Ch. VII, Part 3
62.
The polarization of society noted at the outset (VII.1) bears heavily on the
discursive contests between public health and private profit, where the role of
mass media is deeply ambivalent. As
I write this, the deaths and injuries of American servicemen in Iraq are getting
full, sympathetic coverage, though the numbers are modest. But the deaths and
injuries of ordinary working civilians back in the U-S-of-A are only
occasionally and briefly covered, though the numbers are staggering [2156-57],
and the circumstances are often horrifying [2158]. Moreover, most of them could
have easily been foreseen and prevented [2158-59].
[2156] In 2000, 5,915 workers died from traumatic injuries, and more than 50,000 died from occupational diseases. More than 5.7 million workers were injured on the job. […] That’s one workplace death or injury every five seconds. (Worker Safety and Health, AFL-CIO report)www
[2157] According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), […] on average, sixteen workers were fatally injured and more than 14,900 workers were injured or made ill each day during the year 2001. […] These statistics do not include deaths from occupational diseases, which claim the lives of an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 workers each year. […] An additional 639,500 injuries and illnesses occurred among state and local employees in the 29 states and territories where this data is collected. (Death on the Job, AFL-CIO report)www
[2158]
Every one of their deaths was a potential crime. Workers decapitated on assembly
lines, shredded in machinery, burned beyond recognition, electrocuted, buried
alive — all of them killed, investigators concluded, because their employers
willfully violated work-place safety laws. […]
They happened because a boss removed a safety device to speed up
production, or because a company ignored explicit safety warnings, or because a
worker was denied proper protective gear. (David
Barstow in the New York Times)
[2159]
A whole cascade of failed safety measures went into the Bhopal tragedy. […] A
refrigeration unit designed to prevent just such a catastrophe was shut down and
had been inoperative for five months. The plant lacked a computerized monitoring
system for detecting toxic releases. Instead, workers were in the habit of
recognizing leaks when their noses would burn and their eyes would water. No
alarm system existed for warning the surrounding community, and no effort had
been made to develop evacuation procedures.47
63.
Owners and managers don’t care or react; or else, instead of acting to improve
working conditions they spew out discourses of public relations, deploying
fibspeak (vowing the incident was a mere fluke in a normally safe working
environment, or was caused by the carelessness of the victims) or flakspeak
(accusing labour unions and citizen groups of malicious scaremongering).
[2160]
They
shrug at the pleas of workers whose health they destroy in order to save money.
They hire experts — physicians and researchers — who purposely misdiagnose
industrial diseases as the ordinary diseases of life, write biased reports, and
divert research from vital questions. They fight against regulation as
unnecessary and cry that it will bring ruination. They ravage the people as they
have the land, causing millions to suffer needlessly, and hundreds of thousands
to die. (Muscle and Blood)48
When
unrecorded numbers of miners digging the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel for Union Carbide
of Bhopal ‘(in)fame’ in the 1930s rapidly died from silicosis, an incurable
lung disease that suffocates its victims,49 the deaths were hushed up
[2161], and when Congressional hearings were finally held, the company’s
lawyers called the ‘working conditions’ the ‘best ever’ [2162]. One
contractor’s testimony frankly dismissed the victims with hatespeak [2163].
[2161]
Hundreds of men contracted a mysterious disease while excavating a tunnel near
Gauley Bridge, West Virginia and began ‘dying like flies’ within a year.
[…] Some were dumped in the river bed and covered with the tunnel rock. Others
were transported to Nicholas County and buried unceremoniously on a private
farm. Pneumonia was given as the cause of death.
[2162]
Counsel for the defense maintained that the Hawks Nest tunnel had the best
ventilation of any ever constructed by Rinehart and Dennis, and that the working
conditions and machinery on the Hawk’s Nest job were the best ever known. (West
Virginia Historical Society)50
[2163]
I
knew
I
was
going
to
kill
those
niggers
but
I
didn’t
know
it
was
going
to
be
this
soon.51
Today,
the website of the Elkem Metals Company at the same location merely lauds ‘the
famous Hawk’s Nest Tunnel’ as ‘an absolute engineering feat’.
64.
Just days after the Hawk’s Nest hearings in 1935, industrialists met at the
Mellon Institute and formed the ‘Air Hygiene Foundation’, whose public
relations campaign purported to counter ‘misleading
publicity about silicosis’. By the 1970s, its Orwellian name had grandly
mutated to ‘Industrial Health Foundation’, and it had over 400 corporate
sponsors. When the government’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health (NIOSH) proposed new standards for silica protection, the industries
instantly formed the ‘Silica Safety Association’, which in theory
‘investigated and reported on possible health hazards’ but in practice
successfully lobbied against the proposal. When the Center for Disease
Control reported 14,824 cases of
death by silicosis between 1968 and 1994, the industries raised an outcry about
‘flawed science’ and a ‘silica scare’ to ‘whip up emotions’.
There’s that motivation gap again (VI.34) — why ‘scare’ people if
there's no cause?
65.
Alternately, existing legislation is insistently violated or ignored by cheating
on mandated tests for high dust levels, and with terrible results [2163-64].
Alarming reports are rebuffed as ‘hearsay’ [2165]. (All data are from the
Courier-Journal,
which
interviewed
255
people
in
the
coal
industry, of
whom 234 reported widespread cheating).
[2163]
Hundreds of coal miners nationwide die each year of black-lung disease because
many mine operators […] cheat on air-quality tests to conceal lethal dust
levels.
[2164] Dozens of
miners described dust so thick they couldn’t see their feet or the head lamps
of other miners. Those who are still working spit up coal dust every morning.
[2165]
the
National
Mining
Association
said
claims
that
mines
are
routinely
dusty
are
‘hearsay’.
To
explain deaths of U.S. miners — 54,248 between 1972 and 1994 — due chiefly
to black lung, the industry cynically says the cause is smoking cigarettes.
66.
Whilst industries block new legislation or violate existing legislation, the
current policy of the non-legitimate ‘US government’ is to repeal or gut
legislation:
[2166]
Since
taking office, the Bush Administration has stopped work on dozens of important
safety and health standards, withdrawn worker training grants and stopped
important record-keeping rules that would require employers to identify which
injuries are musculo-skeletal disorders. (AFL-CIO)
[2167]
The Bush administration is proposing changes to safety measures for coal miners
that will result in the additional deaths of hundreds if not thousands of miners
from black lung each year. […] Under the new rules […] mines will be allowed
to quadruple the level of coal dust that miners breathe from the current level
of 2 milligrams per cubic meter to 8 milligrams.52
The
Bush ‘Labor’ Department fouled the air even more with bubblespeak by saying
that ‘exposure to ergonomics-related injuries is not well-understood or easily
measured, making regulations for all industries difficult’.53
Moral: let’s have
no regulations
at all, and let the industries monitor themselves.
67.
The story gets worse. After
incessant ‘cuts’,
‘the federal government now has 1,200 inspectors to cover 7 million American
workplaces’ (Molly Ivins
in the Abilene Reporter-News). Besides,
Bush Jr, in his wondrously spiteful in-your-face style, sent an unmistakable
signal to all US workers by appointing as Solicitor of the Department of Labor
the son of the ‘Justice’ who helped inflict a ‘President Bush’ on the
world: Eugene Scalia, who is America’s most tireless and vociferous bulldog
foe of workplace safety and worker compensation:
[2168]
Scalia refers to repetitive-stress injuries, which afflict 600,000 American
workers annually, as ‘junk science’, [and] a ‘psychosocial issue’ — in
effect, calling those who suffer
from
it
fakers
[…]
‘who do not like their jobs.’ (Joshua Green in American
Prospects)WWW
In
a brief prepared for the United Parcel Service, Scalia nearly burst with
doublespeak to discredit a pending OSHA requirement that employers pay for
protective equipment such as respirators and gloves.
[2169]
The administration provides no proof or credible argument that the proposed rule
will improve health and safety, and in fact, the rule will cause significant
economic harm, will not promote health and safety, and may reduce personal
protective equipment by reducing collectively bargained cooperation between
union and management in the implementation of personal protective equipment
requirements. (quoted in same)
By
this duplicitous logic, the obvious fact that gloves provide safety still needs
to be ‘argued’ and ‘proven’; company expenses constitute ‘economic
harm’; and mandating ‘protective equipment’ equals ‘reducing’ it by
stirring up antagonism between ‘union and management’, which would of course
actually result from not getting it.
68.
How
would
Scalia
downplay
these working
conditions
in
the
food
industry?
[2170]
A Pennsylvania plant was fined for dangerous levels of ‘chicken feathers and
feces’ that put workers at risk of ‘deposits in the eyes, ears and
respiratory tract.’ In Mississippi, OSHA fined a company for an exposed drive
shaft that caused the amputation of a worker’s legs, as well as for failing to
provide safety goggles and gloves, and leaving toxic chemicals unlabeled. (Tony
Horwitz in the Wall Street Journal)www
[2171]
Cynthia Chavez Wall […] cut up and prepared chicken parts that were sold to
fast-food restaurants. She often went home with her hands bleeding from the cuts
she inevitably got trying to keep pace with constant demands to speed up the
process. She worked up against fryers with oil heated to 400 degrees; no air
conditioning, no fans, and only a few small windows. She found it hard, sweaty,
dangerous, hellish work. Then on the morning of September 3,1991,
[…] flames flared and smoke billowed throughout the building, which had
no sprinkler system, no evacuation plan, and only one fire extinguisher. […]
All but the very front doors had been padlocked from the outside. Company
executives later said they did this to prevent chicken parts from being stolen.
Trapped, twenty-five of the ninety employees died in the flames. Cynthia Chavez
Wall’s body was found at one of the doors.54
Perhaps
Scalia would plead that we have ‘no
proof or credible argument’ that feathers and feces harm eyes and ears; that the workers culpably wandered
into the drive shaft or set the fire; and that padlocks prevent ‘significant
economic harm’.
69.
For hazardous conditions, even the mining industry can’t compete with the
nuclear industry (IX.4). Between 1979 (Three Mile Island) and 1986 (Chernobyl),
some 23,000 accidents occurred at U.S. reactors — and went unreported by major
news media like NBC, whose owners are energy conglomerates in the nuclear
business like General Electic.55 One worker was impelled to turn
whistleblower by ‘gathering documentation’ of ‘abuses’ [2172], some of
them grisly and fatal [2173]. In retaliation, she was first harassed and then
contaminated [2174], and finally ‘murdered’ on her way to hand the evidence
to the press [2175].56
The corporation cynically wound up the matter by spreading a freakishly nasty
smear [2176].
[2172]
Karen Silkwood was a laboratory analyst at the Kerr-McGee plutonium processing
plant. […] Radioactive contamination was everywhere, safety records were
routinely falsified, and deadly plutonium was disappearing. […] Silkwood,
outraged, took it upon herself
to
gather
documentation proving
as many of the abuses as she
could, intending to
give the evidence to a reporter from the New York Times. (Raw Deal)www
[2173]
One day a worker bent down to adjust a compressor unit; it exploded, ripping
though his hand and tearing off the top of his face, spitting tissue over the
ceiling. He died instantly. (Howard Kohn in Rolling Stone)57
[2174]
While she was collecting evidence, Silkwood’s phone was bugged, her movements
monitored and, worst of all, she was deliberately contaminated with plutonium. (Green
Left Weekly)
[2175]
Silkwood was found dead inside her car, which had crashed on the way to her
meeting with the Times reporter. Local authorities claimed she had been
drunk or stoned — an odd way to meet a reporter — but later investigations
indicated that she had been purposefully run off the road. In effect, Silkwood
had been murdered. […] The documents she had been carrying were never found. (Raw
Deal)www
[2176]
Kerr-McGee officials have advanced a different conspiracy theory passed along in
off-the-record conversations with local reporters: Silkwood contaminated herself
to embarrass the company. […] One state representative shakes his head. ‘I
can’t understand that dame, shoving plutonium up her ass’. (Kohn)
She
got it up the ass all right, but for a totally different motive: a courageous
concern for worker safety in a murderously cynical industry.
VII.F Discourse and counter-discourse 3: Consumer health
70.
If the dominance of private profit over public health leads to ignoring or
denying dangers to worker safety, just the same happens with dangers to consumer
health. Each year, some 5000 Americans die — an average of 14 every day — and 325,000
are hospitalised by contaminated
food, carrying pathinogens
like E. coli, salmonella, listeria, and campylobacter (Center
for Disease Control and Prevention). Again,
instead of actions to clean up their operation, companies spew out storms of
doublespeak (‘it’s too technical for the public to grasp’), fibspeak
(‘it was a mere fluke’), or flakspeak (‘we are blameless victims of
malicious scaremongering’).
71.
A consumer action group called S.T.O.P. (‘Safe Tables Our Priority’), run
by families of loved ones killed by food, mostly small children, presents
eyewitness testimony,58 such as Nancy Donley’s gruesome tale of her
five-year-old son Alex poisoned by E. coli from a hamburger:
[2177]
I watched in horror as his life haemorrhaged away in a hospital bathroom. I
stood by helpless
while
bowl
after
bowl
of
blood
and mucous gushed from his little body. I listened to the screams and then the
eerie silence that followed as toxins that had started in his intestines moved
to his brain. I sat with my only child as I watched as doctors frantically
shoved a hose into his side to re-inflate a collapsed lung, as brain shunts were
drilled into his head to relieve the tremendous pressure. Then I watched his
brain waves flatten.59
Both
miners and diners are no strangers to dangers, but at least the miners know
it.
72.
Governmental inaction is hardly due to not knowing how these diseases are
transmitted [2178], but to ruthless industries lobbying the government until it
actually loosened its regulations [2179], once again like worker safety
(VII.66f).
[2178]
Most
people
become
infected
primarily
by
ingesting
food
(including meat, produce, fruit,
and
juice)
or
water
contaminated
by
animal
feces.
(epidemiologist
John
Crump)www
[2179]
Americans face a greater risk of contaminated meat because the US Agriculture
Department is allowing companies to perform more of their own food safety
inspections. […] 206 meat inspectors said there were weekly or monthly
instances when they did not take direct action against animal feces, vomit,
metal shards or other contamination because of the new USDA rules. (Organic
Consumers Organisation)www
Again
as in worker safety, poor working conditions make the hazards easily
predictable, as at the Wampler plant in Pennsylvania — a company owned by
Pilgrim’s Pride, whose CEO, one ‘Lonnie Bo Pilgrim’, once handed senators
$10,000 checks on the floor of the Texas Senate to vote against a law
compensating workers for lost fingers or crippled hands — which had to recall
27 million pounds of lunchmeat contaminated with listeria:
[2180]
Leaked internal documents […] referring to dozen of earlier violations of USDA
guidelines, […] described meat residue from the previous day stuck on
equipment; old meat on the tines of forks used to mix meat products; liquid
filled with ‘unknown black foreign particles (possibly from the overhead
cooling units)’ dripping through a hole in plastic covering six hundred pounds
of meat; water splashing from the floor onto food products; workers washing
their boots and allowing water to splash onto food and food-preparation
surfaces; condensation on ducts and pipes above the food-processing area. […]
Testing for listeria was not in Wampler’s plan. […] But when the USDA
finally got around to taking samples, listeria was found in the drains.60
Much
of the meat had already been eaten by children in the National School Lunch
Program, a fact the government carefully keep quiet. Meanwhile, the ‘Bush
Administration’ just as quietly killed Clinton’s regulations to test for
listeria — along with
them, killing many hapless meat-eaters.
73.
Powerful
food industries don’t wait around for government pandering like ‘new USDA
rules’ and ‘inspection cuts’ but aggressively monitor and counter public
discourse about foods with flakspeak and fibspeak. If a known health hazard like
cancer from agricultural chemicals [2181] draws honest public comment, the
industry files lawsuits and howls about ‘bogus
environmental scares’ [2182].61
[2181]
Alar,
or daminozide, is a plant growth regulator that was used to keep ripening apples
on the tree, which helped growers save labor (picking) costs and improved the
cosmetic appearance and keeping quality of red apples. Evidence had been
accumulating since the 1970s [and published in 1973 in the Journal of the
National Cancer Institute] that a breakdown product of daminozide called
UDMH induced cancer in animal tests. (Pest Management at the Crossroads)www
[2182]
Facing CBS News cameras, [Meryl] Streep [co-founder of the Children’s Health
Environmental Coalition] said that Alar, a cancer-causing chemical, was
measurable in apple juice bottled for children. This alarming news was true. And
the Environmental Protection Agency has since reaffirmed its conclusion that
Alar is carcinogenic.62
[…]
The food industry retaliated by suing CBS News. [They] lost these lawsuits, but
their publicity machine still managed to leave the impression in most peoples’
minds that the Alar ‘scare’ was not justified by the facts. (Rachel’s
Environment & Health Weekly)www
The
reason for this stubborn fibspeak ‘publicity’ was patently obvious. ‘
Triggered by the Alar controversy’, food
disparagement laws’
being pushed
through 13 state legislatures by industry
lobbyists
‘made it illegal to disseminate unproven claims that perishable farm products
are unsafe’
(Elliott Negin in the Columbia Journalism Review).62
The
burden of proof rests on the defendant to bring forth ‘reliable scientific
inquiry, facts, or data’ (Texas statute), and to sustain the legal costs that
will probably bankrupt you whether you win or lose.63 (Some statutes
cynically provided for paying the ‘plaintiff’s’ fees but not the
‘defendant’s’.)
74.
The industry then only hungered a showcase to flex the shiny new laws. The issue
proved to be the awesome danger to consumers posed by ‘mad
cow disease’ (or BSE for Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy),
which passes via contaminated beef into a virulent human variant known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob
Disease. Unlike
previously known contaminants, it has no cure so far, and cannot be stopped by
cooking or irradiation; all its victims — as of August 2003, 140 confirmed in
Britain alone — slowly die in unspeakable agony as their brains are literally
eaten up into ‘sponges’ by the virus. Since it can lie dormant for years,
can be spread by nourishing animals on ‘rendered’ feed of animal parts, and
is easily mistaken for Alzheimer’s, the real number of eventual victims is
impossible to calculate.
75.
So the meat industry wanted no talk of it breaking out in the US64
— which it finally did at the end of 2003 — and dramatically moved to
stifle public discourse:
[2183]
Texas cattle ranchers have sued the ‘Oprah’ show [because of] her guest,
cattle rancher-turned- vegetarian activist Howard Lyman, director of the Humane
Society’s Eating with Conscience Campaign. ‘You say this disease could make
AIDS look like the common cold?’ she asked. ‘Absolutely’. […]. Ms.
Winfrey turned to her audience and prompted their applause with this remark:
‘It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!’ The following day,
cattle prices plummeted. Amarillo rancher Paul F. Engler of Cactus Feeders Inc.
decided to use his state’s 1995 food disparagement law to try to recover more
than $1 million in damages suffered.64
With
rich but unintentional irony, the discourse of the actual lawsuit was dressed in
a strenuous style of fraudspeak about virtue being denigrated by vice:
[2184]
[Due to] defendants’ false slanderous, and defamatory statements, plaintiffs
have endured shame, embarrassment, humiliation, mental pain and anguish [and]
are, and will in the future, be seriously injured in their good name and
reputation. (Engler
v.Winfrey)
Out
of court, though, the plaintiff’s instructions to his lawyer were purest
flakspeak:
[2185] We’re taking the Israeli action. Just get in there and blow the
hell out of somebody.65
Topping this flakspeak, Texas Agriculture
Commissioner Rick Perry dubbed beef critics ‘food terrorists’, a term also picked up by a phoney group
called ‘American Council on Science and Health'66 (and not say, 'Industry
Whores for Foison Poison'), even though the term would properly
apply to terrorists attacking ordinary citizens through food [2186], if not
indeed to contaminating food industries like Wampler (VII.72).
The
mad cowboys of Texas did not ‘blow the hell out of’ Oprah — I doubt
anybody could — but the unconstitutional infringement on freedom of speech was
not challenged, and a grim warning was issued to potential ‘food
disparagers’ who are less able than Oprah to waste long times in court and
foot massive legal fees.
76.
Besides, the food industries have their own ‘pre-emptive defence’:
maintaining files to discredit potential ‘enemies’ who might speak out,
e.g., about the bottle feeding ‘aggressively promoted’ by the Nestlé
corporation:
[2187]
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate that more than a million babies die
every year as a result of diarrhoea picked up from unhygienic bottle feeding.
That’s one baby every 30 seconds. […]
Nestlé controls about 40 per cent of the world baby milk market, aggressively
promoting its babymilk products in developing countries and discouraging
breastfeeding. (Networking
Newsletter)www
[2188]
They rely on exploitative and deceptive tactics, including giving free samples
to mothers so their own milk will dry up; […] promising ‘modernisation and
heightened status’; [and] telling mothers that their own milk is
‘inappropriate’. The majority of Third World Mothers wind up watering down
the formulas, using contaminated water because they cannot afford to administer
formulas in the prescribed way. 67
Following
a boycott, the ‘public relations’ (PR) industry joined in the discourse:
[2189] Nestlé responded with a broadside accusing its
critics of ‘an indirect attack on the free world’s economic system’. The
Vice-President of the Nestlé Coordination Centre for Nutrition […] began
collecting files on the activities of various churches, student groups. trade
unions, women’s organisations, and health workers who had joined the boycott.
(Mad Cow USA)64
[2190]
[The Centre’s President] spelled out a comprehensive corporate PR strategy:
[…] working with national and international civil servants, ‘not to defeat
all regulation, but to create regulation that legitimizes and channels our
rights, opportunities and contributions’;
[and] separating the ‘fanatic’ activist leaders from those who are
‘decent concerned’ people, and ‘stripping the activists from the moral
authority they receive from their alliance with religious organizations’. (The Cornerhouse)www
77.
The
goal of corporate PR is to draw the initiative of public discourse onto their
own side, preferably leaving their other side compelled to a silence whose
effect can be lethal indeed, as with mechanical heart valves implanted in the
1980s:
[2191]
Bjork-Shiley valves had fractured during testing, [and] the company that made
the valve, never told the government. […] Pfizer management ordered the
defects to be ground down, which weakened the valves further, but made them look
smooth and perfect. Pfizer then sold them worldwide. When the valve’s struts
break, the heart contracts — and explodes. Two-thirds of the victims die,
usually in minutes. In 1980, Dr Viking Bjork, whose respected name helped sell
the products, wrote to Pfizer demanding corrective action. He threatened to
publish cases of valve-strut failures. A panicked Pfizer executive telexed:
‘Attn Prof Bjork. We would prefer that you did not publish the data relative
to strut fracture.’ […] The fracture count has now reached 800, with 500
dead, so far. Bjork called it murder, but kept public silence. (Greg Palast)www
By
more of the ‘big
coincidences’ that bless Republicans (compare [2041]), Pfizer donated $3.9
million to the GOP in 1999-2003; asked Congress to ban all lawsuits against
makers of body implant parts in Bush Jr’s ‘Tort Reform’; and recently
‘launched Connection
to Care, an expanded program providing free medicines to low-income, uninsured
patients’ (Pfizer Online).www
Now they’re all heart.
78.
Environmentalism is an ideology advocating the health and safety of all
citizens, including workers and consumers (and presidents). Its theory is
simple: clean air, land, and water, free from damage, waste, and pollution. Its
practice, however, is complicated by raising a gamut of social, political and
economic issues. Like the safety of workers and the health of consumers, it
faces a precarious contest between public health and private
profit, which is reflected in discourses and counter-discourses on whether and
how to support the environment.
79.
The confrontational tone was clearly set from above when a ‘Republican’
Congress bankrolled by polluting industries turned its flakspeak against
‘science’:
[2192]
During the 104th Congress, the Committee on Science launched a major initiative
directed at the basic integrity of the science community, [vowing] that many
environmental regulations were not based on ‘sound science’, but instead on
scare-mongering and gross exaggerations of environmental problems. […] The
hearings reflected a fundamental disregard for the scientific process itself and
undermined the very credibility of science as a basis for making policy
decisions. […] This attack spread to encompass almost all forms of regulation,
including those designed to insure public health, protect the environment, and
guarantee workplace safety […] The Chairman proclaimed his belief that the
global [climate] change issue was ‘liberal claptrap’. […] On July 21 1995,
the Committee directed the EPA to terminate its global climate change research
program and reduced the budget for global change research from $22.5 million to
$2.4 million. (Environmental Science Under Siege)68
For
ecologism, a pungent move was to sever the dialectic between theory and data:
[2193]
The hearings reflected a systematic aversion to the use of theory,
models, and other sources of scientific knowledge to provide a full
understanding of observed data. […] The emerging effort to truncate the
scientific method at the initial observations stage endangers the ability of the
scientific community to unify its understanding not only of environmental
problems, but of any phenomenon.68
No
less alarming, and deeply ironic as well, was ‘the overall message of the
hearings that Congress should act as the arbiter of scientific disputes’, just
when the ‘hearings featured a confusing array of scientific distortions, red
herrings, false accusations, and vague charges of a breakdown in integrity’.
80.
Such mistrust emerges even from the discourses of the US Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA). Under Bush Sr, EPA files were leaked in which ‘ninety
independent scientists who advise the agency part-time’ were annotated with
flakspeak like ‘bleeding heart liberals’ or ‘invidious environmental
extremists’ (New Scientist). Under Bush Jr
[2194]
enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws has fallen precipitously. […]
Penalties and remedies for EPA administrative actions in the first 14 months of
the Bush administration fell 80 percent [from] the last 13½
months of the Clinton administration, from $845.1 million to $165.1
million. The average settlement cost of those EPA administrative actions fell by
63 percent, from $234,000 to $87,000 . (Glen Johnson in the Boston Globe)www
This
trend hugely benefited Koch (aptly pronounced ‘coke’), the US’s largest
privately owned oil company with annual revenues of more than $30 billion:
[2195]
Koch Industries had a 97-count indictment against it for knowingly releasing 91
metric tons of benzene, a cancer-causing agent, into the air and water, and for
covering it up from federal regulators. Koch also faced $352 million in fines.
Koch executives contributed $800,000 to George W. Bush’s campaign, and after
he took office, the 90 most serious counts and the $352 million in fines against
Koch were dropped. (Kennie
Anderson, Land Of Hypocrisy)www
Bush’s
own valorous sorties are handily posted on a Chronology
of Environmental Destruction,www including:
[2196] Even before his inauguration,
President Bush began filling critical administration posts with people who had
significant ties to polluting industries, people who regard the environment as a
resource to be exploited.
[2197] Within hours of becoming
president, Bush froze action on former President Clinton’s ‘roadless’
policy, which would have protected 58.5 million acres of national forests from
encroachment by cars, trucks and off-road vehicles.
[2198] Bush abandoned his campaign
promise to regulate power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas
that scientists consider a major cause of global warming.
[2199] The administration called for
‘more study’ of safe amounts of arsenic allowed in drinking water, and later
ignored the study results.
[2200] The administration took away the
Interior Department’s power to veto mining permits, even if the mining would
cause ‘substantial and irreparable harm’.
[2201] The Senate passed a version of the
Bush energy plan that scuttles an increase in fuel efficiency standards.
[2202] The administration cleared legal
hurdles so mining and construction companies can dump waste into streams and
rivers, including waste generated after coal mining companies literally rip the
tops off mountains.
[2203] Bush proposed a deceptively
labeled ‘Clear Skies’ plan that ditches regulations governing emissions of
three major pollutants — mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. (compare
[2060] in VII.23).
[2204] The Bush administration announced
a plan that would gut a key part of the Clean Air Act that requires America’s
oldest, dirtiest power plants and refineries to install pollution control
equipment when they expand.
[2205] Bush announced a new rule that would gut the
National Forest Management Act.
Moreover,
the Bush ‘White House’ set up its own ‘Council
on Environmental Quality’ (CEQ) to rewrite the discourse of the EPA, as when
the post-9/11 hazards in Manhattan were trivialised, mainly in ‘the desire to
reopen Wall Street’ (EPA):
[2206] The CEQ […] suppressed EPA warnings about
potentially dangerous environmental contamination, ordering EPA to replace
warnings with misleading statements that there was no cause for concern. The
changes resulted in the EPA publishing information that was the reverse of
language in the draft. (NYCOSH)www
[2207]
‘E.P.A. Testing Terrorized Sites For Environmental Hazards’ was changed to
read, ‘EPA Reassures Public About Environmental Hazards’. […] ‘Even at
low levels, E.P.A considers asbestos hazardous in this situation’ was deleted
and replaced with a section that read, in part, ‘Short-term, low-level
exposure of the type that might have been produced by the collapse of the World
Trade Center buildings is unlikely to cause significant health effects’. (CBS
News)
The
chairman of the CEQ resorted to doublespeak: ‘The right word here is
‘collaborate; we had to do some very dramatic and significant coordination.’
Yet the meeting
of American Chemical Society featured a piquant counter-discourse, e.g.:
[2208] The debris pile acted like a chemical factory. It cooked together
the components of the buildings and their contents, including enormous numbers
of computers, and gave off gases of toxic metals, acids, and organics for six
weeks (Thomas Cahill of UCDavis)www
81.
The 9/11 disaster as such was not predictable — though poerful evidence is
mounting that the Bush administration had been warned that some such attack was
being planned69 — but the Valdez disaster, like Bhopal in [2159],
was virtually inevitable:
[2209] The true cause of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe
was the oil giants’ breaking their promises to the Natives and Congress,
cynically and disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill. […]
Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system
breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician […] told our investigators that
management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing
spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea
water called, ‘The Miracle Barrel.’70
[2210]
As part of the come-on to get hold of the Chugach’s Valdez property, Alyeska
hired the Natives for emergency work. They practiced leaping out of helicopters
into icy water, learning to surround leaking boats with rubber barriers. But
they soon found that part of their assignment was not to clean up spills but to
cover them up. Their foreman David Decker said he was expected to report an oil
spill as two gallons when two thousand gallons had spilled. Alyeska kept the
natives at the terminal for two years — long enough to help break the
dockworkers’ union — and then quietly fired them all. […] To deflect
inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing
names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill
equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper.71
The incident itself was directly triggered not by a drunken captain but by broken radar:
[2210]
The third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his
Raycas radar, [but] the tanker’s radar was left broken and disabled for more
than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too
expensive to fix and operate. (same)
So
the reviled ‘Captain Big-Swig’ was just a fall guy. For a high (oily) water
mark in fraudspeak, try the recent Exxon brochure: ‘The water is clean, and
plant, animal and sea life are healthy and abundant.'. And as of this writing, Exxon-Mobil,
Nr. 2 contributor (after Enron) to Bush Jr’s campaigns,
has still not paid the a penny of the $5 billion fine and may never do so: in
August, 2003, the Bush-appointed appellate
courts in Texas (!) ordered the Alaskan judge once again to review the award.72
82.
Yet even Koch’s blasts of ‘benzene’, 9/11’s ‘piles of debris’,
and the Valdez lube job are dwarfed by the dangers of sludge, defined as a
‘semisolid mixture of bacteria and virus-laden organic matter, toxic metals,
synthetic organic chemicals, and settled solids removed from domestic and
industrial waste water at a sewage treatment plant’ (HarperCollins
Dictionary of Environmental Science). Toxins include arsenic, asbestos,
petroleum derivatives, industrial solvents, pesticides (like DDT), chlorinated
compounds (like dioxins), and heavy metals (like lead and mercury), plus an army
of bacteria, viruses, protozoa, parasitic worms, and funguses, and radioactive
waste from hospitals, businesses, and decontamination centers — a tasty stew headed for your neighbourhood and maybe your dinner table.
83. Nobody knows how much sludge is really entering the US environment, but
even partial estimates are frightening:
[2211] Chemical plants, pulp mills, steel factories and
all manner of other manufacturing concerns dumped more than a billion pounds of
toxic chemicals into America’s rivers, lakes, streams, bays and coastal waters
between 1990 and 1994. Another huge
load of toxic substances […] ended up in U.S. waters after having been flushed
by factories through sewage treatment plants. […] The toxic emissions we
report in this study, massive though they are, are but a fraction of the total
pollutant load entering the nation’s waterways –– maybe 5 percent. (Dishonorable
Discharge)73
[2212]
Most pollution of America’s waters is unregulated and unmonitored — allowing
polluters to pollute with little fear of regulation or disclosure. A 1994 study
by the General Accounting Office (GAO) found that the majority of toxic
pollutants discharged from 200 of 236 pesticide, pharmaceutical, and paper
plants it examined, were so-called ‘uncontrolled’ pollutants that are exempt
from regulation under the pollution-permitting process of the Clean Water Act.
(same).
84.
The costs for really safe methods of disposal are unacceptable to government or
industry, whilst the Clean
Water Act feebly calls for ‘voluntary compliance’ by industries to detoxify
their own waste (called ‘Bushball’ after Jr’s Texas rules).74
Indeed, a scheme was hatched to turn, erm, excrement into money:
[2213]
Since the early 1990s, the EPA has been working with the waste management
industry and municipalities to establish sewage sludge, the semi-solid waste
by-product from municipal sewage treatment plants, as a safe fertilizer for
application on land.74
Yet
another phoney interest group was drummed up for sludge producers with the
Orwellian name ‘Water Environment Federation’ (rather than, say, ‘Shit Up
the Creek with No Paddle Gang’), which ‘wrapped itself in the language of
environmentalism and locked arms with the EPA’.74 Their newsletter collected double-speak
renames for ‘sludge’ like ‘purenutri’, ‘biolife’, ‘bioresidue’,
‘Powergro’, ‘recyclite’, ‘nutri-cake’ and (the most audacious)
‘ROSE’ (acronym for ‘Recycling Of Solids Environmentally’ (but not, say,
‘putri-nutri’, ‘crappuccino’, ‘shitzbath’, or ‘tox-fraught’).
The winner was ‘biosolids’, defined now in doublespeak as the
‘nutrient-rich, organic by-product of the nation’s wastewater treatment
process’.
85.
In 1992, the jolly old EPA, which had once classified ‘sludge’ as hazardous
waste, approved ‘biosolids’ as a ‘Class
A fertilizer’, and issued a report with the strenuous
doublespeak title ‘Institutional Constraints and Public Acceptance
Barriers to Utilization of Municipal Wastewater and Sludge
for Land Reclamation and Biomass Production’, from which (exploiting
the bold type I put in) I can make the pungent acronym ‘I-COP-A-BUM-SLURP’.
To counter citizens who ‘mount a significant campaign’, it advocates
‘aggressive public relations’ using ‘glossy brochures describing the
project, open public meetings, presentations’ of ‘films’ and ‘material
stressing community benefits’. A 1994 article titled ‘Campaign Tactics: How
to Strategize for Successful Project Development’ even uses the term
‘pre-emptive strike’ for ‘getting positive messages out’ ‘before the
counter-messages start’ (Kelly Sarber).
86.
How safe are these ‘biosolids’? You judge the sludge:
[2214]
25-year-old Harry Dobin ran a coffee truck at a Long Island Railroad station
1000 feet away from a sludge composting site. […] When he could no longer
breathe, doctors performed a lung biopsy and discovered Aspergillus fumigatus, a
common by-product of sludge composting. By the time the disease was diagnosed,
it was unstoppable, spreading to his spine, his legs, and finally his heart,
leading to his death.74
[2215] On Nov. 24, 1999, Joanne Marshall awoke in the middle of the night
to find her 26-year-old son Shayne Conner gasping for breath. Soon, Shayne would
be dead and his mother would embark on a search for answers that has led to her
lawsuit charging that sewage sludge spread on a nearby field killed her son.
[…] Wheelabrator Water Technologies, the owner of the company that spread the
sludge, argues that the science behind Marshall’s claim is unreliable and that
there is in fact no scientific evidence to prove that sludge had anything to do
with her son’s death. (Portsmouth Herald)
[2216]
Tony Behun, an otherwise healthy 11-year-old boy, rides his motorbike across a
mining area ankle deep in sewage sludge. Within hours he develops lesions on an
arm and a leg, runs a high fever within two days, and is dead in eight days from
Staph aureus septicemia. (EPA microbiologist Dr. David Lewis at Sludge
Victims)www
The
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection chose fibspeak for [2216]:
Tony was killed by a ‘bee
sting’, or a ‘chipmunk bite’.75 In another death, Wheelabrator invoked ‘volumes of science that back up the use of biosolids as safe
for land application’. So dying from sludge is just being plain
‘unscientific’.
87.
Worse yet, some food corporations have announced they are considering growing
food on sludge after all, and you can bet the lobbying against labelling will be
fierce.76 A representative of the National Food Processors
Association said that consumers don’t need to know whether their food has been
grown in sludge’.77 Oh
yeah? I say, a ‘biosolids’ company that supplies growers has a gross
message to the American consumer — figurative from other polluting industries
but literal here — which cannot
be put in any nicer words than: ‘eat my shit’.
88.
As with worker safety and consumer health, the industries are busy with a public
relations (PR) campaign of unrestricted fibspeak, fraudspeak, and flakspeak:
[2218] ’Environmental PR’ seeks to fix ‘misperceptions’ by convincing the public that ecological crises don’t exist, that corporations are really protecting and improving the natural environment, and that environmental activists who criticize and attack industry are ‘eco-terrorists’, fear mongers, and the latest incarnation of the communist menace.77
[2219] The
anti-environmental campaign is most obvious in the fringe activities of radical
right-wing organizations calling themselves the ‘Wise Use’ movement.
Supported by corporate sponsors, Wise Use is loudly agitating against laws and
regulations that constrain the rampant exploitation of natural resources.78
[2220] We intend to
wipe out every environmental group by replacing it with a Wise Use group. (Ron
Arnold, director of the ‘Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise’)77
[2221]
Environmentalism [is] an attack on the ideals of Western civilization. Opposed
to science, technology, and economic development, […] environmentalism has
become the gravest threat to human survival. (Ayn Rand Institute)www
But
since environmentalism is after all built upon science, the latter term has to
be split:
[2222] ‘Junk
science’ is the term that
corporate defenders apply to any research, no matter
how rigorous, that justifies
regulations to protect the environment and public health; […] ‘sound science’ is used in reference to any research, no
matter how flawed, that can be used to challenge, defeat, or reverse
environmental and public health protections.77
[2223]
‘Junkman’ Steven Milloy has made a career of lobbying for polluting
industries, heading corporate front groups to deny environmental concerns, and
ridiculing individual environmentalists. […] Milloy defines ‘junk science’
as ‘bad science used by lawsuit-happy trial lawyers, the ‘food police’,
environmental Chicken Littles, power-drunk regulators, and
unethical-to-dishonest scientists to fuel specious lawsuits, wacky social and
political agendas, and the quest for personal fame and fortune’.77
Never
mind that it’s Rent-A-Rants like Milloy who get paid a ‘fortune’.
89.
Like the New Rant against ‘Liberals’ (VII.33), flakspeak as venomous as
[2223] may seem hysterically silly. But its fundraisers must believe it will be
taken seriously as confrontational discourse that effectively blocks rational
dialogue and encourages fierce resentment, even fomenting violence by
anti-environmental activists. These were incited by a literal call to arms from
James Watt, once Reagan’s Interior Secretary (and convicted of corruption in
1996), addressing a gathering of cattlemen in 1990 [2224].
News reports confirm the trend [2225-26].
[2224] If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury
box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.79
[2225] Attacks on US environmentalists are on the rise:
physical assaults, phone harass-ment and death threats; eco-activists have been
shot at, raped, knifed and fire-bombed. 81
[2226]
Helvarg’s book79 records instances of drive-by shootings,
firebombings and pet poisonings. Greens have been attacked by speeding autos,
chainsaws, pistols and, in the case of redwood defender Judi Bari, a car bomb
that nearly killed her.
90.
The most progressive and inspiring counter-discourse on the environment came
from the Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘a non-profit partnership of
scientists and citizens combining rigorous scientific analysis, innovative
policy development, and effective citizen advocacy to achieve practical
environmental solutions’, e.g., by means of ‘renewable energy’:
[2227]
We’ve played a significant role in winning support for renewable energy in key
federal electricity-restructuring bills. […] This exciting new development
will provide enough clean power to meet the entire electricity needs of 7.5
million homes and reduce as much carbon dioxide —
the main greenhouse gas implicated in global warming —
as taking 5.3 million cars off the road or planting 1.6 billion trees.80
The
‘warning’ issued by the Union in November 1992 pointed out that ‘a great
change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast
human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be
irretrievably mutilated’. The discourse encompasses ‘five inextricably
linked areas’: (1) ‘bringing environmentally damaging activities under
control to restore and protect the integrity of the earth’s systems we depend
on’; (2) ‘managing resources crucial to human welfare more effectively’;
(3) ‘stabilizing population’; (4) ‘reducing and eventually eliminating
poverty’; and (5) ‘ensuring sexual equality and guaranteeing women control
over their own reproductive decisions’.80
91.
The lists of the ‘concerned scientists’ read like a veritable Who’s Who
in contemporary science. It bore the signature of 1,500 ‘senior members of the
world’s scientific community’, including 101 Nobel laureates. So which
discourse will you believe — the consensus of world’s most eminent
scientists, or the paid flakspeak and smarmy spin-control of Rent-A-Rant whores
for polluting industries whose raw greed and stinginess send workers like
Cynthia Wall and Harry Dobin or children like Alex Donley and Tony Behun to
nightmarishly gruesome deaths?
VII.H
Discourse and counter-discourse 5:
Civil
asset forfeiture
92.
During the ‘Tory government’, my eye was caught by some startling news:
[2228] The Commons Home Affairs Committee wants to seize
assets from people suspected for drug trafficking even if they have not been
convicted. […] The MPs said
they, their wives and children should be stripped of money, cars and any other
assets — even if they are acquitted by a criminal court. (Daily
Mirror, my italics)
Here
was an unvarnished call to abolish due process of law, coming from the British
Parliament, which might be nostalgically imagined to have invented it.
Merely being ‘suspected’ of ‘drug trafficking’ is to overrule a formal
‘acquittal’, and bring total ruin on your whole family. I felt reminded of
the famed Biblical ire of ‘visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children’ (Exodus
20:5
and 34:7; Numbers 14:18; Deuteronomy 5:9). Strictly applied, this plan would make the
‘criminal court’ irrelevant and dispensable. Once the police decide to
‘suspect’ you, let them just go ahead and ‘strip’ you, splurge your
‘money’, cruise in your ‘car’…they will anyway.
93.
I dismissed the idea as absurd, but déjà vu recently whacked me when I found a
similar plan actually operating in US ‘justice’. It bears the title of
‘civil asset forfeiture’ and sheds a revealing light on the zeal of
government agencies to pursue a ‘war on drugs’ that shows no signs of being
won or even winnable.81 In the official theory, empowering the
seizure of their illegal profits will convince drug traffickers to turn honest
and, say, deal in, erm, energy conglomerates, electronic voting machines, or
biosolids. In the operational practice, ‘law enforcement agents’ can
instantly seize cash and property without proof of crime, due process, or
constitutional safeguards [2229]. ‘Probable cause’ suffices — or merely
‘claims of anonymous informants’, ‘tips’, and ‘hearsay’ [2230], for
which ‘cash rewards’ are paid out [2231] by the grateful police, who get
their share. Even schoolchildren are recruited as informers [2232] (an old Nazi
shtick), though they are only enticed with ‘gifts and candy’.
[2229]
Under civil asset forfeiture, everything you own can be legally taken away even if you are never indicted, tried or
convicted of a crime. […] To get seized property returned, you have to fight
the full resources of your state or the federal government; [and] prove your
property’s ‘innocence’ by documenting how you earned every cent used to
pay for it. (Civil Asset Forfeiture)82
[2230] Totally innocent Americans are
losing their cars, homes and businesses, based on the claims of anonymous
informants that illegal transactions took place on their property. […] Anyone
with a grudge can phone a false tip that can change your life. Suspicion,
hearsay, a police vendetta can cost you your car, your cash, your house, your
toys, and the clothes in your closet. (Looting
of America)83
[2231] The Justice Department’s asset forfeiture fund paid
$24 million to informants in 1990. […] Some airline counter clerks receive
cash awards for alerting drug agents to ‘suspicious’ travellers. (Presumed Guilty)84
[2232] One-fourth of our nation’s elementary and junior high schools now
have Drug Abuse Resistance Education [where] uniformed police officers teach
children the official government line on drugs. Correct answers to policemen’s
questions are rewarded with small gifts and candy. Instructors encourage
children to call police and turn in their parents and friends ‘for their own
good’. What police don’t tell children is […] their parents will be
immediately arrested, the children may be placed in foster care, and their homes
can be confiscated under civil forfeiture laws (Rising American Police State)85
You
might conclude than anybody (including you) could be a hapless suspect, e.g.,
when a gung-ho ‘drug agent’ sees any old ‘walk’ as a future perp walk
[2233]. But in fact, the ‘agents’ are far more selective [2234], and for
potent reasons [2235-37].
[2233]
It is difficult to know how to avoid looking like a drug courier. [One] drug
agent told a judge that he was suspicious of a man because he ‘walked quickly
through the airport.’ Six weeks
later, the same agent said
he was suspicious of another man because he
‘walked
with
intentional
slowness
after
getting
off
the
bus’.
(Drug
War
Hits
Home)86
[2234] The owners’ only crimes in many
of these cases: They ‘looked’ like drug dealers. […] An examination of 121
travellers’ cases in which police found no dope, made no arrest, but seized
money anyway showed that 77 percent of the people stopped were black, Hispanic,
or Asian.84
[2235]
In Volusia County, Florida, the drug squad of the Sheriff’s Department seized
$8 million in cash, […] assuming that anyone carrying more than $100 was a
drug trafficker. […] Ninety percent of the motorists from whom cash was seized
were blacks or Hispanics […] Several officers revealed that they were told to
forget about the white criminals because many could afford expensive and
effective lawyers, while most minorities could not. (Highway Robbery)87
[2236] As officers are pushed for volume
drug arrests, they focus on minority consumers rather than dealers and
manufacturers, who are mostly white. […] This also sheds light on why the
increasing number of drug arrests and convictions does not stop or slow the
level of drug-related crime. ‘Prosecutors and judges are getting stiff necks
from looking the other way’. (Joseph McNamara, past police chief for San Jose,
California)
[2237] [Whilst] police officers use arrests of minorities as career
stepping stones, prosecu-tors who got where they are with primarily white
political support ignore white criminals in favor of minorities [to] keep their
jobs and get re-elected. (Freedom Magazine)87
94.
The most effective resistance is practiced by counter-discourses, which ‘law
enforcement agents’ cannot (yet) control or cut off, posted on the Internet at
websites like The
Future of Freedom Foundation, Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States,
Forfeiture Endangers American Rights (FEAR), and the International Society for
Individual Liberty. Two modes of counter-discourse predominate in my data
samples. Expository discourse from legal or community sources presents
the scope, expansions, or innovations in the laws, such as the involvement of
more and more agencies [2238] or the amounts involved [2239]; the seizure of
property that happens to be the scene of an alleged ‘crime’, even with no
knowledge or involvement of its owner [2240]; the ‘chilling seizure’ of fees
for defense lawyers [2241]; and ruthless, violent tactics gone ‘out of
control’ [2242].
[2238]
Agencies seizing property now include the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals
Service, the Coast Guard, the IRS, local police, highway patrol, the Department
of Housing and Urban Development, the FDA, and the Bureau of Land Management.
Asset forfeiture is a growth industry. Hundreds of expanded asset forfeiture
bills are pending before Congress and state legislatures. (Looting
of America)83
[2239]
Between 1986 and 1990, the U.S. Justice Department generated $1.5 billion from
forfeiture. (Drug
War Hits Home)
86
[2240] Recently the Justice Department
has taken the position that once an illegal act occurs on some property, that
property belongs to the government from the moment of the illegal act, even if
the owners knew nothing about it and had no involvement with the ‘crime’ (U.S.
vs. 92 Buena Vista Avenue) (Rising American Police State)85
[2241] In a particularly chilling
decision, the Supreme Court has even approved seizing the earned fees of
attorneys who represent a criminal defendant that the federal government chooses
to target for forfeiture. (Justice through the Looking Glass)88
[2242] A body of ‘law’ [for] law enforcement personnel to stop
motorists and seize their cash on the spot, to seize and sometimes destroy
boats, cars, homes, airplanes, and businesses in often fruitless drug searches,
and even to kill and maim […] is out of control. (Roger
Pilon, Director of the Center for Constitutional Studies)89
Narrative discourse
tells the stories of specific victims of the ‘laws’ [2243-46], including
imaginative creep to supposed crimes unrelated to drugs [2247].
[2243] Willie Jones, a second-generation
nursery man, […] bundles up money from last year’s profits and heads off to
buy flowers and shrubs in Houston, […] using cash, which the small growers
prefer. […] In Nashville’s Metro Airport, he’s flanked by two police
officers who search him and seize the $9,600 he’s carrying. A ticket agent had
alerted the officers that a large black man had paid for his ticket in bills. (Government
Seizures Victimize the Innocent)90
[2244] In 1989, police stopped [Jamaican Black] Ethel
Hylton at Houston Airport
and told her she was
under arrest
because a
drug dog
had scratched
at her luggage. Agents searched her bags and
trip-searched her, but they found no
drugs. They did find $39,110 in cash, money
she had
received from
an insurance
settlement and
her life savings, accumulated
through over 20 years of work as a hotel housekeeper and hospital janitor. Ethel
Hylton completely documented where she got the money and was never charged with
a crime. But the police kept her money anyway. (Looting
of America)83
[2245] Jacksonville University professor Craig Klein’s new
$24,000 sailboat was subjected to a fruitless drug search by U.S. Customs
Service Agents. In their 7-hour search, the boat was damaged beyond repair. The engine was chopped up with a fire axe, the fuel tank was
ruptured and 30 holes were drilled in the hull. (St Petersburg Times)
[2246] Donald Scott, a ranch owner, was gunned down in his
home by a multi-agency raiding party that the Ventura County District Attorney
found was ‘motivated, at least in part, by a desire to seize and forfeit the
ranch for the government’. (Legal Robbery)www
[2247] [When] Kathy and Mark Schrama were arrested in
1990, […] Kathy was charged with taking $500 worth of UPS packages from
neighbors’ porches, and Mark with receiving stolen goods. […] The day after
their arrest, their house, cars and furniture were seized. Based upon mere
accusation, $150,000 in property was confiscated, without trial or indictment.
Police even took their clothing, eyeglasses, and Christmas presents for their
10-year-old son. (Looting of America)83
95.
The ‘intertextuality’ exerted by these counter-discourses, supported by the
easy access and open participation on the Internet, did much to animate the
active lobbying of Congress by private citizens and by legal groups like the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which led a broad reform
coalition with the American Bar Association, the American Civil Liberties Union,
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, and the
American Bankers Association — a formidable array. After more than a
decade of waffling and against a welter of sneaky ‘amendments’, Congress
passed the ‘Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000’91
‘creating new procedures’, such as:
[2248] Requiring warrants; shifting the burden of proof squarely to the
government by requiring the government to show complicity; […] allowing for
release of seized property in certain hardship cases; allowing the appointment
of counsel for indigent claimants in appropriate cases; requiring payment of
reasonable attorneys fees in virtually all cases where the claimants prevail. (Reform Coalition Succeeds)92
96.
However, the Reform is at best a ‘necessary first step’.93 It
preserves the twisted logic that property becomes guilty if guilty acts occur
there; but it greatly improves the owner’s chances of claiming
‘innocence’, and requires the
government to show a ‘substantial connection between the property and the
offense’. The
immediate eviction of people from their homes is prohibited, but the government
still can lodge a ‘complaint’ and a ‘forfeiture action’ that will do so eventually.
Forfeiture must be justified by a ‘preponderance of the evidence’, but
‘probable cause’ can still start the ‘action’. And most damaging, local ‘law
enforcement agencies’ can still keep forfeited assets instead of referring
them to the Federal Treasury. So maybe
[2249] there is little reason to think that this slightly
higher burden of proof will cause law enforcement officials to shift their
emphasis from seizing property and cash to fighting dangerous criminals. (Executive Privateers)94
[2250] Through a perverse irony, the government soon finds that it has a
financial interest in the profitability of the drug market, and, therefore, a
fiscal stake in keeping drugs illegal. […] Law enforcement develops a stronger
stake in not winning the drug war than in winning. (same)
Can
not winning (in
the official sense) equal winning (in the operational sense)? Here, you might
well feel perplexed about the CIA’s role in the ‘war on drugs’ too:
[2251]
A Federal grand jury in Miami has indicted a Venezuelan general who led a
Central Intelligence Agency counter-narcotics program that put a ton of cocaine
on the streets of the United States in 1990, Government officials said today.
From 1987 to 1991, [...] the unit handled shipments totaling 22 tons of cocaine
being shipped through Venezuela. Since
its inception in 1947, the CIA has been accused of forming alliances of
convenience with drug traffickers around the world in the name of
anti-Communism. (Tim Weiner in the New York Times)
Perhaps it’s not just their own noses the CIA agents follow.
Click here to go to Chapter
VII, Part 4