use, it’s on the roofs. It's on our boil, older boilers still, but when you look at the history of asbestos the knowledge about that product goes back literally decades and decades and decades.

Then you look at the silica industry, the, when you look at the vinyl chloride industry, when you look at the PCB story. And the same unfortunate, the same unfolding of, what can you say but corporate greed.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And in addition to the corporate greed there is their war on science. The attacks on global warming. There is a war on bisphenol A, which is in a wide variety of products, it is virtually in every human being in the United States--

BILL MOYERS: What is it?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: It is basically an ingredient in plastic that is in the linings of cans, it's even in receipts that we get every day from a clerk at a store, the credit card receipt. And we take that and that has bisphenol A on it. And we end up absorbing that.

There's been a tremendous amount of research that shows that it is an endocrine disruptor, that it causes a disruption of the endocrine system that can affect reproduction, that can affect development of the fetus. But it's also a carcinogen. And so this is a real problem that the industry has been fighting to cast doubt on really amazing science that has been done by a wide variety of people.

BILL MOYERS: Just this April California's Environmental Protection Agency put it on its toxins list. The American Chemistry Council is suing California to keep this off of that list of dangerous substances.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And they are supporting research that, as David said creates doubt about the independent scientists who are finding these variety of subtle and not so subtle effects. And they are determined, as they did, as we talked about in tobacco, in global warming, in lead, in asbestos, to make people not be convinced. And if they're not convinced, if they have a question in their mind, then they can continue to sell their chemical.

BILL MOYERS: You two have been yourselves the subject of harassment, legal suits, attacks, efforts to discredit you, right?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Absolutely.

DAVID ROSNER: There was an article in a legal journal that kind of warned us about what was going to happen. It talked about the title of our book--

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Which was Deadly Dust.

DAVID ROSNER: --which was called Deadly Dust. And it said, you know, we could let Rosner and Markowitz play by themselves in their own little play yard of historians, but they, their book has appeared in lawsuits against the industry. And it has become the dominant narrative or it's becoming the dominant narrative of how silicosis is understood. Therefore we have to do something about them. They didn't quite say it in those words, but that was the implication.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Well, they said, you know, be an academic and talk only to academics. But when you talk to the public that's dangerous.

DAVID ROSNER: And then very shortly afterwards we found Deceit and Denial, the next book we did came under enormous attack. They actually subpoenaed the press, they subpoenaed the foundation that supported us, the Milbank Foundation.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: They subpoenaed the peer reviewers of the book for a university press.

DAVID ROSNER: And then they hired a historian to call us unethical, lousy historians, to attack minor footnotes in the book that weren't wrong, but he claimed were wrong. It was quite an attack. And I think the biggest thing they do, though, is try to introduce doubt. One of the issues that they constantly are raising is you don't have definitive, you don't have definitive proof that in 60 years, for example, children might develop cancer from exposure to bisphenol A, right. You don't have the long term studies that we think are really essential.

But you introduce doubt about the data and then you find other people to introduce studies that raise questions about it. So you introduce, it's really the production of uncertainty. Produce uncertainty about the issue and we as an industry have no obligation to prevent disease. And it's completely antithetical to everything that public health could, public health's supposed to be about preventing disease and you always work on imperfect data. You never have the long term 60-year study that tells you you're going to have damage 60 years from now. So that's one of the tactics, it's just to keep saying there's a question, there's a question.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And to attack people like Herbert Needleman, and to create the kind of uncertainty that gives parents pause. Should I act or should I not act? And that is probably the, as David says, the most dangerous thing they do.

BILL MOYERS: But it's consistent with what you have learned as historians this industry and others have done over the years to whistleblowers, to truth tellers, to neutral scientists and journalists who are just simply trying to report what the public should know.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: But if you can't contest the message then you go after the messenger. But think about all the younger academics who are deciding what they're going to study, what they're going to work on. And for those people it is a real decision. Are they going to go up against powerful industries or are they going to do something safe? And our fear is that more and more younger scholars and younger scientists will end up doing something safe rather than something that could really make a difference in the public arena.

BILL MOYERS: Both of you were witnesses in that big case in Rhode Island. Can you summarize that and what happened?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Well, this was the longest civil trial in Rhode Island history, or at least up to that point. And it was a remarkable effort by the attorney general of the state of Rhode Island to prevent future damages for lead’s harm to the children of Rhode Island. It was really a public health lawsuit, an amazing public health lawsuit.

BILL MOYERS: As I understand it Senator Whitehouse whom I have met had this problem before he was a senator. He had inadvertently exposed his own children to lead when he renovated his house. And then he became attorney general and brought this suit to try to hold the industry accountable.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: It took, unfortunately, his personal tragedy to get him to take this extraordinarily important action. And we were asked to testify in that case to provide the historical evidence of what the lead industry knew about the dangers and what did they do with that knowledge, which basically was to deny that there was a problem, to say that this was a public relations problem for them rather than a public health problem.

Our documents showed that they had been, they'd known about what they were creating, they'd known that children would be poisoned, they were discussing children dying as early as the 1920s and '30s, and yet they had created this huge environmental mess of millions and millions of pounds on the walls of Rhode Island, all of which was waiting to poison future generations.

DAVID ROSNER: And that they had done nothing about it, they continued to market. And that really, I think, enraged the jury.

GERALD MARKOWITZ And we were thrilled, just thrilled when at the end of this trial the jury came back and for the first time in lead industry lawsuits they held three lead companies responsible for cleaning up the mess, in the form of lead paint on the walls of houses throughout Rhode Island.

BILL MOYERS: So the jury said the industry has to clean up and pay for it?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: For the first time?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: First time.

DAVID ROSNER: This was the high point of our professional careers, the idea that we could use history and we could use the legal system really prevent disease for the future, not just pay back for the damages already done that were irreversible to children, but to actually prevent future generations. This was a suit that actually was going to demand somewhere between $1 billion and $4 billion from the companies to clean up the mess they had created. The low point of our lives, our professional lives, came two years later when the Supreme Court in Rhode Island overturned the decision.

BILL MOYERS: And what was the basis for them taking it back?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Basically, they said that the lawsuit was filed under the wrong law, that it was filed under public nuisance law rather than under liability law.

DAVID ROSNER: What's interesting now is that there's another suit coming up in California. And there was fear that the California suit would not go forward because they thought the precedent of the Rhode Island Supreme Court denying the legitimacy of the suit would undermine that case. The Court in California rejected the arguments of the Supreme Court in Rhode Island. The Supreme Court of Rhode Island had said this can't go under, there is no standing in future generations to get damages from these companies because they haven't been damaged yet. Until the kids are damaged you can't actually sue. And California has said that absolutely, public health law is all based upon preventing disease. All regulations are in order to prevent future damage, therefore it can go forward in California. So we're quite excited because in June this court is, this case is going to be heard by a California jury.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me about the Baltimore case that you write about.

DAVID ROSNER: In the 1980s, researchers at Hopkins wanted to find a way of remedying the conditions of Baltimore's housing, which lead was all over the place. And they were trying to find a way of doing it cheaply. So what they did is they set up three kinds of housing, one of which has been renovated to $1,650 worth of renovation, another to $3,500 and the last to $7,000 worth of renovation.

And then they recruited mothers, young mothers with children between the ages of six months to five years to live in these different houses, knowing that each house had lead exposures, but that if they could find which was the cheapest and which was the most effective way of lowering the blood lead level, not actually eliminating lead but lowering it a little bit.

GERALD MARKOWITZ: And perhaps the most troubling part of the experiment was that we've seen the consent forms and the consent forms do not tell parents that living in these homes may cause their children to be lead poisoned.

And as a result they ended up exposing 100 kids to less than fully abated homes expecting that most of those blood lead levels of those children would go down. And in fact, for most of the children their blood lead levels did go down. But some of the children, their blood lead levels went up.

DAVID ROSNER: What the court says is they were using children as human guinea pigs, as canaries in the mine so to speak, they were using them to measure the effectiveness of each one of their methods of abating lead. You know, this is young women, single mothers by and large with children, young children. And--

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Overwhelmingly African American.

DAVID ROSNER: And this is the, one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the country, Johns Hopkins.

BILL MOYERS: Weren't they trying to figure out how little could be spent to protect children in the short term? And wasn't that the wrong question altogether, don’t we need to solve these problem for the long run?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Absolutely. And the lead researchers understood that the only way to solve the problem of lead poisoning in children was to get rid of all the lead from the walls. But they didn't think that there would be the political will to do that.

BILL MOYERS: Why don't we have that political will?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Basically the industry has bought that political system.

DAVID ROSNER: For the past 40 years really we've been living under this set of assumptions about the scarcity in our society, how we can't afford anything and how government can't do anything. Government is the problem, not the answer. That's diametrically opposed to virtually all principles of course of public health which sees government as something that really could do something good. And but we've been taught over and over again that it's too expensive and government is the problem. And therefore we're incapacitated.

BILL MOYERS: With millions, billions of dollars at stake in profits aren't they following a kind of logic of capitalism?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: They absolutely are following the logic of capitalism. But we are all research subjects in a grand experiment where we are being exposed to literally thousands of chemicals that we have no data about. And do we want to know in ten, 20, 30 years that these are going to be either making us gravely ill or killing us?

Do we want our grandchildren to be exposed to this toxic soup of chemicals and only to find out when they're in their 30s and 40s that this is endangering their lives? And there really is a way that we can handle that problem. There is legislation in Congress now, the “Safe Chemicals Act,” which would require the EPA to test all existing and, existing chemicals and the 700 chemicals that are introduced every year and to not allow those that are dangerous to continue.

BILL MOYERS: But Jerry, you know that, as you write in here about the politics of science, that the industry went to Congress in 2005 and got fracking, even before it had come to full blossom, got fracking exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act. And you think, and you have hope for any kind of legislation such as you just described?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: Well, I have hope that there were actually 29 senators who were willing to cosponsor this piece of legislation, but no, I don't have hope that it's going to pass. I think only if environmental groups all around the country, and there are hundreds of environmental groups around the country, really mobilize a mass movement to demand that Congress protect our health, we really care about our health, but we are not doing the political mobilizing that is necessary in order to put that caring about health into legislative action.

BILL MOYERS: So how is the politics of science affecting the fate of America's children?

GERALD MARKOWITZ: You know, in our lifetime we have seen the abandonment of the commitment to try to help those who are most vulnerable in our society. And instead of that commitment today we ask how much does it cost. And by that we mean how many dollars does it cost. We don't ask what does it cost in terms of the health of our children, what does it cost in terms of the futures of our children and of our society.

Is Nestle Involved in Murder Of Colombian Union Leader?

James Bargent, AlterNet — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:24:00 -0700

Luciano Romero's homicide is now taking center stage in a legal battle to define corporate responsibility in conflict zones.

On the night of September 5, 2005, two paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia hijacked Luciano Romero’s taxi as he drove through his home city of Valledupar. They took him to a nearby farm, where they tortured then murdered him. His body was found the next day, dumped behind an army garrison, with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth and 50 stab wounds; one more victim in Colombia’s dirty war against trade unionists.

However, seven years on, and while Romero may only be one of approximately 3,000 victims of that war, his murder is now taking center stage in a legal battle to define corporate responsibility in conflict zones. This battle is taking place not in Colombia, but in Switzerland, home to one of the world’s biggest multi-nationals and Romero’s former employers – Nestle.

The struggle to hold Nestle accountable for its alleged role in Romero’s death began with the 2007 conviction of Romero’s killers – itself a rarity in a country with a 95% impunity rate in unionist murders. When passing sentence, Judge José Nirio Sánchez ordered an investigation into the intellectual authors of the crime that would scrutinize the role of not only the paramilitary warlord who commanded Romero’s killers, but also the management at the Nestle subsidiary where Romero worked.

While that investigation has yet to show any sign of progress, the case has been taken up by Romero’s union, SINALTRAINAL, and human rights group the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). In 2012, the organizations filed a criminal complaint in Switzerland demanding the prosecution of Nestle for Romero’s murder.

The powdered milk factory where Romero worked, CICOLAC, was Nestlé’s first investment in Colombia, when it opened the site in 1944. The multi-national sold CICOLAC in 1982, only to buy it back again in 1998. At the time of Nestlé’s return to Valledupar, the northern state of Cesar, where the city is located, was under the control of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary army.

According to the testimonies of demobilized AUC leaders, the paramilitaries had been invited into the region by members of the region’s economic elite, who were tired of the campaign of constant harassment, kidnappings and extortion waged by leftist guerilla groups. Cesar became a fiefdom of Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, alias ‘Jorge 40,’ a member of Valledupar high society whose paramilitary empire stretched across north east Colombia.

The Cesar paramilitary block commanded by Jorge 40 was financed by the region’s cattle ranchers, dairy farmers and other land owners and economic interests. Among them was CICOLAC – according to AUC Leader Salvatore Mancuso, who named the company in the hearings that followed the demobilization of the AUC in 2006.

The paramilitaries in Cesar employed their favored terror tactics in the battle against the guerrillas, and launched a dirty war against anyone they deemed a guerrilla “collaborator” – community leaders, leftist activists, educators and, above all, unionists.

In 1993, Harry Triana became the first CICOLAC unionist in Valledupar to fall victim to that war when killed in front of his children and work colleagues. The next came in 1996, when José Manuel Becerra Pacheco was beheaded and Alejandro Matias Vanstrahlen was shot. The following year, Toribio De La Hoz was shot while celebrating his 42nd birthday in his home and in 1999 Victor Mieles and his wife were abducted in front of one of Nestlé’s Cesar factories and later murdered.

Despite the violence, Luciano Romero emerged as a leading figure in the local union movement. “He was a person who had really absorbed the union’s values,” said Alfonso Baron, a friend of Romero’s and a local SINALTRAINAL leader who has worked at CICOLAC since 1986. “He was a good friend, a good companion, he showed solidarity and fraternity, he was respectful, a hard worker and he looked out for others.”

However, Romero’s activities soon attracted unwanted attentions. In 1988, the Colombian judicial police abducted Romero and tortured him in a secret prison for a week, according to a legal statement submitted by the unionist. By the late nineties, Romero’s work at the union and social activism had attracted the attentions of the paramilitaries, and he started receiving death threats.

The relationship between Romero and CICOLAC was strained. In 1999, a bomb went off at the factory, injuring one person – Luciano Romero. The company CEO, Carlos Fajardo, accused Romero of planting the bomb. The implication – that Romero was working with guerrillas – did not go unnoticed. It was a slur the union heard time and again from the company management, and especially from Fajardo.

“When someone says we are guerrillas it is dangerous,” said Baron. “In this country saying these things publically is risky because you don’t know who is there, who is listening, who is talking.”

The smear persisted even after Romero’s death but was finally laid to rest by the judge in the trial of Romero’s killers, who dismissed attempts to link Romero to the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN) as unfounded.

As well as the accusations the union worked with the guerrillas, Fajardo also hinted at his own connections to the paramilitaries. “To ingratiate himself with the union he would ring us up and warn us to be careful because we’re going to ‘see some things’” said Baron. Fajardo warned union members several times that Romero was on a death list, once saying he could protect the unionist as long as he remained at the company, according to witnesses.

The relationship between Romero and the company began to break down terminally in 2002, when Romero led taut negotiations over an expiring labor agreement. What should have been standard negotiations quickly descended into a crisis. “It was a very tense situation,” said Baron. “The company launched an attack to strip away all our social and economic rights.”

The union began to prepare for a strike. Within days, the paramilitaries began running night patrols and distributing threatening leaflets, and word reached the unionists that if they went on strike they would be killed. Rumors of a death list with Luciano Romero’s name on it began to circulate.

According to witnesses, notorious paramilitaries appeared at the factory when the union was holding protest meetings. Among them was Hughes Rodriguez Fuentes, also known as “Comandante Barbie.”

Rodriguez was a finance chief for the AUC’s Martierres War Front of Cesar – the paramilitary unit that Romero’s assassins belonged to. The authorities in both Colombia and the United States believe he was a trusted ally of Jorge 40, and one of the warlord’s principal money launderers and fund raisers. He was also one of CICOLAC’s milk suppliers, and, according to witnesses, a personal friend of Carlos Fajardo.

During the labor dispute, the CICOLAC management told Rodriguez and the other milk suppliers that the union’s labor demands would push down milk prices while a strike would lead to the closure of the plant.

Also among those CICOLAC milk suppliers was Hernando Molina Araujo, a future Governor of Cesar, whose term was cut short after he conspired with the AUC to assassinate a local university professor. Another was Gustavo Gnecco, member of an infamous family of local power brokers who moved easily between the worlds of legitimate business and the drug trade, politics and paramilitarism.

With tensions building and violence looking likely, the union cancelled the strike. Not long after, Romero was one of nine workers, six of them union leaders, fired by CICOLAC – illegally according to the union. Ten months later, the company fired 99% of the workforce, and sold CICOLAC to DPA – a company jointly owned by Nestle and New Zealand based Fonterra. The workforce for the renamed DPA-CICOLAC was forced to accept reduced terms, and for many of them, temporary contracts. According to Baron, ten years and two rounds of labor negotiations later, workers still earn less than they did in 2002.

Despite the end of the dispute and Romero’s sacking, the threats against the union continued. In 2004, he went into exile through a protection program. However, he returned to Valledupar in 2005. “I would imagine his return was influenced by the emptiness of not being with his family, of not seeing his wife and children,” said Baron. “Being away from your home country is a form of slow death.”

By September, Romero was preparing to denounce Nestle as witness at the Permanent Peoples Tribunal in Switzerland. He was also working on the complaint he had filed against the company for unfair dismissal, and organizing a protest to commemorate the second anniversary of the mass lay off of the CICOLAC workers.

Just days before the protest was scheduled to take place, Jose Ustariz Acuña and Jhonatan David Contrera received orders from their AUC commanders to abduct, interrogate and murder an ELN guerrilla pretending to be a taxi driver by the name of Luciano Romero.

Neither the union nor ECCHR accuse Nestle of ordering Romero’s murder. However, they insist the company is responsible for his death. “The paramilitaries punished us precisely because we made demands of the company,” said Edgar Paez, a member of the union’s national leadership. “They have a very close relationship that does not permit us to exercise our right to organize, to unionize.”

Responsibility not only lies with the CICOLAC management but also with the Nestle parent company, according to Claudia Mueller-Hoff from ECCHR. “They are culpable because of omission, they had a duty to act, they had a duty to protect,” she said. “This risky behavior of the subsidiary is something where the Nestle parent company should have intervened because it was brought to their attention on several occasions.”

Nestle is far from the first multinational to be linked to anti-union violence and paramilitarism in Colombia and there have been investigations into subsidiaries of Chiquita, Drummond and Coca Cola. Mueller-Hoff though, is hoping this case will be different as it has the potential to help define what a company’s obligations are in conflict zones. “Parent companies need to look into their impact worldwide even if it’s an impact that is generated through their subsidiaries,” she said.

Nestle firmly denied it shares responsibility for Romero’s death. In a written statement for AlterNet, the company said: “We have never used violence, nor have we associated with criminals. We have no responsibility whatsoever, directly or indirectly, neither by action nor omission for the murder of Luciano Romero.”

However, Nestle declined to comment on the relationship between the CICOLAC management, the milk suppliers and paramilitaries, or on the accusations of reckless slander against the management, and the events of the labor dispute. It also declined to comment on Salvatore Mancuso’s testimony that CICOLAC had funded the AUC.

Progress in the case has so far been hampered by legal wrangling. In early May, the five Nestle executives named in the complaint avoided the possibility of prosecution when the statute of limitations for the crime expired after the Swiss courts had argued over jurisdiction for a year. “It seems to be an attempt to avoid dealing with the important legal questions at stake,” said Mueller-Hoff. “The Swiss public prosecutor has even fallen behind our relatively modest expectations.”

However, the ECCHR, SINALTRAINAL and Romero’s family are still optimistic the second target of the complaint – Nestle as a company – can still be prosecuted. Under Swiss law, the statute of limitations only begins for a company when it ends the practices it is accused of. According to SINALTRAINAL, this has yet to happen.

While Jorge 40 and the AUC have now demobilized, paramilitary successor groups, often led by former mid-level commanders, continue to terrorize unionists working at Nestle today.

In 2011, Roberto Gonzalez became the 13th Nestle unionist to be murdered when he was shot in the back in Valledupar. In 2012, 23 SINALTRAINAL members who are current or former Nestle workers received death threats.

“Every time there is a labor dispute, there is a leap in paramilitarism,” said Paez. “The threats come, people are followed, there are some really difficult security situations.”

Some of the threats received last year directly referenced protests SINALTRAINAL had led against Nestle, including one promising to “exterminate” the union for their campaign at Nestlé’s Bugalagrande factory. The tone of the threats has changed little since the paramilitary heyday and recipients remain, as in one threat sent by neo-paramilitary group the Urabeños, “guerrilla sons of bitches disguised as unionists.”

Paez believes the links between paramilitarism and the landowning elite who supply DPA-CICOLAC with milk have also changed little. “DPA is still buying milk and they buy this milk from these men, who in some way have connections to paramilitarism,” he said.

While the struggle to hold corporations accountable for their role in Colombia’s dirty war continues, those on the front lines of that war have little doubt as to who it has benefited from the violence. “In Luciano’s case who won?” said Baron. “The state won because there is one man less in the struggle, the company won because they benefited directly and above all, the bosses won because they managed to show that with violence you can bring an end to unionism.”

Keep the Arctic Cold: Why the Rush to Drill Alaska Must Be Stopped

Subhankar Banerjee, Seven Stories Press — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:23:00 -0700

A leading international voice on arctic conservation addresses President Obama’s strategy for tapping America’s northern frontier.

I wrote a letter to the editor as a follow up to the generous review “In the Beautiful,Threatened North” by Ian Frazier in The New York Review of Books of the anthology, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point that I edited. My letter, “Can Shell Be Stopped?” has just been published in the New York Review.

After the June 6 issue (with my letter) went to the printer a few significant things happened that relate to the letter that I’ll mention here briefly. On May 10, the White House published a 13-page document, “National Strategy for the Arctic Region.” It opens with a one-page introduction by President Obama. He begins with these words: “We in the lower forty-eight and Hawaii join Alaska’s residents in recognizing one simple truth that the Arctic is an amazing place.” All fifty-five contributors in Arctic Voices, I’m sure, will be very pleased with these words from the President. But before the tears of joy could flow down my cheeks, the droplets dried up as I began to read the second paragraph: “Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.” In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.” Of course the report mentions protecting the environment but gives no specific details. This major report from the White House was released after we came to know that on midnight on May 7, the average global CO2 concentration had reached 400 parts per million (ppm). The pre-industrial average was 280 ppm. The Scientific American reported, “[T]he last time CO2 levels are thought to have been this high was more than 2.5 million years ago, an era known as the Pliocene.” This is so significant that Scientific American now plans to publish in the coming year a “400 ppm” series of articles, “to examine what this invisible line in the sky means for the global climate, the planet and all the living things on it, including human civilization.” And George Monbiot correctly pointed out in The Guardian, “The only way forward now is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350 ppm, as the 350.org campaign demands.” We may have forgotten, or didn’t pay attention, that the Arctic had reached 400 ppm almost exactly a year ago. A May 31, 2012 press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated, “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Barrow, Alaska, reached 400 parts per million (ppm) this spring, according to NOAA measurements, the first time a monthly average measurement for the greenhouse gas attained the 400 ppm mark in a remote location. … Carbon dioxide at six other remote northern sites in NOAA’s international cooperative air sampling network also reached 400 ppm at least once this spring: at a second site in Alaska and others in Canada, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and an island in the North Pacific.” Arctic is the barometer of our planet. When it comes to climate change, if you want to know what will happen tomorrow, do not hire an astrologer, instead simply pay attention to what’s happening in the Arctic today. Dr. James Hansen and I are currently engaged in a conversation that will be published in the paperback edition of Arctic Voices in August. As Jim told me, “We must keep the Arctic cold, for us to have a stable planet.” Drilling in the Arctic Ocean is a wrong path for the planet. By asking “Can Shell Be Stopped?” in the NYR, I wasn’t interested in philosophical contemplation but rather to figure out a practical path that might stop oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean–a small but significant step toward helping to “keep the Arctic cold.”

Being a Democracy Hating, Corporate Power-Defending Newspaper Owner Runs Deep in the Koch Family

Yasha Levine, Not Safe for Work Corporation — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:16:00 -0700

The Koch bros are rumored to be possible bidders for the Tribune company and its large regional papers including the LA Times ... their grandfather Harry Koch would be proud.

This article first appeared at Not Safe for Work Corporation.

There’s a rumor going around that the Koch brothers are interested in buying up the Tribune Company, which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun… And there’s a lot of speculation about what would happen if they did.

Some worry, and rightly so, that the Kochs—whose combined wealth makes them the biggest billionaires on the planet—would integrate the Tribune Co. with the rest of their free-market thinktank-industrial complex, and turn its newly acquired news media property into a gigantic business propaganda machine. Half the reporters at the Los Angeles Times even took a vote saying they’d quit if the Kochs bought the paper.

Others are positively enthusiastic about the possible takeover. Slate’s Matthew Yglesias, for one, argued that "America would be better off for it" because the Kochs would spent lots of money building a better "conservative media product."

But while the country’s media commentators busy themselves trying to predict what Koch ownership would mean for newspapers, many of them are overlooking one important fact: We already know. Because the Koch family has a long history of newspaper ownership.

The Kochs and newspapers go waaay back, right back to their grandfather Harry Koch (yep, that’s a real name), who emigrated to America from the Netherlands in 1888 and bought a newspaper in a podunk railroad town in North Texas called Quanah. With the power of the press behind him, ol' Harry Koch went on to make a fortune for himself and his brood by aggressively rah-rahing on behalf of railroad and banking interests, fighting organized labor and savaging New Deal programs.

Not much is known is known about Harry Koch. Charles and David Koch don’t like to talk about him much. And when they do talk about Grandpa Harry, they don’t tell the truth. Like a lot of billionaires, they want the public to think they're self-made, that they came from humble beginnings, and so they portray their grandpa as if he was a po' immigrant who lived on the edge of poverty, barely scratching out an existence from his tiny newspaper business.

"The whole area was very poor and people didn’t have the money to pay for their subscriptions. So they would pay in produce or chickens or eggs," Charles Koch recalled.

When I travelled to Quanah for the Texas Observer in 2011 to investigate the life of Harry Koch, and to understand the environment that spawned the most powerful brother-oligarchs of our time, I discovered that the truth is much more interesting than Charles' tale. Quanah, Texas, is the world as Harry Koch made it, through his newspapers and railroad. His sons have been remarkably true to the Darwinian-capitalist views Harry ceaselessly proclaimed in his newspaper. So, if you want to know what the Koch brothers have in mind for our country, start by taking a look at the newspaper that their Grandpa Harry Koch ran.

***

Harry Koch was born in Holland in 1867 into a wealthy family that owned farmland, ran a linseed oil mill and operated a shipping business that ran sailboats between his seaside hometown of Workum, and Amsterdam. Harry Koch's mother died when he was a child, and his father remarried a much younger woman—the daughter of a local banker—and had seven new kids with her.

Life at home didn’t satisfy young Harry. As soon as he turned 21, he emigrated to the United States, hoping to get in on the railroad boom of the late 19th C.

Real estate speculation was a major part of the railroad racket. Railroad companies had acquired huge tracts of public land for free by government grant, and needed to sell it off as quickly and as profitably as possible. That meant railroads were on the constant lookout for sympathetic newspaper publishers to help promote and sell the countless boom towns that had been planned around railroad platforms all across the nation. The railroad town newspaper publishers' job was to hype up local real estate booms and land grabs, providing an opportunity for railroads to dump their properties on gullible settlers at inflated prices

Enter: Harry Koch.

After bouncing around and learning the ropes of the newspaper business, Harry settled in the tiny frontier town of Quanah up near the panhandle, bought two of the town’s newspapers, merged them into the Quanah Tribune-Chief, and quickly established himself as the region’s most ambitious railroad booster.

When Harry moved to Quanah, the town barely existed. There was a cluster of wooden shacks, a crude railroad platform and a whole lot of sunbaked dirt — all of it owned by the Fort Worth and Denver Railway Company. The company had created Quanah just a few years earlier, and wanted to sell as much land in the area as quickly as possible.

Harry’s job was simple: sell Quanah land to as many suckers as he could con. So he dutifully filled his newspaper with wild stories of prosperity, boasting about Quanah’s fertile soil, and the fine qualities of its inhabitants, and the curative properties of the climate.

It wasn’t an easy sell. In the 1890s, North Texas was hit by a massive crop failure, a severe economic depression and low commodity prices, a triple hit that devastated the region and sent many farmers looking for greener pastures. But that didn’t faze Grandpa Harry Koch, who acted like nothing bad had happened, and went about his business hard-selling the superb productivity of the parched, dead land: "Crop failures have been unknown in this valley for twenty years," Grandpa Koch declared in his paper.

He’d print anything, so long as it lured settlers with some loose change in their pockets.

Harry Koch ran his newspaper, the Tribune-Chief like an unofficial sales and advertising division of the Fort Worth and Denver Railway Company, working on commission and kickbacks. Records show that the Ft. Worth-Denver Railway paid Harry directly for his "advertising services." Sometimes the railroad remunerated him in land instead of cash, allowing him to cash in on a real estate bubble that he was helping to inflate. The more he hard-sold the riches of Quanah, the more cash he pocketed.

Grandpa Koch worked hard, and he was credited with helping turn the town into a major regional transportation hub with three different railroad lines going through it. It didn't hurt that he got rich in the process.

Over time, Harry took an increasingly active role in regional development, investing in local businesses and branching out into oil exploration. In 1910, he finally hit the big time: Harry Koch became the founding director, and one of the biggest shareholders, of a local railroad company, the Quanah, Acme & Pacific, which covered a short spur through a handful of towns in North Texas.

After two decades of promoting other people’s railroads, Harry got in on the railroad action himself — and all the perks that went along with it, including the easy money railroads made by bribing and extorting towns desperate to be connected to the railway line. And of course, Harry Koch's Tribune-Chief went all out in the promotional department, printing full-page advertisements for company shares and land in towns created and owned by Koch’s railroad.

Harry Koch went from being a booster to a small time railroad baron, an Ayn Rand hero of the Texas scrub. It was a huge step up in prestige and wealth, and he owed his rise to the way he used his newspaper business.

But Harry Koch wasn’t just about making money for himself. Harry saw himself as a civic-minded publisher who worked for the greater good of his community. He used his paper to educate his readers about complex political, economic, religious and cultural matters. And given that railroad workers were constantly striking for better pay, and farmers in the Populist movement agitated for nationalizing the railroads, regulating Wall Street and breaking up monopolies, the people of Texas were in dire need of the sort of proper education about the free-market facts, that Grandpa Harry Koch heroically provided.

Here are some of Grandpa Harry Koch's editorial highlights:

On unions & strikes:

Harry Koch was no friend of unionized labor. In 1897, not long after he moved to Quanah, Harry penned an impassioned editorial expressing his outrage over the way he was treated by the street railway workers of Galveston, Texas, who decided to strike on the day the National Editorial Association came to town for its annual convention, thereby rudely interrupting a procession of lavish dinners, boozing and partying. Harry was there, and described how the respectable guests were put in the awful predicament of having to walk, with their feet, from one bar to the next. But the newsmen didn’t have to endure the humiliation for long. "Santa Fe officials took pity on the suffering newspaper men and made up a train to Woolman’s lake where the oyster roast was to be held," Grandpa Harry wrote.

On government regulations:

Harry disapproved of financial regulations—or, for that matter, regulations or laws of any kind. He was an anarcho-libertarian before the term was invented! "If we depended upon laws to make us perfect the United States should be a near Utopia and Texas would be the most heavenly spot on earth," wrote Harry, sounding like one of the gazillions of libertarians paid to imitate Grandpa Harry in the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, and elsewhere. This insight didn't stop Grandpa Harry from laughing at the thousandsof people who had been defrauded by Charles Ponzi, calling them "suckers" and "idiots."

"In dear old Boston, 11,126 suckers are to hold a conference to discuss ways and means to recover some of the money they entrusted to Ponzi, a former convict. We sincerely hope most of these creditors will bring a guardian along, otherwise it may endanger the peace of the community to have so many idiots come together."

On Rockefeller and oligarch philanthropy:

Harry Koch defended fellow industrialist John D. Rockefeller from critics who accused the robber baron of setting up Chicago University to whitewash his crimes:

"True, Rockefeller’s money is tainted, but how much money is there in circulation that has not at one time or another been possessed by dishonorable men or women? … No person is altogether good or bad, and it seems to us that as long as a bad man is willing to put his money to a good cause, build universities, churches or hospitals, he should not be refused and encouraged to use his money to baser ends."

On ethnic diversity:

Harry Koch frequently weighed in on matters of race. Among other things, Charles Koch's grandpa wrote that he believes "Jews are poor politicians" and that black folks can’t be expected to live up to the moral standards of the white race.

"Marrying comes as easy to some negroes as changing their places of residence. One old negro who died here not long ago, had at least three wives living in Quanah, and several more in neighboring towns. Nobody ever thinks about prosecuting a negro for bigamy, and we suppose it is right not to hold Africans but partly civilized too strictly amenable to laws made by and for white people."

On monopoly power:

Koch published a passionate defense of monopolies and trusts, which he said got a bum rap for no reason at all.

"It is fashion this day and time for democratic newspapers to jump on to trusts and denounce them, whether good or bad. As for the Tribune-Chief, we are enough of a heretic to look upon them with a passive eye and believe that capital has the right to combine. Trusts mark a natural and important and interesting phase of our development. There is nothing in them to be afraid of: they cannot hurt the people, although we, if we pleased, could crush them. We are the people, they are our servants, our creation, altogether ours. We should therefore hold ourselves towards the trusts as masters, proud of what is good in them, anxious to remedy what is evil. And when Europe pales at the tramp of our industrial march, let us remember that we owe to the trusts much of this new-borne prestige… "Let this thing be borne in mind as significant, that all real trusts, all that are destined to succeed and endure, are established on a basis of permanent lower prices for their products. Everybody knows that sugar and oil have been considerably cheaper since these industries have been under trust control. And the same is true, barring periods of fluctuation, of all industries under effective monopoly, from steel rails to cigarettes…"

On democracy:

Harry loved monopolies — but not so much democracies, which he called "Mob-ocracy."

In a 1934 editorial headlined "Democracy’s Problem," Charles Koch's grandpa expressed to readers his concern that democracy might not be all that it’s made out to be: "Mobocracy has long since been discarded as undesirable, even if attainable, and representative democracy has in operation disclosed many defects. . ." (According to the Cato Institute, founded by Harry’s grandson Charles, our wise Founding Fathers agree with Mr. Koch: "Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’s Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.")

On public pensions:

Harry Koch raised the "welfare queen" alarm even before the country passed its first welfare laws.

In 1935, Harry Koch described how a dangerous mob of black people descended on his newspaper after a rumor spread "among Quanah’s colored population that the Tribune-Chief contained a request from the government that every man past sixty should report as an applicant for an old age pension." Harry says that was enough to get "every elderly negro in town" cramming into Tribune-Chief‘s offices. It was proof positive that African-Americans (whom you might recall Harry considered "partly civilized" and unable to observe "laws made by and for white people") were already scheming to exploit government programs made for honest white folk.

The funnies:

The Quanah Tribune-Chief kept readers entertained with funny tales about the local black community's zany hijinx in racist, segregated Texas. Here’s one:

An old Negro, passing a graveyard, saw the grave of a man he had known and paused to read the words on the tombstone. Finally he had it: "I still live," read the inscription. "Jes’ look at dat," exclaimed Old Ned. "Who he think he fooling’? If I’m ever dead, I sho’ll be man enough to own up to it."

On eugenics:

Blame Heredity, Not Nature Both the Texas Senate and House are reported to be favoring bills providing for the sterilization of some of the inmates of insane asylums and prisons. Such measure is expected to greatly cut down the number of habitual criminals and mental freaks.

On the assassination of elected officials:

In the 1930s, Harry Koch’s Tribune-Chief joined the smear campaign against Huey Long, the popular Democratic Senator from Louisiana who was keen on challenging FDR from the left. To Harry, Huey was a covert Bolshevik for proposing to cap individual' net worth, and to set up a genuine welfare system that would redistribute the wealth. After the Louisiana Senator was by a killed by a lone gunman in 1935, Harry all but approved of the murder:

"Huey Long was shot by a doctor Sunday evening after he had left the Louisiana legislature. Fighting people like he did and depriving them of a livelihood, the shooting did not come unexpectedly. Bill Maddox, who went to school with him said Huey was very bright but greatly disliked by the other boys, while Huey’s younger brother says he had to do his fighting for him."

On Pinkos:

Of course, Huey Long wasn’t the only covert commie plotting to undermine the United States. As he fought against the New Deal, Harry Koch became a chronic Red-baiter. In a 1938 editorial, he warned his readers (particularly the ones who were "Americans who believe in America") that "Communists were working particularly within the schools" and that "it is the duty of every parent to inspect closely material of a radical nature which is infiltrated ever as skillfully into the public school system."

What Harry didn’t tell his readers was that his own son, Fred Koch, had just come back from the Soviet Union, where he was under contract with Comrade Stalin to build 15 refineries, train commie engineers and beef up Soviet energy independence. Fred made a killing working for the Soviet Union, taking home a $5 million nut for himself, but that didn’t stop Fred Koch from carrying on his father’s red-baiting tradition. Fred Koch took the obsession to new paranoid heights when he helped found the John Birch Society in 1958, after which he toured Elk Lodges and YMCAs across America, arguing for the reimposition of segregation, denouncing President Kennedy as communist agent and traitor, and warning people of a diabolical commie plot to subvert America using labor unions, gays, Jews, blacks and that most evil and cunning of all Soviet-trained commie traitors, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

***

When I stepped out of Quanah’s little courthouse, my eyes squinting from hours of staring at dim microfilm, it was as if I was still in Harry Koch’s horrible little dreamworld, because Quanah today is the perfect expression of the Koch family’s ideal world — as ignorant, poor and powerless as Harry would have wanted it to be. Every local I met acted like a pliant peasant: they were too poor, too sick and too tired to care.

In 2011, the Koch family still owned most of downtown Quanah, as well as the gypsum factory on the outskirts of town. Another billionaire owned a massive cattle ranch outside the city limits, where hired hands earn $150 a day—flat rate. "I gotta make sure there enough water, I gotta move them from one patch of land to another, I gotta round em up and drive them into a pen for transportation... you name it, I gotta do it. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get it done. Five hours, two hours or 18 hours. It pays $150," one of the ranch hand told me. "That’s just the way it is."

If Harry Koch were still alive, he wouldn’t even have to keep putting out his paper, because Quanah, and all the hundreds of other towns like it all over Texas, have so internalized the Kochs' Darwinian ideology, now under the banner of "libertarianism," that heavy-handed persuasion is no longer as necessary as it was in the days when labor unions and socialism were powerful forces.

Perhaps that’s the real reason why the Kochs are so interested in applying Grandpa Harry's formula to the few remaining newspaper holdouts, especially targeting a major coastal city like L.A. — one of the last regions in America that hasn't yet been Quanah-fied.

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