Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning
While the recent recall of more than a half billion eggs in the wake of some 1,470 Salmonella infections has triggered a renewed focus on the dangers posed by factory farms to human health and to the environment (see videos below), the discussion stops short because factory farms are but one symptom of the deadly consequences of a perverse ideology whose sole purpose is to expand the already obscene wealth of less than 1% of the population at the expense of a healthy economy, community, the environment, peace, and the very ability of our planet to sustain life…
Wealth disparity and control of mass communications permits billionaire sociopaths to poison the well of public discourse
Earlier this summer, in ‘Savage Capitalism,’ we covered Maude Barlow’s assessment that “the world has divided into rich and poor as at no time in our history.” Barlow stated:
While these numbers are astounding, they are an abstraction. A rare opportunity for a glimpse of the excess that flows by permitting so few to possess so much occurred when two out-of-wedlock children sued Donald Bren, a real estate developer whose estimated $16 billion net worth placed him 16th amongst the 400 richest Americans.
As observed by Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy, quoting political scientist Samuel Huntington:
A lavish lifestyle, of itself, doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the combined $35 billion inherited fortunes of Charles and David Koch (pronounced “Coke”) which, as reported by Jane Mayer in “Covert Operations” “is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.”
The Koch brothers are a testament to the unhealthy nature of a capitalist economy.
Koch Industries, whose conglomerated holdings include “oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline,” produces an estimated $100 billion in annual revenues and so much pollution that it has been listed as one of the nation’s ten worst.
But the Koch brothers do more than pollute the planet. They have funneled so much money into “organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups,” that Greenpeace has described Koch as “the kingpins of climate science denial.”
It is the Koch brothers who, like their John Birch Society father before them, have poisoned the nation’s discourse by covertly funding the pseudo grass-roots “Tea Party” movement, whose uninformed followers simply do not realize that theirs is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian agenda that is intended to solidify corporate wealth and power at their own expense.
The goal of billionaire sociopaths like the Koch brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Rupert Murdoch, is a plutocracy; that is, government of, for, and by the wealthy — a government which masquerades as a democracy.
Concepts like “liberty” and “freedom” become but a facade which hides the brutal reality of a system which, in the words used by former Vice President Henry Wallace to describe the “American fascist,” is designed “to keep the common man in eternal subjugation.”
The goal of the hard-right propaganda machine is to not only divert the attention of the working class useful idiots/’Tea Party’ followers by way of what George Orwell described as “the three minutes of hate” — as was reflected by the recent insanity on display regarding the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” — but to convince the uninformed that their subjugation by capitalist inequality is the very essence of “liberty” and “freedom.”
Any doubts about their plutocratic objective were erased by one of the Koch brothers’ most blatant abuses of wealth and power — the effort, described by Charles Lewis on Democracy Now:
Corporate crime pays
“Behind every great fortune there is a crime”.—Honore de Balzac
William K. Black, a former Wall Street regulator, described the environment created by the symbiotic relationship between Wall Street and politicians as “criminogenic.”
But when you add health care insurance, farming, outsourced manufacturing, the military-industrial complex, a brutal corporate empire, and coal, uranium, and oil extraction to the Wall Street/politician mix, what you find is a potentially deadly crimino-pathogenic environment all flowing from a twisted plutocratic philosophy that elevates the riches of the wealthy few above the health and very lives of the great bulk of humanity.
53 year old Philippe Padieu of Frisco, Texas, was sentenced to 45 years in prison after he was convicted on six counts of having unprotected sex with women without informing them that he was HIV positive.
Yet, when allegations surface that thousands of Americans have been knowingly infected by deadly bacteria and viruses (including E-coli, salmonella, MRSA, swine and bird flu, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy aka “mad cow disease”) as a result of the filthy conditions of and methods applied by factory farms, as depicted in Food, Inc. (see trailer below), the corporate titans at the base of the factory food chain, at most, face fines that can be written off as part of the cost of doing business.
In Corporate Rotten Eggs, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich described the Clinton era “corporate crimes” of Austin “Jack” DeCoster: “His workers had been forced to live in trailers infested with rats and handle manure and dead chickens with their bare hands. It was an agricultural sweatshop.” Reich, who fined DeCoster $2 million, notes that DeCoster’s subsequent record “would make a repeat offender blush.”
Earlier this year, upon the imposition of $125,000 in fines by the state of Maine for DeCoster’s cruelty to animals, Martha Rosenberg, in “Teflon Chicken Don†Jack DeCoster Agrees to Cruelty Plea described this serial corporate criminal as the “John Demjanjuk of factory farming.” The cruelty charges surfaced after state investigators in HazMat suits staged an eight hour raid, finding:
Officials had been tipped off by an undercover video…depicting live hens suffocating in garbage cans, twirled by their necks in incomplete euthanasia, kicked into manure pits to drown and hanging by their feet over conveyer belts.
In the wake of the 550 million-egg recall, the FDA inspected the facilities operated by Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms of Iowa Inc., which house 750 million chickens. In addition to finding Salmonella in the water used to wash the eggs, federal officials observed “filthy conditions, including chickens and rodents crawling up massive manure piles and flies and maggots ‘too numerous to count.'”
The Des Moines Register reports:
During his recent appearance on Democracy Now, David Kirby, author of Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, described the dire environmental threat posed by factory farm pig manure:
I’ve seen those farmers out there spraying directly into creeks, applying so much of this brown water onto the fields that it pools up and you see the little rivlets and you see it running off into creeks, that bloom red, orange, purple and green with algae from all of the nutrients, and then…that’s the number one cause of fish kills, including in the Gulf of Mexico every summer…
Over the past month, this one source of toxic waste merged with another, making it difficult to determine precisely how much of a 7,722 square mile “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico (slightly smaller than New Jersey) is due to agricultural run off and how much is due to another egregious corporate crime, the deadly BP Deep Water Horizon explosion.
Of course, if one were to hold a contest for most despicable corporate criminal of the decade, Massey Energy CEO and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Director Don Blankenship would beat DeCoster hands down.
In addition to the ecological devastation wrought by
In the wake of the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster that killed 29 miners, the Velvet Revolution’s StoptheChamber.com called for Blankenship to be prosecuted for “mass murder.”
Don’t hold your breath!
Whether we deal with DeCoster’s corporate crime spree or massive safety violations by the likes of BP and Massey Energy leading to deadly disasters, what we don’t see is anything resembling the life behind bars fate of the guy who knowingly infected women with HIV. DeCoster, according to Reich, writes off the fines as simply the cost of doing business. In the case of BP, we find the chief U.S. Coast Guard inspector lamenting “that a top BP executive could not articulate any lessons learned from previous deadly oil refinery and drilling disasters over the last two decades.”
If you thought the deaths of 29 miners would weigh on a sociopath like Blankenship, think again. In the wake of the disaster, Blankenship said: “The very idea that they [federal regulators] care more about coal miner safety than we do is as silly as global warming.”
Blankenship followed up the deadly Big Branch disaster by continuing his effort to pour millions into the Tea Party movement — a movement the L.A. Weekly aptly dubbed “Poison Populism.”
Massey has funneled money into the campaign of the Tea Party’s Rand Paul, who initially rewarded BP and Massey by dismissing the disasters with “accidents happen.” Paul then came up with a means of eliminating Massey’s sorry record of federal safety violations — eliminate all federal mine safety regulations. Paul dismissed environmental devastation wrought by mountaintop removal with “nobody will miss a hill or two.”
According to Mike Rozelle of Climate Ground Zero, “over 500 mountaintops have been blasted away” producing landfills that buried over 2,000 creeks. While the Environmental Protection Agency has delayed hundreds of additional projects for further study, Rozelle predicts that if the coal industry gets its way, in 10 years most of the mountains in southwest West Virginia will be gone.
Age of absurdity
We are living an absurdity solely due to a twisted philosophy that elevates profits before people, community, and the environment; an absurdity that kills 45,000 Americans each year simply because they can’t afford health insurance; an absurdity that, as revealed by the tearful Congressional testimony of Dr. Linda Pino, permits health insurance carriers to kill patients by denying necessary medical procedures in order to protect the corporate bottom line.
The simple solution — a single-payer system — eludes us not because it isn’t more cost effective, efficient, and just but because of the effectiveness of capitalist propaganda and the ability of a corrupt media and PR industry which drowns out the message of all political candidates who do not toe the corporate line.
The corporate message is that a Medicare-for-all system that cuts out the unnecessary parasites (health insurance companies, their CEOs, and Wall Street investors) is bad and that a system that puts profits before people is good — a message which succeeds not because of its intrinsic truth but because 95% of what Americans see, hear, and read comes from either hard-right ideologues or from corporate-owned media. Both have worked in tandem to convince the victims of toxic capitalism that democratic socialism, an equitable economic system which stresses our common, humanitarian interests and public co-responsibilities to one-another and to a sustainable planet is evil and that unregulated monopoly capitalism, which, while cloaked by the myth of a “free-market,” sacrifices all to the unbridled greed of the privileged few is good.
David Kirby’s Aug. 24 discussion of the looming threat of factory farms on Democracy Now follows…
The trailer for Food, Inc. follows below. (Note: If you get the DVD, be sure to watch the lengthy but highly informative deleted scenes)…
Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).
It is all very clear and truthfull. But we forget one thing. All the people doing the work is US. Year you and me, who says “yes pay me” Just using our mouth, and still letting “them” use our hands and bodies is getting us nowhere closer to a better world. We need, all of us, to get to understand that a paycheck is not a free pass to no moral. It is not freeing us from responsibility. We need to learn when and how to say no to what money.
Clearly our planet cannot take much more capitalism.
It is amazing how thoroughly the masses have been brainwashed to reflexively dismiss socialism, humanity’s only hope, as evil.
Even many “progressives” recoil in fear and disgust at the mere mention.
We need to nationalize the entire energy sector in order to phase out petroleum. We need to outlaw both parties for their many high crimes and we must TAKE BACK OUR AIRWAVES. They belong to us. Our planet cannot afford any more mind numbing drivel. We need to educate, educate, educate. Alter and abolish. Start over from scratch. Peaceful Revolution.
It all sounds like a pipe dream, and indeed it will be only thus, unless we grasp tight the one loose thread the oligarchs have inadvertently left straggling from the frayed sleeve off the sweater of total domination, nine eleven truth.
With it we can dismantle capitalism and begin to heal. Without it we are toast
Excellent writing, Ernest!
I have a small totally noncommercial website I started a couple of months ago. I contribute some original content and several socialist writers like Robert Jensen and Bill Blum have given us blanket permission to post their stuff. But when I emailed Brad for permission to repost one of your articles, unedited, with proper attribution and a link to the source (BradBlog), he said he’d prefer that I just publish a short excerpt with a link back here.
Well, I could have done that under “fair use” without asking permission, so I just let it go. So although I’d like very much to repost this article, I don’t want to support capitalism even to promote an anti-capitalist article.
I hate going behind Brad’s back while he’s gone, but if you could see your way clear to granting Creative Commons 3.0 (copyleft) permission to repost for noncommercial purposes only (unedited, with proper attribution, and an active link back to the source, of course), I’d be grateful.
Camusrebel–thanks for saying in so few words what took me so many to convey.
Mark E. Smith. I thank you for your kind words. As you know, Brad is on vacation through Labor Day.
This is not a time-sensitive–breaking news–piece. Why don’t you wait and I’ll take it up with him when he returns.
nine eleven truth …if only someone had a backbone …the war on terror is a fraud …nine eleven truth would show it for the fraud it is…the first pre-emptive invasion was on the American people !
Thanks, Ernest. I agree that your piece will stand the test of time and could be usefully reposted long after Brad gets back, should he grant permission.
I have sometimes written to the authors of relevant (radical leftist and anti-capitalist) material posted on for-profit websites, and to those websites themselves, for permission to repost. In most cases it is the author rather than the website that owns the copyright to their original material. In other cases the copyright is shared and I’ve had to get permission from both the website and the author. And in some cases the website alone can grant permission to repost.
Fortunately for my purposes, most leftist material is published copyleft and as long as it is reproduced for noncommercial purposes, no permission is required.
Copyright limits the reproduction of original material so as to ensure maximum profits to the creators and publishers. The Creative Commons 3.0 (copyleft) license is designed to ensure the maximum dissemination of information as long as there is no profit motive. It is a quite different way of doing things.
Whereas capitalism prioritizes profits over the general welfare, socialism prioritizes the general welfare over profits. Educational programs designed to be inclusive and reach the greatest number are an example of this unusual way of thinking.
Right now, what we’re dealing with is lawless corporatism. “Deregulation” is another word for lawlessness. It is extreme and dangerous. Capitalism with laws to curtail extremism would be preferable to extreme corporate lawlessness without accountability (aka the USA). Right now via riggable voting machines that produce statistically impossible election results, massive corporations have control over who gets in power (not talking about the incorporated neighborhood bakery or baked chestnut vendor here). No outrage in the news media? No — they own the news media. They control what most US citizens eat (even what babies eat), what news they see, who represents citizens in government (that is, who represents multinational corporate interests).
re: “the unhealthy nature of a capitalist economy” and the comment “socialism, humanity’s only hope”
Both of these points miss the mark- what is needed is clarification. Capitalism is not inherently bad. What we have now is finance capitalism i.e. funded by debt. It is unsustainable as it concentrates money into fewer and fewer hands as time goes by. Socialism negates the benefits of capitalism. What is needed is a middle road along the lines of social democracy that is not funded by debt-backed money. The truth is we now live in a world that has everything it needs to survive sustainably. Our past economic systems were based on scarcity. Technology has changed that and will continue to displace people’s jobs that will no longer be needed and the robotic revolution will further exacerbate the societal problems . We should be entering the age of abundance (assuming we decide to stop raping the planet). We have enough thorium to provide cheap, safe energy to last us 1,000 years, reducing dramatically the need for fossil fuels, reversing GW and providing energy for desalinating water.
Yet we still struggle to survive. The gap between GDP and incomes demonstrates this clearly. We simply don’t earn enough to buy all the stuff we produce. The benefits of productivity has to be spread amongst all people if we as a democracy are to survive (and for that matter, the world). We’re headed for a crash (which I predict will happen on or by Aug 2011) and we can either fix the systemic problem or suffer needless pain and death. It’s not ponzi-finance capitalism like fractional reserve lending has wrought on us nor is it socialism that will save us. What I and thousands of others are proposing is taking the middle road, combining the benefits of both.
Sadly, it’s not a new idea and Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln have all used credit as a public utility in the past. Eventually though, as the passing of time erases our memories of history, scoundrels come up with new ways to engorge themselves at the expense of others. Solutions are out there and links to most of them can be found at Sovereign Money.
Another great piece thanks to Mr. Canning and Brad Blog.
AS of now, I swear an oath to stop buying any eggs or meat produced from a factory farm, and to seek out alternate dairy products if feasible. I live in an area where I’m sure there’s plenty of sources to do this. I’ve basically stopped eating fast-food, so the rest shouldn’t be too hard- and, after reading this, I feel bound by duty to stop contributing to the system I spend so much time bitching about anyways!
This is all quite disgusting, as well as frightening. I don’t fear too much for my own safety when it comes to food, because I am vegan, one of the few things that can save the world. What’s truly frightening is the overall fate of the world.
I’m only 20 years old, and I can tell you that most of my generation, and the generation before me is at the pinnacle of apathy, nihilism, and satisfied with their own personal ignorance. If that isn’t changed, then, I don’t know if I sound over-dramatic saying that all is lost.
Izzy, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but vegetables can be contaminated with e-coli from factory farms.
Buy organic.
Your comment about the danger posed by ignorance mirrors that provided by Dr. James Hansen in Storms of My Grandchildren, which addresses the danger of global climate change:
However, before you give into despair, consider the words of the late Howard Zinn in A Power Governments Cannot Suppress:
@camusrebel I have always said that the truth about 9/11 would never be allowed to be known because it would be a death blow to the oligarchs who are running things.
I now see that I was half right. It WILL be a death knell for the corporate state, for corporate-controlled media, and for the bought-and-paid-for Democratic and Republican political parties.
It will be the “instant truth” that will suddenly reveal all the other truths, for if the “average joe” can suddenly see that the people who control the media and the government are willing to kill thousand of civillians on our own soil (and millions on foreign soil) to get what they want, they are clearly pathological and willing to do ANYTHING to get what they want. The whole house of cards comes tumbling down when the average Fox-watcher and the average NYT-reader both realize that “they’ve been had.”
If they can do THAT, then of course they can steal elections, of course they can bribe judges and juries, of course they can get the media to tell outright lies, of course they can steal a trillion dollars from our treasury, and of course they would destroy our environment and our lives for a few extra pennies added to their trillions.
It won’t be easy, because they really WILL be fighting for their virtual lives, but the truth must come out.
Mysterious Deaths of 9/11 Witnesses (MUST SEE)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...38;feature=fvw
I am astonished at the amount of pigswill corporate America can feed the public and get away with. Are we so poisoned, brainwashed, medicated, dulled, depressed, exploited, and just plain tired and looking for escape that they can dump any load of crap they want onto us and get away with it?
Uh……yeah….
I just looked up some info on laws on animal cruelty. Guess what (big surprise)…livestock is excepted, in Iowa, anyway.
How do you take even one piece of this and work toward meaningful change? How do you fight the hydra?
@RobertM:
You wrote, “Socialism negates the benefits of capitalism.”
To the contrary, socialism provides precisely those limits and regulations on capitalism that you think are necessary.
As an example, take the Scandinavian countries. Because they have socialized medicine and high taxes, we call them socialist. They call themselves capitalist.
Putting limits on wealth, holding corporations accountable, and providing for the welfare of the general populace, are all things that our government considers subversive, anti-capitalist, and socialist. But without limits and regulations, you have uncontrollable capitalism. Whether you want to call it finance capitalism, predatory capitalism, or anything else, the United States government, both major political parties, and most of the third parties as well, would never tolerate the socialism that would limit and regulate capitalism so that it could function without harming people, the economy, or the environment.
Once you put socialist limits and regulations on capitalism, it is no longer free market capitalism but socialism.
Without socialism, capitalism is inherently evil and destructive because it lacks human values and has only a profit motive. I provides only for the maximum profits to shareholders and can even be precluded by law from providing for the general welfare, if by so doing it would lower profits to shareholders. If the Preamble were part of the Constitution, corporations would be unconstitutional. And if we had a democratic form of government rather than a shared tyranny where the edicts of unelected officials (the supreme court) cannot be appealed, corporations could not be mistaken for persons.
Perhaps I would have done well to provide a better link on Democratic Socialism than Wikipedia.
Here is a pamphlet [PDF] by the Democratic Socialists of America that attempts a better explanation, while eliminating many misconceptions.
It begins by noting:
Mark E. Smith & Ernest
I think we are in agreement. That’s why clarification was needed. Thanks. Socialism is one of those words that invokes a guttural response with the misinformed and that’s why I avoid it. It’s much easier to sway people (as Republicans have done so well in equating their fascism with “American values”) when you don’t use words that scare dumb people.
When Mark said socialism, I thought he meant “In the traditional sense, “socialism” means the ownership and control of the means of production by the workers themselves” whereas you appear to be advocating “democratic socialism” like the Scandinavian countries, in which I am in total agreement with, however they accomplish their social aspects through high taxes. What I am suggesting is that the government spend that money into existence for social programs (and infrastructure and a national dividend)without taxes or borrowing. If anyone is interested, Richard Cook, a former analyst at the treasury dept. has an excellent book out monetary reform “We hold these truths..”
It’s all gonna fall apart unless the people do something:
“Target Ain’t People”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FhMMmqzbD8