Monthly Archives: April 2013

Guns

They have only one purpose, to project bullets at speeds that can penetrate.  Like a rattle snake, guns are not inherently good or inherently bad.   They are probably fun for shooting at targets, but there are many not content to use them on things that are not alive.  And, like a sleeping rattlesnake woken by a careless foot on its back, the trigger of a gun is faster and more deadly than lightning.

I know several hunters, and while I don’t agree that killing animals is fine, these men are responsible, decent people.   They care greatly about the environment, use their guns safely (except for the animals they kill)  and eat the animals they kill.   Whatever my feelings about the anonymous deer and wild boar they may kill, I don’t begrudge people like them the right to responsibly keep and shoot their guns.  None of their children will ever stumble across a loaded gun and accidentally kill another child.

It’s the idea that if small, bookish Jews in Eastern Europe and Germany had only had enough high powered guns they could have prevented the Holocaust that makes me crazy.  Or that the cure for homicidal maniacs armed to the teeth and intent on murdering as many children as possible before turning the gun on themselves could be stopped, if only every kindergarten teacher in the country was armed with firepower equal to the assault weapon wielded by the insane intruder.  

America is a violent place, and we lead the world in murder by gun, by a long shot, as it were.  The land was taken by violence, at gunpoint.  Slavery was outlawed in Mexico in 1829.  Americans who moved into Mexican territories wanted to have their slaves with them, Mexico gave them guff about this after 1830.  Remember the Alamo!  Our guns finally made the Mexicans change their minds, realize we were right.  “Keep your slaves, keep ‘Texas’, have a nice day,” said the ghosts of dead Mexicans.

Texas, formerly Mexico, has the world’s highest rate of felony assaults on children.  These are assaults where bones are broken, organs crushed, real physical damage is inflicted on top of the trauma of the assault itself.  Granted most of these assaults are not committed with guns, but what the hell?  Is this really the best we can do?   

Is it any consolation that Texas also leads the country (and probably the world) in executions year after year?    

Spring Cleaning

I paid $92 a couple of months ago for the privilege of riding my bicycle 38 miles through the five boroughs of New York City.   Thousands do this ride every May, I’ve done it several times.  Sections of highways are closed as motorists seethe, and it is very cool to be biking on the FDR, the Belt Parkway, across the 59th Street and Verrazano bridges.  The trouble is, I hadn’t been on a bike in months.   Last night I took my 7th ride in 11 days, getting my legs and lungs ready for that long ride.

But that’s not the point, nor should anybody be particularly interested.  In fact, there is little reason for anybody to be interested in what comes next– and I can say that with confidence, even as what comes next, at the moment, is an expanse of white below the words I’m typing now.    

I like to draw and I have become addicted to certain drawing implements lately.  If I don’t have a black ink filled brush (calli free-flowing waterproof black) , a yellow ink (Winsor Newtown’s beautiful Winsor Yellow) filled brush, black and red calligraphy pens in two widths, a .9 mm mechanical pencil and a few other odd devices, I am desperate.  I look over at the metal mug filled with them and I feel happy.  Leave one of them at home, I am bereft.  I have extras, empty and ready, in a drawer against the possibility I might lose one of these marvelous drawing implements.  I say again, I love to draw.  I cannot help it.

But I am not organized about it, do not sell the drawings, or send them anywhere to be published.  I rarely even think to give them as gifts.  I’m sure the ones I do give most often get lost, or tossed.   So I draw something and put it to the side.  Another drawing goes on top, but not in a neat pile, there are other things under the drawings.  A bunch of cables for electronic devices, a coil of wire, some one-hand folding knives, a bank statement, metal rulers, a roll of gaffer’s tape, phone charger, digital recorder, wire bound and other notebooks, music– I can see the corner of the lead sheet for Body and Soul winking out at me as I tap here.  The desk, as large as a door, is basically two precariously piled haystacks of drawings and other items, with a little space in the middle, under the computer screen.

The leak in my ancient bathroom sink (it has two spigots, one for hot, the other for cold) had become a waterfall in recent weeks.  I ran into the super and he told me he could come by any time to fix it, I just had to call him.  Weeks went by as I glanced at the floor, which had become an extension of the desk, the kitchen table, papers spilled in an avalanche, papers I daintily stepped over.   I could not expect the super to do this dainty dance.  I realized, to my horror, I’d have to make a wide, clear path from the front door to the bathroom.

This may sound like common sense, something every five year-old learns “pick your damned stuff off the floor!”.   Well, common sense, as Sekhnet’s mother used to say, is not so common.  But marshaling my will, at last, I made a clear path to the bathroom, the super came up, and after a titanic struggle that involved taking the immense, heavy top off the antique pedestal sink, he was able to install two shiny new faucets.  For the first time in months the sound of running water is not coming from the bathroom.  It’s almost eerie how quiet it is here, with just the computer and refrigerator purring at me.  

“Was there some point to this?” a poor soul, tried beyond silence, will ask.

Uh, only that I spent over an hour yesterday making some small progress in tidying this place.  And that if I could put in another hour today, and one more on Wednesday, and so forth, I might again have an apartment where people could feel comfortable sitting, where Sekhnet could spend time without leaping out of her skin, hopping on to the back of her skeleton and skittering out the door screaming.

Our Infinitely Puckish World

Go on youTube and put in Vandana Shiva, you’ll find a number of videos of her speaking.  Every one of them is worth listening to.   I’ve been thinking Vandana Shiva is a genius, the way she cuts through infinite complexity with brilliant simplicity.   She has a doctorate, in physics, I think, and is one of the great speakers alive today.  She may be the most important voice out there, a voice that few have heard. a wonderful voice.  

There are a bunch of great speakers operating today.  You  can find many of them on TED talks, a great source for fascinating ideas to think about.  But unlike most of them, Vandana Shiva is not selling anything.  She lives past, present and future at once, her passion is sustainable life.   There is no subject more vital, literally, than sustainability.

Vandana Shiva will explain this to you, like you are sitting together after a delicious meal of fresh local vegetables seasoned with fragrant seeds.   You will not stop her conversation lightly, she draws you in with great compassionate logic and the light touch of humor.  Her humor is irony, that refreshing irony people need when they must use their bare hands to handle things made by monsters.  

Is she accurate when she says 270,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves in the last decade, as the crop seeds in India went from 80% owned by farmers to 95% of farmers now paying Monsanto for a license to grow crops?  I have no reason to doubt her.  

And I know quite well, I assure you, that few give a rat’s ass about an Indian farmer.  Isn’t it true that millions are slaughtered every year in senseless war?   That child soldiers are raped and forced to murder?  Isn’t it true that gorillas and chimpanzees plead for mercy when they are being slaughtered? And aren’t children torn apart every day by explosives sent by men who never set foot on their continent?  Who has tears for the Indian farmer who can’t bear the shame of bankruptcy after countless generations living well off the land?

Vandana Shiva spends only a moment on the suicides of the farmers.  She knows it is not the point.  The point, she says, is that if we do not take back control of our food supply from predatory corporations, those companies will profit from the death of the world, until the world is dead.  Then there will be no more human life and no need to fear man’s unsustainable ways, but that will not necessarily be a good day to wake up.

On the other hand, as they teach a lawyer to argue, Dr. Shiva herself admits that Indian seed companies only made two rupees per bag of seed under the old regime.  Now Monsanto charges thousands of rupees for a bag of the patented seed, a seed very similar to the original seed in most ways, but patented and licensed by one of the wealthiest mega-corporations on earth.   The Indian seed company now makes several hundred times more profit, since they are middlemen in the licensing deal between Monsanto and the Indian farmers.  So you do the math, two rupees or fifteen hundred rupees, your choice. 

In our infinitely puckish world, the logic of the earth’s greediest and most morally debased, backed by irrefutable economic fact — and the death of a human who is  not a wealthy, white American truly is an unfortunate externality, after all — carries the day every time.  Never mind that many more will starve, preventable disease (caused by a diet of poison) will continue to proliferate, , the earth itself will whither and die.  And until that time, the earth’s most greedy and unredeemed will continue to amass more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.

You might wonder, did I ever stop to examine why I hate your freedom so much?

The Plot is Thicker than it Looks

Few things are as simple and straightforward as we’d like them to be.  In an ideal world a president with insight and compassion would always do the insightful, compassionate thing.  We don’t live in that world.  Beyond that, we don’t even live in a world where we can agree on what is insightful and what constitutes compassion.

I was reminded of the hideous complexity of the world and its laws in follow-up conversation with my friend who has been battling Monsanto for years.   He pointed out several inaccuracies in my presentation.  The Monsanto Protection Act, so-called, for example, does not prevent anyone from suing Monsanto, but Monsanto was rarely sued anyway, the government agency that had arguably failed to stop Monsanto from mischief was sued, Monsanto sent an army of lawyers to help their friends in the government regulatory agency out.  I’ll outline a few more here, to illustrate how thick this stinking plot actually is.

The protections Monsanto had written into the budget bill may or may not prove to be a great boon for the mega-corporation, it will play out in the courts, as always.  The Monsanto part of the law will only be in effect for the length of the budget bill, which covers only a certain fiscal period.  My friend pointed out that the president did not have the option of vetoing the budget bill, which funds the government going forward, for the sake of a few dozen rotten wormholes in it.   These riders and provisions are typically inserted into bills like this, and there is no line item veto.  The president either signs the bill or takes the heat for shutting down the government.  It would not be a rational act for him to say “the buck stops here” over a detail like the Monsanto Protection Act.

As for the respectful, pleasant colleagues, my friend told me not to go overboard.  As a corrective, he sent me a profile of one of these adversaries, Dick Cheney’s son-in-law.   A mild-mannered stone faced killer Win-Win Cheney must be awfully proud of.   Regarding my impression of friendship with his adversaries he wryly compared his imagined dinner companions to a pack of rabid Tasmanian Devils.   In light of that, it must be admitted (and the passive voice used) that the surface cordiality he’d once remarked on was overstated.  In my own law career I am now recalling several attorneys with the foam of rabies on their greasy lips.

If you want more of the real story of Monsanto’s treachery, and the great harm its single-minded pursuit of patenting and monopolizing the world’s seed supply is causing, watch this video of a talk given by the brilliant and courageous seed activist Vandana Shiva, I’ve cued up a nice bit of it here.

Et Tu, Mr. President?

Harry Truman supposedly said “the buck stops here.”  If he got legislation he disagreed with, he’d brandish, like Ronald Reagan famously did after him, his ready veto pen.  George W. Bush was famous for signing bills with a signing statement attached, saying, in effect: if parts of this bill are offensive to me, which they are, I will not be zealous in carrying out those parts of the law.   I suspect Obama has followed his predecessor in the use of this practice, like he has with most of Bush’s other programs: using drones to remotely execute guilty and innocent alike, maintaining a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay (although he closed it by executive order on his first day in office), punishing whistle blowers, making the world safe for massively profitable corporations (who are not always required to pay tax), maintaining the opaque governmental practices of his secretive predecessor.

I mention all this because Sekhnet was recently outraged to learn about what critics are calling The Monsanto Protection Act.  Anonymously inserted into a budget bill the president signed last week, this Act makes it illegal for anyone to sue Monsanto for anything, except under extremely restricted conditions.   It is as outrageous as Mr. Cheney’s secret Energy Task Force explicitly exempting Natural Gas exploration and extraction from environmental regulation.  Just because a botched hydro-fracking job recently caused a 5.2 Richter Scale earthquake in Oklahoma doesn’t mean the hugely profitable industry should have to divulge all of its trade secrets.  Besides, Halliburton is involved in digging the miles deep wells.

“Obama signed it,” I told her, “he has a huge team of very smart people who drink a lot of coffee and read every word of every law he signs.  He’s a skilled lawyer, a smart man and a canny politician.  I assure you, he intended to sign the Monsanto Protection Act.  The only question is “why’?”

Sekhnet was outraged that the legislator who’d written the outrageous Monsanto Protection Act had done so anonymously.  “Isn’t this a democracy where we have the right to know who this duly elected lawmaker is?”  I coughed and cleared my throat and we talked about other, more pleasant things. 

I have an old friend who is a litigator in the federal courts.   He specializes in environmental cases and has argued against well-paid lawyers for some of the most toxic (and lucrative) products and practices ever devised.  He flies to the federal court in San Francisco armed with months of research and legal arguments and does battle with companies like Monsanto over things like whether their patented, genetically engineered seeds are doing irreversible damage to the environment.  

In another world, these arguments, once settled by science, would not be so fiercely fought.  After all, it is not that difficult to prove that a certain practice causes harm.  But in the plushly appointed federal courts that is not the end of the argument, only the beginning.  Lawyers are paid millions to make these arguments as muddy as possible, to defend the rights of massively wealthy polluters by every means necessary.   These cases tend to drag on for years, often with no clear result.

My friend reports that his well-paid adversaries are civil, seemingly decent people he interacts with outside of court once in a while during these long trials and the endless motion practice.  They are highly intelligent and not overtly unfriendly, for the most part.    I suspect that they also respect my friend as a fierce and worthy adversary.  I found the same thing with my adversaries in my own wretched law practice, not that they necessarily respected me, but they were for the most part pretty decent people it was easy enough to get on with.  It very rarely got personal.

So much less personal, I suppose, when the parties are the earth itself and one of the wealthiest “persons” on the planet, a mega-corporation called Monsanto.  My friend has battled their good–natured lawyers for years, and in the process I’ve become aware of and learned about some of the issues involved.  

Did you know, for example, that Monsanto, manufacturer of Agent Orange, does a lot of business in India?   In the old days farmers got seeds from their harvest.  Nowadays, Monsanto sells the farmers seeds every season, since their patented seeds are programmed to need an annual license.  They sold millions of dollars worth of seeds to Indians for a disease and pest resistant cotton.  The only thing they forgot to mention to the Indian farmers was that this genetically modified seed needs much more water than traditional cotton seed, several times more than the region can provide.  Thousands of bankrupted Indian farmers, perhaps a quarter of a million, committed suicide when they bet their homes on a crop that failed.   One could say that Monsanto caused these many thousands of deaths (which few here have even heard about), but that would be the hysterical opinion of someone who hates our freedom.  The Wall Street Journal, for one, disputes this rash and judgmental view.

Monsanto is also aggressive about suing organic farmers who have wind-blown Monsanto seeds from nearby industrial farms sprout like weeds among their traditional, natural crops.   Presumably, Monsanto will still be able to sue anyone violating its patents, certain things are absolute and cannot be abridged under American law.   As far as my friend litigating against his friends from the Monsanto law team, probably not any time soon.

There are other arguably respectable businesses who continue to pollute on a massive, earth-threatening scale.  My friend will never be at a loss for cases against other corporations who work around environmental concerns with a thousand skilled eyes on maximizing profits and minimizing liability.  But Monsanto, who my friend calls Ron Santo, (after the Cubs Hall of Fame third baseman), has, like its slugging rhymed almost-namesake, knocked the ball out of the yard with the Monsanto Protection Act, exempting it from virtually all court oversight for its deeds and misdeeds.

Barack Obama is in his second term.  He’s not running again.  One would presume he no longer has any need to kiss corporate ass to raise campaign money or for any other reason.  One would presume wrong, apparently.