This is the year the APA puts the finishing touches on DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a compendium that determines what treatments insurers will cover, what disorders merit funding as “public health” threats and, of course, Pharma marketing and profits. Some question the objectivity of a disorder manual written by those who stand to benefit from an enlarged patient pool and new diseases. Furthering the appearance of self-dealing is the revelation that 57 percent of the DSM-5′s authors have Pharma links.

No kidding. Present at this year’s meeting were former APA president Alan F. Schatzberg, MD and Charles Nemeroff, MD, both investigated by Congress for murky Pharma income. Schatzberg and Nemeroff are co-editors of the APA-published Textbook of Psychopharmacology whose 2009 edition cites the work of Richard Borison, MD former psychiatry chief at the Augusta Veterans Affairs medical center who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for a $10 million clinical trial fraud. Also present was S. Charles Schulz, MD, who was investigated for financial links to AstraZeneca believed to alter his scientific conclusions.

Even though Assistant Secretary of Defense Jonathan Woodson sent a memo to all branches of the military in February about over-prescription of antipsychotic medications like Seroquel and Risperdal for PTSD, military figures closely linked to that over-prescription were also listed in attendance at the APA meeting.

Elspeth Ritchie, MD, told the Denver Post that AstraZeneca’s Seroquel was “very useful for the treatment of anxiety and combat-related nightmares,” though it was (and is) not approved for such treatment while she was medical director of the army’s Strategic Communications Office in 2008, participated in many symposiums. Ritchie, who is now chief clinical officer for the District of Columbia’s department of mental health, appeared in an AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly funded webcast for the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Academy in 2008 in which she lauds the use of “sophisticated” psychiatric medicines “on the battlefield.”¹

Seroquel earned AstraZeneca nearly $6 billion in revenue last year, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. “IMS Health, a healthcare information and services company, said that in the 12 months ending in February of this year, 14.1 million Seroquel prescriptions were written, more than any other antipsychotic,” it reports.

Also participating in the military and PTSD content at the APA meeting was Matthew Friedman, MD, Executive Director of the VA’s National Center for PTSD who reported, “I received an honorarium from AstraZeneca in the past year,” in a 2009 government slide show called “Pharmacological Treatments of PTSD and Comorbid Disorder.” Friedman also served as a Pfizer Visiting Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina College of Medicine last year yet is listed in the APA meeting guide as having no “significant relationships to disclose.” APA officials have not responded to several requests for comment.

Of course, disorders that Big Pharma has helped monetize like bipolar (which was termed “under diagnosed” and emerging in the elderly at the meeting) and “mood disorders” (once called “life”) were well represented. But an alarming amount of attention also went to the apparent new Pharma profit center of alcoholism and drug addiction.

Addiction specialists have known for more than 70 years that the only “treatment” for drug addiction and alcoholism (after patients are detoxed) are anonymous, self-help programs that are also free. In fact, medicine is as powerless to understand or treat drug addiction and alcoholism as alcoholics and drug addicts are over their addiction.

Still the National Institutes of Health, in conjunction with Big Pharma, continues to spend millions, some say billions, developing “animal models” of addiction and vaccines to “cure” them. Nora D. Volkow, MD director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, says she seeks a vaccine to treat those at risk of alcoholism and drug addiction on the basis of “biological and environmental factors,” before they get sick. (See: treating those “at risk” for psychosis or depression or bipolar disorder on the basis of their family histories with no symptoms evidence.)

It is pretty fair to say Volkow is not an alcoholic or drug addict. Any of them could tell her they don’t seek “help” until they’re out of options — and even then not from a doctor but from each other. In fact, if Pharma, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Psychiatric Association think they can treat a disease caused by drugs with a drug, that’s pretty insane. In fact, one of the treatments suggested for alcoholism at the meeting was quetiapine, also known as Seroquel.

1. “The Returning Veteran: PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury,” Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Academy, May 28, 2008

It’s a prime piece of property in downtown Seattle, West Lake. The non-profit got the 12 acres for a song – $53 million after the land was appraised at $72 million.

Then the city of Seattle “gave” another $28 off the price, so this land ended up costing Bill and Melinda Gates – their foundation – $25 million.

More than 40 people, as part of a global day of action against Monsanto, recently marched to and around the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation “campus” in West Lake to deliver a letter asking the Foundation to divest from Monsanto (the Foundation has more than $23 million in Monsanto stock as part of a very odd mix of companies in their portfolio).

Trying to eradicate developing countries’ diseases, forcing genetically modified farming into Africa, and weighing in on and lobbying for privatizing public education are just a few of the Gates Foundation’s larger goals, largely financed by $11.9 billion, with the following five top stock holdings:

• Berkshire Hathaway Inc. – 73,997,400 shares, 49.75% of the total portfolio.
• McDonald’s Corp. – 9,372,500 shares, 5.21% of the total portfolio.
• Caterpillar Inc. – 9,590,400 shares, 4.86% of the total portfolio.
• The CocaCola Company – 10,182,000 shares, 4.31% of the total portfolio.
• Waste Management Inc. – 15,716,367 shares, 4.15% of the total portfolio.

They’ve got 500,000 shares of Goldman Sachs, 7.1 million shares of Exxon Mobile and those half a million shares of Monsanto.

Monsanto’s Chemical War on the World

What’s all the protesting about? According to Dena Hoff, a diversified family farmer in Glendive, Montana, and North American coordinator of La Via Campesina, “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust’s purchase of Monsanto shares indicates that the Gates Foundation’s interest in promoting the company’s seed is less about philanthropy than about profit-making. The Foundation is helping to open new markets for Monsanto, which is already the largest seed company in the world.”

These aren’t sour grapes about one of the richest people on earth capitalizing on stock trading. Monsanto, who created the dioxin-leeching defoliant Agents Orange and Blue, is one of the main drivers of genetically modified foods.

Heather English Day, director of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, and one of the organizers in Seattle to bring attention to the slash and burn mentality of Monsanto, the Gates Foundation’s AGRA, sums up the recent news on GE crops and foods: “Reports are coming out weekly about impending crop failures of GE corn in Africa, pesticide resistance for GE corn grown for ethanol in the US, and about indications that Bt toxins, the primary GE pesticides, especially when in the presence with Roundup, have potential impacts on human kidney cells and mammalian testis.”

Another protestor-letter signatory is Les Berensen, a medical doctor who is also with GMO Free Washington. His concern is tied to Monsanto’s Roundup, which has the main ingredient of 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Berensen mentions how salmon and other fish species are being affected by the huge runoffs from fields of corn, beets, soy, cotton, and potatoes that are genetically modified to take up to four or five dousings of Roundup.

He likens this day and age of Monsanto as a Frankenstein era for both species in the wild and the human species. These anti-Monsanto events are carried out regularly in many parts of the world, and they are attended by a diverse group of people. In Seattle recently, several speakers rallied us before we marched to the FOundation: Dan Trocolli, Seattle Educators Association and Social Equality Educators; Kristen Beifus, Washington Fair Trade Coalition; and William Aal, Washington Biotechnology Action Council.

One fellow holding a corn sign and getting signatures is Travis Young, UW graduate student in planning and with CAGJ and AGRA Watch. He is seeing more and more destruction of departments at UW through consolidation and outright disbanding. He’s working on food policies for several cities as part of his graduate work.

Localized Food Security, Global Food Fights

“There are already many movements around healthy local food economies. There are proven projects and farms in Africa that are both sustainable and organic. Getting people hooked on Monsanto’s seeds and pesticides with micro-loaning that they can’t pay back will result in more farms being lost and more people moving to the cities. This is not a successful formula, and the Gates Foundation should really lead by getting rid of its Monsanto stocks, as a first step.”

Many protesters wear Haz-mat suits, and many carry signs belying the fear of this giant genetically modified experiment taking place in mankind. I met Ellie Rose at one of these events; she’s working on Transition Seattle and buttressing “a culture of engagement through a group called We the People Power.”

Karen Studders came from Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park, where for two months she lived in a tent. Studders, in her mid-sixties, once worked in big business, for government organizations, and with United Nations agencies, plying her legal and science degrees from the University of Minnesota. “We have to act quickly. The abuse of these corporations, which is so blatant now, has got to stop. I have a lot of hope after being part of the Occupy movement, especially after we were illegally evicted.”

She not only went from tent to tent to listen to the ideas and rebellion of the youth, but she went into a self-made retreat after the police crack down, traveling to various cities to see the Transition Town movement up close and personal.

The security at the Foundation does not accept any signed letters. We tried delivering one asking the Gates Foundation to divest from Monsanto. I talked with several Foundation employees – researchers with higher education graduate degrees and doctorates. They said that Foundation’s policy for employees is to “not let us engage in any dialogue on any issues of controversy.” Which means, nothing but the weather can be discussed? (Whoops, climate change seems to affect disease and crops). Additionally, any nice, well-crafted and footnoted handouts on Monsanto and Roundup pesticides they might be handed “will have to be handed over to security once we enter the building.”

Those three monkeys – see, hear, and speak no evil – seem anachronistic in the 21st century for a think tank outfit like the Gates Foundation. Fortunately, less than a week after Seattle’s event, dozens of protesters monkey-wrenched Monsanto’s California office in Davis, an area close to the Capitol, through vocal activism. Unlike Seattle’s event, the California activists made demands to shut down the biotech giant which has its talons in the United States government, including the Supreme Court.

“If a small group can take down their office for a day from some mild protests, a few hundred thousand can take down the entire company — permanently,” wrote journalist Anthony Gucciardi from Natural Society.

Frankenstein’s Agronomists and Etymologists

Pretty strange news these days on the Franken-crop front, also known as the genetically engineered/ genetically modified food battlefield.

A top-secret visit by Bill and Melinda Gates to Australia in December to check up on their $10 million test crop of genetically modified bananas “capable of resisting disease.” Field trials at South Johnstone, Queensland, Australia, are pointing to a GE banana with more pro-vitamin A than regular bananas.

The stuff of movies like Soylent Green or some 21st Century James Bond plot. Poor African nations are in the sights of big agri-business and biotechnology outfits like Monsanto, Bayer, Chimera, BASF, Syngenta. The Gates Foundation’s AGRA – Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa – is all about top down mandates, hyper-technology, corporate-driven solutions, and sometimes bizarre genetically modified organism in a hocus pocus that puts profits ahead of precautionary principle.

Seven Billion Guinea Pigs and counting …

Full steam ahead for outside-the-local-region solutions, and damn the local knowledge, those land races of food and crop varieties that have stood the test of time — and culture.

George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, the nation’s largest organic farming cooperative, which had more than $600 million in sales last year, puts it plainly: “There is a growing awareness that our [food supply] system makes us all guinea pigs of sorts.”

Story after story, incident after incident prove to more than just the organic foodies that genetic engineering isn’t the answer to famine, climate change and strengthening food security for poor and rich countries. The seed company Pioneer (owned by Dow Chemical) was developing a GE corn strain, Herculex, that had wrapped up in its DNA a toxin that would help it resist corn rootworm. The problem was, as a group of scientists working at Pioneer’s request found out, that GE corn killed ladybugs.

Here’s where the GE-Biotech story gets ugly – according to the journal Nature Biotechnology, Dow prohibited the scientists from publicizing the research and kept it from the EPA. That corn bio-tech “creation” was approved in 2003.

Now the narrative really gets close to the HG Wells story of The Island of Dr. Moreau: Nature News reported that a research team discovered two varieties of transgenic canola in the wild, plus a third variety that is a cross of the two GM breeds. One of the transgenic varieties found was Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola, – engineered to be resistant to glyphosate. The other one, from Bayer Crop Science’s Liberty Link canola, is resistant to gluphosinate.

That third cross contaminated variety contained transgenes from each of these, and, through it’s own evolutionary track, is resistant to both types of herbicide.

It doesn’t take graduate degrees in agronomy, chemistry and botany to figure out that companies like Monsanto and Syngenta have set loose into nature unnatural and untested plants that proliferate, cross-breed, and create new plants.

We have no idea what these GMOs are doing to us as biological entities eating so many foods containing GE canola, soy, corn and beet sugar used in a so many processed food products consumed by tens of millions of people.

Climate Change and Seeds

For more than two decades, and especially this past year, the alarms have been going off concerning climate change making an already difficult situation of global food security, and in Africa in particular, worse.

The climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, had all sorts of panels on food insecurity complicated by the effects of climate change. Which countries have the least capacity to adapt? Developing countries – i.e. the majority of countries.

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that body disregarded by Republicans and lambasted and vilified by the Tea Party and blokes like presidential aspirant, Ron Paul – recently made it clear with a convergence of dozens of scientific studies and organizations that there will be deleterious impacts of climate change on agriculture, livestock and fishing.

The Last Fish

Here’s how screwed up the GE-GMO purveyors are – genetically altered salmon, pen raised, of course, have been DNA-bombarded with the genes of a fresh water bass species so they get five times the size of “normal” farmed salmon in the same 18-month period. Feeding those Franken-salmon corn meal, soy by-products and chicken and beef renderings adds to the gross experiment.

Here’s an even more strange fact that is pushing GE technology into husbandry and fisheries sciences – a single bluefin tuna will make international headlines when it sells for more than $100,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. They are so rare now – overfished to near extinction – we have to marvel at the rapidity of the globe’s drive for wild food. Fish are probably the last wild food Americans eat. Sushi joints from Seattle to Missoula and Las Vegas are as popular as Carl’s Jr.

When I talk with sushi-eating friends about their habits, they shrug it off, saying they might as well eat the last of the wild marine protein before the world contaminated everything and shifts to GE-Everything.

Famine, Hunger, Solutions

Floods and inconsistent weather patterns affecting rainfall have impacted most parts of the world, situations worsened by the prices of fuel. Oxfam correlates this impact into hardship –climate change will help double food prices by the year 2030.

These factors, seen before and after Durban’s “Climate Conference Debacle,” are churning up the debate on genetically modified food. The Gates, Monsanto and some agricultural experts are convinced that GMOs will provide part of the answer to the long-standing hunger and food insecurity challenges that have plagued the African continent for half a century.

But civil society, social justice advocates and others from non-governmental organizations urged world leaders to focus on the importance of food security, particularly in Africa. Wilfred Miga of PELUM sees food in Africa tied directly to individual countries’ identity and sovereignty – food culture and the right to grow they’re called. PELUM is an association in Zambia giving political and technical voice to small-scale farmers in rural areas. It’s simple for people like Miga – improving livelihoods and increasing the sustainability of farming communities by empowering ecological best practices.

Miga said PELUM understands that despite the challenges the African continent faces, GMOs are not a universal answer to food insecurity. In fact, he like thousands of others in the food sovereignty movement know GMOs gut food sovereignty because those crops are patented, they are bio-manipulated to have killer or assassin genes that prevent germination without the pesticides and other artificial inputs created and marketed by the same seed companies or subsidiaries, and the crops in mass plantings will contaminate all other wild or non-GMO crops, in a worse case scenario.

Hawaii had widespread contamination of papaya crops from GM varieties, even in the seed stocks that were sold as conventional.
Jimmy Buffet and the Mosquitoes that Ate Key West

Worse yet, back to HG Wells, is the GE mosquito, in Jimmy Buffet land (maybe he’ll score a song about the Franken-squito and Margarita-ville).

UK-based Oxitec is going to release genetically-engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys this month, the first-ever U.S. release of these engineered bugs.

Aedes aegypti are produced by this private biotechnology company in hopes that their offspring will die at a young age in an effort to lower mosquito populations and limit the spread of dengue fever. Genetically-engineered mosquitoes were released by Oxitec in the Cayman Islands, Malaysia and Brazil. Eradicating dengue fever is laudable (I had a case of it in Guatemala, and I never deviate from calling it Break Bone Fever to this day), but the company’s claims that their GE mosquitoes are sterile and they have eradicated the fever are wrong: their mosquitoes are fertile, and no one has successfully eradicated dengue fever from any population.

So, this corporation from overseas gets to use 36-square acres near the Key West Cemetery as a testing plot (undisclosed location) for up to 10,000 genetically engineered mosquitoes.

Many questions about genetically-engineered mosquitoes remain unanswered, and since Friends of the Earth exposed this GE mosquito release story, here’s what that group has to say about the real questions behind the release:

Who’s regulating this release and who more importantly, who will be legally and financially liable if something goes wrong?

Shoot, what about the unintended consequences of decreasing in Aedes aegypti population have on the local food chain and ecosystem? Could other more dangerous bugs take its place, such as the Asian Tiger mosquito which is one of the most invasive species on the planet?

Informed consent? Will Oxitec be required to obtain the free and informed consent of Key West residents (unlike in the Cayman Islands where “no public consultation was undertaken on potential risks and informed consent was not sought from local people”)?

The super-mosquito next generation? What happens when Oxitec’s mosquitoes survive into adulthood (since 3–4 percent have been found to do just that despite the flaw engineered into their genome)?

It’s not just a male thing! Although Oxitec plans to only release male genetically engineered mosquitoes, what are the risks if female genetically engineered mosquitoes are released (since the company sorts them by hand and up to 0.5 percent of the released insects are in fact female)? Since females bite humans, how could this impact human health? Will it hamper efforts to limit the spread of dengue fever?

Do we need more corporate marketing of things like mosquitoes? Since Oxitec cannot completely eliminate a mosquito population will countries and communities become dependent on Oxitec for the indefinite future? What economic impacts will such dependence have on communities?

Two Carrots a Day … and Corporations are NOT People

This entire GMO debate has to be framed by community power over corporate power. The Occupy movement speaks to some of that, and the Move to Amend (reversing or nullifying a Jan. 2010 Supreme Court case, Citizens United) also touches upon some of this corporate malfeasance and misdeeds. But it takes a real in-the-trenches person like Richard Grossman, who died November at age 70, to cut through the bedrock of why these corporations or foundations like Gates have way too much control and power.

He started off 40 years ago talking about how corporations had taken control of our environment. He has since looked at the systemic failure of the United States federal government which has since day one been in cahoots with the oligarchy and land-holding elite:
“One simple way of comparing then and now is that I don’t talk much about corporations anymore. We live under minority rule. And the class of people who do the governing generally could be called a corporate class.

“But 180 years ago, they were the slave master class. One hundred years before that they were the propertied nobility in England. In the USA, a minority designed our structure of governance, has been making the laws, using the power and violence of the nation to deny the many, to accumulate property and wealth, to replicate their designs across generations, to groom leaders of the next generation to continue their supremacy, to create the educational systems, mythologies and celebrations to camouflage and deceive, to channel people who would be activists into realms where even if they stop or slow down a particular corporate state assault, they don’t lay a hand on systemic reality, don’t touch the structure of governance and law, don’t question the country’s great myths. For the past century or so, one such realm has been regulatory and administrative law and agencies, those vast energy sinks and diversions that eat activists for breakfast.”

So what’s for breakfast? Cassava? Friends of the Earth Nigeria is showing why even non-GMO messed-with hybrids pose problems with biodiversity. Using hybridization and selective breeding, three new yellow varieties of cassava with loads of vitamin A will supposedly help with malnutrition, blindness and death.

Can anyone in the Gates’ Foundations AGRA project understand why this supposed research breakthrough gets dismissed by groups like Friends of the Earth Nigeria (FoEN). The argument is around why the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) research team in Ibadan would be messing around with one of Nigeria’s key food crops.

It’s about biodiversity, something corporations scoff at when it comes to finding ways to “beat or speed up mother nature.” Here’s the irony with all of this agronomic meddling: two carrots can easily provide the daily vitamin A requirement.

Plain old carrots for breakfast. Easy to plant, easy to eat, and not one iota of that process is tied up in Dow, Monsanto, General Mills, or Bill Gates, or any stockholders’ greedy interests.

There’s even an upside to the parade of medical journal articles linking red meat to coronary heart disease and cancer deaths. As long as people are taking about beef’s ick factor and link to progressive diseases, they’re not talking about the “third rail” of meat safety – mad cow disease.

It’s has been almost ten years since the U.S.’s first mad cow was discovered. Ninety-eight percent of U.S. beef exports evaporated within 24 hours when Mexico, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea, and 90 other countries banned US beef. The only reason the European Union didn’t ban U.S. beef was because it had already banned it for excessive use of growth hormones!

Now the U.S. is trying to win back Japan and China’s business, not fully restored since the first U.S. mad cow, in a trade version of the golden rule or “turnabout is fair play.” Specifically, the U.S. would agree to resume beef imports from other countries it has hitherto banned because of their mad cow risk (like Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands) in the hopes that the U.S.’s holdout trading partners will do the same, under the proposed rule.

“Quite simply, this proposed rule will show the United States is willing to talk the talk and walk the walk with regard to following international standards developed by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE),” says National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Director of Legislative Affairs Kent Bacus. “It’s difficult for us to continue to demand that our trading partners comply with OIE standards when we don’t,” agrees Josh Winegarner, government relations director for the Texas Cattle Feeders Association.

But R-CALF USA, a national cattle group often at odds with the government, is unhappy with the impending we’ll-eat-it-if-you-do quid pro quo. “Exposing U.S. consumers and U.S. livestock to a heightened risk of BSE [mad cow] introduction is irresponsible and contrary to pledges made by the Obama Administration during his campaign,” says the group.

Under OIE criteria, countries can have “negligible”, “controlled”, or “undetermined” mad cow risks based on the strength of their feed bans (feeding ruminants-to-ruminants like cows to cows), control of animal imports from risky countries and disease surveillance. OIE gave the U.S. a surprising “controlled risk” status despite three identified mad cows but the classification failed to pry open closed export markets as hoped. In fact, trade officials now say the U.S.’s controlled risk status costs it $3 billion a year in foreign sales and are seeking “negligible risk” status.

Negligible risk status under OIE guidelines requires “there has been no case of BSE or, if there has been a case, every case of BSE has been demonstrated to have been imported and has been completely destroyed” and that safety measure have been observed for at least seven years. If a mad cow case or cases were home grown, a country can still seek negligible risk status, according to OIE criteria, if it can demonstrate that all cattle “reared with the BSE cases” and consuming the same potentially contaminated feed or all cattle born from the same herd are “permanently identified, and their movements controlled, and, when slaughtered or at death, are completely destroyed.”

But even under those circumstances, the U.S. doesn’t make the cut because herd mates and feed mates of the first U.S. mad cow were not “identified”, “destroyed” or had their “movements controlled” as required. Eleven out of 25 head of cattle which authorities considered “likely to have eaten the same potentially infectious feed” as the Washington state cow were never found says the Associated Press. The fail rate was considerably higher with subsequent U.S. mad cows.

Mad cow disease belongs to a family of fatal brain diseases or “transmissible encephalopathies” and is known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows, scrapie in sheep and goats and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk. The diseases are thought to be transmitted by prions, invisible infectious particles that are not viruses or bacteria, but proteins.

Though prions are not technically “alive” because they lack a nucleus, they manage to reproduce. And though not technically “alive,” prions are almost impossible to “kill” or destroy because they are not inactivated by cooking, heat, ammonia, bleach, hydrogen peroxide, benzene, alcohol, phenol, lye, formaldehyde or radiation. In fact, alcohol makes prions more transmissible because it binds them to metal like surgical instruments. Nor is it safe to just dump prion material in landfills because prions endure in soil for years and contaminate it.

Many have heard mad cow scare stories like: people with Alzheimer’s disease really have variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human version of mad cow disease; dogs, cats, pigs and fish are at risk; mad cow is spread by flies and mosquitoes; and mad cow is in milk or cosmetics. But prions are scary enough without urban legends to embellish them.

In humans, mad cow prions can cause a fatal neurological disease called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). But the government is quick to point out that humans get other forms of CJD that are not variant, including classic or sporadic – which occur spontaneously – and hereditary CJD – which is genetic. The government also says there are clinical and symptom differences between the two and that classic or sporadic CJD tends to strike the old (at an average age of 68) while vCJD tends to strike the young (the average age in Britain was 28). The problem is doctors don’t know which type of CJD a patient has without a brain biopsy, usually after death – just as veterinarians don’t know which cows have mad cow until after death.

On December 23, 2003, as the nation headed into Christmas, the USDA announced that a Holstein cow, imported from Canada and slaughtered in Moses Lake, Washington, on December 9 for human food, tested positive for mad cow disease. Ann Veneman, agriculture secretary and other USDA officials said the cow was discovered because she was a “downer” (unable to walk), indicating that the mad cow testing program worked since it screened downers as the main source of mad cow risk. But three workers who saw the animal said it walked just fine.

What followed, believe it or not, were congressional hearings, a federal criminal investigation, and a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation largely over whether or not the animal walked to slaughter. Because if the animal looked fine and walked under its own steam to slaughter, the entire federal mad cow testing program was misconceived and was letting millions of similar animals into the food supply. But if the slaughterhouse workers were lying, as the government hoped, and the animal was prodded or fork-lifted to slaughter, we might have a farming system that values money over living things and chews them up and spits them out, but at least the mad cow alert system works.

In testimony before Congress, USDA inspector general Phyllis K. Fong blamed “procedural errors” for the conflicting data about whether or not the animal walked, and said an employee “who alleged that the BSE-positive cow was ambulatory and healthy when it arrived at the facility described a different animal from the one that arrived in the same trailer and later tested BSE-positive.”

Unfortunately, that was not the only government discrepancy. There were also two very different versions of what happened to the meat from the Washington state cow. The government said in its final report that, “By December 27, 2003, FDA had located all potentially-infectious product rendered from the BSE-positive cow in Washington State. This product was disposed of in a landfill in accordance with Federal, State and local regulations.”  But the Los Angeles Times reported that despite “a voluntary recall aimed at recovering all 10,000 pounds of beef slaughtered at the plant the day the Washington state cow was killed, some meat, which could have contained the Washington cow, was sold to restaurants in several Northern California counties.” And eaten, it turns out.

“In an interview, Alameda County health officer Dr. Anthony Iton recalled that in early January 2004, almost a month after the initial discovery, state health officials informed him that five restaurants in the Oakland area had received soup bones from the lot of tainted beef,” says the Times. “It immediately dispatched inspectors to the restaurants. But it was too late; soup made from the bones had been eaten. He was particularly disturbed to learn that none of the restaurant owners had received written notice of the recall and that federal inspectors did not visit them until 10 days after the recall.”

There was a second affront to food consumers besides letting the mad cow into the food supply and lying about it: bound by a USDA rule, the California Department of Health Services did not release the identities of stores or restaurants that purchased the meat, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “Alameda and Santa Clara counties have been informed by the state that 11 local restaurants and a market purchased soup bones from the suspect lot, but they have also declined to identify which establishments purchased them,” said the Chronicle. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture insists the recall is precautionary and the meat poses no health risk.”

USDA spokesman Matthew Baun actually said it was the public’s responsibility to find out if any food they ate was at risk because the recall information was a trade secret! It is “up to consumers to check with their grocers, butchers or restaurants to find out if any of the recalled meat may have landed on their tables,” said Baun. “We are prohibited from releasing information that companies would consider proprietary. If you are concerned whether you may have purchased the product, you can call your retail store. They would know. . . . The only way to know for sure is to contact stores.”

Being “concerned” whether you “purchased” a product that could cause certain death struck the public as a glib understatement and four years later similar outrage over  government shielding of outlets selling meat from sick and abused cattle killed for the National School Lunch Program at Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California prompted the USDA to reverse its policy protecting sellers, if not growers, of dangersous meat.

More Mad Cows and More Damage Control

Because of suspicions that feeding ruminants-to-ruminants and making cows cannibals could cause or spread mad cow disease, the U.S. had already banned the “protein recyling” practice in 1997. But one week after the Washington state mad cow surfaced, the USDA strengthened controls against mad cow disease by banning downer cattle in the food supply. It also banned “specified risk material“(SRM) from cows in the human food supply which included brains, skulls, eyes, spinal cords, tonsils, spleens, lymph tissues, and most of the vertebral column and small intestine, said to be at highest risk.

While scientific literature suggests that all cattle tissue, not just SRM, can harbor BSE infectivity, the government submits that “the presence of PrP [BSE] does not necessarily indicate the presence of BSE infectivity,”–meaning it may be in the meat but you may not catch it. Not too reassuring.

Japan and South Korea, two of the U.S.’s top-three beef importing nations were also not reassured by the new safety controls and withheld their business. And even as Mike Johanns, who succeeded Ann Veneman as agriculture secretary, tried to woo back Japan’s $1.5 billion a year business and South Korea’s $800 million,¹ the unthinkable happened. A second mad cow was found in the U.S. and unlike the first cow, which had been born in Canada, the second cow had never left its Texas ranch.²

Worse, the 12-year-old “cream-colored Brahma cross” had been suspected of mad cow eleven months after the Washington cow, but the government did not tell the public until seven months later. It took the government three tests to identify the cow as positive, the last test unilaterally ordered by USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong over Johanns’ head. Asked why the United States’ best technology was missing mad cows Johanns conceded to reporters that prion distribution in a brain could make “it possible for one sample to test negative while another sample might test positive,” reported the Houston Chronicle. He also conceded that “the protocol we developed just a few years ago to conduct the tests, including the type of antibody used, might not be the best option today.”

And there were other disturbing facts. The cream-colored Brahma cross was sold at a livestock sale despite reports that she was a downer. (“The cow had always been excitable and had fallen while she was being loaded to go to the market, but that this was not unusual behavior for her,” the owner told government investigators.) The buyer sent the Brahma cross to the slaughterhouse four days later, but when the truck arrived at H&B Packing in Waco, she was dead and the truck turned around and transported her instead to Champion Pet Food, across town. And 350 of her possible herd mates and offspring were slaughtered “and possibly in the human food supply, even before the government inquiry began,” reported the Dallas Morning News. The cow’s owner was “relatively sure” he had not kept any offspring from the cow at the facility but “there were essentially no records maintained on the index farm,” reported the government.

Yet despite selling an animal that couldn’t walk for human food, maintaining no records and the business’ very murky ownership, according to the government, the identity of the ranch and its owner was protected. Even more outrageous, the ranch was cleared to resume selling meat within one month. Why should a livestock operation be penalized for producing food that could kill people?

Meanwhile, the trading relationship with Japan was roiling. One month after Japan agreed to start importing U.S. beef again in early 2005, SRM – specified risk material -was found in a U.S. beef shipment and the ban was immediately re-imposed. Oops. The USDA conducted a self-policing “export verification audit” to reassure Japan and it just made things worse. Nine slaughterhouses were found in noncompliance with SRM policies, according to the audit, and 29 downers went into a human food supply, 20 not tested for mad cow disease. The reason the cows were not tested for mad cow almost sounds like a joke. Government inspectors “did not believe that they had the authority” to go into the pens where the animals were held and get samples, reported the Houston Chronicle.

In answers to written questions from Japanese agriculture officials, Johanns said the 29 cattle were healthy until they arrived at the slaughterhouses, “where they suddenly became unable to walk because of injury or other factors,” reported Eiji Hirose of Yomiuri Shimbun/Daily Yomiuri – kind of like the Texas rancher’s “excitable” cow. Legally, downers could be slaughtered for food if they had suffered an acute injury after passing inspection. But Johanns did not give any “clear evidence for his conclusion,” wrote Hirose, and his overall comments appeared “to show the U.S. government does not take the issue seriously enough.” Japan’s agriculture minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, was similarly unappeased and told Johanns in a phone conversation, he was concerned about SRM and downer cows. Japan then sent a team of officials to inspect US slaughterhouses firsthand.

Can anyone guess what happened next? Even before Japanese inspectors arrived in the U.S., another mad cow was found. On March 13, 2006, a deep-red, crossbred beef cow from an Alabama ranch, estimated to be ten years old, became the third confirmed U.S. mad cow.

Like the Texas cow, the Alabama cow was a downer, initial tests failed to disclose her mad cow status and the identity of the Alabama ranch and its owner were protected. Also, like the Texas cow, she had recently given birth – she “had at her side a 2- to 3-week old red Charolais cross female calf” at the time of her death, said the government report – and her herd mates were not found or kept out of the food supply, though 37 farms were investigated.

The audit for Japan and mishandling of the first three mad cows are not the only red flags for U.S. beef safety. Lester Friedlander, DVM, a USDA federal meat inspector for 10 years, told United Press International in 2005 that a USDA official told him not to say anything if he ever discovered a case of mad cow disease, and that he knew of cows that had tested positive at private laboratories, but were ruled negative by the USDA.

And a 2008 Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) report to assess safe removal of specified risk material (SRM) in U.S. slaughterhouses found the same equipment was being used at one facility on animals at high risk of mad cow and other animals because, according to the supervisory public health veterinarian, “there were no ‘visible SRMs’ on the equipment,” as if prions could be seen. The government report also says FSIS Headquarters officials “believed the sanitizer spray was sufficient to address the problem,” as if prions aren’t practically indestructible. Maybe it was even alcohol.

Cluster Bombs

Even before the 2003 Washington state cow, agribusiness recognized the damage that rumors of mad cow or other lethal agents in the food supply could do and lobbied lawmakers to pass food disparagement laws in the late 1990s. Oprah Winfrey herself was tried in Amarillo in 1997 for “disparaging” beef when she remarked on her show that she would never eat a hamburger again after learning of the forced cannibalism on U.S. farms, causing cattlemen to lose $11 million when prices plummeted. She was acquitted.

Since the three U.S. mad cows, beef producers and officials are quick to reassure the public when CJD cases surface that the brain diseases are not variant CJD from eating meat. Still, the damage control is tough when cases occur in clusters since sporadic or classic CJD by definition occur randomly and not in clusters.

Soon after the Washington state cow, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigated a potential cluster of more than 13 CJD cases, thought by some to be linked to food served at the Garden State Racetrack in southern New Jersey. But the CDC issued a report that found five of the cases were sporadic CJD, not variant CJD; six were “probable” CJD but not variant; three were not CJD; and three were still under investigation. The occurrence of 14 CJD-related cases over 9.25 years “would not be unusual,” said the CDC.

Apparent clusters of nine people in Idaho in 2005³ , four in northeastern Indiana in 2007 and two in Tennessee in 2009, were similarly smoothed over. And when a CJD patient was admitted to an Amarillo, Texas hospital in 2008 causing cattle futures to tank, a beef-cattle specialist with the Amarillo office of Texas AgriLife Extension assured the public the case was sporadic not variant – before test results were even in. Two years later, there were more questions about CJD cases in Texas. A map of “CJD Cases by County 2000–2010″ on the Texas Department of State Health Services website shows two red areas that look like, well, clusters.

Nonetheless, Americans seem less rattled about beef scares than are countries they export to. As the U.S. and South Korea prepared to sign the free-trade agreement, KORUS FTA, in 2008, which included wide provisions for beef trade, actual riots over the risk of mad cow in U.S. beef broke out in South Korea. “We Don’t Like the FDA,” “Mad Cow, You Eat It!” and “Send Mad Cow to the Presidential Office!” chanted demonstrators at candlelight vigils in 22 cities, some dressed in cow costumes.

Fueling the riots were reports in local media that Koreans are genetically more vulnerable to vCJD, that mad cow prions were in cosmetics, diapers and sanitary napkins and television images of downer cows at Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California fork-lifted and “water-boarded” to slaughter for National School Lunch Program a few months earlier. And even as President George W. Bush assured South Korean president Lee Myung-bak at Camp David during the trade negotiations that U.S. beef was safe, a case of CJD appeared in a 22-year-old Virginia woman who had never left the country. It was an unusually young age for CJD if it weren’t variant.

As the U.S. now seeks “negligible risk” status for mad cow disease, there’s no reason to believe its institutionalized ineptitude, denial and misinformation about beef risks has changed and therefore that such a classification means anything. In fact, there is only one government safeguard that beef consumers can count on: if more mad cows surface, the names of the ranches that produce them will be protected.

An earlier version of this report appeared on Truth-out.org

1. Art Hovey, “Cattlemen leery of reopening border”,  Lee Newspapers, February 10, 2005
2. Betsy Blaney, “Cattle Herd Must Stay Put—Texas Ranch Where Diseased Cow Originated Is Quarantined,” Associated Press, July 1, 2005
3. Rare Disease Raises Questions—Idaho Cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, Herald Journal, October 23, 2005

I’d like to take you on a brief but epic journey of the toads, their helpers and their antagonists — from the meat eating toad saviors to the Commie vegans (me), to the right wing talk-shit radio host who ridicules the detour, to the local evangelical pastor who believes we should be working on “the abortion issue instead of the toad issue,” to the five-year-olds filled with wonder and their Dixie cups filled with toadlets, to the little old ladies (and men) in tennis shoes who remain the backbone of the movement to help animals of all kinds, and to the discomforting effect that any kind of street activism seems to have on don’t-make-a-scene, don’t-slow-my-routine Americans who, if living in 1775, might have yelled: “Get a life, Paul Revere!” And, most importantly, to the power of what can happen when a single person cares a lot even when no one else seems to care at all.

Once upon a time, every spring, the hibernating bufo americanus digs up about a foot through the dirt and emerges into the darkness of the first warm rainy night in March. By the thousands, and from every direction over several weeks, the Roxborough toads begin their journey from backyards, junior league baseball fields, a small cemetery and the woods of the 340-acre Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, hopping to the highest point in the city, the abandoned (by humans) 30-acre Roxborough reservoir. Most of the toads hop for over a mile and cross one or two busy roads where they are met with a 20-foot tall stone wall which they travel along for a city block. They then turn right to go up a brick pedestrian ramp another half block or so, crawl under a fence, then down a steep wooded embankment and into the reservoir where they began their lives. About a month after the males fertilize the females’ eggs, the tadpoles develop into tiny fly-sized toadlets and they begin the perilous reverse migration.

Pickerel frogs, in much smaller numbers, also move with the toads during the four to six week migration. When the trilling of the male toads, calling for the females, joins with the croaking frogs and the squawks and chirps of migrating birds the reservoir becomes another of nature’s great symphonies. An association of free producers — producing joy!

The toad detour began several years ago when Lisa Levinson, a 44-year-old therapist, saw toads getting crushed by cars one night on her way home from work. She stopped traffic and picked up the toads and put them on the other side of the road. Soon someone called the police on this “crazy lady in the street.” But when the female officer rolled up, instead of taking Levinson in for observation, she blocked off the street with her patrol car so Levinson could continue her work unimpeded. After another year of unsafe solo “renegade operations,” Levinson convinced the city of Roxborough to issue a temporary permit to block the two main migration roads for several hours during nights that the toads are on the move. Levinson then organized over 100 volunteers and got the backing of a dozen civic, environmental and neighborhood groups to support the project. The Toad DETOUR was born. The Schuylkill Center recently took over the detour and there is also a documentary film, The Toad Detour, by Burgess Coffield.

Although a longtime animal activist, I’m a newbie to amphibian migrations. Turns out that all over the world people are detouring (or dodging) traffic to help toads, frogs and salamanders cross the roads. No claim is made that the Roxborough toads are endangered as a specie, nor that preserving them is going to do some wondrous thing somewhere down the line for the human animal — the toads are being assisted for their own individual sake, protected not from evolution and nature but from one of the more unnatural creations that humans have invented. The volunteers in this unglamorous but highly effective endeavor are not, by and large, vegetarian animal activists.

The Roxborough detour is the only one I’m aware of that protects migrating toadlets as well as adult toads. The toads don’t make it easy to help as they travel mainly at night and in the rain. So you will see volunteers with flashlights, buckets, rain suits, reflective vests, walkie talkies and umbrellas, both inside and outside the wooden barricades, gathering data on numbers of toads and frogs crossing, nightly temperature and weather conditions, numbers killed outside the barricades, etc. My first year I was tasked with counting the dead ones — they came much earlier than expected and the detour wasn’t officially set up so a couple hundred of them were run over in the first hour or two of migration, dying in all poses of mutilation, amputation and twisted agony. Many people aren’t aware that they have amphibian migrations going on in their areas because even many hundreds of dead bodies are typically washed away by the rain and/or scavenged by other creatures during the night. By morning rush hour there’s no evidence that these amphibian Antietams have occurred.

Female adult toads have it rough: they are bloated with eggs, again sometimes hopping for a mile, and they are often laid claim to by males who hitch a ride on their back the entire way, something known to scientists as “amplexus” (Perhaps you’ve read Henry Miller’s great toad-fucking trilogy “Sexus Amplexus Nexus”?) One of the saddest sights is to find a pair of them run over and dying together.

Some nights there are 30-40 volunteers and other nights, like a memorable Saturday night thunderstorm last April, there are only two people staffing the two barricades and redirecting traffic. On that night the wind was gusting 40 mph, God flipped on the lightning switch and then wastefully walked away for two hours in a scene, as I stand toading, straight out of Faulkner: Levinson was at one barricade, I was a half mile away at the other one and the storm washed dirt, tree branches and debris down the hilly streets that border the reservoir, the street became a stream flowing over my shoes and I watched the small but mighty pickerel frogs (who feel like a rocket in your hand), understanding that it’s party time, leaping across the road in a couple bounds while the placid non-athletic toads were simply carried away, que sera sera, like little boats from the top of the street to the bottom. My umbrella looked like Picasso got a hold of it. And, of course, car-bots were still out there driving, wondering why they were being detoured.

Actually, most motorists are great about the detour — some who roll down their windows and ask what’s going on often end up volunteering. It’s hard to describe what a unique community event the toad migration is — it’s Roxborough’s equivalent of wildebeests on the Serengeti, especially when the streets appear to be moving with thousands of toadlets. June 12 was the apex night last year for the toadlets and neighbors called up their grandchildren to come over and witness it. Children, being lower to the ground, make great toad-spotters and on this night, outside of the barricades, they and their parents collected 1,900 toadlets in cups and put them on the other side of the road. Many thousands more crossed between the barricades. Toadlets were behind me, beside me, in front of me, even boldly marching single file down the sidewalks on their way “back” to homes they’ve never seen near headstones, home run fences and deep in the woods.

Not everyone likes the detour. A neighborhood pastor thinks it’s ridiculous and that we should be helping humans rather than toads. (Fugettaboutit that we pick up much trash while toad patrolling in this heavily littered area. His current church sign: “GET OFF FACEBOOK AND GET INTO MY BOOK.”) Instead of seeing this incredible miracle of God’s (or somebody’s) creation he sees 40 people out in the rain helping toads, often outnumbering those at his Sunday evening service. One of the most infuriating documents for capitalist Christian America, whenever it’s put into practice, is the diabolical Sermon on the Mount. Invariably, irreverent agnostics like me get the memo from the desk of Jesus H. Christ about mercy, while multitudes of Christians nit pick about who deserves mercy and who doesn’t (non-human beings, prisoners/criminals, Muslims, etc.)

Still, I know where from the pastor comes: how many peace vigils and antiwar protests have I attended over the past 10 years where there weren’t 40 people? But non-human beings shouldn’t have to wait indefinitely to get their injustices addressed. I also feel that if the toads could fight back, they would, which you can’t say for the American working class. I’d rather spend time directly and tangibly helping some innocents than trying to rally narcissistic zombies who see nothing wrong with living inside a relentless and remorseless lifetime worldwide war-making machine and then, upon a blue moon retaliation, ask stupid shit like, “Why do they hate us?”

The toad detour has also taken potshots from a local right wing talk radio host. A local all-volunteer effort that takes no tax dollars and unites three generations becomes an object of suspicion and derision because it helps animals. One morning he ominously wondered, “Where do these people get their money from?” The previous week I spent 80 bucks at Radio Shack to buy two walkie talkies. But since I’m a Marxist I guess the international communist conspiracy paid for it after all. (By the way, I would like to join the international communist conspiracy but I can’t find it anywhere — it’s not in Russia, it’s not in China, it’s not in Vietnam. Maybe it’s on back order or only available now as an FBI entrapment scheme.)

For the rabid right, kindness is a “wedge” issue and they’re against it on principle. And these hierarchy-lovin’ authoritarians are onto something here: capitalism has so thoroughly alienated people of all political stripes from their lives, their work and other human beings — just as Marx said it did 160 years ago — that kindness to animals is sometimes a gateway back to restoring humanity in general. And looking at the structural causes that make so much kindness necessary leads directly to the answer of abolishing the property status of animals which leads to dumping capitalism entirely. Animal activists who don’t see this are deluding themselves, thinking that this vicious system is going to create a special legal niche for non-humans that it won’t create for humans. And “progressives” who won’t embrace elementary respect and justice for non-human beings ( i.e., STOP FUCKING EATING THEM!) have more in common with Dick Cheney than they should be comfortable with. Animal liberation is revolutionary. So, congrats, you right wingers are correct about something important: kindness is dangerous (for you).

The shock jock is a kissin’ cousin to the DWB (driving without brains) young white males who scream “Fuck the frogs!” and “Get a life!” One of these human patriots threw an egg (missing) at three of our volunteers one night — a man and two ladies who were 82, 80 and 67 years old respectively. Truth is, it doesn’t matter how much animal rescuers soft pedal what we do, we are a threat in a thoroughly speciesist world. Also, as Occupy Wall Street shows, in a cowardly kiss up kick down obedient society begging for fascism, people hate other people who stand up to power.

All I can say is that on The Day Of The Great Skinniness, when we Commie vegans have triumphed, every one of you right wing bastards are getting shipped off to Randy’s Gulag Tofupelago for brown rice, miso and Melanie music. To show you that I am merciful, I won’t make you drink kombucha tea. So be very afraid! After all, that what you guys do so well — being afraid of beings of different colors, shapes, sizes, languages, afraid of experiencing the suffering of others, afraid of releasing your death grip on the rest of creation. “NO FEAR!” says your chatty pick up trucks — riiiiiiiiight.

The toad detour is a diverse group of strangers who have come together and cooperated to experience the ecstasy of altruism, a little bit of humanity unleashed to what it can and should be, where money is not answered to and private gain has no place, something very un-American because America is nothing but the tyranny of money which squashes the truth toad, the science toad, the humanity toad, the democracy toad, the compassion toad and leisure time toad. Nobody needed to tell Lisa Levinson that cars mowing down thousands of creatures was wrong and needed to be stopped. And no corrupt politicians had to be appealed to for years on end to remedy the problem. No, the working class, in the form of the toad detour, JUST TOOK IT, and that’s a lesson we should be trying to figure out how to apply everywhere.

The toads are on the move right now. If you live in the Philadelphia area and would like to volunteer, contact cmorgan@schuylkillcenter.org”>. The staff of the Schuylkill Center does not condone or endorse foul-mouthed Marxist vegans — they are good people helping good toads. So help them help the toads cross the road to make whoopee.

The School for Murder

The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly called the School of the Americas (SOA), is a combat training institute for Latin American soldiers located in Fort Benning, Ga. The school came to media attention in 1996 after the Pentagon unveiled a curriculum that advocated execution, extortion, and torture.

SOA’s name change to WHINSEC in 2001 was made after numerous protests in the U.S. and Latin America exposed its violent character. Yet there is no evidence that WHINSEC practices are different from the violent past of the SOA.

For instance, although the U.S. officially “deplored” the 2009 overthrow of the democratically elected president of Honduras, it was WHINSEC graduates who spearheaded the ousting. Honduran pro-democracy resistance groups say that today SOA/WHINSEC graduates prop up an administration that increasingly represses human rights activists, journalists, and social movements.

SOA boasted on its Web site that it had “defeated” many critics of the school who identified with Marxist Liberation Theology. Graduates certainly murdered prominent advocates of that philosophy. Some instructors’ duties include repression of socialist parties; Lt. Col. German Barriga in Chile was implicated in the 1976 disappearance of the Chilean Communist Party leader Jorge Muñoz, who was never found.

Since the 1970s, atrocities by SOA students have rapidly multiplied. Violent political repression is common from attendees. Ample information has been gathered by SOA Watch, available at www.soaw.org.

But there has been no serious attempt by Congress to close down the school despite its bloody record.

SOA-style Political Repression in the USA

Instead of closing the school, the U.S. is increasingly copying SOA/WHINSEC strategies to quell domestic political dissent. Consider the Patriot Act of 2001. Antiwar activists, Muslims, and other dissidents were among the most targeted victims of the ensuing FBI raids, spying, and civil liberties violations. The act has been renewed every time it is slated to expire.

Then there is the military’s Total Information Awareness program to amass huge databases of information on all U.S. residents. Even though it was shut down, a congressional report concluded that the program has continued under other names.

Documents recently uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force investigated activists who revealed abuse of animals on factory farms. The animal rights protesters entered properties, and videotaped and publicized the awful conditions. The report states that although the acts were a form of nonviolent civil disobedience, they were a violation of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and agents recommended prosecutions for terrorism. So causing a corporation economic losses due to protest is now to be treated as an act of terrorism!

Democrats and Republicans are accomplices in squelching political opposition. For example, both parties have restricted protests at their national conventions to distant “free speech zones.” With the help of the FBI and Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, the 2008 Republican National Convention has resulted in grand jury witch-hunts and the prosecution of antiwar activists who organized rallies.

The 2010 arrest of Bradley Manning shows the looming threat of a police state for whistle blowers. Pfc. Manning was charged for allegedly sharing documentation of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan with the information-sharing Web site Wikileaks. Manning was held in solitary confinement for months, prompting worldwide outrage.

The War on Dissent Ramps Up

On December 31, Obama signed into law a bill that allows preventive detention of “terrorist suspects” on U.S. soil. Under the National Defense Authorization Act, the military has the power to hold indefinitely any person considered a “threat to national security.” Suspects, including U.S. citizens, can be detained in secret without trial, knowledge of the charges against them, or legal counsel. The law gives the military new authority to act against civilians inside the country.

December 2011 also marked the first time Predator drones were used in the U.S. against civilians (except at the border). Drones are unmanned, remotely controlled military aircraft. They were originally introduced in combat in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to conduct spying and fire missiles.

Drones were originally approved for the Customs and Border Protection Agency in 2005 with little publicity. A neglected provision in the Customs and Border budget request to Congress stipulated that drones could be used for “interior law enforcement support,” which made them available to police without new laws or regulations, discussion or debate.

AeroVironment, Inc., the leading producer of small drones, stated in their 2011 Annual Report that future profits are likely to come from domestic use.

Federal agents continue to spy on, and raid the homes of, antiwar activists and those in the Muslim community. There has been a nationally coordinated effort to evict, often-violently, demonstrators across the country staying in Occupy movement encampments.

Fighting State Terror Tactics

Bills have been introduced in Congress to end SOA/WHINSEC, as well as to make the instructors and curriculum transparent. Protests take place every year at Fort Benning to expose the school’s destructive role in Latin America and call for shutting it down.

Public pressure in Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Venezuela resulted in pledges by these governments to stop sending students to the school and a strong movement is underway in Chile to demand the same.

It is past time for similar protests of School of the Americas-type tactics in the U.S. SOA/WHINSEC, the FBI, Republicans, Democrats, and corporations are linked together in their ambition to extinguish political dissent. A coalition of labor, Occupy, antiwar, environmental and animal rights activists engaged in a united fight can destroy the police/military policies and profit driven system that dictate our lives.

• This article was first published at Freedom Socialist newspaper, Vol. 33, No. 1, February-March 2012

That means there will be an additional six weeks of winter.

Or it means there will be an early Spring.

It doesn’t make much difference. Phil has an accuracy rate of about 39 percent, according to the StormFax Weather Almanac. That’s probably about the same as TV weather forecasters.

StormFax has tracked Phil’s predictions since 1897, the year he (with the help of the Punxsatawney Spirit) made his first trip to Gobbler’s Knob, about two miles from the town in the northwest part of Pennsylvania.

The name, Punxsutawney, is probably derived from an Algonquin or Delaware Indian name which loosely translates as “village of sand fleas.” The name, Phil, is a tribute to Philip Freas, a staff writer for the Spirit, who wrote dozens of stories about what would become one of the most enduring tourism attractions in the country.

The festival is based upon a German superstition and a Celtic celebration. The superstition relates to hibernating animals; when they leave their den, if they see their shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter; if they don’t, it’s an early spring. The Celtic festival (known as Imbolc) was midway between the winter solstice (usually about Dec. 21–22), and the Spring Equinox (usually March 20). The date set for Phil’s annual prediction is always February 2, midway between the beginning of Winter and the beginning of Spring. This, of course, means that among the millions who now watch the ceremony in person, by webcam, or on the TV news, none are groundhogs. Except for Phil, they hibernate in well-constructed underground burrows from October to early Spring.

The name, woodchuck, an alternate for groundhog, is probably from “wojak,” a Native American word.

The second most famous ground hog is Gus. Unlike the furry Phil, who lives with his wife, Phyllis, in a library for most of the year, Gus is a cute little animatronic animal whose primary mission is to lure Pennsylvanians to spend money on the state lottery. Television commercials have assured Gus of his own celebrity. However, unlike Phil, he doesn’t make personal appearances.

Groundhogs in captivity have life spans that average 10–14 years. However, faced by several predators—including wolves, coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, eagles and man—groundhogs usually live only two or three years in the wild.

Phil and Gus are just about the only two groundhogs that people feel any warmth for. The Pennsylvania Game Commission treats groundhogs as nuisance animals. Every day but Sunday is open season on the animals that weigh only about five to nine pounds. Even a cursory look at Google shows that several hundred thousand posts about groundhogs focus upon ways to kill them, with thousands of people bragging about how many they killed, and with what kind of trap, gas, or gun. There is no fur or meat value to humans.

Hunters and trappers kill groundhogs near roads and fields, and go from farm to farm. However, hunters and trappers often believe that in their own enjoyment of killing a gentle species that poses no threat to humans they may be doing some kind of a service to mankind. Many believe that killing groundhogs will keep them from overpopulating the environment. However, such is not the case. “Studies show that even when all the woodchucks are trapped out of an area, others from surrounding areas quickly move into the vacated niche,” says Laura J. Simon, field director for the Urban Wildlife Program of the Humane Society of the United States. But there is also another problem. In Spring and Summer, baby groundhogs live in the underground tunnels. Killing their mother will lead them to starve to death.

Natural predators keep the balance of nature to reduce overpopulation. Like most animals, groundhogs have a sense that allows them to breed to keep the species alive in areas of extreme danger; as the danger is removed, instead of breeding, groundhogs will actually stabilize population growth.  Hunters and farmers claim groundhogs leave holes that can damage tractors or cause injuries to horses and livestock. However, the perceived reality of that happening may be far greater than the actual risk, according to Simon.

The second major reason people kill groundhogs is because of fear. “At least half the calls we get,” says Simon, “is because people are afraid that groundhogs will attack them.” But, groundhogs, says Simon, “are benign shy animals that will retreat to their burrows when they see humans, even small children, coming close.”

The third major reason people want to kill groundhogs is because the animals, in search for food, will destroy gardens. Ironically, the deforestation of America has allowed groundhogs to flourish. They prefer to build their complex multi-level burrows on open ground at the edge of forests. This open view gives them protection from predators, while providing sources for their appetite for grub, grasshoppers, earthworms, berries, and various fruits and some vegetables; for water, they eat grasses and leaves. But as agricultural land is also destroyed to allow the construction of everything from parking lots to condos to supermarkets, groundhogs, like most species, are shoved from their own homes. That’s when homeowners see the holes in their lawns and some garden crops chewed up. Animal-friendly gardeners will plant extra so animals and humans can share the food.

Some of the methods to get rid of groundhogs cause more injuries to humans than to groundhogs. People have also used broken glass or poured concrete into the entrance and exit holes of the burrows. But, these methods, says Simon, don’t work.

There are several non-lethal humane ways to effectively discourage the animals. One of the best is to enclose the garden in a three foot high mesh fence, “with the top part left wobbly to discourage the animals from climbing,” says Simon. To discourage groundhogs from burrowing under the garden and then coming up to munch, the Humane Society advises homeowners to purchase a four-foot tall roll of green garden fencing. The lower 12 inches of mesh should be bent at a 90 degree angle and run parallel to the ground, away from the garden, to create a “false bottom,” and secured to the ground by landscaping staples. Homeowners can also discourage groundhogs by placing objects that reflect sunlight and continually move in the breeze, such as tethered Mylar party balloons. Simon says ones with big eyes “seem to work best because they create a predator image.”

Groundhogs and people can co-exist, with neither harming the other. Killing groundhogs just because we can is never a good reason.

•  Rosemary Brasch assisted with this article.

Butterball is certified by the British Retail Consortium, says the site, on “300 elements related to food safety and quality, as well as worker safety, environmental impact and management commitment.” The turkey processor practices “good citizenship” based on “self-governance,” “social responsibility,” and  “sustainability.”

But search for the words “welfare,” “Mercy For Animals” or “Shannon, North Carolina” (where a grisly Christmas-time expose took place) and you will get no results. Maybe you didn’t spell the words correctly.

Between November and December of 2011, while people were making their holiday plans, an undercover employee at a Butterball turkey semen collection facility in Shannon documented turkeys with open sores, infected eyes and broken bones, covered in flies and living in their own waste. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

“In the video, workers can be seen kicking and stomping on turkeys, as well as dragging them by their wings and necks,” reported ABC news. “The video also shows injured birds with open wounds and exposed flesh.”

Birds at the Butterball facility were left to slowly die from their injuries, some unable to even reach food or water, says the undercover employee. The “pain and the suffering that they’re experiencing,” is clearly visible she told NBS news.

Like scores of other gigantic food producers who have been exposed on undercover videos as harboring sadistic employees and sick and dying animals, Butterball pleads ignorance. It has a “zero tolerance policy for any mistreatment of our birds,” and has fired the proverbial “bad apple” employees it did not know about. Who knew?

Butterball is also “taking steps to help ensure that all new and existing associates have a clear understanding of our animal well-being policies,” said Rod Brenneman, president and CEO of Butterball. Maybe employees don’t know they aren’t supposed to stomp and kick birds, drag them by their wings and necks, not to mention bash them in the heads with metal bars, as the employee reports. Let’s tell them!

But, it wasn’t only Butterball management that enabled the agricultural hell for turkeys in the interests of cheap “holiday” food. Dr. Sarah Mason, head of animal health programs in the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, tipped off Butterball about a December 28 raid and managed to sabotage it.  Even as the Hoke County Sheriff’s Department sought to raid Butterball on the basis of videotaped evidence, Mason contacted “a friend and fellow veterinarian” who works for Butterball, which assured that the raid “never had a chance,” reports the Fayetteville Observer.

Hey, from one vet to another, we better hide the animal abuse we’re permitting!

Given that the state agency is in charge of regulating Butterball yet undermined the raid, was there a quid pro quo involved? “That’s a criminal matter, to be decided by the district attorney’s office,” opines the Observer.

The sordid collegiality between government and industry which makes a mockery of democracy, consumer rights and animal welfare, brings to mind the saga of egg don Austin “Jack” DeCoster, the salmonella king.

Despite the recall of half a billion salmonella-contaminated eggs from DeCoster-affiliated farms in 2010, his conviction on animal cruelty,  the same year and nine deaths and 500 illnesses traced to his eggs in 1987,  Iowa state agencies thought he was a pretty cool dude.

“One of the things I’ve always said about DeCoster is that when there’s a problem at his facilities, he acts fast,” enthused Kevin Buskins, a spokesman for Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources which shares oversight of egg operations with the state agriculture department.

Will Butterball get a pass like DeCoster did? So far no charges have been filed against the turkey processor and its state regulator “friend” still has her job. And there is even more good news for the turkey processor. The company and its communications agency, Howard, Merrell & Partners, received four public relations awards from the Virginia Chapter of the National Agri-Marketing Association, Carolinas, this month at an industry banquet.

Receiving honors were a celebration for the “millionth fresh bird produced during the 2010 holiday season,” a press release announcing  330,000 pounds of turkey products donated to the needy and a campaign in partnership with the Weekly Reader that demonstrates “how responsible agricultural practices lead to healthy animals and safe, high-quality food for consumers.”

We had wanted the U.S. Department of the Interior to stop the government-approved slaughter of wild horses and burros in the southwest, but were disappointed that the cattle industry used its money and influence to shelter politicians from Americans who asked for compassion and understanding of  breeds that roamed freely long before the nation’s “Manifest Destiny.”

We wanted to see the federal government protect wolves, foxes, and coyotes, none of whom attack humans, have no food or commercial value, but are major players in environmental balance. But, we knew that the hunting industry would prevail since they see these canines only as competition.

We wanted to see the Pennsylvania legislature stand up for what is right and courageously end the cruelty of pigeon shoots. But, a pack of cowards left Pennsylvania as the only state where pigeon shoots, with their illegal gambling, are actively held.

For what seems to be decades, we have written against racism and bigotry. But many politicians still believe that gays deserve few, if any, rights; that all Muslims are enemy terrorists; and publicly lie that Voter ID is a way to protect the integrity of the electoral process, while knowing it would disenfranchise thousands of poor and minority citizens.

We will continue to write about the destruction of the environment and of ways people are trying to save it. Environmental concern is greater than a decade ago, but so is the ignorant prattling of those who believe global warming is a hoax, and mistakenly believe that the benefits of natural gas fracking, with well-paying jobs in a depressed economy, far outweigh the environmental, health, and safety problems they cause.Ee will continue to write against government corruption, bailouts, tax advantages for the rich and their corporations, governmental waste, and corporate greed. They will continue to exist because millionaire legislators will continue to protect those who contribute to political campaigns. Nevertheless, we will continue to speak out against politicians who have sacrificed the lower- and middle-classes in order to protect the one percent.

We will continue to write about the effects of laying off long-time employees and of outsourcing jobs to “maximize profits.” Until Americans realize that “cheaper” doesn’t necessarily mean “better,” we’ll continue to explain why exploitation knows no geographical boundaries.

The working class successfully launched major counter-attacks against seemingly-entrenched anti-labor politicians in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states. But these battles will be as long and as bitter as the politicians who deny the rights of workers. We will continue to speak out for worker rights, better working conditions, and benefits at least equal to their managers. We don’t expect anything to change in 2012, but we are still hopeful that a minority of business owners who already respect the worker will influence the rest.

There are still those who believe education is best served by programs manacled by teaching-to-the-test mentality, and are more than willing to sacrifice quality for numbers. We will continue to write about problems in the nation’s educational system, especially the failure to encourage intellectual curiosity and respect for the tenets of academic integrity.

Against great opposition, the President and Congress passed sweeping health care reform. But, certain members of Congress, all of whom have better health care than most Americans, have proclaimed they will dismantle the program they derisively call “Obamacare.”

During this new year, we will still be writing about the unemployed, the homeless, those without adequate health coverage—and against the political lunatics who continue to deny Americans the basics of human life, essentials that most civilized countries already give their citizens.

We had written forcefully against the previous president and vice-president when they strapped on their six-shooters and sent the nation into war in a country that posed no threat to us, while failing to adequately attack a country that housed the core of the al-Qaeda movement. We wrote about the Administration’s failure to provide adequate protection for the soldiers they sent into war or adequate and sustained mental and medical care when they returned home. The War in Iraq is now over, but the war in Afghanistan continues. The reminder of these wars will last as long as there are hospitals and cemeteries.

We had written dozens of stories against the Bush–Cheney Administration’s belief in the use of torture and why it thought it was necessary to shred parts of the Constitution. We had hoped that a new president, a professor of Constitutional law, would stop the attack upon our freedoms and rights. But the PATRIOT Act was extended, and new legislation was enacted that reduces the rights and freedoms of all citizens. At all levels of government, Constitutional violations still exist, and a new year won’t change our determination to bring to light these violations wherever and whenever they occur.

The hope we and this nation had for change we could believe in, and which we still hope will not die, has been minced by the reality of petty politics, with the “Party of No” and its raucous Teabagger mutation blocking social change for America’s improvement. We can hope that the man we elected will realize that compromise works only when the opposition isn’t entrenched in a never-ending priority not of improving the country, but of keeping him from a second term. Perhaps now, three years after his inauguration, President Obama will disregard the disloyal opposition and unleash the fire and truth we saw in the year before his election, and will speak out even more forcefully for the principles we believed when we, as a nation, gave him the largest vote total of any president in history.

We really want to be able to write columns about Americans who take care of each other, about leaders who concentrate upon fixing the social problems. But we know that’s only an ethereal ideal.  So, we’ll just have to hope that the waters of social justice wear down, however slowly, the jagged rocks of haughty resistance.

The House voted 124–69, December 13, to send an animal welfare bill back to committee, in this case the Gaming Oversight Committee. The bill, SB 71, would have banned simulcasting of greyhound races from other states. Pennsylvania had banned greyhound racing in 2004. Among several of the current bill’s amendments were ones that would also have banned the sale of cat and dog meat, increased penalties for releasing exotic animals, and stopped the cruelty of live pigeon shoots.

It’s the pigeon shoot amendment, sponsored by Rep. John Maher (R-Allegheny), that caused legislators to hide beneath their desks, apparently in fear of the poop from the NRA, which lobbied extensively against ending pigeon shoots. The unrelenting NRA message irrationally claimed that banning pigeon shoots is the first step to banning guns. The NRA even called the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) a radical animal rights group.

The House action leaves Pennsylvania as the only state where pretend hunters, most of them from New Jersey and surrounding states where pigeon shoots are illegal, to come to Pennsylvania and kill caged birds launched in front of spectators and the shooters.

Most pigeon shoots are held in Berks County in southeastern Pennsylvania, with one in the nearby suburban Philadelphia area. Scared and undernourished birds are placed into small cages, and then released about 20 yards in front of people with 12-gauge shotguns. Most birds, as many as 5,000 at an all-day shoot, are hit standing on their cages, on the ground, or flying erratically just a few feet from the people who pretend to be sportsmen. Even standing only feet from their kill, the shooters aren’t as good as they think they are. About 70 percent of all birds are wounded, according to Heidi Prescott, HSUS senior vice-president, who for about 25 years has been documenting and leading the effort to pass legislation to finally end pigeon shoots in the state.

Birds that fall outside the shooting club’s property are left to die long and horrible deaths. If the birds are wounded on the killing fields, trapper boys and girls, most in their early teens, some of them younger, grab the birds, wring their necks, stomp on their bodies, or throw them live into barrels to suffocate. There is no food or commercial value of a pigeon killed at one of the shoots.

The lure of pigeon shoots, in addition to what the participants must think is a wanton sense of fulfillment, is gambling, illegal under Pennsylvania law but not enforced by the Pennsylvania State Police.

The International Olympic Committee banned the so-called sport after the 1900 Olympics because of its cruelty to animals. Most hunters, as well as the Pennsylvania Game Commission, say that pigeon shoots aren’t “fair chase hunting.” Almost every daily newspaper in the state and dozens of organizations, from the Council of Churches to the Pennsylvania Bar Association, oppose this form of animal cruelty.

On the floor of the House, Rep. Rosita C. Youngblood (D-Philadelphia), usually a supporter of animal rights issues, spoke out against voting on the bill, and asked other Democrats to go along with her. Youngblood is minority chair of the Gaming Oversight committee.

Youngblood’s chief of staff, Bill Thomas, emphasizes that Youngblood’s only concern was to protect the integrity of the legislative process. Although some members truly believed they voted to recommit the bill for procedural reasons, most members were just simply afraid to vote on the bill. Voting to recommit the bill were 52 Democrats, many of them opposed to pigeon shoots; 35 voted to keep it on the floor for debate. Among Republicans, the vote was 72–34 to send the bill to committee.

The Arguments

Germaneness: The Republican leadership had determined that all amendments to bills  in the current legislative session must be germane to the bill. “You can’t hijack a bill,” many in the House, including key Democrats, claimed as the major reason they voted against SB71.

However, the Republicans, with a majority in the House and able to block any bill in committee that didn’t meet their strict political agenda, raised “germaneness” to a level never before seen in the House. For decades, Democrats and Republicans attached completely unrelated amendments to bills. Even during this session, the Republicans, in violation of their own “rules,” attached amendments to allow school vouchers onto several bills, many that had nothing to do with education. But, the Greyhound racing bill was considered under both gambling and animal cruelty concerns. Thus, the amendment to ban pigeon shoots could also be considered to be an animal cruelty amendment and not subject to the Judiciary Committee, where it was likely to die.

Separate bill. Several legislators believed the attempt to stop pigeon shoots should have been its own bill, not tacked onto another bill.

However, only twice have bills about pigeon shoots come to the floor of the House. Most proposed legislation had been buried in committees or blocked by House leadership, both Democrat and Republican, most of whom received support and funding from the NRA, gun owner groups, and their political action committees (PACs). In 1989, the Pennsylvania House had defeated a bill to ban pigeon shoots, 66–126. By 1994, three years after the first large scale protest, the House voted 99–93 in favor of an amendment to ban pigeon shoots, but fell short of the 102 votes needed for passage.

The bill would duplicate or repeal a recently-signed law:

Rep. Curt Schroeder (R-Chester Co.), chair of the Gaming Oversight committee, sponsored the House version of the Senate’s bill. If it was truly an unnecessary bill, he or the leadership could have previously sent it to committee for reworking or killed it. According to sources close to the leadership, despite his concern for animal welfare, Schroeder was not pleased about the amendments tacked onto his bill.

Short time to accomplish much: Several Democrats believed that by spending extraordinary time on the bill, necessary legislation would not be brought to the floor and the Republicans could then blame the Democrats for blocking key legislation.

However, both parties already knew how they would vote for redistricting (the Republicans had gerrymandered the state to protect certain districts), school vouchers, and other proposed legislation.  Further, the Republican leadership could have blocked putting the Greyhound bill into the agenda or placed it at the end of other bills. Even on the floor of the House, the leadership could have shut down debate at any time. Thus, the Democrats’ argument about “only four days left” is blunted by the Republicans’ own actions. During 2011, the House met only 54 days when the vote on SB 71 was taken. If the House was so concerned about having only four days left in the year to discuss and vote upon critical issues, it could have added days to the work week or increased hours while in session. Speaker Mike Turzai (R-Allegheny), to his credit, wanted a vote, although he personally opposed the pigeon shoot amendment. “Let’s put this issue to rest,” he told the members. Taking the time to debate the bill, says Bill Thomas, “wasted taxpayer money and time.” However, “the amount of time spent avoiding the bill,” counters Prescott, “wastes far more time and resources than voting on it.”

Nevertheless, no matter what the arguments, sending the bill to committee was a good way to avoid having to deal with a highly controversial issue. It allowed many legislators to pretend to their constituents that they still believe in animal welfare, while avoiding getting blow-back from the NRA or its supporters. Conversely, it allowed many of those who wanted to keep pigeon shoots to avoid a debate and subsequent vote, allowing continued support from pro-gun constituents who accept the NRA non-logic, while not offending constituents who believe in animal welfare.

Whatever their reasons, the failure of the many of the state’s representatives to stand up for their convictions probably caused legislation to ban this form of animal cruelty to be as dead during this session as the pigeons whose necks are wrung by teenagers who finish the kill by people who think they’re sportsmen but are little more than juveniles disguised in the bodies of adults.

In June, Pfizer announced it was ending arsenic-containing chicken feed which no one realized they were eating anyway but its arsenic-containing Histostat, fed to turkeys, continues. Poultry growers use inorganic arsenic, a recognized carcinogen, for “growth promotion, feed efficiency and improved pigmentation,” says the FDA. Yum.

And in August, Cargill Value Added Meats, the nation’s third-largest turkey processor, recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey because of a salmonella outbreak, linked to one death and 107 illnesses in 31 states. Even as it closed its Springdale, Arkansas plant, steam cleaned its machinery and added “two additional anti-bacterial washes” to its processing operations, 185,000 more pounds were recalled the next month from the same plant.

Since the mad cow and Chinese melamine scandals of the mid 2000′s, a lot more people think about the food their food ate than before. But fewer people think about the drugs their food ingested. Food animal drugs seldom rate Capitol Hill hearings which is just fine with Big Pharma animals divisions since if people knew the antibiotics, heavy metals, growth promotants, vaccines, anti-parasite drugs and feed additives used on the farm, they would lose their appetite. Besides, people aren’t Animal Pharma’s primary customers anyway and the long term safety of animals drugs isn’t an issue, since patients are supposed to die.

One of the late Sen.Ted Kennedy’s last legislative fights was about the overuse of livestock antibiotics. “It seems scarcely believable that these precious medications could be fed by the ton to chickens and pigs,” he wrote in a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA) which has yet to pass. “These precious drugs aren’t even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America,” said Kennedy.

Because antibiotics make animals use feed more efficiently so they eat less and control disease in confinement farming’s packed conditions at the same time, they are practically the fifth food group. On a turkey farm with five million hens, antibiotics would save almost 2,000 tons of feed a year says an article in a poultry journal.

And when the FDA tried to ban cephalosporins in 2008, one type of antibiotic crucial for treating salmonella in children, it became apparent just what Kennedy was up against. Two months after the FDA announced a hearing about a cephalosporin “Order of Prohibition” in agriculture, the regulatory action had morphed into a “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry” thanks to lobbyists from the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork and cattle industries.

“Order of Prohibition”… “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry,” same idea, right?

At the House Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry hearings, the National Turkey Federation’s Michael Rybolt defended antibiotics as a cost savings to consumers. “The increased costs to raise turkeys without antibiotics is real,” he said. “Today at retail outlets here in the D.C. market, a conventionally raised turkey costs $1.29 per pound. A similar whole turkey that was produced without antibiotics costs $2.29 per pound. With the average consumer purchasing a 15 pound whole turkey, that would mean there would be $15 tacked on to their grocery bill.”

Conventionally grown turkeys are even a better deal when you consider the cost of antibiotics!

And antibiotic-based turkey farming is downright green, said Rybolt, calling 227 acre turkey operations, “small family farms.” Without them, more land would be needed to grow crops and house the animals because of the “decrease in density.” And, with 175,550 more tons of feed needed, there would be “an increase in manure.”

When the FDA capitulated to industry and turned the cephalosporin prohibition into a salute to animal “advances,” former Kansas governor and former dairyman John Carlin, asked, “What changed in less than five months? Certainly the problem hasn’t gone away.”

This month, the FDA also rejected petitions to ban human antibiotics like penicillins, tetracyclines and sulfonamides in livestock filed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Defense, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), and the Union of Concerned scientists, some filed over 12 years ago. Why?  “FDA cannot withdraw approval of a new animal drug until the legally-mandated process,” said an FDA spokesman. The process includes an “evidentiary hearing,” perhaps like the cephalosporin advances.

Of course. germs in turkey and other meat, even antibiotic resistant germs, are neutralized by cooking–but drug residues are not. A report last year from the USDA’s inspector general accuses U.S. slaughter houses of releasing products to the public with excessive drug levels in them and charges that, “The effects of these residues on human beings who consume such meat are a growing concern.”

Nor are the antibiotics just in the meat! Scientists at the University of Minnesota found antibiotic residues in corn, green onions and cabbage after growing them on soil fertilized with livestock manure. The drugs siphoned right up from the soil in just six weeks.

A quick look at the Code of Federal Regulations for turkey drugs does not whet you appetite for Thanksgiving. There are several arsenic turkey drugs approved to provide an, “increased rate of weight gain and improved feed efficiency,” say the official guidelines. But they are also “dangerous for ducks, geese, and dogs,” and must be discontinued,  “5 days before slaughtering animals for human consumption to allow elimination of the drug from edible tissues.” Whew.

Halofuginone, another drug given to turkeys to kill pathogens, “is toxic to fish and aquatic life” and “an irritant to eyes and skin,” says the Federal Code. “Avoid contact with skin, eyes, or clothing” and “Keep out of lakes, ponds, and streams.” Bon appetit.

Drug-based farming has cut the time to “grow” an animal almost in half while doubling the market size of the animal itself.  For example, chickens were once slaughtered at fourteen weeks, weighing two pounds and are now slaughtered at seven weeks, weighing four and six pounds.

But the brave new food techniques come at a price because the animals’ organs can not always keep up with the metabolic frenzy. Birds “fed and managed in such a way that they are growing rapidly,” are at risk of sudden death from cardiac problems and aortic rupture, say poultry scientists.

Growth drugs in turkeys may also “result in leg weakness or paralysis,” says the Federal Code, a side effect that a turkey slaughter house worker reports firsthand. Many turkeys arrive at the House of Raeford, in Raeford, NC with legs broken or dislocated, he told me in an interview and, “When you try to remove them from their crates, their legs twist completely around, limp and offering no resistance.” The turkeys, “must have been in a lot of pain,” says the worker, but they don’t cry out. “In fact the only sound as you hang them, he says, is the “trucks being washed out to go back and get a new load.”

The undercover employee’s reports of the “live hanger” culture at the House of Raeford, in which workers pulled the heads and legs off turkeys when they were stuck in crates and worse, led to Denny’s suspending its business from Raeford, the nation’s seventh largest turkey producer. The slaughter house is also infamous for a chlorine spill that killed a worker in 2003, an ammonia spill that evacuated  two towns the next year and a murdered worker in 2006.

Still, the mother of all turkey drugs is the asthma-like drug ractopamine, marketed as the “Medicated Tom Turkey Feed” Topmax. Approved for turkeys only two years ago, figures for Topmax use in turkeys are not yet available but the same drug is now used in 45 percent of U.S. pigs and 30 percent of ration-fed cattle.

There are two reasons ractopamine has raised safety questions. One is that its label reads:

WARNING: The active ingredient in Topmax, ractopamine hydrochloride, is a beta-adrenergic agonist. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Not for use in humans. Keep out of the reach of children. The Topmax 9 formulation (Type A Medicated Article) poses a low dust potential under usual conditions of handling and mixing. When mixing and handling Topmax, use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask. Operators should wash thoroughly with soap and water after handling. If accidental eye contact occurs, immediately rinse eyes thoroughly with water. If irritation persists, seek medical attention. The material safety data sheet contains more detailed occupational safety information. To report adverse effects, access medical information, or obtain additional product information, call 1-800-428-4441.

The other reason is that ractopamine is not withdrawn at slaughter. In fact, it is begun as the animals near slaughter and started during turkeys’ last 14 days. It is actually pumping through their systems as they arrive on the killing floor.

Like antibiotics and arsenic, ractopamine is given to turkeys to make them grow faster. It is similar to clenbuterol, a performance enhancing sports drug that is banned in the US, for both humans and livestock, and elsewhere. But ractopamine is also banned in Europe, Taiwan and China, where 1,700 ractopamine “poisonings” were reported and ractopamine-produced pork was seized in 2007. (You have to worry when China calls a food unsafe.)

Ractopamine caused actual riots in Taiwan in 2007 when 3,500 Tawainese pig farmers, some carrying pigs, threw dung and rotten eggs at police and military soldiers over the rumor that a ractopamine ban would be lifted.  “Get out, USA pork” and “We refuse to eat pork that contains poisonous ractopamine,” they chanted for hours according to Taiwan News.

Reports of ractopamine’s lack of safety are not hard to find.  In 2009, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) termed ractopamine a cardiac stimulator. Ractopamine residues “represent a genuine risk to consumers,” wrote a medical  journal article, citing “long plasma half-lives, and relatively slow rates of elimination.” And a report from Ottawa’s Bureau of Veterinary Drugs says that rats fed ractopamine developed a constellation of birth defects like cleft palate, protruding tongue, short limbs, missing digits, open eyelids and enlarged heart.

The FDA is well aware of ractopamine’s downside. In 2003, three years after the drug was approved for use in U.S. pigs, the FDA accused its manufacturer, Elanco, of withholding information about ractopamine’s “safety and effectiveness” and “adverse animal drug experiences” in a fourteen-page warning letter.

Elanco, said the FDA, failed to report furious pig farmers phoning the company about “dying animals,” “downer pigs,” animals “down and shaking,” “hyperactivity” and “vomiting after eating feed with Paylean,” and also suppressed clinical trial information. But, thanks to same probable lobbying that reversed the cephalosporin ban, the FDA approved ractopamine for cattle the following year and for use in turkeys in 2009! Last year, the FDA enlarged the approval for cattle.

Turkey meat produced with ractopamine is not the same as normal meat by Elanco’s own admission! “Alterations” in muscle were seen in turkeys fed ractopamine like an increase in “mononuclear cell infiltrate and myofiber degeneration,” says its 2008 new drug application documents. There was “an increase in the incidence of cysts,” and differences, some “significant,” in the weight of organs like hearts, kidneys and livers. (“Enlarged hearts” had been seen in test rats feed ractopamine in the Canadian studies.)

Still, ractopamine, like antibiotics, is being hailed as “green” and for lowering the carbon footprint. It has “positive environmental benefits for livestock producers in terms of decreased nitrogen and phosphorus excretions,” extols one journal article. It results in a “reduced amount of total animal waste,” unless, of course, you count the manure coming from Big Pharma.

Dr. Are Nylund at the University of Bergen, Norway confirmed the ISA virus detection by Canadian lab, Dr. Fred Kibenge, in Rivers Inlet sockeye smolts. Dr. Nylund reports he only got a positive in one of the fish and this result was close to the detection limit for the test that he used. In the report below, the higher the value, the lower the amount of virus. He said the sample was poor quality. We are on a steep learning curve here, having never dealt with viruses, keeping the samples in a home-type freezer was not optimal.

Download Report (22.0K)

I also received the report from Dr. Kibenge, of the World Animal Health reference lab for ISA virus in Province Edward Island, on salmon a small group of us collected in the Fraser River on October 12. Late last week results from this group of tests was leaked to the New York Times and we heard that a Coho salmon tested positive for ISAv. Now that I have the complete report we learn that, similar to the sockeye from River’s Inlet, the Coho in the Fraser River was infected with the European strain of ISA virus. But we see from this report that a chinook salmon and a chum salmon also tested positive.

Download Alexandra Morton Samples (SOCKEYE CHINOOK and COHO) (45.9K)

What does this mean?

While this continues to raise the level of concern that ISA virus is going to cause significant problems in wild salmon in the eastern Pacific, a lot more work is required. Someone has to culture the virus. Once that happens we can learn how long it has been here, and exactly where it came from.

The good news is that the levels of ISA virus detected in all these salmon has been low. While the salmon in my latest collection died before spawning, it is possible that ISA virus was not the cause of their death. Because ISA virus was only detected in the gills of the chum and chinook, it is possible they were only recently infected. The chum was silver-bright and likely just arrived in the river. The Chinook was severely jaundice. Did these two fish just become infected and is that why it was only detected in their gills? Two possible sources would be salmon farms off Campbell River that they had just been exposed to on their in-migration into the river, or did they become infected by sharing the river with the Coho which had ISA virus in her heart suggesting a more system-wide longer infection period – I don’t know. The Segment 6 probe is less sensitive than the segment 8 probe, so while we learned the Chinook and Chum were infected with ISA virus, we don’t know what strain.

If the virus is this contagious that it infected other salmon that had just arrived into the river this does present concerns.

I am not presenting myself as an expert in ISA virus, but I feel strongly there should be no secrecy when it comes to European strain ISA virus in wild salmon. I am on a steep learning curve and feel it is essential that we move forward to:

1 – establish an international board to make sure testing is done in a highly and scientifically defensible manner
2 – establish a BC lab that can culture and test for ISA virus and report publicly
3 – test widely for the virus in the ocean, rivers and lakes and include other possible species such as herring
4 – mandate tests on every Atlantic salmon facility, especially the lake-rearing facilities by more than one lab so that no one lab bears the brunt of this and so the public can take full confidence in the tests

There has been an incredible response from many of you. So many of you have provided funds in small donations that we are able to move forward with revealing where ISA virus is hiding. Thank you. Thank you also for the people reporting back as to what is happening in your rivers and lakes. I am not at all interested in handing this over to Fisheries and Oceans [DFO] or the Province of BC. I have asked the provincial salmon farm vet, Dr. Gary Marty several times what ISA virus test he did on all the Atlantic salmon he found ISAv lesions in. He has not answered, he had the province of BC’s lawyer answer instead providing me with no information. I was hoping I could send samples to him, but I won’t without knowing what test he is doing.

There is an astonishing silence from government. How is it possible they have never found ISA virus?

I think we need to step into this void and seriously apply ourselves to understanding what is going on here. I don’t know why we would leave this up to DFO.

Fraser Coho infected with European ISA virus

The Iowa legislature last year approved a dove hunting season, the first in more than nine decades. However, the state’s Department of Natural Resources and the Natural Resources Commission (DNR) banned the use of lead shot and bullets.

That led to a massive all-out assault by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the U.S. Sportsman’s Alliance (USSA).

In a letter to Gov. Terry Branstad, the NRA underscored its opposition by waving a veiled threat that banning lead ammunition is an “attack [on] our freedoms.”

“Absurd,” replied Robert Johns of the American Bird Conservancy, who explained that “the NRA continues to deliberately miscast the lead-versus-non-lead ammunition issue as an attack on hunting.” There is nothing in the Constitution or in any federal court decision that would prohibit the banning of any specific kind of ammunition.

The NRA blatantly suggested the ban on lead shot “is designed to price hunters out of the market and keep them from taking part in traversing Iowa’s fields and forests.” For its “evidence,” it pointed out the cost of non-toxic ammunition is higher than ammunition made of lead. However, the use of non-toxic shot results in only a 1-2 percent increase in total costs for hunters, according to a study conducted by the National Wildlife Research Centre, certainly not enough to justify the NRA’s paranoid panic that non-toxic bullets will lead to a decrease in hunting.

Iowa’s DNR, the NRA claimed, was echoing not just environmental extremism but “the unscientific battle cry of the anti-hunting extremists.”

Contrary to NRA and USSA statements, there are several hundred scientific studies that conclude that lead shot is a health and environmental danger. Lead can cause behavioral problems, learning disabilities, reduced reproduction, neurological damage, and genetic mutation. For those reasons alone, the U.S. bans lead in gasoline, water pipes, windows, pottery, toys, paint, and hundreds of other items.

“Wildlife is poisoned when animals scavenge on carcasses shot and contaminated with lead-bullet fragments, or pick up and eat spent lead-shot pellets[,]mistaking them for food or grit,” the Center for Biological Diversity points out. As many as 20 million birds and other animals die each year from lead poisoning, says the CBD.

Humans can be poisoned by eating animals that have eaten the pellets from the ground or which have eaten decaying carcasses of birds that have been shot with lead ammunition. Iowa is one of only 15 states that doesn’t have some regulation that bans lead in shot and ammunition. Most European countries ban the use of lead shot for hunting.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1991 banned the use of lead shot in all waterfowl hunting. The NRA screamed its opposition at that time. However, the ban didn’t lead to a reduction of hunting or hunters, nor did it violate any part of the Constitution.

R.T. Cox, in his column, “The Sage Grouse,” notes that “bird hunters can leave 400,000 pellets per acre of intensely hunted areas.” About 81,000 tons of lead shot are left on shooting ranges each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Part of the reason for so much lead shot on the ground is that doves, which can fly up to 50 miles per hour and make sharp turns, are difficult to hit. While hunters may claim they shoot the birds as a food source, such claims are usually blatant lies meant to hide the reality that the 20 million doves killed each year are nothing more than live targets. The five ounce mourning dove, hit by shot, provides little usable meat. The NRA even advises hunters that for health reasons, they should “cut away a generous portion of meat around the wound channel.”

Lead on the dove killing fields isn’t the only problem. An investigation by the North Dakota Dept. of Health in 2007 revealed that 58 percent of venison donated to food banks by the Safari Club contained lead fragments. During the past decade, 276 California condors were found to have had lead poisoning; there are fewer than 400 in the state. A ban on lead shot was enacted in 2007.

There are alternatives to using lead. Non-toxic bullets and shot are made from tungsten, copper, and steel, without the negative health problems. While some hunting advocates maintain that lead bullets are significantly better in the field, there is no evidence to suggest that “green” ammunition results in fewer kills.

Nevertheless, disregarding scientific evidence and facing NRA wrath, Branstad said he agreed with a legislative panel’s decision to ignore the findings of the state’s professional wildlife conservationists, who he said exceeded their authority, to restore lead shot hunting.

Andrew Page, a senior director for the Humane Society of the United States, has another opinion, one far more logical than the NRA/NSSA rants: “If hunters are conservationists as they say they are, they should be the first to stand up and say they won’t poison wildlife or the ecosystem.”

In a study that reveals the GOP pledge to protect business interests at all costs, the Center for Media and Democracy recently analyzed 800 bills supported by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This secretive group consists of big businesses and conservatives who influence state legislatures around the country to lower wages and taxes on business, and weaken environmental protection that could crimp profits.

Undoing efforts to address climate change is a major priority of ALEC sponsors such as Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart, AT&T and Peabody Energy. For example, they created a model law – State Withdrawal from Regional Climate Initiatives – that is being introduced by state lawmakers to curb carbon reduction mandates and overturn cap-and-trade deals.

The GOP’s efforts don’t stop here. Because they believe private property should be the basis for environmental policy, owners become the only protection for the environment. According to the GOP, only self-regulation and a laissez-faire market can provide protection. Toward this end, House Republicans created a rider for the 2012 appropriations bill (H.R. 2584), consisting of items to weaken environmental regulations by cutting funding and rolling back rules.

While the Senate would have to confirm the changes and President Obama would have to sign the bill, it’s unlikely that such changes will pass. The bill continues to change; nevertheless, the attempt reveals GOP plans to roll back environmental protections agreed upon by both parties over the past 40 years. The GOP promises more jobs and recovery from the current depression as a reward for such actions.

“Many of us think that overregulation from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is at the heart of our stalled economy,” said Mike Simpson, Republican from Idaho. The bill cuts up to 18 percent of the funding from the Forest Service, the Department of the Interior and the EPA, and was voted out of committee by House Republicans.

The bill is loaded with a promise to business to end regulation and leaves only the profit motive to determine the use of land, water and wildlife.

By blocking regulations the GOP would allow:

– Automobiles to stop increasing gas mileage after 2016, and allow them to spew fine particles that cause cancer into the air.

– Pesticide manufacturers to use false and misleading information on their labels, and chemical companies and agriculture to dump pesticides into the waterways.

– Uranium mining in the Grand Canyon.

– The cement industry to pump cancer-causing dust into the air.

– Increased levels of arsenic, formaldehyde and other cancer-causing substances in the air, soil, drinking water, and sediment, as well as allow increased ammonia emissions from power plants.

– Oil conglomerates to ignore health-based air quality standards offshore, and make it more expensive for citizens to challenge government actions regulating oil extraction companies.

– Increased storm water discharge from commercial and residential construction sites, mountain top removal water to run off into streams, and prohibit the EPA from forcing Florida to enforce the state’s Water Quality Standards.

– Increased ash from the burning of coal, and methane from manure piles.

– Lawsuits over grazing on public lands to proceed more easily, livestock to move freely across government grazing land, and prevent reviews of grazing permits.

– Alaskan western red and yellow cedar to be cut and sold for shipment overseas.

– Unlisted endangered animals to be hunted and killed, and wolves to be de-listed from protection.

– Endangering of bighorn sheep by allowing more livestock to graze in their habitat.

In addition, the GOP would:

– Eliminate the regulation of livestock waste runoff or disposal.

– Allow greenhouse gas producers, such as coal plants, to continue emitting for one year, and bar lawsuits during this time.

– Prohibit funding for listing or protecting any new animal species under the Endangered Species Act.

– Block any updates to the Clean Water Act, and prevent regulation of cool water intake facilities.

– Limit public appeals of Forest Service timber harvest plans.

– Provide financial breaks for mining companies, and prevent any new hard rock mining regulations.

– Allow Texas to implement its own cap-and-trade system without Federal input.

– Prevent boat inspection safety checks on the Yukon River.

– Prevent the EPA from adopting water ballast requirements that stop the intrusion of invasive species into the Great Lakes.

– Force the EPA to ignore Clean Air Rules for power plants, and ignore the public health benefits of the Clean Air Act.

– Block the designation of Federal land to be set aside as wilderness areas.

– Require detailed records to be kept and quarterly reports on any gas or oil permits not allowed.

These efforts make it clear that Republicans ignore the role of deregulation of financial institutions that sunk the economy and robbed millions of Americans of their jobs and their savings.

They hope voters will forget President Bush and the Republican role in this disaster, blame the depression on Obama, and give them the presidency in 2012. They destroyed the economy once and they can do it again-this time taking the environment with it.

In his debut book, Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege, independent journalist Will Potter  details one such assault on freedom and democracy, the targeting of environmental and animal-rights activists. In recent decades, corporations whose profits depend on degrading the ecosphere started to worry that those activists posed a real threat to their operations. Politicians and law-enforcement agencies responded with laws and tactics targeting not only the illegal actions of some of those groups but also the constitutionally protected speech and association of a wider range of groups. The fear-and-smear campaigns take their toll on the activists.

In a book that alternates between reporting and reflection, Potter not only details the strategy and tactics of corporations and the state, but also gives readers a feel for the human costs for the activists. In an interview, I asked Potter to explain the threat posed by these campaigns.

[Full disclosure: Potter was a student in two of my classes at the University of Texas at Austin. Since his graduation, I have followed his work and now think of him as a colleague rather than a former student.]

Robert Jensen: Let’s start with what you don’t mean by the title, Green is the New Red. You say in the book that you aren’t suggesting the environmental/animal-rights movements are directly analogous to the left/radical/socialist/communist movements that were targeted in the Red Scares of the 20^th century in the United States. If the scope of those Red movements was wider and the repression faced much more severe, what is the title intended to communicate?

Will Potter: Although I make clear that what’s going on now is not the same or worse than the Red Scare (nor is it the same or worse than what Arab and Muslim people have experienced since September 11), these current events need to be understood in a historical context. Coordinated campaigns to target and repress dissident voices have taken place throughout U.S. history, and foremost among them is the Red Scare. For most Americans, of all political stripes, that term is synonymous with using fear to push a political agenda — it is a dark era of U.S. history where lives were ruined, and freedoms chilled, in the name of national security. Beyond those big-picture similarities, though, there are eerie parallels between the Red Scare and this Green Scare, in terms of the specific tactics used by corporations and politicians to instill fear and silence dissent.

RJ: Whatever the size or current influence of these radical environmental movements, you write that they are challenging core notions of what it means to be a human being. Based on your experience as an activist and your reporting, how do you assess these movements?

WP: These movements, like all social justice movements, have diverse components. Although it has become fashionable to “go green,” the true nature of the environmental and animal rights movements goes much deeper than promoting hybrid cars and energy-saving light bulbs. They are about more than promoting a quick-fix or advocating environmentalism through consumerism.

These movements are challenging deeply held religious and cultural beliefs that the interests of human beings are always paramount, and that we have the right to use the earth and other species in whatever ways we see fit, costs be damned. These movements recognize that behaving as if human beings are the only species on the planet is destructive, but their critique is more than an appeal to self-interest. It is about critically examining our relationship with the natural world, and all other species on the planet, and questioning what it means to be a human being.

RJ: Do you think that is the reason those movements are being targeted, because people in power in government and corporations understand how fundamental that challenge is, and want to suppress it?

WP: Absolutely. In fact, that’s how the threat is often described by these individuals themselves in Congressional hearings, internal corporate documents, FBI memos, Homeland Security reports, and in the media. At first I dismissed much of this as political theater — exaggerating the threat in order to justify the crackdown. For instance, it was hard not to laugh when the CEO of Yum Foods (KFC’s parent company) testified before Congress that PETA represents the threat of a “vegetarian world.” He called them “corporate terrorists.” But this culture war rhetoric stops being funny when you see how it plays out in real life. PETA, along with other mainstream groups like the Humane Society of the United States, have been attacked as “terrorists” by corporations and politicians, and investigated by the FBI. The only way we can explain that groups like the Humane Society are being investigated as terrorists alongside the Animal Liberation Front is that all of it — the aboveground and the underground, the mainstream and the radical — represents a cultural threat.

RJ: Let’s go back to your reference to the specific tactics used, by both government and corporations, in this campaign. What are some of the most common tactics, and what is the strategy behind them?

WP: The comparison of today’s political climate to the Red Scare was particularly useful in identifying and classifying the tactics used in this campaign. The tactics, then and now, can be grouped into three main areas: legal, legislative, and a third I would call extra-legal, or scare-mongering. The courts have been used to push the limits of what constitutes “terrorism,” and to hit activists with disproportionate penalties and prison sentences. In this realm the word terrorist is used early, and used often, to skew public opinion against defendants before they ever set foot in a courtroom. At some point these legal tactics have limitations, though, and so corporations and politicians have lobbied for new laws that go even further. Federal laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, coupled with state-level legislation, are being used to single out activists based on their political beliefs. The intention with these legislative efforts is not only to enact new laws, but to use Congressional hearings and political theater to shift cultural perceptions of these movements. The final element is perhaps the most dangerous of them all. During the Red Scare, court cases and legislation sent people to prison, but scare-mongering tactics (PR campaigns, press conferences, ads, reckless use of language to demonize people) leveraged the weight of fear and incarcerated many more.

The strategy behind these tactics is fragmentation. In discussing this, I think it’s helpful to visualize social movements as having a “horizontal” and “vertical” component. The intention is to separate these movements horizontally, and create rifts between them and the broader left. Animal rights activists and environmentalists are therefore depicted as ideological extremists who, if they have their way, will stop you from eating meat and driving cars and having pets. There are, of course, already tensions between these movements and the more traditional left, but campaigns by corporations and politicians intend to exacerbate them. If these movements are not seen as part of a broader social justice struggle, it is easier for other leftist and progressive groups to turn their backs on their repression.

Similarly, there is a campaign to fragment these movements vertically. Aboveground lawful groups are told that they must condemn underground groups, and if they do not, they will also be treated as terrorists. This two-prong strategy — breaking these movements away from other social movements, and breaking the aboveground away from the underground — isolates those who are being targeted and intensifies the repression.

RJ:  Whatever one thinks of the specific analyses or tactics of groups such as the Earth Liberation Front, the accelerating pace of ecological collapse suggests their call to consciousness about the larger living world is more important than ever. After your investigation into the Green Scare, what is your assessment of the likelihood the culture will listen?

WP: As the scale of the ecological crisis we are facing becomes more apparent, and as the backlash against social movements that are challenging our self-destructive culture intensifies, it is difficult to not feel dark, to feel helpless. I certainly feel that way quite often — not just because of the content of my own work, but from the near-blackout in the mainstream press. Unfortunately, I do not see any of this changing anytime soon. As the ecological crisis accelerates, the accompanying crackdown by corporations and people in power will intensify as well. The people who have the most to lose will cling desperately to that culture as it is threatened, and this includes not just CEOs but much of the overwhelmingly privileged United States and so-called First World.

After all of that, this will probably sound quite odd, but in the face of this I would argue that there are reasons to be inspired. Through my work, and in particular through book and media tours, I have been fortunate to meet people all over the country from diverse backgrounds. What has been striking to me is that, even if people are unfamiliar with the Green Scare or the targeting of political activists, they are rarely surprised. People may not know the specifics, but they know that corporations have more power than people. They know the scope of ecological destruction is increasing. They know we have no choice but to change but that people in power will not change willingly. I’m not convinced that the question at hand is whether or not the culture will listen, because I think that so many people already feel this. I think the question is: Will we find the courage to be heard?

I went out to Echo Bay a few days ago and examined a bucket of herring caught near the Burdwood salmon farm. One fifth of these herring were bleeding at the base of their fins. There is not one lab in Canada that will take a viral sample from me, because they are afraid of losing work with government and industry and the last samples I shipped to Washington State were left to rot, so there is nothing I can do to figure this out. Read this and consider taking the action listed at the end. I can’t fix this; it is too big, reaching deep into the bowels of government.

The history of ISAv</p>

Infectious salmon Anemia is a fish influenza virus that originated in the rivers of Norway. Like sea lice, it was benign and did not kill salmon. It was unknown until 1984 when it appeared in Norwegian salmon feedlots. When salmon farmers captured brood stock from Norwegian rivers they transported this virus out of its isolated mountain strongholds and released it around the world.

ISAv became lethal in farm fish because there is no reason for it to live lightly in fish destined for slaughter. ISAv attacked Norway and the industry learned to be careful. But the shareholders demanded more income than 1000 Norwegian feedlots could generate and so the industry spread and ISAv hitched a ride.

The non-lethal form of ISAv is hard to detect and so it slips into countries undetected and then every time it replicates there is a small chance some section of the RNA will be copied imperfectly – and it mutates. Scientists call its change from non-lethal to lethal a “stochastic event” depending only how many times it replicates. Think ticking bomb… all it takes is time for it to “go viral”.

Unfortunately shareholder demand and ISAv were incompatible and so despite research to the contrary (Vike et al., 2009; Nylund et al., 2007) it was important to ignore that the virus was spreading in eggs. Because there are about 92 identifiable strains of ISAv from the different rivers, scientists are tracking ISAv just like we tracked swine flu. They found the same strain of ISAv in farms 1000 km apart in fish from the same parents. This was exceedingly inconvenient. If ISAv was passing from one generation to the next, valuable brood lineages should have been destroyed. So industry decided to ignore this, and governments helped them. As a result, Atlantic salmon eggs are being flown all over the world trying to satisfy those insatiable shareholders.

When ISAv appeared in Marine Harvest farms in Chile in 2007 the myth was that it was less virulent than in Norway and would not become a problem. But two years later and millions of dead fish, with no scientific reporting on wild fish, Marine Harvest’s Chilean CEO wonders whether they could have stopped the epidemic if they had eliminated the first farm with the first infected fish (Intrafish, 2009). Research suggests the Chilean ISA strain is most closely related to a fish farm egg facility in central Norway (Vike et al., 2009), Chilean media points out that most of the epidemic began in and hit hardest in Marine Harvest fish farms. Aquagen confirms ISAv in a Marine Harvest egg facility

in central Norway. Chileans feel Norwegian salmon farms bring illness and leave them with the problems.¹

In 2008 Chile got serious, ending industry self-monitoring and passed Resolution # 2638 – a Sanitary program for controlling ISAv with very strict and real measures that include 48 hour mandatory reporting if a farm even suspects ISAv.

I began writing to the Department of Fisheries – Canada about ISAv in 2008, asking ex-Minister Gail Shea to close the border to Atlantic salmon eggs to protect the North Pacific. ISAv is also known to infect herring and one of the symptoms is bleeding at the base of the fins, though several diseases can also cause this. But who knows? No one! Letting loose a lethal virus into the North Pacific is a very, very bad idea.

In response to me and others the ex-Minister of Fisheries Gail Shea, Member of Parliament Randy Kamp of the Fisheries Committee, Andrew Thomson, Aquaculture Director and DFO Regional Science Director Laura Richards have all responded:

In reference to your concern over the spread of the infectious salmon anemia virus (ISAV), I assure you that measures are in place to deal with not only ISAV, but all fish pathogens of concern

Last week I decided to ground-truth their statements and found there are no visible regulations in Canada to prevent ISAv contamination. Was this an oversight? Absolutely not!

The Manual of Compliance is a federal fisheries document written in Ottawa. On the cover page it announces:

“Scientific Excellence * Resource Protection and Conservation * Benefits for Canadians”

But on page 54 the form that is used to clear a foreign hatchery for egg import into British Columbia has only 3 viruses listed, and the wily globe-trotting, lethal, inconvenient ISAv is not there.

Is it possible they forgot? No! Two pages later there is another form and ISAv is there.

There is an explanation for the second form: “…use this Laboratory Report form for fish health certification purposes other than the FHPR, e.g. for OIE-based trade requirements”

So this manual, written in Ottawa, promising excellence, protection and benefits to Canadians does not protect wild fish from ISAv. The form that certifies foreign hatcheries does not request information on ISAv. But the form used to keep international trade flowing does have ISAv on it because the world community demands it. And yet a Member of Parliament, a Minister, the head of fisheries science for BC and the head of aquaculture assured me there were measures in place! No, they are not; and worse, they recognized it should be reported and still omitted it.

Our government is working to protect international trade between corporations that are not based here, not us.

The federal Canadian Food Inspection Agency also got worried about those trade deals and wrote a “Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement” and made ISAv reportable in Jan. 5, 2011. (scroll 2/3 way down page)

Canada’s aquatic resources are vulnerable to devastation by the introduction or spread of diseases and exporters cannot meet foreign export requirements….These Regulations are therefore intended to control aquatic animal disease introduction and spread, thereby meeting international standards.

So as a result of threatened foreign export of farm fish product from Canada the CFIA finally made ISAv reportable Jan. 5, 2011. We don’t know if this is working.

And it gets worse. In 1995, the Province of BC ran the lengthy and expensive Salmon Aquaculture Review (SAR). Recommendation #16 called for transparent fish farm disease reporting open specifically to First Nations and Fishermen.

In response BC drafted a 2002 “Letter of Understanding” signed between Bud Graham, ADM, Ministry of Agriculture, Food & Fisheries and Odd Grydeland, BC Salmon Farmers mandating that the fish farmers must report disease to a database so secret not even the Ministry’s compliance officers are allowed to see it and we, the public, paid $70,000 to create a database we are not allowed to see to satisfy a million dollar government process that called for transparency. I feel like I am standing on an M.C. Escher staircase. No one knows which way is up — except those shareholders look like they keep coming out on top. When all the fish in the sea are dead what kind of meal will those shares make? All I can say to the shareholders is remember ISAv appears to be traceable to source.

If You Want Wild Salmon

It just gets clearer and clearer. If you want wild salmon it is up to you. This whole thing is corrupted. The province is currently reviewing a new salmon farm application in Clayoquot Sound. A group of us got together to send a camera down to the site and found far more life than Mainstream said was there.

But it is not just government. The environmental groups of BC are deciding whether or not to support World Wildlife Fund Certification of net pen salmon farms! David Suzuki is even considering this, despite no mention in the certification of real protection from disease. Please contact your environmental organizations. They are trying to survive in a corporate world of funders and really need your guidance. If they support WWF in certifying net pen salmon feedlots BC will further its role as a doormat to corporate schemes. You can oppose the World Wildlife certification of net pens salmon farms here. These companies are following their own laws failing to recognize the biological world they use. ISAv has demonstrated it’s capabilities and for our government to prop the door open to this marine influenza C with a meaningless certification is criminal.

Voices for Wild Salmon

So once again Salmon Are Sacred has thought of a way to help you be heard and we are volunteering again to do the heavy lifting. Just Download our paper fish at the top of the webpage fill it out, get you friends and family to fill them out and when the mail strike is over send them to us at the address on card, or create your own beautiful fish. We have to show government how many of us there are.

If 100,000 of you decide to take a stand for wild salmon we will carry these fish on a migration through government that won’t stop until reason is brought to us.

Visit us at www.salmonaresacred.org so we can continue.

Join our email list, be a voice for wild salmon, show up as we move through this.

Show up for the Cohen Inquiry Aquaculture Hearings set for late August (no time on the water this year); I will update my site when firm dates are set.

It’s a rigged game folks and we have been played for fools.

1. “Salmon Virus Indicts Chile’s Fishing Methods,” New York Times, 27 March 2008.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Today we have the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) passed in 2006. AETA is a beefed up version of the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA) that was passed in 1992.

Under AETA, “Whoever travels in interstate commerce…. for the purpose … of interfering with the operations of an animal enterprise, intentionally… causes the loss of any … personal property [or] intentionally places a person in reasonable fear … of serious bodily injury … by a course of conduct involving … harassment or intimidation or conspires or attempts to do so” shall be subject to massive fines and many years in prison. In plain English, if you organize a group of people to take action that results in a financial loss to an animal enterprise or scares the employees of that company then you can go to prison for a very long time. That’s today’s law, and so far, the one prosecution I’m aware of that the government initiated under it, was dismissed without its constitutionality being tested.

However, seven people went to prison for organizing against Huntingdon Life Sciences under the AEPA, the older, “gentler” version. AEPA created the new crime of “animal enterprise terrorism,” but you had to cause physical disruption to violate this law. It was designed to counter the growing underground movement of animal rights and environmental activists who damaged property to disrupt the activities of corporations that tormented animals and despoiled the environment.

But the young people who organized Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), and have become known as the SHAC 7 were not part of an illegal underground campaign. Instead they organized a very public and successful effort to shame and harass a large corporation, Huntingdon Life Sciences. In post-9/11 America, prosecutors developed a new legal theory by expanding the “physical disruption” language in AEPA to include loss of profits. The SHAC 7 were convicted of being animal enterprise terrorists under that interpretation of physical disruption. In 2006 the judge sentenced the “conspirators” to up to six years in prison.

This movement isn’t about being nice to kittens and puppies. It’s about torture of animals on a massive scale, in pursuit of corporate profit. Huntingdon Life Sciences kills at least 71,000 and possibly as many as 181,000 animals annually to test cleaners, cosmetics, drugs, pesticides and other ingredients. Hidden camera videos have recorded employees beating animals and dissecting live monkeys.

Will Potter, in his new book Green is the New Red, describes a particularly horrific experiment at another laboratory: “[O]ne infant primate [was] named Britches. Experimenters had taken Britches from his mother on the night of his birth and sewn his eyes shut with thick black sutures. They attached a sonar device to his head that let off a screeching sound and placed him in a steel cage, alone; the isolation and sensory deprivation caused neurological disorders. Britches would lurch and shake, shrieking.”

What’s this got to do with United States v. Dennis? Just as in Dennis, the courts in the SHAC 7 case have criminalized organizing. And if that can be done under AEPA, you can imagine the result under AETA, which could be considered as AEPA on steroids!

I know there are RFC supporters who feel that fighting for animal rights is a somewhat trivial pursuit compared to trying to prevent the horrific crimes against humanity carried out by multi-national corporations and the many governments they influence or control. But the behavior against which these activists are organizing, is part of the same culture that permeates the military industrial complex, the energy companies, the private prison corporations, and so on. These are the same foes we all face every day. The rights the corporations and their political flunkies seek to curtail belong to us all. And the sensibilities these heroic young militants seek to spread are the same values to which other progressives aspire.

Let’s not look down our noses at a new generation of activists whose causes vary from our own and who are doing things a little differently from what our generation did. Instead, let’s emphasize our points of convergence. We need as much solidarity as we can get in taking on the corporate juggernaut.

Five hundred wolves were shot that year in Idaho and Montana by hunters and federal agents under the “livestock protection” banner.

One legal defender of wolves was a federal judge whose subsequent rulings blocked wolf hunting proposals created by government bureaucrats.

Although there are thought to be only 1,500 wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, these states championed their ranchers’ and elk hunters’ interest in removing wolves from the ESA and legalizing public wolf hunts.

Since the ESA passed in 1973, no species has been delisted — stripped of their legal protections — in political bargains, despite the Bush administration’s repeated attempts to weaken the Act. Scientific reasons prompted delistings. But in April 2011’s budget bill, a deal was cut.

“Science has been subordinated to political instrumentalism, setting a dangerous precedent for the future,” warned David N. Cassuto, Professor of Law at Pace University School of Law, in an April 19, 2011 editorial in the Christian Science Monitor.

On Friday, April 8, 2011, Rep. Mike Simpson (R, ID) and Senator Jon Tester (D, MT) conspired to overturn Judge Donald Molloy’s ruling in U.S. District Court last summer which returned wolves to the endangered species list, thus safeguarding their lives in the western region.

Simpson’s and Tester’s trigger fingers attached an irrelevant rider into the federal budget bill pending before Congress to remove federal protections from the wolves of most of the Northern Rockies. They threw the wolves’ fates to Idaho and Montana hunters.

Jay Tutchton, an attorney at WildEarth Guardians, told High Country News that the actions of Tester and Simpson were “cowardly…because slipping wolves into a ‘must have’ budget bill pre-empts the legislation from being open to full scrutiny, and from being argued on its own merits.”

The wolves were in a particularly weak position at this point, as several environmental groups had just attempted to cut a settlement deal to remove ESA protections from wolves. Molloy refused to accept that settlement—on two main grounds. First, Malloy had already ruled that the 2009 delisting was legally flawed, and declined to go back on that ruling. Second, the settlement wouldn’t satisfy all the parties, especially the four environmental groups and Attorney Tutchton, who rightly wanted to keep their original court victory.

Immediately after Judge Molloy’s ruling against the delisting scheme, Montana’s Senator Tester started talking about delisting wolves as part of his political campaign. Tester, a cattle rancher, is battling Rep. Denny Rehberg (R, MT) in the upcoming 2012 election, and apparently thinks the state’s biggest wolf-hater will garner the most votes.

Congressional leaders and the White House gambled that wolf hunting might save Tester’s seat in the Senate, so with a wink and nod, the rider had few votes to slow it down.

Settlements and Sell-Outs

As noted above, ten of the 14 plaintiff groups that sued Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to block them from delisting wolves made a strange decision in March 2011. They moved to settle the lawsuit, and place wolves under state management in Idaho and Montana. This would have exposed wolves in two states to public hunts. The groups said such a settlement would protect more wolves than a delisting that eliminates wolf protections in five states.

Most oddly of all, the ten groups claimed anti-wolf sentiment would grow if they held the line. They were offering political (not ecological) reasons to compromise.

How could “anti-wolf sentiment” get any worse? Idaho’s Gov. Butch Otter already claims “respect” can be the same as “hate” for wolves, and has boasted about joining a wolf trophy hunt.

Judge Molloy sided with the four non-settling parties and rejected the settlement on the day Tester and Simpson imposed the wolf rider.

A week later, on April 14th, Congress, as expected, approved the budget deal, including the rider that directs Ken Salazar to reinstate the 2009 decision that delists wolves in five states: Idaho, Montana, Washington, Utah and Oregon. Wyoming is expected to follow.

“This is more than a victory for Montana,” chirped Tester, who chairs the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, “and it’s what’s right for the wolves themselves.”

Denise Boggs, the Executive Director of the Montana-based Conservation Congress, has a sobering view of Tester: “He’s a consummate liar who has gone back on virtually every environmental promise he made while running for the Senate.”

Jay Tutchton warns that once Obama signs the bill, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service will re-publish its 2009 delisting rule in the Federal Register and then that rule delisting wolves will be in effect.

Ask not why Congressional leaders felt they had read the tea leaves on how environmentalists would react to their reckless, revolting deal-making that preserved the wolf rider in the 2011 budget. Ten groups — a few of them extremely wealthy — showed their disinterest in wrangling with Congress, crafting an unnecessary “settlement” to heave wolves to hunters in Montana and Idaho.

Here is a list of the Plaintiff groups that offered a settlement, effectively asking a federal judge to reverse a previous hard-won decision for wolves:

Cascadia Wildlands
Center for Biological Diversity
Defenders of Wildlife
Greater Yellowstone Coalition
Hells Canyon Preservation Council
Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance
Natural Resources Defense Council
Oregon Wild
Sierra Club
Wildlands Network

Once again Big Food is “appalled” by the video — which shows sick and injured calves killed with hammers, workers standing on calves’ necks and barely alive calves on “dead piles” — while working to make publicizing such videos illegal.

And once again farm owners blame employees and play innocent, while video clearly shows them sanctioning the violence and verifying that the suffering crossbreed calves depicted should get no medical care.

Like most factory farm owners whose operations have been investigated by Mercy For Animals, Kirt Espenson, owner of the 10,000 calf E-6 Cattle Company in Hart, TX, both denies condoning the abuse and defends it.

The animals denied medical care for their open sores, swollen joints and severed hooves are actually E-6 Cattle Company’s wholesome meat initiative he says: they were not given medicine so that people wouldn’t get drug residues! (And the ones not going to be eaten by people are given drug$? Right!)

Many others were sick from the cold weather and had to be eliminated, says Espenson — as if cold weather were an untreatable disease and sentient mammals are a walnut crop.

While Big Food, law enforcement officials and government regulators continue to view videos like E-6 as isolated events, no farm that Mercy For Animals has investigated has lacked such atrocities. From the DeCoster egg farms, finally investigated by Congress, to the Hy-Line Hatchery in Spencer, Iowa where newborn male chicks are ground up alive, to the Conklin Dairy Farms in Plain City, Ohio where cows are stabbed with pitchforks, Mercy For Animals continues to show that abuse is the order of the day when animals are nothing but economic units.

Nor do perpetrators pay. No charges were filed against the Conklin Dairy owner, Gary Conklin, for example, because “in context, Mr. Conklin’s actions were entirely appropriate,” said Union County prosecuting attorney David Phillips.

While condemning animal cruelty depicted in videos like this week’s and stressing that welfare guidelines exist, Big Food is also currently trying to make such videos, shot by undercover employees, illegal. After the E-6 video broke, June delivery for live cattle at the Chicago Mercantile exchange fell to $1.15 per pound, down over one percent. That’s real money.

The video.