Category Archives: History and Politics

Why Give A Crap About the War on Wikileaks?

The U.S. government may be telling the truth– Bradley Manning, who disclosed, among other things, classified video of the U.S. military murdering  unarmed civilians, and two reporters from Reuters, in Baghdad, is a traitor, a frustrated homosexual from a broken family engaged in a prolonged hissy fit; that Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is a deranged enabler of world terrorism, a rapist and dangerous fugitive— but this 2010 TEDtalk is worth watching before you make up your mind– if you are disposed to have any opinion at all about such matters:

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html

Asked to state his core values, Assange says “capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.”  

These days he lives under 24 hour surveillance in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he was given political sanctuary.

Keeping it Darkside (with footnote!)

The scariest things about a war against people who hate our freedom is that it never ends, it justifies the most terrible things imaginable and is self-sustaining.   With the technology now in place, a wartime president, and they all are now, forever, is able to spy on, locate and kill by remote control anyone he or she deems worthy of death.

If Louis Farrakahn had this technology in 1965 he wouldn’t have had to foment murderous hatred by preaching “a hypocrite such as Malcolm X is worthy of death!”   Malcolm’s on the phone, he’s getting into his car, boom!  Done.

In 1917, when the U.S. was engaged in a war nobody to this day can give a moral reason for (American banks had loaned millions to France and England, jingoism had run amok, colonialists were vying for control of Africa and Asia), it was literally packaged and sold by the US President as The War to End War and a crusade to Make the World Safe for Democracy.   It did neither, as the next century was to grotesquely illustrate in the blood and nightmares of countless hundreds of millions.

Woodrow Wilson was the president who hired a PR genius , George Creel, and created a government office called The Committee for Public Information, to make Americans enthusiastically join up for this senseless slaughter.  Wilson’s remembered well by many as the peace-loving idealist who formed the League of Nations which became the UN.  Others remember him as the KKK sympathizer who screened the infamous “Birth of a Nation”, the first moving picture ever shown in the White House.  

This movie portrayed a noble South besieged by lawless Blacks, enraged, apparently, over their former condition of servitude.   The Federal government laughed, as the piano player accompanied the silent black and white film, as southern ladies were defiled.  Finally hooded heroes emerged to defend the honor of their women and restore decency to the South.  These heroes were members of the KKK.  There are people who insist that Wilson was a klansman himself.  It wouldn’t surprise me, in light of the facts and the profile of the psychopathic type who is usually elected president of the USA.

Don’t get me wrong, I use psychopathic in the most respectful way.  These men are not  serial killers, they are charming, confident, mostly brilliant winners of vast popularity contests.  I just recall the things many have done to prove they are ready for office, like publicly executing brain damaged prisoners to prove their toughness (Clinton, Dubya).   The things they sign off on as president sometimes involve killings and these men must not flinch, even when they may personally think the killing in question is probably wrong.   There are trillions of dollars at stake if they don’t play ball with the people who have the most to lose.  In most cases it is thought best to keep these high-stakes matters private.

The only hope for working representative democracy is transparency, information, a robust exchange of actual ideas based on the actual facts of each given case.  When Cheney  restored the power of the Unitary Executive and famously moved our democracy to the Dark Side to fight people as evil and devious as he himself is, his first move was to stamp every government action secret and confidential.  Make the bastards go to court to prove it isn’t, you know?

Secrecy is essential for a government working in the shadows.  For example, if you have a top secret memo, written by lawyers– one soon to be a Federal Judge with a lifetime appointment– that redefines torture to allow unspeakable things to be done during interrogations, your operatives are free to do whatever is necessary to extract information.  If some asshole publishes photos of some of these horrors, and some bleeding heart like the NY Times publishes them, a whole unnecessary shit storm, a gigantic kerfuffle, (as when Cheney innocently shot  his acquaintance in the face while drunk), flares up.   It makes everyone look bad in the name of  protecting a few hundred or thousand people who might very well hate our freedom.  Can you prove these were innocent people we humiliated, tormented and broke, NY Times?

If you publish photos of Auschwitz for chickens, or pigs, or cows, there are statutes that will punish you.   If you show the parade of American coffins coming back from various foreign wars– watch out.   The toxic mix of chemicals forced deep into the earth at great force to extract clean, safe natural gas?   Top secret, there’s a federal statute that says so.   There are certain practices that do not lend themselves to the disinfectant of  sunlight.

Strict deterrents, a determined ruler finds, are very useful in gaining compliance– particularly where delicate government secrets are involved.   At a critical juncture where a disastrously costly war in Iraq might have been prevented, a man with direct knowledge of the false evidence petitioned the government to reveal that the aluminum tubes from Niger had nothing to do with Saddam’s supposed nuclear program.  The government told him to shut up.  Instead he published an Op-Ed in the NY Times, the Grey Skank, America’s journal of record.  Some might call him a patriot for this action.

Others were not impressed with his patriotism.  In short order his wife’s status as a CIA officer was publicly revealed.   That she was working to prevent WMD from falling into the hands of terrorists was secondary to the need to chill the sort of bravado her husband had shown at this crucial juncture.  He could easily have ruined everything!  

Revealing the wife’s secret agent status led, no doubt, to the mass round-up and execution of all of her informants, the shutting down of her network.   As I recall America was already at war in Afghanistan.  If so, this treasonous act during a time of war should have been a capital offense.  Instead it was one more thing for Americans to just “get over” as the administration plunged ahead with its plan to, inadvertently, make Iran the most powerful player in the region.  Lawyers made the rest of this treasonous conspiracy quietly disappear as one fall guy was convicted of obstructing justice and then had his prison sentence commuted.

Anyway, my point is this:  In 1917, Woodrow Wilson decided that there were too many unpatriotic Americans, unionists, communists, socialists, pacifists, who were intent on preventing America’s entry to the War to End War.   Congress passed the 1917 Espionage Act which allowed these groups to be spied on, prosecuted in federal court and locked up for a long time for aiding the enemy during war (Wikipedia would be handy to check now, but I’ve got to end this tirade soon).

Fast forward almost a century.   President Barack Obama’s government has used the 1917 Espionage Act, a law passed to make prosecution of a senseless war (except for the war profiteers who made billions) easier, to prosecute more cases (6) than all American presidents before him combined (3).   Details from the Grey Skank herself here.

Another moment of true horror, hearing that President Transparency has been more zealous than his even his famously secretive predecessors in keeping unseemly government actions opaque.   Punish the whistle blower harshly and consistently enough and you eventually can stop worrying about the public getting a whiff of the unspeakable things governments do in our name.

Democracy is best left to the experts, it would appear by the evidence.

FN (From NY Times article linked above):

In one of the more remarkable examples of the administration’s aggressive approach, Thomas A. Drake, a former employee of the National Security Agency, was prosecuted under the Espionage Act last year and faced a possible 35 years in prison.

His crime? When his agency was about to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a software program bought from the private sector intended to monitor digital data, he spoke with a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. He suggested an internally developed program that cost significantly less would be more effective and not violate privacy in the way the product from the vendor would. (He turned out to be right, by the way.)

He was charged with 10 felony counts that accused him of lying to investigators and obstructing justice. Last summer, the case against him collapsed, and he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor, of misuse of a government computer.

Mass Hunger Strikes at Gitmo, have you heard?

All the rules that our former Vice President Dick Cheney and President G. W. Bush put into place about how to get around international and U.S. law seem to have been vigorously embraced by President “Change You Can Believe In”.    There was talk when Cheney’s lawyers were force feeding this new regime to our democracy– that you can hold people indefinitely without charges and even torture them, (as long as your lawyers redefined the practices to be lawful and interrogators were properly immunized against prosecution), and also kill people without trial and spy on them without a judicial rubber stamp.  Oh, and also invade countries because you honestly believe they might attack you some day, whether they have the means to do so at the moment or not.

I recall the mouse-like debates at the time– “but, if we give these powers to this Unitary Executive, supremely wise and prudent though he is, what about the next one?  Would we want Hillary Clinton (the presumptive next president at the time) to be able to decide who is an enemy combatant, who to kill by drone, which civil liberties to suspend and which countries we can invade without an actual causus belli?”   The answer, five years after an Executive Order closed down the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, is still “NO!”

There were once more than 800 detainees, held in this legal limbo on a corner of Cuba.  These prisoners, many turned in for generous American reward money, were famously called “the worst of the worst”.  Quietly more than 600 of these merciless terrorists have been released, not charged with anything, or after a careful investigation of the facts reveals one as, say, an Afghan pediatrician, turned in for the reward money.  “Go back to your clinic, doctor, and continue treating children.  And sorry about the two or three years of what some critical people might cavil and call ‘torture’.  Have a nice day, doctor.  And by the way, have your lawyer read our new laws carefully before you spend any money trying to sue us.  He’ll tell you we’re bulletproof, and he’ll be 100% correct.  Have a very nice day, and again, sorry we never changed your towels or bedding, during those times when you had a bed.”

At last count there are 166 men left in Guantanamo, 86 of whom have already been cleared by our intelligence service for release.  You may recall that President Obama, in one of his first official acts, closed that shameful “detention center” in January 2008.   Not that it had any real world effect on the actual detention center.  Many of those prisoners, long denied habeus corpus (the ancient right to know what you’re accused of and what jeopardy you face before they lock you up) are now on a mass hunger strike– 100 of them, in fact.  You won’t see much of this on the news.  Face it, it’s embarrassing, and horrible.  Why publicize something so tawdry?   It will certainly not help anyone sell anything.   We don’t talk about 250,000 Indian farmer suicides in the last decade because Monsanto took their farms, why mention 166 people, some of whom may actually have connections to terrorism?

Because America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, and has long been famous for its spirit of fair play, the more than twenty  hunger strikers in danger of death will not be allowed to starve themselves to death.  They are taken out of their cells by force, if necessary (and one suspects it often is necessary, unfortunately, as people desperate enough to go on a hunger strike will often not be the most cooperative or sensible people) strapped into a chair and have a feeding tube forced down their nostril into their alimentary canal (or further down, I’m not a doctor, what do I know about forced feeding?) so that nutrients can be forced into their bodies.  

You see, we value human life, we do.  Some life we value a lot more, and a monetary value can be, and is, assigned to each life, but we find all life precious.  Even the lives of those who may, quite possibly, hate our freedoms, even after more than a decade of forced detention, humiliation, rough-stuff, and, in maybe three cases we know of, enhanced interrogation that may have arguably crossed the line and been near the border of torture as traditionally defined, even those lives are precious.  And we will not let them die no matter how passionately they might beg for that right.

The Law is A Blunt Instrument (10 minute drill)

That’s the nicest way I can put it, by quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, I think it was.  Again, two seconds on Google is too long for me, as I’ve set the timer for ten minutes and am determined to get on with it.

We’ll go with the Q & A format today:

Do you regret the three years in law school, forty plus thousand in debt and the ten years practicing that miserable (for the subsistence lawyer) profession?

I don’t regret it.  School has always come easily to me, I like books, at least 30% of what I studied was interesting.   The discipline and structure of law, so foreign to my way of thinking and so much the lingua franca of our world, was worth subjecting myself to, I think.   Standing in front of certain judges was a sickening exercise, and I saw up close the corruption of the system.   Shoot, I saw that already in the NYC school system.  Regrettable as the whole adventure was, I don’t really regret it, no.

Are you a hopeless romantic, then?

Hopeless, probably.  Romantic, well, you’d get an argument there from some people.  One person’s romance is the other person’s self-indulgent narcissistic daydream, I suppose.  But we were talking about the law, were we not?

Who are you asking?

Funny!  I didn’t realize you had a sense of humor.  Right, then.  Yes, the law.   What is it about the law that is so disgusting?

Are you asking the questions now, as well as answering zem?

It so would appear, yes, and with less than five minutes left on the clock, it would behoove us to keep things moving.  What is so disgusting about a blunt instrument is to see it used on things it cannot possibly help.  Some wit said if the only tool you have is a hammer the answer to every question will be a hammer.

A hammer?

Yes.  Now, as I was saying, the blunt instrument of Western Law, and probably every kind of law that industrial societies are based on, was designed to protect the property of the wealthy.   If you take a fine-toothed comb over the US Constitution, famed around the world as the blueprint for democratic government, and the first such charter, you will eventually discover three discreet phrases, inserted by lawyers who owned slaves, that make it perfectly legal to import and own ‘such persons as the states shall see fit to admit’ and that, if you own enough of them, your representation in Congress would be enhanced by 60% of the voting power of such creatures, if God had seen fit to give them the vote instead of chains and an angry, poor, sunburned white man to whip them. 

“Pish tosh!”, you say, “ancient history!” as I see 39 seconds left on the clock.  Let me just say this then:  read the Constitution, read The Slaugtherhouse Cases and Cruikshank, observe the almost century-long-sleep of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and have a very nice day, there’s the beeper.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Just as I was feeling I may have been a little harsh on the State of Texas, I was listening to a podcast from KCRW in Santa Monica, Warren Olney’s news show To The Point.  The show, entitled Are High-Stakes Tests Corrupting Public Education? was broadcast on April 5, 2013.  The theme of the show is stated next to the podcast:

After charges of systematic cheating on standardized testing by administrators and teachers a backlash is growing against standardized testing.

Since there is a growing trend to tie teacher pay to the scores of their students on standardized tests, it is not surprising that some teachers and administrators have been caught cheating.  All it takes, after all, is the eraser on your number two pencil and a pile of student exams.

My sister teaches first grade in Florida, one of the poster states for No Child Left Behind, now called Race to the Top, both of which are based on the Texas assessment model where President George W. Bush’s people got the idea.   Florida is also a “right to work” state, which means, actually “the right to work without a contract or union interference”.  You can get a contract in a “right to work” state, but don’t expect too much about keeping your job to be guaranteed in it.  

My sister, who teaches students from poor and largely illiterate families, many of whom don’t speak English, is graded on the same scale as those who teach the children of the affluent.  There is no curve.  You can imagine her torment, thinking of her pay being tied not to how much she actually teaches her students, which is considerable, but to how well they do on standardized tests, when compared across the nation to every other kid.  Her class, by the way, always has the top scores, by far, in her school.  But she and her students are judged against the scores of students in wealthy neighborhoods in far away states that fare much better in educational outcomes.

Anyway, it will surprise few, I suppose, to hear it stated on Olney’s show, at around 8:10, that Texas leads the nation in money spent on standardized testing and also on the sheer number of tests given.  

It has a wonderful side effect, what one of Olney’s guests called “drill and kill”, this relentless teaching to the test, preparing kids to guess the right answers and learn strategies for gaming these often shabbily designed tests (I speak from experience, having prepared classes for and proctored a number of these), it serves to demoralize the staff and children of schools in poor neighborhoods.  These schools can then be shown to have failed, and closed, and public money can be given to the private sector to operate competitive schools that can succeed.  In the end, to a certain type, privatizing everything is the way to go, since the “free market” (think “right to work”) is the best arbiter of good and bad.

After all, look how well the free market has taken care of controlling health care costs in the USA (leading the world in expense, pretty far down the list in health outcomes), making sure banks and investment houses (which are largely the same thing now) play fairly, guaranteeing a baseline quality of life in the richest country in the world so that no old person ever has to eat dog food (cat food is also a possibility).  

Ach, there I go again, hating our freedom… I really am a one trick pony.  Good night.

Unable to find data

Much as I dislike statements of “fact” that are not backed up with a citation to a credible source, I included one yesterday about Texas leading the USA, and by extension the world, in felony assault on children.   I’d heard the stat cited on Public Radio in NYC some time ago, and it stuck.   The actual show, and time and date of broadcast, is probably noted in the drawing book I was carrying at the time, but there are too many of them to flip through.

I did some on-line research and was unable to find the supporting documentation, or anything resembling it.  Not to say that it’s not true, but a source has been hard to find.

You can read a report on Felony Assault on Children here, but Alberto Gonzales’ Department of Justice has thoughtfully redacted pages 17-67.  It does not appear that there is a state by state breakdown in the report, though under the section on state law there is a defendant demographics table on page 45.   I suppose a Freedom of Information request could be addressed to the DOJ.

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?    

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.