Food Beware

Opening Thursday at the Quad Cinema in New York and available in home video on November 17^th, “Food Beware: the French Organic Revolution” is a companion piece to films like “Food Inc.” and “The Future of Food” that detail the harm done to consumer and nature by chemical farming.

But “Food Beware” has an added dimension, going one step further to make the case that the cancer epidemic of our epoch is directly related to the chemical-laden agriculture that has been largely adopted in the pursuit of profit. Originally titled “Nos enfants nous accuseront”, this documentary by Jean-Paul Jaud explores the same deadly nexus that is the subject of Sandra Steingraber’s “Living Downstream”. Stricken by bladder cancer in her 20s, Steingraber—a biologist and poet—sought to make the connections between cancer and the toxins that seeped into the waters of her Illinois farming community. In that book she wrote:

To the 89 percent of Illinois that is farmland, an estimated 54 million pounds of synthetic pesticides are applied each year. Introduced into Illinois at the end of World War II, these chemical poisons quietly familiarized themselves with the landscape. In 1950, less than 10 percent of cornfields were sprayed with pesticides. In 1993, 99 percent were chemically treated.

This is exactly the same threat that the people living in the small, rustic farming village of Barjac faced when the mayor decided to make the school lunch organic. Alarmed by a spike in cancer rates in an area dominated by chemical-based farming, the Communist mayor Edouard Chaulet (an affiliation unfortunately not identified in the movie) decides to take action against a cancer epidemic that has become generalized in Europe as the press kid for “Food Beware” indicates:

• In Europe every year, 100,000 children die of diseases caused by the environment.
• In Europe 70% of cancers are linked to the environment: 30% to pollution and 40% to food.
• In Europe cases of cancer in children have been increasing by 1.1% yearly for 30 years.
• In France the number of cancers in males has increased by 93% in 25 years.

Despite the clearly polemical—and urgently needed—focus of the movie, it does not preach to the audience and even sustains a meditative and lyrical quality throughout. Nestled beneath the Cévennes Mountains in south-central France, the village of Barjac and the surrounding fields look like something out of an impressionist painting. Furthermore, despite having all the reason in the world to be outraged by being victimized by toxic chemicals, the villagers appear more interested in creating alternatives to the existing system than confronting the powers that be. Since many of their friends and neighbors are farmers using carcinogenic pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers, perhaps they have no choice in the matter unless they were willing to fight a kind of civil war.

Some of the more interesting moments of this very human drama involve local organic farmers and their chemical-based counterparts having discussions about whether it is feasible to make the transition to all-organic, exploring the social and economic factors that divide the two groups. Relying wholly on the testimony of the interviewees rather than direct commentary, the audience hears the case for organics in strictly economic terms—a clear rebuttal to those who condemn organic farming as impractical and expensive. Considering the subsidies that chemical-based farming receives as well as the damage it does to soil and water resources, not to speak of the collateral damage it does to human beings, it condemns itself in both economic and human terms.

The movie arrives at a time when the food production system has received intense scrutiny. Yesterday, when I watched the screener, the Sunday NY Times Magazine section had a special Food Issue. One article promoted vegetarianism and another considered the calorie-restriction diet, a regimen that allows people to live far longer and with fewer ailments like diabetes and heart disease based on statistics. There was also an article by Michael Pollan touting “Rules to Eat By”. Along with the Times’s Mark Bittman, whose most recent book “Food Matters” worries about unsustainable agriculture, Pollan has become one of the major spokesmen for the values upheld in movies like “Food Inc.” and “Food Beware”.

But there is not a neat fit between the Food Revolution and the more traditional ideas about revolution upheld by people like Barjac’s Communist mayor. Pollan became a lightning rod for criticism after he urged people to continue shopping at Whole Foods. After John Mackey, the libertarian founder of Whole Foods, had written an article in the Wall Street Journal attacking government involvement in health care, there were calls for boycotting his stores. Using his reputation as a prophet of healthy eating, Pollan denounced the boycott using a singularly tortured logic:

John Mackey’s views on health care, much as I disagree with them, will not prevent me from shopping at Whole Foods. I can understand why people would want to boycott, but it’s important to play out the hypothetical consequences of a successful boycott. Whole Foods is not perfect, however if they were to disappear, the cause of improving Americans’ health by building an alternative food system, based on more fresh food, pastured and humanely raised meats and sustainable agriculture, would suffer. I happen to believe health care reform has the potential to drive big changes in the food system, and to enlist the health care industry in the fight to reform agriculture. How? Because if health insurers can no longer pick and choose their clients, and throw sick people out, they will develop a much stronger interest in prevention, which is to say, in changing the way America feeds itself.

There is also some reason to question the NY Times’s commitment to healthy eating despite the frequent publication of Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman’s articles on eating healthy. Their science pages have been polluted for some years now by the writings of John Tierney, a libertarian who never saw a chemical he didn’t like. On June 5^th 2007, Tierney mocked Rachel Carsons for warning of “a cancer epidemic that never came to pass.” He also touted the work of I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin who believes that “civilization depended on farmers and doctors fighting ‘an unrelenting war’ against insects, parasites and disease.”

Possibly an even worse offender is the NY Times’s Gina Kolata, who has virtually made a profession out of denying links between chemical pollutants and cancer, notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) being a sibling of Judi Bari, the environmental activist who was killed by a bomb planted in her car. In an article published in the July 6^th 1998 Nation Magazine, environmental journalist/activist Mark Dowie pointed out:

On March 19, 1996, two long stories by Kolata appeared in the Science Times section. “Some environmentalists are asserting that humans and wildlife are facing a new and serious threat from synthetic chemicals,” reads Kolata’s lead, ignoring the fact that Colborn’s hypothesis was drawn not from environmentalists but from the work of more than 400 scientists, all of whose names and numbers were provided to the Times. Throughout the main article she uses the “e” word repeatedly to describe Colborn and Myers, though both have doctorates in zoology. And she calls Myers’s employer, The W. Alton Jones Foundation, “an environmental group.” (The private foundation dedicates only part of its philanthropy to environmental issues.) Kolata invokes the expertise of Dr. Bruce Ames of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Stephen Safe of Texas A&M, as she has often before, to counter Colborn and Myers’s hypothesis. Ames is an active adviser to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a corporate-supported “watchdog coalition that advocates the use of sound sciences in public policy.” TASSC has about 900 members, 375 of whom are scientists. The rest are executives from the chemical, oil, dairy, timber, paper, mining, manufacturing and agribusiness industries seeking ways to defend their products in media and the courts.

Ultimately, the cognitive dissonance at work in the pages of the NY Times points to the political paralysis that prevents major reforms from taking place in American society as well as other major industrialized countries like France. The powers-that-be recognize that humanity is threatened by greenhouse gases, chemical-based farming, exhaustion of the world’s fishing stocks, mountaintop removal in coal country and a myriad of other environmental problems but they stop short of attacking the root of these problems, namely production on the basis of profit.

As the crisis deepens, with all its attendant symptoms from the cancer epidemic to species extinctions, the understanding that a radical change is necessary will seep into the consciousness of those who have the power to change the system, namely the working people who bear the brunt of unhealthy food, chemical pollution and other hazards that constantly lowering wages leaves them vulnerable to. A NY Times editor or a hedge fund manager can afford all the healthy food and the best medical care required to fix the illnesses that attack even the wealthy but the world we need should make it possible for everybody to live well, not just the rich. If it takes socialism to make that world possible, then let’s move forward.

Obama and mountaintop removal

Although I have become somewhat inured to Barack Obama’s continuation of the second Bush term, I felt an almost virginal sense of being violated by his latest thumb in the eye of the Democratic Party base. I am speaking of his giving the green light to 42 more mountaintop removal permits, thus proving his fealty to arguably the most viciously anti-environmental sector of American private enterprise.

So disgusting was this action that even Daily Kos, which tends to grovel at Obama’s feet, was forced to take notice. Dgil, a Kos contributor, directed his or her readers to a Los Angeles Times article that broke the story:

With the election of President Obama, environmentalists had expected to see the end of the “Appalachian apocalypse,” their name for exposing coal deposits by blowing the tops off whole mountains.

But in recent weeks, the administration has quietly made a decision to open the way for at least two dozen more mountaintop removals.

In a letter this month to a coal ally, Rep. Nick J. Rahall II (D-W.Va.), the Environmental Protection Agency said it would not block dozens of “surface mining” projects. The list included some controversial mountaintop mines.

Dgil added his own two cents at the end of the post:

So why has the current administration quietly moved forward with a huge expansion of an ecologically destructive mining process? The end result is expansion of an energy source campaigned against, and whose additional mined energy output can be created in ways with little (wind) or no (hydro) additional environmental impact.

The gist of the LAT article is that this decision was made for the crassest of reasons-political expediency to get votes. Additionally, why would an administration that has positioned itself as determined to move forward on trimming atmospheric carbon emissions, purposefully expand the production of highly polluting coal? What benefit will this actually bring the residents of this area? More health problems? A devastated ecology? Destroyed recreational opportunities?

With all due respect (well, maybe half respect) to Markos Moulitsas and company, the real goal is not to get votes. Instead, this decision would have been made even if it cost votes. Obama’s calculation was, is it has always been, to act on behalf of the interests of the bourgeoisie, if I might put it in such crass, unrepentant terms. It goes along with putting a shiv in the back of UAW workers, bombing civilians in Afghanistan, catering to Goldman-Sachs and all the rest. It is called capitalist politics and acts independently of the wishes of the gullible voter. Indeed, despite EPA director Carole Browner’s reputation in liberal circles as being a committed environmentalist, I found her record questionable but I suppose that is what recommended her to Obama.

As a long time environmentalist, converted to the cause after hearing Joel Kovel liken capitalist growth to a metastasizing tumor, there are two issues which grab my attention more than any other. One is overfishing and water pollution, a function no doubt of my love for the lakes and streams of upstate New York growing up. The other is mountaintop removal, a crime that has stirred me from afar. Although I have never been to Appalachia, I cannot help becoming outraged by what strip mining does to people and nature alike. It represents the fanged, merciless and total victory of profits over human need.

I was introduced to mountaintop removal in an article that appeared in the April 2005 Harpers Magazine, a publication that I have been subscribed to for about 30 years. Written by Erik Reece and titled “Death of a Mountain: Radical strip mining and the leveling of Appalachia”, it is one of the most powerful environmentalist critiques I have ever read. (Reece’s expanded his article into a book in 2006 titled “Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness”.)

Since Harpers (regrettably) makes very few articles available to non-subscribers, we are fortunate to be able to read it at http://www.wesjones.com/death.htm. Reece writes about one activist who symbolizes the kind of working class resistance that is on the front lines against polluting corporations across the entire country. Her name is Teri Blanton and she is definitely not the chardonnay drinking, Arugula munching type:

Coal operators are not an easily intimidated bunch. But there is probably no one in the state of Kentucky who rattles their cage like a forty-eight-year-old grandmother named Teri Blanton. A former chairperson of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, the state’s largest social-justice organization, Blanton has spent the last two decades helping coalfield residents fight the corporations that have turned so much of eastern Kentucky into what she calls a toxic dump.

One can get a real education in environmental corruption and smash-mouth class warfare by tracking the last twenty years of Blanton’s life. She grew up in a small town called Dayhoit, in Harlan County, where four generations of her family had lived along White Star Hollow. It was the kind of community where neighbors shared their coal in the winter, and on a rare piece of flatland, one man, Millard Sutton, grew enough vegetables to feed nearly everyone in town. Families took turns helping out in his garden. Blanton moved to Michigan in the seventies to start a family, then moved back to Dayhoit in 1981 as a single mother of two. Her career as an activist started shortly afterward, when she phoned the highway department and asked for someone to clean up the large puddle of black water and coal sludge that stood in front of her trailer where her children caught the school bus. The highway department called the coal company that was mining around White Star Hollow, and the company responded by sending a coal truck to slowly circle Blanton’s trailer all day. “That really burnt my ass,” Blanton recalled, “that they thought they could shut me up by intimidation.” That coal company, owned by two brothers, James and Aubra Dean, never did clean up the mess, and in the end, after Blanton’s relentless badgering, the highway department built a new road up to her trailer.

Blanton would seem to have much in common with Maria Gunnoe, another female, working-class activist from the region who is featured in the documentary “Burning the Future” that I reviewed in February 2008 and whose Youtube trailer is linked to at the top of this article. In the review, I take note of the kind of resistance that is sweeping the coal region and that has taken to the streets once again to protest Obama’s sell-out:

Remarkable enough as a muckraking indictment of the coal industry, the movie is also a real breakthrough by showing the capacity of ordinary Americans, most of whom conform to the “Red State” stereotype of country music, NASCAR races, hunting and the Baptist church, to resist the onslaught that has turned their water wells into receptacles of filthy, toxic strip-mining run-off. The documentary, directed by David Novack, is a reminder that political activism is nearly never the result of preaching from above but the experience of daily life under a social, economic, or–in this instance–an environmental crisis. When your children suffer one health emergency after another, it is of no use to tell the parents that this is balanced by “economic progress” in their home state.

Sadly enough, the UMW has endorsed Obama’s mountaintop removal permits, despite the fact that it is a threat to their health and to the natural beauty of the region. Jeff Biggers, a journalist and author of “The United States of Appalachia” was interviewed on Democracy Now on May 29^th and spoke about the sad state of the coal miner’s union:

JUAN GONZALEZ: How has the American labor movement dealt with this issue? Clearly, obviously, at least for the mine workers and others, this has meant a loss of jobs. But have they taken a firm stand with their political leaders around this?

JEFF BIGGERS: You know, the United Mine Workers—and I should say, you know, I’m a grandson of a coal miner, and my granddaddy was a union coal miner. He suffered with black lung. And I appreciate the work of the United Mine Workers. They’re the people who gave us our eight-hour workday. You know, we struggled for a hundred years to have a great union movement.

But that movement has been broken really since the 1980s. In West Virginia, in particular, they’re still struggling just to survive. And what I don’t understand is, instead of looking at the ramifications of mountaintop removal that has taken their jobs, that has absolutely plundered the industry and led to skyrocketing poverty rates, the United Mine Workers are hanging onto the scraps, and they’re supporting mountaintop removal in West Virginia. Think about this. There are less than a thousand jobs for the United Mine Workers in mountaintop removal. Less than a thousand jobs. You know, they’re really trying to hang onto the last crumbs of this industry, as opposed to saying, “Let’s come up with another form of underground mining, or let’s actually—let’s shift into some sort of clean energy that we can relocate and we can reeducate and retrain our miners to do.”

One is of course struck by how much another once-powerful union has departed from its militant roots, namely the UAW which has seen its pay and benefits stripped as part of a deal to rescue GM. Perhaps all this is inevitable. Maybe we have to turn back the clock to the early 1930s when industrial union did not exist in the U.S. With the UAW and the UMW functioning like the class-collaborationist craft unions that Samuel Gompers led, a vacuum will open up for a new trade union movement that is committed to the revolutionary ideals that many rank-and-file activists of the 1930s shared. This time, however, we should keep our eyes on the prize and not be tempted to settle for half-measures that leave capitalism intact, as was FDR’s aim. Of course, given Obama’s tendency to operate like Herbert Hoover, the task of educating the left will be a bit less difficult than it was in the 1930s.

Offshore; Food, Inc.

“Offshore” might not be the first movie about Indian call center workers—“Slumdog Millionaire” has that distinction—but surely this dark comedy is the first produced by Indians that deals with the cultural and economic dislocations, not to speak of the outright racism, when they get these jobs as a result of outsourcing.

As a joint Indian-U.S. production, the movie tries to tell both sides of a story that is all the more topical given the current economic downturn. It begins with a visit of Voxx call center executive Ajay Tiwari (Sid Makkar) to the offices of Fairfax Furniture in Detroit in order to line up a deal to relocate their call center to Mumbai where it will be staffed by Indians.

But before the move can be consummated, it will be necessary for a cadre of Voxx workers to be trained at Fairfax headquarters where they will be on a forced march to learn the model line in two months. Voxx had proposed a nine month preparatory period but the Fairfax bosses were anxious to cut costs as soon as possible.

The three Indian workers are given the cold shoulder in the company cafeteria and are convenient scapegoats for the long-time employees who are on their way out. Even worse, the company trainer makes their daily sessions a hell on earth demanding instant answers to obscure questions about how to assemble a coffee table, etc. The Indians are models of perseverance and good will but come close to breaking on a daily basis.

Director/writer Diane Cheklich explained her motivation in making such a movie:

Almost everyone these days has been personally touched by outsourcing, whether as a customer calling into a call center for service or as a worker who has lost their job to an offshore company. The concept resonates with people on both sides of the ocean.

While I found the movie altogether compelling, it did leave me with a somewhat deflated feeling since the drama was posed in terms of “cowboys versus Indians” as the film-makers describe it. In an epoch of an almost Hobbesian struggle of workers of one ethnicity against another for the right to be exploited by a Fairfax or a General Motors for that matter, the audience, well at least this member of the audience, would hope for a resolution that favored all the workers against the bosses who set them against each other. “Offshore”, perhaps acknowledging current realities, does not offer such a pat resolution. “Offshore” opens tomorrow at the Imaginasian Theater in New York. A trailer can be seen at the official website: http://www.offshorethemovie.com/

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“Food, Inc.” is a powerful indictment of corporate farming that opens at the Film Forum in New York on June 12^th. Inspired by the writings of Eric Schosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”), who provide a kind of tag-team running commentary throughout the documentary directed by Robert Kenner, it is the definitive statement on how America produces crappy food to the detriment of the people who eat it, the animals who are treated cruelly in farms and slaughterhouses, and the largely immigrant workforce that labors in unsafe and low wage conditions. The only benefactors it would appear are the men who run Monsanto, Purdue, Smithfield and a small group of other huge multinationals that only see food as the ultimate commodity. When they look at a tomato, they don’t see something to eat but something to turn into a dollar no matter the consequences to society.

While I have been paying close attention to these issues for well over a decade, I was surprised to learn that I only knew half the story. It is far worse than I imagined, especially when you are dealing with camera images rather than words on a page. I was shocked to see what chickens raised in factory conditions look like. The film’s producer went to dozens of large-scale chicken farmers who were under contract to Purdue or Tyson to get permission to film inside a chicken coop (a warehouse would describe it better) but were thwarted each time, only finally to get Carole Morison—a Purdue supplier—to allow them inside even if it meant the end of her business. She was disgusted by what was taking place and wanted to get it off of her chest.

She had already put up screened windows so her chickens could see daylight over the objections of Purdue, but had no control over how the animals were raised. The chickens had been bred to have larger breasts and mature twice as fast as normal with the intention of supplying the supermarkets with a more cost-effective product. What this does not take into account is the inability of a hen to walk properly with the extra weight on top placed on spindly underdeveloped legs. As a consequence, the sheds were filled with crippled hens crawling about the floor, often close to death or already dead. The floor of the warehouse was littered with these casualties to the profit nexus and their feces. No wonder Purdue and Tyson didn’t want you to see how your food looked before it came to the meat bins at your local supermarket.

Despite the grizzly aspect of factory farming that is depicted throughout the film in a kind of homage to Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, the branding for these commodities tries to evoke a long-lost period when farming was a far more local and organic mode of production. The pictures on the labels for well-known food products make you think you have been transported to Dorothy’s farm in the Wizard of Oz when the reality behind the label is much more like Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”. In one particularly grotesque scene, we are in the control room of a mega-corporation where a bank of computers oversees the production of ground beef at various far-flung farms under its control. The key to success, the owners tell us, is that the beef is sterilized with chemicals in order to prevent e-coli disease. Apparently this is exactly what Burger King et al are looking for since they anticipate that more than 90 percent of all fast food burger patties will be produced this way in a few years.

Unfortunately, Barbara Kowalcyk, one of the interviewees, was not fortunate enough to have had one of these chemically treated hamburgers served to Kevin, her 2 ½ year old son, on a vacation some years ago. The meat carried e-coli bacteria that killed him after several days of agony in a hospital bed. Now she campaigns to see “Kevin’s Law” passed in order to close down any plants that have repeated violations of contaminated meat. Surprise, surprise. Washington has not seen fit to pass the bill.

Although I strongly urge my readers to see this movie, I do feel obligated to offer some criticisms that get to the heart of my differences with Schlosser and Pollan, no matter how much I applaud their work. A significant part of the movie is devoted to an examination of Stonyfield yogurt, a product that is always in my refrigerator especially since yogurt is a staple of the Turkish dishes I enjoy preparing. The CEO of Stonyfield is one Gary Hirshberg who is seen conferring with Walmart representatives who were about to introduce his products to their vile stores. Hirshfield justifies dealing with Walmart because he believes that there is no alternative to capitalism, even though he doesn’t quite use those words. If we are going to make wholesome food grown in conditions respectful to the environment and to animals, you need retailers like Walmart to make the organic sector grow.

The press notes for “Food, Inc.” quotes Walmart on this score:

“Actually, it’s a pretty easy decision to try to support things like organics or whatever it might be based on what the consumer wants. We see that and we react to it. If it’s clear that the customer wants it, it’s really easy to get behind it and to push forward and try to make that happen.”

– Tony Airosa, chief dairy purchaser for the nation’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, which recently began carrying organically-produced food in its store. Wal-Mart has since stopped carrying milk containing growth hormone.

In my view, it is utopian to think that the factory food system will be transformed incrementally in this fashion. The Monsantos, Purdues, Tysons and Smithfields of this world are not going to be displaced by organic farming for the simple reason that they were produced by the forces of production that have taken a century to mature. American society is under enormous pressure to compete with other capitalist powers in an epoch of stagnating profits. As such, factory farming is geared to the economic imperatives of a nation that is being forced to attack the living standards of workers and farmers alike.

If any evidence of the bankruptcy of the system is needed, as well as its talent for self-deception, you can start with the White House itself—a symbol of American corporate power and its strategy for continued world domination.

When Michelle Obama planted an organic garden on the White House lawn, Michael Pollan hailed the move in the Huffington Post:

Perhaps the most encouraging action so far has come from the East Wing, where Michelle Obama has been speaking out about the importance of real, fresh food, home cooking and gardening. By planting an organic garden on the White House lawn, she launched a thousand victory gardens (vegetables seed is suddenly in short supply), gave conniptions to the pesticide industry (which wrote urging her to use some of their “crop protection products” whether she needed them or not), and at a stroke raised the profile and prestige of real food in America.

He also was encouraged by Obama’s appointments:

Tom Vilsack has sounded a welcome new note at the Department of Agriculture, where he has appointed a proven reformer — Kathleen Merrigan — as his deputy, and emphasized his commitment to sustainability, local food systems (including urban agriculture); putting nutrition at the heart of the department’s nutrition programs (not as obvious as it might sound), and enlisting farmers in the fight against climate change. He has been meeting with the kinds of activists and farmers who in past administrations stood on the steps of the USDA holding protest signs.

I wonder if Michael Pollan watched the movie he appeared in, since Monsanto was rightfully pilloried as using its control over genetically modified soybean seeds as a way of maintaining a monopoly over farmers, who once had the right to reuse seeds. (Monsanto patented the seeds and sues any farmer its detectives find in violation.)

This is what the Organic Consumers Association has to say about Tom Vilsack:

TAKE ACTION TO STOP VILSACK’S CONFIRMATION

* Former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack’s support of genetically engineered pharmaceutical crops, especially pharmaceutical corn:

http://www.gene.ch/genet/2002/Oct/msg00057.html

http://www.organicconsumers.org/gefood/drugsincorn102302.cfm

* The biggest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He was also the founder and former chair of the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership.

* When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child of economic development potential was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning dairy cows.

* Vilsack was the origin of the seed pre-emption bill in 2005, which many people here in Iowa fought because it took away local government’s possibility of ever having a regulation on seeds- where GE would be grown, having GE-free buffers, banning pharma corn locally, etc. Representative Sandy Greiner, the Republican sponsor of the bill, bragged on the House Floor that Vilsack put her up to it right after his state of the state address.

* Vilsack has a glowing reputation as being a shill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto. Sustainable ag advocated across the country were spreading the word of Vilsack’s history as he was attempting to appeal to voters in his presidential bid. An activist from the west coast even made this youtube animation about Vilsack.

The airplane in this animation is a referral to the controversy that Vilsack often traveled in Monsanto’s jet.

Despite these criticisms, I strongly recommend “Food, Inc.” that opens at the Film Forum in New York on June 12^th.

Official website: http://www.foodincmovie.com/

Jared Diamond and Chevron

Chevron refuses to pay for damages like this in Ecuador

NY Times, May 15, 2009
In Ecuador, Resentment of an Oil Company Oozes
By SIMON ROMERO and CLIFFORD KRAUSS

SHUSHUFINDI, Ecuador — Mention to Anita Ruíz the name of the giant oil company Chevron, and she trembles with rage. At her wooden hut here in the Amazon forest, where oil-project flares illuminate the night sky, she points to a portrait of her youngest son, who died seven years ago of leukemia at age 16.

“We believe the American oilmen created the pollution that killed my son,” said Ms. Ruíz, 58, who lives in a clearing where Texaco, the American oil company that Chevron acquired in 2001, once poured oil waste into pits used decades ago for drilling wells.

Texaco’s roughnecks are long gone, but black gunk from the pits seeps to the topsoil here and in dozens of other spots in Ecuador’s northeastern jungle. These days the only Chevron employees who visit the former oil fields, in a region where resentment against the company runs high, do so escorted by bodyguards toting guns.

They represent one side in a bitter fight that is developing into the world’s largest environmental lawsuit, with $27 billion in potential damages.

Chevron is preparing for a ruling by a lone judge in a tiny courtroom on the top floor of a shopping center in Lago Agrio, a town rife with slums that Texaco founded in the 1960s as its base camp in the Amazon.

Chevron faces claims for an era when oil companies were less purposeful about protecting the environment than they are today. It also faces potentially huge damages in a country where American corporations once wielded strong influence but are now treated with discourtesy, if not contempt.

The sympathies of the judge, a former military officer named Juan Nuñez, are not hard to discern, and he appears likely to rule against Chevron this year. “This is a fight between a Goliath and people who cannot even pay their bills,” Mr. Nuñez, 57, said in an interview in his office, where more than 100,000 pages of evidence were stacked to the ceiling.

Read full article

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From an interview with Jared Diamond in Strategy and Business, a publication of Booz & Company, a consulting company:

S+B: The hottest hot button right now in political economics is globalization. If you were called in to a company that was in the throes of concentrating globally, making acquisitions, trying to find ways to be more effective in global organization and global management, what would you tell it to watch out for?

DIAMOND: The potential advantages of globalization include the greatly increased flow of ideas between parts of the world. That’s a great potential advantage for the parts of the world receiving ideas. It can be an advantage for the global company — if the company is capable of learning from the parts of the world to which it expands. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

S+B: Have you seen examples of beneficial impact?

DIAMOND: I have seen it at Chevron, which I have had the chance to observe for the last several years. Because I am concerned with environmental problems, I’ve been on the board of directors of the U.S. affiliate of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which is the largest international environmental organization. About 10 years ago, oil and natural gas were found in the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. That discovery posed acute environmental problems, because the oil fields also are the wettest place in the world, with rain up to 800 inches per year. It’s also in an area with unique biology. The CEO of Chevron happened to be someone who realized that it was in Chevron’s interest to solve the environmental issues and not try to sweep them under the rug. So Chevron entered into a partnership with World Wildlife Fund to deal with those issues. The WWF has offices at two of the Chevron camps and monitors the environment and provides input. I’ve gone out there now three times, most recently last January and February, sponsored by WWF but working out of the Chevron camps.

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From an article I wrote in 2005:

Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” is best understood as the environmentalist cousin to recent books and articles by Joseph Stiglitz, George Soros and Jeffrey Sachs that warn about the dangers of globalization. For the economists, the present world economic system is a ticking time-bomb that might destroy rich and poor alike. For Diamond the environmentalist, the refusal to husband resources such as forests, fish and clean water will lead to the collapse of modern-day societies just as surely as they led to Mayan or Easter Island collapse. Since Diamond and the economists all believe in the inviolability of the capitalist system, there is a certain cognitive dissonance at work in their writings. They harp on the symptoms, but stop short at identifying the root cause. It is what psychologists call denial.

But hope for the future arrives like a man on horseback in the concluding section of “Collapse.” Our survival depends on corporations like Chevron who have proved that capitalism and sustainable development can co-exist. During an ornithological expedition in Papua New Guinea, Diamond discovered that the corporation had created a “bird-watcher’s dream.” Descending toward the local airport, he saw virginal rain-forest and scant evidence of the devastation typical of oil exploration and drilling.

What is more, Chevron demonstrated that it really cared about him. After stepping several feet onto a company road shortly after his arrival to inspect local birds, he was chastised by company officials that this was a hazard not only to himself but to the environment. A truck could smack into him or a pipeline next to the road, causing a spill of blood or oil. So his conversion took place on a road just like Paul’s on the way to Damascus. The chastened ornithologist and prophet of doom promised company officials that henceforth he would wear a hardhat and stay on the side of the road.

Not only was oil company property home to far more birds than found in Papua New Guinea as a whole, it was also a place where indigenous peoples could be “better off with us there than if we were gone,” according to a Chevron executive. For Chevron, having Jared Diamond and the World Wildlife Fund (on whose board he sits) on their side amounts to a public relations coup. In a massive ad campaign throughout the 1990s, they exploited their partnership with the WWF and other mainstream environmentalist groups.

Chevron officials are very clever, certainly much cleverer than Jared Diamond. In 1992, Chevron’s contributions counsel David McMurray admitted, “Because of the type of business we are in we need to prove that we are responsible corporate citizens. Environmental pollutions are at the forefront in our company, so we are following this up with contributions.” That year Chevron dished out $1.6 million to environmentalist causes. This practice is called “greenwashing.” In “Divided Planet,” Tom Athanasiou explained that “the key to greenwashing is manufactured optimism, which comes in many forms­as images, articles and books, technologies, and even institutions. Anything will do, as long as it can be made to carry the message that, though the world may be seen to be going to hell, everything is good hands.”

Read full article

Leon Trotsky and Ecology

In the latest issue of What Next?, an online socialist magazine based in Great Britain, there’s an article titled The Prophet Misarmed: Trotsky, Ecology and Sustainability by Sandy Irvine. The gist of Irvine’s criticism is that Leon Trotsky was clueless on the environment based on a passage in “Literature and Revolution”, as well as other writings, that includes the following:

The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing ‘on faith’, is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad….

According to Irvine, this kind of Promethean hubris can be found across the ideological spectrum, something undoubtedly true. Keep in mind that the broad cultural context for the Russian Revolution was futurism, which lent itself to all sorts of grandiose schemes about mechanizing the entire world. It was also the context for Italian fascism and it would be difficult to distinguish between futurist art in Soviet Russia and Mussolini’s Italy in the early 1920s.

Irvine also charges Trotsky with upholding the kinds of “stagist” conceptions that were characteristic of the Second International in its decline:

In Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto, Trotsky duly refers to the lands of Asia, Latin America and Africa as “backward countries”. Not for him any pause to consider whether their cultures – or at least aspects of them – might offer equally valid paths of development and perhaps more sustainable ones. Not surprisingly, then, he refers to Ghandi as “a fake leader and false prophet” (Open Letter to the Workers of India, 1939). Indeed, his writings often display a deep contempt for non-urban ways. “The entire future work of the Revolution will be directed towards … uprooting the idiocy of village life”, he writes in Literature and Revolution. He similarly sneers at “peasant-singing intelligentsia”. Urbanism is the only future: “the city lives and leads”. (For some reason, he even takes a swipe at “home-brew”: presumably the only politically correct pint is one served from giant state breweries!)

While I would be the first to take umbrage at the suggestion that “non-urban” ways should be condemned out of hand, you have to put Trotsky once again in his historical context. The Russian countryside was not something to be idealized. Peasants were illiterate, in poor health, and worked like mules. In the context of the 1920s, the drive to socialize farming was progressive just as it was in Cuba after 1959. Health improved, literacy was achieved, and the conditions of work became more humane. The real issue, however, is not about life-styles over “home-brew” but how to integrate the town and the countryside. Trotsky was not noted for understanding the issues raised by Karl Marx in his examination of the problems of soil fertility (not the “soil erosion” alluded to by Irvine) but his urban prejudices are almost besides the point in coming to grips with the underlying problems. Being tolerant of rural ways will not get us out of the intractable problems facing humanity in the 21^st century. The only solution is abolishing the distinction between town and country, a goal that is not given its proper weight in Irvine’s analysis.

Irvine’s main complaint with Trotsky, and Bolshevism in general, is the genuflection to industrialization and Progress:

The new USSR proudly displayed its new symbols of this model of Progress. They included lines of electricity pylons striding over hill and dale (Lenin once defined socialism as “Soviets plus electrification”). It was also embodied in massive dams that sought to tame once wild rivers. The virtually useless White Sea-Baltic Canal, opened in 1933, was another such symbol, one costing tens of thousands of lives. The towering skyscraper building too symbolises this model of Progress (many Russian and East European cities are still scarred with giant emblems of Soviet Gothic architecture). Trotsky did strongly criticise certain means used by Stalin but he made fewer criticisms of the goals.

Once again, Irvine packs contradictory elements into the same critique. Is there something wrong with electricity pylons striding over hill and dale? When I was involved with Tecnica in the late 1980s, one of our volunteers was featured on Ted Koppel’s Nightline television show, which devoted a half-hour to the organization that the FBI had linked with espionage. He was an electrical engineer who practically single-handedly kept Managua supplied with electricity after a contra attack on a pylon.

We also worked with another volunteer named Ben Linder who was constructing a small hydroelectric weir in Northern Nicaragua until he was murdered by the contras. His goal was to allow poor peasant families to have lights and other electrically-generated amenities for the first time in their lives. Was this wrong?

Irvine’s case would be better made if it wasn’t directed against adopting models of Progress, but in analyzing why so many of Stalin’s gigantic projects ended up so poorly. This, of course, would require much more of an engagement with social and economic forces rather than jeremiads against the attempts of a beleaguered Soviet government to rapidly industrialize in the face of both “democratic” and fascist threats to its existence.

Fundamentally, Irvine’s approach is idealistic, seeing environmental destruction as a function of bad ideas rather than the historical process unleashed by capitalism and sustained by a USSR that had suffered a counter-revolution. He writes:

Trotsky’s views on the environment and land use conform to the dominant mindset of the last two hundred years. “Non-human nature” has been perceived as mere raw material, there to be managed and manipulated, as people see fit. Wild rivers, for example, are waiting to be “harnessed” and virgin forests “harvested” or otherwise “put to work”. This worldview came to dominate the minds of many of society’s critics, not just defenders of the status quo.

To put it bluntly, you might as well go back to the Old Testament in trying to ascribe blame since the very first chapter of Genesis is just as anthropocentric as Trotsky:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

This indeed was the dominant theme in Green ideology until Marxists began to reconfigure the relationship between the material world and ideas about that world. Rather than looking for bad ideas to blame, Marxists sought to analyze the environmental crisis in terms of the mode of production. For example, Marx understood the soil fertility crisis of the 19^th century as the logical outcome of an industrial farming that separated the production from their traditional fertilizer sources. Despite the introduction of chemicals into farming under the auspices of the Green Revolution, this crisis has not been fully resolved. It was only through the re-integration of the town and the country that this would be possible. This for Marx and Engels was not a question of life-style, but rather overcoming the metabolic rift.

In light of this, it is rather disconcerting to have a look at the 125 books mentioned in Irvine’s bibliography and see not a single reference to John Bellamy Foster or Paul Burkett, the two Marxists who have done more than any others to re-establish Karl Marx’s ecological dimensions.

Perhaps the only question that still bothers me at this point is why the editors of a Marxist journal would have bothered to publish an article that so clearly departs from historical materialism. As the environmental crisis of the 21^st century deepens, there will have to be major attempts to both theorize the challenges we face correctly and to offer informed opinion based on familiarity with the science. Sandy Irvine’s article unfortunately fails on both grounds.

Wall-E

The Disney animated feature Wall-E received many Academy Award nominations including one for best original screenplay. It was also named the best animated feature by my colleagues in NYFCO, a group that I obviously have much more respect for. Since the movie supposedly embraces environmentalist values, I finally decided to order it from Netflix despite my misgivings over anything associated with Walt Disney.

It turns out my misgivings were well-founded.

Wall-E is the acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, the robot star of the movie who is a blend of R2-D2 and ET, in other words just the kind of cuddly creature that can lend itself to vast ancillary sales in toy stores. (One Wall-E replica sells for $49.95 on amazon.com.)

For the first 20 minutes or so, we follow Wall-E on his daily rounds as he wheels around an uninhabited metropolis that is literally deluged with garbage. His job is to sweep up the garbage, compact it, and stack it in heaps that are now as tall as the buildings. Although we don’t learn why or how it came to pass, the robot possesses a human personality that leads it to salvage bits and pieces of junk that strike its fancy, including a diamond ring in a blue velvet box. He throws out the ring and saves the box, one of the few genuinely comical touches in this grating film.

We eventually learn that the earth has become uninhabitable. All of its inhabitants are now in a space station far from earth where their every need is attended to by robots. So pampered are they that they have lost the ability to walk on their feet. More corpulent than anybody ever seen in a Minnesota shopping mall, they look rather like Jabba the Hutt. One gets the strong sense that director Andrew Stanton doesn’t care much for overweight people. Ironically, he cast Jeff Garlin as the voice of the captain of the space station. Best known for his role as Larry David’s agent on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, Garlin has struggled with weight issues all his life. A N.Y. Times magazine profile reveals how serious his problems are:

I eat some food and gain some weight. If it were a logical thing, I’d be having a great time all the time. But it’s not, and I don’t know how to fix it. I know that I don’t want my kids to have eating issues. My mother didn’t understand a proper serving, but I don’t blame her. That’s how she was taught. But you’ve got to say, “I’m not passing that down.”

A robot named Eve (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) eventually joins Wall-E on the ruined planet. She has been sent there from the space station in order to look for vegetation. Like other Disney movies, the two robots fall in love just like Lady and the Tramp, or Bambi and Faline. Since the two robots are rather weak in the character development department, their relationship just doesn’t generate a lot of warmth-at least that was my reaction. It is rather like seeing one vacuum cleaner French kissing another, if you gather my drift.

As it turns out, Wall-E has already discovered a plant before Eve’s arrival. Once she discovers it in his shack, her mission is accomplished and a space ship returns to earth to bring her back to the space station with her discovery. Since poor Wall-E can’t live without her at this point, so to speak, he hitches a ride on the rocket and returns with her for the final two-thirds of the movie, which I found utterly uninspired. It turns into a struggle between our lovable robot couple and the computer controlling the space station, which has decided that a return to earth is futile.

Played by Sigourney Weaver, the computer is an obvious imitation of the one that ran the space ship in 2001. Indeed, one of the more notable aspects of this movie is its almost feverish desire to recycle movie iconography from the past 50 years or so. The plot itself borrows from Waterworld, I, Robot, and Artificial Intelligence: AI. Meanwhile, Wall-E’s comical peregrinations are an obvious homage to Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen’s robot turn in Sleeper. I strongly suspect that a failure of imagination led to this reliance on pastiche.

But my real problem was with the movie’s faux environmentalism. While the planet is suffering from a crisis of corporate pollution and waste products, the movie is so detached from what is happening today that its message would be lost on any analytically minded child, or adult for that matter.

There is also the issue of the movie’s fat phobia. Despite my distaste for Spiked Magazine, a libertarian publication out of Great Britain, I think that they are on to something when it comes to fat phobia:

One of the more depressing things about the constant talk of an obesity epidemic that is killing us all, and most particularly our children, is the media’s constant readiness to give room to almost any nonsense so long as the word fat appears in it, while ignoring significant research that fails to fit the now-conventional wisdom that ‘being fat = death’.

Recently this trend has been on display in the way in which the British press has uncritically reported the views of Professor David Hunter of Durham University. Described by the Daily Telegraph as a ‘leading public health expert’, Hunter has claimed that the UK National Health Service (NHS) will become unaffordable due to the costs of treating obesity-related diseases, opined that obesity requires ’strong action’ from government, and demanded that the government require tobacco-like warnings on foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar. Claiming that the obesity epidemic posed as significant a threat as terrorism, Hunter derided the official response as nothing more than ‘piddling’. According to Hunter, half the British population will be obese by 2032.

Despite the fact that most critics agreed with the N.Y. Times’s A.O. Scott that the movie advances “a critique of corporate consumer culture”, director Andrew Stanton disavows any such intention, stating in one interview:

I hate to not be able to fuel where you want to go, but it’s not where I was coming from. I knew I was going into that kind of territory, but I didn’t have a particular message to push. I don’t have a political or ecological message. I don’t mind that it supports that view, it’s a good citizen way to be, but everything I wanted to do was based on the love story.

Just a final word on the Disney corporation, which has the gall to distribute this movie and produce others like Madagascar in the save the planet vein. This is a predatory corporation that seeks to impose its culture on the rest of the world. Before Disney sold WABC radio to Citadel Broadcasting (the financially ravaged company has just be delisted from the NY Stock Exchange), it gave a voice to some of the worst pro-corporate and pro-pollution personalities on the planet, from Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity.

Earlier Disney products

And that’s the “enlightened” Disney Corporation of today. Let’s never forget how it got started:

Green Left Weekly, March 31, 2004
An American icon
Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince

By Marc Elliot

Andre Deutsch, 2003
305 pages, $30 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon

“Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Walt?”, read the placards of striking Disney cartoonists in 1941, mocking the popular lyric from Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs. They were on to something, because Disney, whose name is synonymous with “wholesome family entertainment”, had a dark side every bit as bad as his cartoon wolf.

Disney spied for the FBI for a quarter of a century, red-baited and wrecked Hollywood careers and lives, and teamed up with organised crime to deny his workers a union. He was a virulent anti-Semite strongly sympathetic to fascism.

Disney, whose films were praised by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover as “dedicated to the highest standards of moral values”, had a self-serving understanding of good and evil. Marc Elliott’s new muckraking biography demonstrates that Disney was as capable of black deeds as the next reactionary capitalist.

Terrifying paternal violence had left its mark on the young Disney, who was to bully and intimidate his employees, particularly the restive ones, throughout his career.

Born in 1901, Disney broke through to animation success in 1928 with Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie (Disney did Mickey’s screen voice for seven years). The non-sexual, apolitical, harmless mouse made Disney a favourite of a conservative film industry. His Silly Symphonies set to classical music, and his “golden age” (1937-42) of animated features (Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo, Fantasia) consolidated Disney’s reputation as a major, and politically safe, animator. Wealth and Oscars were his reward.

How Disney made his fame and riches, however, is the ugly underbelly to his celebrated cartoons. In a labour-intensive industry (it took 14,000 drawings to make a 10-minute cartoon), Disney was obsessed with keeping wages low and unions out, thus generating chronic grievances in his workforce of more than 1000.

While Disney was pocketing US$2000 a week in 1941, his highest paid artists got only $300, inkers and painters (the lowest paid of the creative staff) only $18, and apprentices a less-than-subsistence US$6. Favourites were unfairly rewarded, hours were long and overtime unpaid.

Wages were docked for minor breaks from work, all employees having to punch a Bundy time machine every time they left their drawing board for whatever reason – getting a drink, going to the toilet or sharpening a pencil. There was arbitrary dismissal for “immorality” whenever Disney’s puritanical “house rules” were breached. Disney took all public credit for the creative process, the lack of screen credits for his animators resulting in non-recognition and poor career prospects in the industry.

Disney’s workers were ripe for organising. The Screen Cartoonists’ Guild (SCG) had become a local of the Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers union in 1941 and secured good contracts at Warner Brothers and MGM. Disney had formed a “company union” to ward off the SCG, but 400 of Disney’s workers rejected it and signed SCG pledge cards. Disney’s illegal sacking of 20 leaders of the organising drive and his refusal to recognise the SCG, drove Disney workers to strike in May 1941.

Half the workforce struck and picketed, for nine weeks. Solidarity actions upped the pressure – the Screen Actors’ Guild donated to the strike fund, printers forced the withdrawal of the Mickey Mouse comic strip from the dailies, Disney film processing was banned by technicians at the Technicolour and Pathe labs. Theatres were picketed and his films boycotted.

Nervously stressed, Disney’s facial tics, obsessive hand-washing and juvenile stubbornness to negotiate, forced his brother, Roy, to send him out of the country and settle the crippling strike. The SCG was recognised, all sacked activists rehired, wages increased and paid vacations granted.

Disney, however, was an anti-communist zealot who saw the strike as a Jewish-Marxist plot to destroy him. He sought vengeance. The day after the strike ended, he sacked a leading activist (for the fifth time), Art Babbitt (creator of Goofy and the best bits of Fantasia – like the dancing mushrooms piece). Babbitt, a brilliant animator, was described by Disney as “head sewer rat” of the Cartoonists’ Guild. Other top animators and activists were sacked or fled to studios with better working conditions, higher pay, on-screen credits and a chance to use their creative skills free from the cloying sentimentality of the Disney-cute style.

Propaganda films for the US military during World War II, heavily subsidised by the government, made Disney tidy wartime profits, though the “anti-fascism” of an anti-Semite who had attended American Nazi Party rallies and was entertained by Mussolini at his private villa, stopped short of supporting Hitler’s Jewish and socialist victims.

Disney rejected a request to make an animation film on Christian/Jewish unity in the face of the Nazi nightmare and the proposal to have cartoon farmyard animals stamping out ”weasel words of hate” against Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds was seen by Disney as “promoting communism” because a Rhode Island Red could only be a symbolic communist!

Disney, who believed the war should really have targeted the Soviet Union, took his anti-communist crusade into the heart of Hollywood. With Disney’s eager assent, he was made an FBI informer in 1940. He filed dozens of reports on Hollywood “subversives”.

As a founder member and vice-president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (a rabid anti-communist organisation of right-wing Hollywood celebrities funded by the major studio heads), Disney was instrumental in getting the government red-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to investigate Hollywood. HUAC destroyed the careers, and sometimes the lives, of hundreds of Hollywood radicals and liberals.

Disney, who appeared at the hearings as a “friendly witness”, falsely named Herb Sorrell (1941 strike leader from the Painters’ Union) as a communist with the intention, successfully achieved, of destroying Sorrell’s progressive Conference of Studio Unions, which had succeeded the painters’ union, and allowing the gangster-run International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) to take control in the industry.

Sorrell never recovered, dying from a heart attack soon after. He was only in his 30s. The career of former Disney animator and strike leader, Dave Hilberman, was destroyed, too, after Disney named him to HUAC.

Disney actively supported the Hollywood blacklist which was insidiously effective – the merest whisper of a name was enough to do irreparable career damage. Depression, premature death and suicide could, and did, follow. Others were forced into exile – like Charlie Chaplin (‘the little Commie’, snarled a gloating Disney).

Disney continued to clean his own turf of all those not sharing his reactionary politics. The writer, Aldous Huxley, was working for Disney on Alice in Wonderland but was sacked after he protested the bloody beating of his picketing son by IATSE underworld goons.

When Disney died in 1966, Walt Disney Productions had become one of the wealthiest studios in the world and it continues to rake in the profits. Disney’s anti-worker and anti-union spirit lives on – strict dress and grooming codes (from fingernails to ‘fancy underwear’) – are enforced at Disney’s theme parks around the globe and when Disneyland staff in California threatened a strike in 1991 over a facial hair ban, their strike leader was sacked.

Walt Disney’s carefully cultivated image is that of a creative, and highly moral, genius. He did have a genius of a sort – a genius for making profits, for breaking unions, for exploiting workers, for glory-hogging, for spying and informing, and for red-baiting and ruining the lives of anyone who threatened to interrupt the flow of wealth to Disney. He is truly an ”American icon” – an icon of capitalist USA.

Radiant City; The Unforeseen

Two powerful documentaries about the social and environmental impacts of suburban sprawl are now available on home video. The first, “Radiant City“, combines the documentary form with some surrealistic touches in an effort to show how far removed a vast subdivision of Calgary is from the title of a 1935 Le Corbusier book: “La Ville radieuse“, or radiant city. The second is “The Unforeseen“, which explores a struggle that took place in Austin, Texas about 25 years ago between environmentalists and some truly villainous real estate developers. If these two movies do not convince you that suburbia is no longer sustainable or worth sustaining for that matter, then nothing will.

“Radiant City” is a story narrated by members of the Moss family who live in one of the oversized new homes in a vast subdivision that is utterly devoid of trees. The houses seem as if they were dropped from helicopters onto barren tundra, with no more than 10 or 15 feet separating each house. Apart from the occasional swimming pool and strip mall, there is not a single amenity associated with urban life. The two Moss children escort the viewer around their neighborhood making sardonic observations. We follow the boy to the top of a cell phone transmitter tower where the rooftops of what Malvina Reynolds once called “little boxes” can be seen in all directions, except these boxes are rather large. He tells us that he can’t stay in the tower too long because it will fry his brain and maybe cause a tumor.

The father admits that the subdivision is sterile and depressing but confesses that he had no alternative. If he wanted to live in a more traditional suburban or urban neighborhood, he would have had to accept far less space. Ironically, the creation of such oversized houses has led to an increasing atomization since such subdivisions foster a retreat to one’s own house where recreation (video games, cable TV, etc.) are geared to the family unit rather than the community as a whole. For that matter, there really is no such thing as community in the subdivision even though its inhabitants keep using the word.

One of the experts on urban malaise interviewed throughout “Radiant City” is James Howard Kunstler – the author of “The Geography of Nowhere,” who co-director Jim Brown acknowledges as a major influence. In an interview that can be read in the press notes section of the movie’s website, Brown explains his purpose in making such a movie:

Suburbs promise the good life – but they don’t deliver it. They promise community but in fact they atomize people into weird anti-communities. Walk down a street in a recently built suburb – and it’s so eerie and quiet. There’s nobody on the streets. No birds because there are no trees. Sprawl eliminates the features that make communities distinct. Unique local characteristics disappear in a strange monoculture. As we approach an age of resource scarcity – suburbia is the worst possible model for urban development. It overtaxes our dwindling supplies of petroleum and water. But I I don’t think it will change until we’re hit with a real crisis, and it may already be too late. India and China are racing to copy us, but there’s still no real will here in the West to change. We’re not ready to turn the corner yet.

“The Unforeseen” pits local Austin residents committed to the traditionally laid-back, nature-worshipping life style of this truly beautiful city and real estate developers bent on turning it into another Houston or Dallas. As someone who lived in Houston, Texas in the early 1970s on assignment with the Socialist Workers Party (trust me, that’s the only way I would have ended up there) and who had occasion to visit Austin from time to time, I can assure you that it was like going from hell up to heaven. With its sterile subdivisions, parking garages and strip malls, Houston, Texas might be considered as a sister city to the Calgary of “Radiant City”.

At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to Gary Bradley, an ambitious real estate developer who built a 4000-acre Circle C Ranch subdivision just outside of Austin, just on the brink of the Savings and Loan crisis which destroyed him. As interviewee Bill Greider explains the real estate bubble of the early 1990s, you are struck by how similar it is to the one today. In either case, you are dealing with a financial industry that has convinced itself that there will be an inexhaustible market for suburban housing and shopping centers that will reach to the moon and in both cases the finance/construction tower of Babel comes crashing to the ground.

Before the crash, Bradley enters into an alliance with another real estate developer to take on the local environmentalists who question the benefits of suburban sprawl, especially the impact it will have on Barton Springs, a local waterhole that has been a Mecca to local residents for generations. That developer is none other than Freeport-McMoran, the multinational corporation that operates a gold mine in Papua, New Guinea that has been responsible for dumping a mountain of waste into local streams. In other words, the perfect company to turn Austin into a toxic dump.

Dick Brown, a lobbyist for Freeport-McMoran, is interviewed throughout the movie making the case for “property rights”, all the while working on a plastic model of an F-16 fighter plane. It is hard to tell which is more off-putting, the spectacle of a grown man playing with such a creepy toy or his defense of profits above people.

The movie also features interviews with Robert Redford, one of the movie’s producers, who used to visit Barton Springs as a child and still has vividly pleasant memories of those days. He also has fond memories of Los Angeles in the early 1940s before it too became like Calgary and Houston. Although I don’t have much use for celebrity liberals in general, I found his observations truly affecting since they jibe with my own reflections on a golden age that has disappeared. Even though my own home town remains as rustic and under-populated as it was in the 1950s, the local lake has been destroyed by “development”, i.e., sewer drainage.

While I was watching the two movies, I could not but help make the connection with indigenous peoples who lived near Calgary and Austin, one group I know through direct contact and the other through scholarly material.

Calgary is in Alberta, the home of the Blackfoot reservation that lies on the border with Montana. I visited the reservation about 10 years ago and got a chance to see first-hand how American Indians lived. No matter how impoverished, they still valued community (and communal values) in a way that the contemporary suburban dwellers of Calgary cannot.

Meanwhile, I am finishing a reading project that has lasted nearly 6 months that is focused on three tribes of the Southwest: the Comanche, the Apaches, and the Quechuans-all of whom are represented as savagely dangerous “Others” in Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”. Suffice it to say, the Indians of the 18^th and 19^th century should not be romanticized in “noble savage” fashion, but up until they were fully integrated into the capitalist economy that surrounded them, they knew how to live in harmony with nature. At the risk of sounding reactionary, I would argue that we have to learn such lessons from the savage or die at the hands of civilized capitalist excess.

Email and coal ash trails

Not hazardous, according to Obama’s new energy czar

Seasoned Regulators to Lead Obama Environment Program
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 12, 2008; A09

The Obama administration has ambitions for a radical change in U.S. environmental policy. But President-elect Barack Obama did not pick radicals to lead it.

Instead, the three officials tapped for leadership posts on the environment are not activists but regulators who have spent years in the weeds of such issues as mercury emissions, brownfields and black-bear hunts.

They will inherit the usual issues — dirty air, dirty water, brownfields and red tides — plus an unprecedented one. Obama has promised to cut back U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases — a proposal that could set off an enormous political fight.

A review of their records and past statements reveals little about the exact policies they would pursue under Obama. It shows they have won over some environmental activists with an open attitude and disappointed others who felt they were not pushing hard enough.

Their expected efforts to limit greenhouse gases would be more ambitious than changes they have sought in previous positions.

“It’s going to be an enormous challenge,” said Felicia Marcus, the western director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “To call it ‘herding cats’ would be to oversimplify it. It’s like herding dogs, cats, wolves and sheep.”

Democratic sources say Obama plans to name Carol M. Browner, a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to a new position overseeing energy, environment and climate change policy from the White House.

Full article

—-

Washington Times
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Climate czar left no electronic trail
Jim McElhatton (Contact)

Don’t bother looking for any electronic records of Carol Browner’s first stint as a federal government executive. The soon-to-be Obama administration climate czar intentionally didn’t keep many.

In sworn testimony obtained by The Washington Times, Ms. Browner disclosed that she refused to use e-mail when she served as President Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency chief in the 1990s for fear of leaving a digital trail. She also ordered her government computer hard drive wiped clean of records just before leaving office.

“It was a conscious decision not to use a piece of equipment or to learn how to use a piece of equipment because I didn’t want to be in a situation similar to what I had been in Florida,” she testified about government computers. The testimony referred to her days as an environmental regulator in Florida, where an e-mail message sent to her surfaced in litigation.

“This is why I made this decision not to use my computer,” she said. “I was very careful.”

Full article

—-

Waste News, May 1, 2000, Monday
U.S. EPA rules on coal waste; Material termed not hazardous
BYLINE: Susanna Duff
WASHINGTON — Coal combustion waste is not hazardous and can continue to be land disposed or used as mining fill, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said last week.

However, the agency will develop national standards under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Combustion waste currently is exempt from federal regulation, but fossil fuel combustion has toxic metals that could potentially contaminate ground water, the EPA said.

The EPA’s April 25 proclamation came after several extensions from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which last year ordered the agency to determine whether fossil fuel waste is hazardous. The agency since had given two opposing answers. Last year, the EPA gave Congress a report based on a 19-year scientific study that found coal combustion waste was not hazardous and should be regulated as solid waste under RCRA Subtitle D.

But this February, the EPA determined combustion waste is hazardous and should be regulated under Subtitle C.

The agency caved under pressure from environmental groups, argued industry groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Edison Electric Institute and several state environmental agencies.

Environmentalists, including the National Environmental Trust and the Clean Air Task Force, had sent a letter dated Jan. 13 to EPA Administrator Carol Browner stating a hazardous determination would “hasten the building and operation of newer, modern plants using clear fuels, thus reducing the full range of air emissions.” The groups are thought to recently have sent the deciding report to the EPA.

The agency’s reversal to call combusted waste hazardous had surprised members of Congress and industry groups.

In a Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee hearing, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., expressed concern that the agency was going against its own scientists under the influence of environmentalists. Inhofe indicated that the EPA’s final decision could affect the budget of the agency’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response.

“If the states and industry do not take steps to address these wastes adequately in a reasonable amount of time or if EPA identifies additional risks to public health, EPA will revisit this decision to determine whether a hazardous waste approach is needed,” said Michael McCabe, EPA acting deputy administrator.

—-

NY Times, December 25, 2008
Coal Ash Spill Revives Issue of Its Hazards
By SHAILA DEWAN

KINGSTON, Tenn. – What may be the nation’s largest spill of coal ash lay thick and largely untouched over hundreds of acres of land and waterways Wednesday after a dam broke this week, as officials and environmentalists argued over its potential toxicity.

Federal studies have long shown coal ash to contain significant quantities of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium, which can cause cancer and neurological problems. But with no official word on the dangers of the sludge in Tennessee, displaced residents spent Christmas Eve worried about their health and their property, and wondering what to do.

The spill took place at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a Tennessee Valley Authority generating plant about 40 miles west of Knoxville on the banks of the Emory River, which feeds into the Clinch River, and then the Tennessee River just downstream.

Holly Schean, a waitress whose home, which she shared with her parents, was swept off its foundation when millions of cubic yards of ash breached a retaining wall early Monday morning, said, “They’re giving their apologies, which don’t mean very much.”

The T.V.A., Ms. Schean said, has not yet declared the house uninhabitable. But, she said: “I don’t need your apologies. I need information.”

Even as the authority played down the risks, the spill reignited a debate over whether the federal government should regulate coal ash as a hazardous material. Similar ponds and mounds of ash exist at hundreds of coal plants around the nation.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has issued no warnings about the potential chemical dangers of the spill, saying there was as yet no evidence of toxic substances. “Most of that material is inert,” said Gilbert Francis Jr., a spokesman for the authority. “It does have some heavy metals within it, but it’s not toxic or anything.”

Mr. Francis said contaminants in water samples taken near the spill site and at the intake for the town of Kingston, six miles downstream, were within acceptable levels.

But a draft report last year by the federal Environmental Protection Agency found that fly ash, a byproduct of the burning of coal to produce electricity, does contain significant amounts of carcinogens and retains the heavy metal present in coal in far higher concentrations. The report found that the concentrations of arsenic to which people might be exposed through drinking water contaminated by fly ash could increase cancer risks several hundredfold.

Similarly, a 2006 study by the federally chartered National Research Council found that these coal-burning byproducts “often contain a mixture of metals and other constituents in sufficient quantities that they may pose public health and environmental concerns if improperly managed.” The study said “risks to human health and ecosystems” might occur when these contaminants entered drinking water supplies or surface water bodies.

In 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed stricter federal controls of coal ash, but backed away in the face of fierce opposition from utilities, the coal industry, and Clinton administration officials. At the time, the Edison Electric Institute, an association of power utilities, estimated that the industry would have to spend up to $5 billion in additional cleanup costs if the substance were declared hazardous. Since then, environmentalists have urged tighter federal standards, and the E.P.A. is reconsidering its decision not to classify the waste as hazardous.

A morning flight over the disaster area showed some cleanup activity along a road and the railroad tracks that take coal to the facility, both heaped in sludge, but no evidence of promised skimmers or barricades on the water to prevent the ash from sliding downstream. The breach occurred when an earthen dike, the only thing separating millions of cubic yards of ash from the river, gave way, releasing a glossy sea of muck, four to six feet thick, dotted with icebergs of ash across the landscape. Where the Clinch River joined the Tennessee, a clear demarcation was visible between the soiled waters of the former and the clear brown broth of the latter.

By afternoon, dump trucks were depositing rock into the river in a race to blockade it before an impending rainstorm washed more ash downstream.

The spill, which released about 300 million gallons of sludge and water, is far larger than the other two similar disasters, said Jeffrey Stant, the director of the Coal Combustion Waste Initiative for the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental legal group, who has written on the subject for the E.P.A. One spill in 1967 on the Clinch River in Virginia released about 130 million gallons, and the other in 2005 in Northampton County, Pa., released about 100 million gallons into the Delaware River.

The contents of coal ash can vary widely depending on the source, but one study found that the mean concentrations of lead, chromium, nickel and arsenic are three to five times higher in the Appalachian coal that is mined near Kingston than in Rocky Mountain or Northern Plains coal.

Stephen A. Smith, the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said it was “mind-boggling” that officials had not warned nearby residents of the dangers.

“The fact that they have not warned people, I think, is disastrous and potentially harmful to the residents,” Mr. Smith said. “There are people walking around, checking it out.”

He and other environmentalists warned that another danger would arise when the muck dried out and became airborne and breathable.

Despite numerous reports from recreational anglers and television news video of a large fish kill downstream of the spill, Mr. Francis said the T.V.A.’s environmental team had not encountered any dead fish. On Swan Pond Road, home to the residences nearest the plant, a group of environmental advocates went door to door telling residents that boiling their water, as officials had suggested, would not remove heavy metals.

Environmentalists pointed to the accident as proof of their long-held assertion that there is no such thing as “clean coal,” noting two factors that may have contributed to the scale of the disaster. First, as coal plants have gotten better at controlling air pollution, the toxic substances that would have been spewed into the air have been shifted to solid byproducts like fly ash, and the production of such postcombustion waste, as it is called, has increased sharply.

Second, the Kingston plant, surrounded by residential tracts, had little room to grow and simply piled its ash higher and higher, though officials said the pond whose wall gave way was not over capacity.

Environmental groups have long pressed for coal ash to be buried in lined landfills to prevent the leaching of metals into the soil and groundwater, a recommendation borne out by the 2006 E.P.A. report. An above-ground embankment like the one at Kingston was not an appropriate storage site for fly ash, said Thomas J. FitzGerald, the director of nonprofit Kentucky Resources Council and an expert in coal waste.

“I find it difficult to comprehend that the State of Tennessee would have approved that as a permanent disposal site,” Mr. FitzGerald said.

The T.V.A. will find an alternative place to dispose of the fly ash in the future, Mr. Francis said. He said that at least 30 pieces of heavy machinery had been put in use to begin the cleanup of the estimated 1.7 million cubic yards of ash that spilled from the 80-acre pond, and that work would continue day and night, even on Christmas. The plant, which generates enough electricity to support 670,000 homes, is still functioning, but might run out of coal before the railroad tracks are cleared.

About 15 houses were affected by the flood, Mr. Francis said, and three would likely be declared uninhabitable. “We’re going to make it right,” he said. “We’re going to restore these folks to where they were prior to this incident.”

A spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency, Laura Niles, said the agency was overseeing the cleanup and would decide whether to declare Kingston a Superfund site when the extent of the contamination was known.

United States coal plants produce 129 million tons of postcombustion byproducts a year, the second-largest waste stream in the country, after municipal solid waste. That is enough to fill more than a million railroad coal cars, according to the National Research Council.

Another 2007 E.P.A. report said that over about a decade, 67 towns in 26 states had their groundwater contaminated by heavy metals from such dumps.

For instance, in Anne Arundel County, Md., between Baltimore and Annapolis, residential wells were polluted by heavy metals, including thallium, cadmium and arsenic, leaching from a sand-and-gravel pit where ash from a local power plant had been dumped since the mid-1990s by the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. Maryland fined the company $1 million in 2007.

As it grew dark in Kingston, a hard rain enveloped Roane County, rendering the twin smokestacks of the steam plant, as locals refer to it, barely visible amid the dingy clouds.

Angela Spurgeon, a teacher and mother of two whose dock was smothered in the ash-slide, said she was worried about the health effects, saying that on the night of the accident everyone was covered in sludge.

“The breathing is what concerns me, the lung issues,” Ms. Spurgeon said. “Who knows what’s in that water?”

Felicity Barringer and Robbie Brown contributed reporting.

E. Coli and capitalism

E. Coli

About 3 years ago I began buying meat or fish from Fresh Direct and Whole Foods in New York. The first is an Internet-based retailer. You order online and deliveries are made to your apartment from warehouses in the outer boroughs. The advantage supposedly to Fresh Direct was that the food was under tighter control than in supermarkets where meat and fish are sold long after their expiration date. Their website brags:

Our food comes directly from farms, dairies and fisheries (not middlemen), so it’s several days fresher and a lot less expensive when it gets to your table. Our fully refrigerated, state-of-the-art facility (minutes from Manhattan in Long Island City) lets us meet standards no retail store in the country can match. We follow USDA guidelines and the HACCP food safety system in all our fresh storage and production rooms. Since customers don’t shop in our facility, we can maintain different environments for each type of food we sell. For example, we have seven different climates for handling produce, ensuring that the bananas are as happy as the potatoes.

As much as I enjoyed the convenience of ordering from Fresh Direct, I cut them out last October when I discovered that the initial capital investment came from Peter Ackerman, a George Soros type investor who funds NGO’s around the world dedicated to overthrowing the latest designated enemy of the U.S. State Department–including the Albert Einstein Institute that Stephen Zunes is haplessly trying to defend against the charge of meddling in Venezuela’s internal politics.

Whole Foods, on the other hand, is a nationwide chain that first established a foothold in New York a few years ago. Whatever I wasn’t buying from Fresh Direct, I’d pick up at Whole Foods. As its name implies, it puts a heavy emphasis on organic meat and produce. Their website, competing with Fresh Direct as to who is best positioned to Save the Planet, informs us:

This is where it all began. Whole Foods Market is all about organics, and organics is all about respect for the earth and the natural processes that have nourished us for millennia. Organic agriculture works in harmony with Nature to produce food that is free of man-made toxins, promoting the health of consumers, farmers and the earth, with an eye to maintaining that health far into the future.

Organic farming is a hopeful enterprise, practiced with compassion and empathy for the land and the creatures upon it.

Somehow, the “health of consumers” went by the wayside this week when Whole Food was implicated in a major E. Coli outbreak, as today’s Washington Post reports:

Whole Foods Market pulled fresh ground beef from all of its stores Friday, becoming the latest retailer affected by an E. coli outbreak traced to Nebraska Beef, one of the nation’s largest meatpackers. It’s the second outbreak linked to the processor in as many months.

The meat Whole Foods recalled came from Coleman Natural Foods, which unbeknownst to Whole Foods had processed it at Nebraska Beef, an Omaha meatpacker with a history of food-safety and other violations. Nebraska Beef last month recalled more than 5 million pounds of beef produced in May and June after its meat was blamed for another E. coli outbreak in seven states. On Friday it recalled an additional 1.2 million pounds of beef produced on June 17, June 24 and July 8, which included products eventually sold to Whole Foods. The recall is not related to the recent spate of E. coli illnesses among Boy Scouts at a gathering in Goshen, Va.

Whole Foods officials are investigating why they were not aware that Coleman was using Nebraska Beef as a processor, spokeswoman Libba Letton said.

Also of some interest in light of the Democratic Party’s “change” mantra is the role of a Democratic Governor in doing favors for Nebraska Beef:

The force behind Nebraska Beef is Nebraska businessman William Hughes. Hughes was a top executive at the now-defunct BeefAmerica. In 1997, the USDA yanked its inspectors from BeefAmerica’s Norfolk, Neb., plant because of repeated sanitation violations, including contamination of meat with fecal matter. The company had to recall more than 600,000 pounds of beef after the USDA traced E. coli O157:H7-tainted meat from a Virginia retailer to the Omaha packer. It filed for bankruptcy the following year.

By then, Hughes was already part of a group of Nebraska Beef investors. The state gave the company additional financial support in the form of $7.5 million in tax credits under its Quality Jobs Act. Then-Gov. Ben Nelson (D), now a U.S. senator, sat on the three-member jobs board that approved the tax credits. Nelson’s former law firm, Lamson, Dugan and Murray, represents Nebraska Beef.

While state leaders welcomed Nebraska Beef and the jobs that came with it, residents who lived near the plant did not, and for more than a decade, they battled the company over manure strewn in the street and workers walking off the kill floor and into the local grocery store covered in cow splatter, said South Omaha resident Janet Bonet.

Labor unions have also criticized Nebraska Beef over its labor practices. Since 1998, the company has had 47 workplace safety violations and paid more than $100,000 in fines, Occupational Safety and Health Administration records show. Lamson said most were not serious.

I have never bought beef at Whole Food, but now wonder about the chicken and fish that I have. For that matter, the food could be just as unsavory as John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, another businessman with political ambitions as grandiose as Peter Ackerman’s. Starting off as a leftist undergraduate at the U. of Texas, Mackey evolved into a libertarian as soon as he started a food business as he explained in a salon.com interview:

When I was in my very early 20’s I believed that democratic socialism was a more “just” economic system than democratic capitalism was. However, soon after I opened my first small natural food store back in 1978 with my girlfriend when I was 25, my political opinions began to shift…

I didn’t think the charge of capitalist exploiters fit Renee and myself very well. In a nutshell the economic system of democratic socialism was no longer intellectually satisfying to me and I began to look around for more robust theories which would better explain business, economics, and society. Somehow or another I stumbled on to the works of Mises, Hayek, and Friedman, and had a complete revolution in my world view. The more I read, studied, and thought about economics and capitalism, the more I came to realize that capitalism had been misunderstood and unfairly attacked by the left.

A couple of years ago Mackey made the news for using a pseudonym on the Yahoo stock market forum in an attempt to drive down the price of a company he sought to take over, as Smartmoney.com reports:

In January 2005, someone using the name “Rahodeb” went online to a Yahoo stock-market forum and posted this opinion: No company would want to buy Wild Oats Markets Inc., a natural-foods grocer, at its price then of about $8 a share.

“Would Whole Foods buy OATS?” Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats’ stock symbol. “Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small.” Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management “clearly doesn’t know what it is doing. . . . OATS has no value and no future.”

The comments were typical of banter on Internet message boards for stocks, but the writer’s identity was anything but. Rahodeb was an online pseudonym of John Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. Earlier this year, his company agreed to buy Wild Oats for $565 million, or $18.50 a share.

Obviously, despite the lip-service paid to transparency in the marketplace, Mackey is not above tipping the scale in his favor.

This is not the first time that an “organic” food producer has been implicated in an E. Coli outbreak. Only 2 years ago, Earthbound Farms spinach was contaminated with the deadly bacteria. Earthbound Farms, like Coleman, Fresh Direct and Whole Foods, is another “green” producer whose website states:

More than 24 years ago, Earthbound Farm started in a backyard garden, where we grew food we felt good about serving to our friends and family. And that meant farming organically.

Today, our commitment to the health of those who enjoy our harvest is stronger than ever. Earthbound Farm certified organic produce is grown by about 150 dedicated farmers, who use the same organic farming methods on the smallest farm (about 5 acres) as on the largest (about 680 acres). Together, we’re working to bring healthy and delicious organic food to people wherever they live and shop, and to protect the environment.

Since E. Coli is associated with animal waste, it seemed odd at first that spinach could become tainted. It turned out that animal waste was involved, as radical food journalist Michael Pollan explained in an October 15, 2006 N.Y. Times piece titled “The Vegetable-Industrial Complex“:

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution – the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops – and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem – chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.

But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has spread it far and wide. We don’t yet know exactly what happened in the case of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we’re washing the whole nation’s salad in one big sink.

My father, who died in 1970, was the owner of a fruit and vegetable store in the Catskill Mountains. He also sold fish in the wintertime. After an A&P moved into town in the mid 1960s, his business started to go downhill–a trend that had begun with the decline of the tourist industry a few years earlier.

To this day, I have never tasted fruit and vegetables like those that he sold. Compared to the garbage you buy in supermarkets today, they were like a Platonic ideal. Biting into a tomato in the mid 1950s was like partaking in the Eternal Essence of Tomato. The same thing was true of the fish that he sold which came from fresh water lakes and the ocean, never from fish farms. Some fish that he sold–like Pike or Yellow Perch–are simply unavailable today, even in boutique stores in the richest neighborhoods.

Nearly everything he sold was seasonal and native to a particular section of the U.S. This was long before the days when grapes came from Chile and tomatoes from Mexico. You bought grapes in the summertime because that is when they were available. In December you ate apples from the Pacific Northwest and oranges from Florida and that was that. Whatever you sacrificed in terms of choice was more than adequately compensated by taste. Since much of the fruit and produce was still being produced by relatively small farms, there was less susceptibility to the kinds of bacterial infection described by Michael Pollan.

There has been a tendency among some on the left to think uncritically about the “benefits” of industrial farming, as if input-output ratios based on minimal expenditures is the sole criterion. In many ways, the crisis of agriculture today is no different than it was in Marx’s day. By substituting industrial farming techniques for the “backward” methods of the past, the door is open to the kind of problems Marx described in V.3 of Capital:

If small-scale landownership creates a class of barbarians standing half outside society, combining all the crudity of primitive social forms with all the torments and misery of civilized countries, large landed property undermines labor-power in the final sphere to which its indigenous energy flees, and where it is stored up as a reserve fund for renewing the vital power of the nation, on the land itself. Large-scale industry and industrially pursued large-scale agriculture have the same effect. If they are originally distinguished by the fact that the former lays waste and ruins labour-power and thus the natural power of man, whereas the latter does the same to the natural power of the soil, they link up in the later course of development, since the industrial system applied to agriculture also enervates the workers there, while industry and trade for their part provide agriculture with the means of exhausting the soil.

Marx and Engels’s solution in the Communist Manifesto appears as timely as ever, even if through its implementation we will once again suffer the hardship of only being able to eat grapes in the summertime:

Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

Was Enron “Green”?

Generally I don’t have much to say about Spiked online nowadays since the ex-members of the Revolutionary Communist Party in Great Britain have pretty much severed all their connections to the left. Although they are somewhat coy about their ideology, the impartial observer can recognize it immediately as libertarianism but without the bellicose foreign policy associated with today’s Ayn Rand supporters.

There are a few exceptions, however-most notably James Heartfield who wrote an interesting review of Rick Kuhn’s Isaac Deutscher Prize-winning biography of Henryk Grossman, a Marxist economist who had a significant influence on the RCP in the 1980s.

Apparently James has a new book out. Titled “Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance“, it contains the kind of tirades that are the stock-in-trade of Spiked online. But where most contributors to Spiked frame their arguments in nebulous terms of “progress” and “human development”, James is more comfortable invoking Karl Marx-even if he neglects those aspects of Marx’s writings that would clash with Spike’s editorial slant. I am of course referring to Marx’s deep concern about soil fertility, which was to the 19^th century what climate change is today.

While I doubt that I will have either the time or the interest to read James’s book, I was motivated to write something about an excerpt that appears on the Metamute website. I don’t know much about this Zine, except that it seems to attract bright young things from the leftwing of the academy.

James’s article is titled “Manufactured Scarcity – The Profits of Deindustrialisation.” It is focused on “Green Capitalists” and Enron in particular. The editors introduce it as follows:

‘Green capitalism’: a new paradigm of sustainable production or a license to shut down plants and print money? James Heartfield looks at the case of influential pioneer in increasing profits by cutting output, Enron

This piqued my interest. Was Enron truly “Green”? Of course, it is difficult to find a corporation today that does not have Green pretensions. In my critique of Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”, I debunked his reference to Chevron as “Green” based on the energy company’s contributions to the following distinctly anti-environmentalist outfits, as documented in Josh Karliner’s indispensable “The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization.”:

1. Citizens for the Environment: advocates strict deregulation as a solution to environmental problems.

2. Oregonians for Food and Shelter: a pro-pesticide lobby.

3. Global Climate Coalition: global warming skeptics.

4. Pacific Legal Foundation: files court challenges to clean water, hazardous waste and wetlands protection laws.

5. National Wetlands Coalition: should probably be called National Anti-wetlands Coalition since its main goal is remove obstacles to oil drilling in their midst.

6. Mountain States Legal Foundation: founded by batty former Interior Secretary James Watt.

Ultimately, corporations like Enron and Chevron will spend all sorts of money on advertising and bribes to groups like World Wildlife Fund, upon whose board Diamond sits, in order to fool people into thinking that they are “Green”. That does not mean that we have to take them at their word. We should also of course take note that the six aforementioned groups are exactly the kind whose ideas are reflected in the pages of Spiked online.

According to James, Enron’s “Green” credentials were based on, among other things, its Climate Protection Award from the EPA in 1998. Since the environmental policies of the Clinton-Gore administration are viewed by most radicals as being worse than the Bush administration that preceded it, one can only wonder why this award proves that Enron was Green. If Enron gave itself an award, would anybody take that seriously? Given the cozy relationship between Enron and both bourgeois parties, the EPA award amounted to just about the same thing.

James’s main complaint is that Enron put a damper on production in compliance with Green thinking, while at the same time it boosted profits. He refers to this as “manufactured scarcity”, which took the form of “clean energy” and California’s “Negawatt Revolution”. Here’s how it worked, according to James:

Chief Executive Kenneth Lay turned Enron from a company that made its money generating power into one that made its money trading finance. Whatever else it was doing, there was no denying that Enron was cutting back its own CO2 emissions and getting rich doing it. One company memo stated that the Kyoto treaty ‘would do more to promote Enron’s business than will almost any other regulatory initiative’.

This is true as far as it goes. Enron pushed for adoption of the Kyoto Treaty since it mandated a switch from coal-burning plants to natural gas, which Enron-essentially an energy broker-supplied. However, being in favor of natural gas does not really make you “Green”, especially in light of the following:

Of Enron Corp’s many political maneuvers in Washington before its fall into bankruptcy, winning the promise of federal financing for a 390-mile pipeline from Bolivia to Brazil through the Chiquitano Dry Tropical Forest may have the most enduring consequences.

Enron built the natural-gas pipeline directly through South America’s largest remaining undeveloped swath of dry tropical forest, a region rich with endangered wildlife and plants.

The pipeline, completed late last year, and its service roads have opened the forest to the kind of damage environmental groups had predicted: Poachers travel service roads to log old-growth trees. Hunters prey on wild game and cattle graze illegally. An abandoned gold mine reopened and its workers camp along the pipeline right-of-way.

–Washington Post, May 6, 2002

James continues:

Amory Lovins’ negawatt revolution in California was Enron’s wet dream. Having shut down its own generation capacity, PG&E was at the mercy of Enron’s market manipulation. Buying surplus electricity on the open market PG&E was royally fleeced, losing $12 billion. Utility bills rose by nine times. Enron took advantage of the restricted market and cut electricity to California. They even invented reasons to take power plants offline while California was blacked out. Enron official joked that they were stealing one million dollars a day from California. The PG&E that Lovins held up as a model went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the state of California.

More than anything, Enron was about deregulation, a word that does not appear once in James’s article. Enron was supposedly an alternative to traditional public utilities, using the marketplace to satisfy demands for electricity. It manipulated the supply in order to drive up prices. If it used environmental rhetoric to mask its true intentions, one should not blame environmentalism for this. We must blame capitalism.

For an alternative analysis of Enron’s “environmentalism”, one can turn to the Center for Media and Democracy, also known as PRWatch. In a 2003 article titled “How Environmentalists Sold Out to Help Enron“, the excellent Sharon Beder detailed how mainstream environmentalists, not much different from Jared Diamond, sold out to the thieves at Enron.

According to Beder, the Natural Resources Defense Council was the main culprit.

NRDC received $3.1 million from the Energy Foundation between 1991 and 1997 and $1.13 million from the Pew Foundation between 1993 and 1995. Both foundations were set up with corporate money made in oil and other industries. These foundations dominated the funding for activist groups, ensuring that their lobbying on energy issues took a pro-business, pro-deregulation and pro-private utility stance. According to Ralph Nader, “the network of funders has become a network of enforcers. And these guys are all on a first-name basis with these corporate [utility] executives.” The Energy Foundation ran conferences where environmentalists and consumer activists could hob nob with utility executives and get on their wavelength.

Now the best way to describe the collusion between PG&E and NRDC is anti-environmentalist. No matter the utility company’s advertising on television, which stressed “Conversations with the Earth” and “Smarter Energy for a Better World”, it was nothing but PR. This, I should add, is a matter that Spiked online has some familiarity with as an occasional co-sponsor of hi-falutin’ conferences with Hill and Knowlton, the sleaziest PR firm in the world best known for its campaign in the first Gulf War around Kuwaiti babies being thrown on a cold hospital floor by Iraqi troops.

NRDC was a key player in pushing for deregulation in California during the 1990s. Supposedly, the profit motive would persuade utility companies to expand production. The deregulation bill that the California legislature passed included some sops to the Green movement like a small budget for energy efficiency. But mostly it was in keeping with assaults on public ownership occurring everywhere in the world.

Ironically, the same myopia that prevented James Heartfield from understanding the importance of deregulation in the California/Enron fiasco also prevents him from understanding the situation in South Africa:

California’s ‘negawatt revolution’ is only one of the more extreme versions of the way that green priorities work in tandem with profiting by manufacturing scarcity. South African radical Dominic Tweedie argues that recent electricity blackouts there happened because of ‘a campaign to impose artificial scarcity’. The failure to build power stations to meet the growing demand from South Africa’s black townships was not recognised as a problem by activists there because they bought into the green prejudice that social aspirations could be met by redistribution alone, at the expense of increased output. Now supply companies are hiking up prices to the people who can least afford them.

To be sure, South Africa’s power company (ESKOM) was manipulating supplies in order to enjoy super-profits just like Enron, but the primary problem facing poor Blacks is privatization, a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with deregulation. When ESKOM began putting power meters in the slums of Soweto, the understandable reaction was to use direct action to challenge and remove them. To raise the slogan “Build More Power Stations Now!” might appeal to the libertarians grouped around Spiked online but would have little traction in the townships.

Finally, a word about the conclusion to James’s article. He writes:

Setting caps on energy production, industrial output, car transport and house-building in the name of saving the environment all have the effect of damaging people’s standard of living. But as we have seen, that does not stop individual businesses from making big profits out of those caps. Trading in carbon rights, making windmills, carbon offsetting schemes, and organic food are all ways of making profits out of artificial limits set upon growth.

When I read something like this from somebody who obviously has an excellent grasp of Henryk Grossman’s economic theory, I can only shake my head in wonderment. “Growth” is not something that happens by removing environmental limits, like a cork from a bottle. Growth occurs as part of the business cycle as Grossman explains in chapter two of “The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System”. During the 1930s, there was no growth because the capitalist system had entered a monumental crisis that no amount of Keynesian fiddling could resolve. It took WWII to bring prosperity.

Today, the world is facing what some experts regard as the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s. It is quite sad to see somebody obviously so well trained in Marxist economics, as James Heartfield clearly is, to be wasting his time and our time shadow-boxing with “Green Capitalists”. Today, it takes real audacity to challenge liberal and conservative orthodoxy alike and proclaim that nothing less than socialist revolution can resolve both stagnation and ecological degradation. It is too bad that some comrades no longer have the will to challenge the system. Let us hope that as the crisis deepens, some of them will be inspired to respond to 21^st century capitalism in its dotage, a threat to civilization potentially greater than fascism in the 1930s.