Dark Money's Poison

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What has occurred to me this morning as I contemplate what to write about Dark Money is that “ignorance truly is bliss.” In some ways, that is, I would be more comfortable and relaxed if I didn’t know about the swinish billionaire class whose devilish machinations are the subject of Jane Mayer’s recent book, Dark Money (Doubleday, 2016). But I do, and now I’m compelled to try to write about it and them. You probably already know who they are: the Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, John Olin and his tribe, the DeVos family (Amway) and countless others most of us have never heard of. And what the book describes is the underhanded methods these oligarchs have used in the last forty or so years to change the political landscape to such an extent that they now control the debate over policy, over what can even be discussed, and consequently over the fate of billions of people on this planet. A quote from an unnamed environmental lawyer puts it well: 

“You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.” (Mayer, p. 153).

The question is, how can these rich bastards keep succeeding with their subterfuge? Aren’t there laws that control what a think tank can be, how profits in family trusts can be used? Well yes. But the rich have always had ways to shelter and/or hide their money, and “donating” it to foundations and think tanks is only one of the ploys they use to get tax exemptions while at the same time getting to control what passes for “research,” and hence the rules of the game.

            The story actually begins with John D. Rockefeller. The grand old man of American oligarchy started what was probably the first private or nonprofit foundation in 1909. And its purpose, like all the ones that followed, was simple: give the appearance of “donating” part of his wealth to a foundation ostensibly devoted to promoting the general welfare, while at the same time providing the donor with tax deductions and subsidies, i.e. lower income tax. Still, the first foundations—like Rockefeller’s and Ford’s—actually did take their charitable role semi-seriously, supporting the arts, museums, media, schools, and other ostensibly “public-interest” causes. But in the 1970s, and even before, the more recent oligarchs discovered the idea that not only could their foundations save them tax money, they could promote their favorite anti-regulatory and anti-government policies as well.

            The poster boys for this type of “philanthropy” are the Koch brothers, starting with the father, engineer Fred Koch, who built the original fortune. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Fred was a right-winger with a vengeance, a founding member of the John Birch Society who saw Communists under every carpet, especially those in the White House. In his 1960 pamphlet distributed to over 2 million sympathizers, Fred Koch referred to “the colored man who looms large in the Communist plan to take over America” and actually predicted a “vicious race war” in America, all while characterizing income taxes as nothing less than “socialism.” Taxes were his obsession, and in order to escape having to pay estate taxes on his fortune—earned, not incidentally, by helping sweet guys like Stalin and Hitler set up refineries in their home countries—he established a “charitable lead trust” whereby he could pass on his estate without taxes as long as his heirs (he had four sons, Charles and David plus Bill and Fred) for twenty years donated the interest on the principle to charity. As Jane Mayer puts it, “tax avoidance was thus the original impetus for the Koch brothers’ extraordinary philanthropy.” As to that philanthropy, it might be useful to point out that not everyone was happy with this new ability of the rich to protect their fortunes via pretend charity. As Teddy Roosevelt said at the time in response to the Rockefeller ploy: “No amount of charity in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them” (Mayer, p. 70). Amen to that. It might also be added that whereas paying taxes cedes control over the spending of it to the government (which can distribute funds to those who need it), stashing money in a private foundation means that the owner can distribute funds where he or she wants to—and get thanked for the ‘generosity.’ Perhaps that is why private foundations have multiplied like rabbits since the early days: in 1930, according to Mayer, there were only 200 private foundations; by 1950, there were 2,000; by 1985, 30,000; and in 2013 their number had swelled to 100,000, with combined assets of over $800 billion. As to the Kochs—and second son Charles is really the leader of this dog pack—they have established foundations at every opportunity. Charles was early attracted to the faux-anarchy of ‘libertarianism,’ by which he really meant freedom from government interference, especially regulations of any kind, in his business dealings. One of his early forays was the establishment of something called the Freedom School, devoted to his brand of libertarianism (he later funded and pretty much controlled the Cato Institute). As one writer said of him, “He was driven by some deeper urge to smash the one thing left in the world that could discipline him: the government” (p. 54). In the process, he often smashed people too: as in the case of Donald Carlson, a longtime tank-cleaner at the Kochs’ Pine Bend Refinery in Minnesota, who was finally dismissed in 1994 with six months pay (his accumulated sick pay, but no workmen’s compensation) because he could no longer work due to benzene poisoning (his compulsory blood tests had shown the poisoning since at least 1990, but he was never notified). Koch Industries fought his claims to the bitter end—Carlson died of leukemia, a predictable outcome of his work with benzene, in 1997—and only under court threat agreed to give his widow some money conditioned on a confidentiality agreement. After it expired, Doreen Carlson spoke out: “And they want less regulations? Can you imagine? What they want is things that benefit them. They never cut into their profits.”

            Other oligarchs Mayer focuses on were following similar patterns. In 1973, taking their cue from the famous Powell memo of 1971 urging the wealthy to go to war with the anti-capitalist forces then thought to be opposed to business, Richard Mellon Scaife (heir to the vast Andrew Mellon banking fortune) and Joseph Coors (the beer magnate) financed the launching of the Heritage Foundation. Unlike previous think tanks like Brookings that were careful to maintain at least a veneer of scholarly objectivity, the Heritage Foundation was devoted to waging a battle of ideas, of selling “a predetermined ideology to politicians and the public [rather] than undertaking scholarly research” (p. 78). The problem, of course, is that most people and the media do not make such distinctions; thus, the “scholars” from Heritage and other right-wing foundations like the American Enterprise Institute are regularly invited to appear on talk and news shows as if they are objective investigators of fact. The overall project would come to be known as “movement philanthropy,” where great fortunes could be spent promoting a kind of free-market fundamentalism, especially including anti-regulatory, anti-tax and anti-government warfare.

            A variant to this movement was started by another of the ‘philanthropists’ Mayer profiles, the industrialist John M. Olin. An industrial giant that made most of its money peddling explosives and other armaments in both WWI and WWII (Winchester rifles, hydrazine rocket fuel, etc.), the Olin corporation, with its newly acquired subsidiaries (Mathieson Chemical, Squibb) turned out to be one of the first targets of the new EPA in 1973 (founded under Richard Nixon). Olin not only produced DDT in Alabama, it was also involved in multiple mercury-pollution capers, one in fouling the Niagara River in upstate New York, and another decimating an impoverished company town called Saltville in Virginia. An Appalachian hamlet in southwestern Virginia, Saltville was owned lock, stock and barrel by its Olin overlords: 2,199 residents rented their houses, shopped at the company store and got their water from the company. Everyone worked at the chlorine plant that used mercury in its production process—a process that leaked something like 100 pounds of toxic mercury into the public waterway (the north fork of the Holston River) every day for about 20 years, resulting in mercury in fish, not to mention the poor humans who lived there. In addition, the company also dumped 53,000 pounds of mercury into an open sediment pond. One local said: “We all played with the mercury as children. Daddy brought it home from the chemical plant.” And though the company issued gas masks to workers, their use was never enforced. After the publicity about mercury poisoning in Japan’s Minamata Bay, Virginia passed strict pollution standards, but Olin said it couldn’t meet them and so the company announced it would cease operations in Saltville in 1972 (leaving Saltville as one of the first  “superfund” sites). Life Magazine’s article about the “end of a company town” implied that it was environmental activists who had destroyed a way of life. But lives had already been destroyed. As one native said: 

“The Olin Company was dirty and treated the people bad, not like people. Most of the workers were poorly educated, and they led them around like sheep. A lot of people got sick, and there were more birth defects in Saltville than in other parts of the state” (p. 99).

            Of course Olin denied it was in any way at fault and also denied that its foundation money had any connection to its long history of pollution, but the record suggests otherwise. Here is what John Olin said about his foundation campaign:

“My greatest ambition now is to see free enterprise re-established in this country. Business and the public must be awakened to the creeping stranglehold that socialism has gained here since WWII” (100).

Clearly, re-establishing “free enterprise” meant giving business free rein to use any and all environmental poisons without some pesky government agency infringing on its 'freedom.' And this was before Olin got going with his enduring contribution: taking aim at the “liberal establishment” (liberalism and socialism were synonymous to Olin) dominating colleges and universities in order to establish a kind of “counter-intelligentsia” devoted to conservative thought. To effect this sea change, he hired William Simon (energy czar and Treasury Secretary under both Nixon and Ford) to be head of his Olin Foundation in 1977. Simon had always nursed a deep hatred for the liberal elite, claiming that a secret system of academics, media types, and bureaucrats ran the nation to such an extent that “Our freedom is in dire peril.” With Simon in the lead, the Olin Foundation began its campaign to establish “beachheads” (the military language is not accidental; this was seen as a war) not just in small colleges but at the most elite institutions like Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Amazingly, they were able to prevail, with institutional coups like the “James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions” at Princeton; the “Program on Constitutional Government” at Harvard (run by Harvey Mansfield); and the “John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies” also at Harvard (and run by hawk Samuel Huntington). Ostensibly neutral (note the language), these were all as ideological as the real coup de grace, their impact in law schools with something they called “Law and Economics Theory.” Nursed by Olin contributions of over $68 million to law schools at Harvard, Chicago, and elsewhere, Olin fellows from the likes of Harvard’s “John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business” then branched out to teach at Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgetown, MIT and beyond. Among these legal ‘fellows’ was John Yoo (of the infamous “torture memo”), and another supposed intellectual, John R. Lott Jr., who went on to write a book called More Guns, Less Crime. In it, Lott argued that more guns actually reduce crime and promised that legalizing concealed weapons would make people safer. On inspection (by Adam Winkler of the book Gunfight), Lott’s study turned out to be based on no data whatever. When pressed to produce his data, that is, Lott claimed it had been lost in a computer crash. In addition to such fake scholarship, one of the major contributions of the Law and Economics caper were its infamous “seminars” for judges, initiated by the ideologue Henry Manne, by then dean of the George Mason University School of Law (a haven for right-wing ideologues). These “seminars” were two-week all-expenses-paid junkets for indoctrination in law and economics in places like the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Florida. Something like 660 judges were treated to these pleasure-cum-indoctrination vacations, including future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. As one of Olin’s accolytes himself put it, “Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects…it seems neutral, but it isn’t in fact” (108). A case in 1997, where the EPA had moved to reduce surface ozone as air pollution caused by refinery emissions, demonstrates the point. An economist at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center, Susan Dudley, challenged the EPA ruling, arguing that the federal agency had not considered that, by blocking the sun, smog cut down on cases of skin cancer: If pollution were controlled, she said, it would cause up to 11,000 additional skin cancer cases each year. Incredibly, the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia (whose majority judges had all tasted the seminar cool-aid) embraced Dudley’s argument, finding that the EPA had “explicitly disregarded the possible health benefits of ozone” (154)! Fortunately, the Supreme Court eventually overruled the circuit court, saying that the Clean Air Act’s standards cannot be subject to cost-benefit analysis.

            Enough said. What Jane Mayer’s book demonstrates—and I have only been able to provide a tiny taste of its voluminous contents—is that big money from a determined oligarchy can profoundly affect, shape, and ultimately destroy democracy and much else besides. It can defy reason to the point that President Obama’s attempts to pass even the minimal cap-and-trade legislation to begin to reduce global warming were defeated even before they had a chance for a public hearing. The same has happened with the non-stop attempts to defeat his health-care-for-all bill, which continues to be attacked and distorted to the present day (a Circuit Court has recently ruled against its provision to provide government aid to those who can’t afford their premiums). And all is done under the guise of philanthropy, all disguised with market-tested language and emotional appeals that convince the masses (see the Tea Party) that it is in their interest to side with the richest, most immoral, and, at times, criminal class in the nation. And what it demonstrates is that democracy—if there is any democracy left at this stage in the republic—must be defended just as vigorously as the attacks by the dogs who would pervert, undermine and destroy it. And even then. Even then, I say, especially when contemplating the power that great gobs of money have to corrupt, or reflecting on the apparently bottomless lust of those with it to want always more even if they have to sacrifice the entire planet to get it—even then, it may be necessary to bring back the guillotine. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Inmates Control the Asylum

Now that a week has passed since the November 4 election, it may be time to assess the damage and the prospects for the next two years. And of course it’s easy to attribute the debacle to Republican money made possible by Citizens United. For example, everyone on the left knows that the Koch Brothers contributed untold millions to super-pacs that bought tons of TV ads making the Republican victories possible. But what we may not have known until recently is that these same brothers, some of the biggest and dirtiest oil men in the nation, actually have leases on about 1.1 million acres of Canada’s tar sands land, the biggest non-Canadian leaseholder in Alberta (see Washington Post, 3/20/2104). If they can get the Keystone pipeline built (the issue Republicans say is first on their agenda), they stand to double their fortune—from about $100 billion they have now to about $200 billion in a few years. That’s why they’re willing to invest millions into political support for tea-partiers and conservatives in general. (Someone without money, like myself, would have thought that $100 billion might be enough; it could support me and everyone I’ve ever known for a lifetime in unimagined luxury; but not for these guys.)

            But of course it wasn’t just money that the Repugnants used to win the election. They also did everything they could to mess with the vote, suppressing it here, making it impossible to unseat their candidates in safe districts there. In general, this means targeting cities and urban areas (where minorities live) in order to enable rural and suburban areas (where whites live) to dominate the vote. Several methods have been used to achieve this. First, by taking over state houses in key states, they’ve managed to gerrymander voting districts to such an extent that even were the Democrats able to get out their vote, it wouldn’t matter. All the Dems power has been limited to urban zones, while suburban and rural zones have been crazy-quilted in such a way as to vote-proof their conservative candidates. Then these clever fellows instituted voter ID laws that made it almost impossible for minorities to comply—either because getting birth certificates and other IDs were too difficult or expensive, or by making common forms of ID ineligible. Though Republicans routinely allege massive voter fraud, studies in recent years have all given the lie to this dodge; there has been almost no voter fraud in recent years (one study found only 31 incidents nationwide between 2000 and 2014), especially compared to the millions of voters who have been disenfranchised. And finally, some clever lawyer type came up with the scheme known as Crosscheck. Used by 27 states, Crosscheck involves going through huge voter rolls in various states and trying to find name matches—which often occurs with common minority names like Jackson or Kim or Garcia or Patel. Then they claim, on no other basis than a name match, that a Jackson or Lee or Garcia has voted in two different states—an obvious violation of law—and succeed in getting the names thrown off the rolls. In Georgia, this worked to throw 40,000 voters off the state rolls, thus disqualifying a huge percentage of voters that had been newly registered as a result of a campaign by Atlanta’s Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church. (For a summary of these methods, see Juan Thompson’s piece for The Intercept, reprinted 9 Nov. in Reader Supported News [http://readersupportednews.org], where he notes that overall turnout in this election was 36.6%, a modern low.)

            This brings us to the underlying point of this election. Yes, it is surely to get Republicans elected to control the Congress. And yes, it is surely to allow billionaires like the Koch Brothers to control the government. But it’s more specific than that, and it’s not just a bunch of scared white males trying to maintain their positions of privilege, though it’s that too. This is about the deeper fear among conservatives that demographics as well as scientific truth is turning against them and could upend the huge victory they’ve achieved in recent years—convincing the world that free trade, deregulated free market capitalism and globalization are divine edicts from nature and hence the only game in town. I addressed this in a previous blog called Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes’ brilliant summary of the conservative battle to undermine the science of cigarette smoke, CFCs, acid rain, and global warming. Beginning to read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate has buttressed the case even more. Because what Klein does is not simply to cite all the reasons that the science of global warming has become definitive, compelling and truly urgent; she makes clear that the massive threat to human civilization posed by global warming cannot be stopped short of a massive change in our economic system. This is the sense in which she titles a chapter with the counterintuitive slogan, “The Right is Right.” Oreskes actually made a similar point in her book. That is, the right, the tea partiers, the conservative nut jobs who continually make apparently lunatic statements equating liberals with socialists and communists who intend to impose collectivist social controls on freedom-loving individualists like themselves—they actually have a point. And that point is simple. The world has allowed global warming to get so out of hand that amelioration measures that might have worked two or three decades ago can no longer work now. Globalization and its resultant export of the West’s industrial base to Asian countries like Korea and Bangladesh and China and India have exacerbated the problem to the point where now only large, cooperative planetary measures can work. And by “work” is meant keeping global warming below the 2^o Celsius target internationally-agreed upon recently. So, if we are to keep overall temperature rise to that 2^o C mark or less—and Klein makes clear that the International Energy Agency warns that if we don’t do this by 2017, a mere three years away, our fossil fuel economy will “lock in” truly dangerous, runaway warming—then the measures feared by the right will become mandatory. The CO₂-producing methods we’ve been so profligate with until now (indeed, even more profligate since the 1990s when scientists began their dire warnings about the perils involved in continuing to burn fossil fuels) will force governments to impose measures that could well end up ending capitalism and free markets and so-called “free” trade as we know it.

            In truth, Klein makes the case in her book that this result is all but demanded and assured. Here is how she puts it in her Introduction:

…our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature….So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate (Klein, 21-22).

Now we know why the Koch Brothers and Crosscheck and all that Republican energy was put into the recent election. These are the people who know that if the truth about global warming is allowed to reassert itself (Klein points out that as recently as 2007, a Harris poll found 71% of Americans believing that burning fossil fuel alters the climate), they and their whole economic system, their whole wealth system, their whole belief system, their entire worldview, is doomed. As Klein puts it beautifully a bit later, “Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests” (41). And it does; because the threat of global warming demands one thing above all: collective action by the world’s nations, especially the nations that have profited most from burning fossil fuels, Great Britain, Europe in general, and the United States of America. And collective action, regulation, environmentally-based action to preserve the planet from the massive changes to life that excessive warming will unleash, is already unleashing, goes against everything conservatives purport to believe.

            So we understand why Mitch McConnell and John Boehner announced what their preferred agendas would include: putting an end to EPA interference in coal and other energy production (like fracking), passing the laws to enable the Keystone pipeline to bring all that tar sands sludge into the U.S. and through New Orleans, and fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All are intended to energize the energy-wasting, globalized capitalist system which fuels their wealth and success. Naomi Klein is particularly revelatory about how trade rules and the WTO (World Trade Organization) fits into this diabolical system. Recently, a case came before the WTO relating to both trade and solar panels produced in Ontario, Canada. The solar company was/is run by Paolo Maccario, an Italian businessman who moved his solar factory to Ontario in 2010 due to its Green Energy and Green Economy Act to promote the production of renewable energy there. Besides providing subsidies to green companies, the Act ensured that a percentage of the workers and the materials (between 40% and 60%) companies used were local to Ontario. This made sense, especially after the economic crisis that had earlier devastated the province. The plan worked quite well, and by 2012, Ontario was the largest solar producer in Canada, with only one coal-fired plant left.  There was a fly in the ointment, though: the WTO rules about discrimination against outside producers. Japan and then the European Union brought claims against Ontario’s requirement for those percentages to be sourced locally, saying that this requirement would “discriminate against equipment for renewable energy generation facilities produced outside Ontario.” That is, by Japan and the Europeans. And the WTO agreed, ruling against Canada that the buy-local rules were illegal. Ontario then had no choice but to void the local-content rules that were the heart of the program, and Maccario’s solar operation—by common consent producing the best solar panels anywhere—had to pull back and suspend all its plans for expansion.

            Thus, the “national treatment” rules in almost all free-trade agreements (and they will operate in the Trans Pacific Partnership that the Congress wants to vote on right away, and which Barack Obama is even now trying to facilitate on his Asia trip) work directly against local laws that are intended to support green manufacturing to help and heal the environment. It is an absurdity. But that is what the free-marketeers—i.e. the multinational corporations who rule the world these days—have worked day and night to achieve. Trade trumps the planet. That would seem to be their motto. And it is happening in every nation, all the time. Klein cites another example from 2012, when an oil company decided to use NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement so beloved of our politicians) to challenge Quebec’s fracking moratorium, “claiming that it robbed the company of its right to drill for gas in the province” (72). As Klein sums it up,

To allow arcane trade law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future, is a special kind of madness.

            And it is. Madness. But then, what is one to think of another outcome of the recent Republican victory in the Senate: that, since the majority party selects committee chairmen from its members, the new head of the Senate’s Committee on the Environment and Public Works will be none other than the chief denialist in the U.S. Congress, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Inhofe is the author of the book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. He has said things like “God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous;” and that the temperature increases from global warming “may have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives.” In any country but the United States, putting such a person at the head of such a critical committee would be considered madness indeed. But here we are, with Inhofe poised to take over from Senator Barbara Boxer as head of the committee most responsible for laws related to our environment and the greatest threat to the planet in history.

            So that’s the ultimate skinny on the last election. The most deranged inmates are now in control of the asylum.

Lawrence DiStasi

But Is It Food?

A recent article by Dr. Mercola (June 3, www.nationofchange.org) exposed the formation of a new group, the Alliance to Feed the Future, purporting to “balance the public dialogue on modern agriculture and large-scale food production.” What they are, of course, is a front group of over 50 corporations and organizations devoted to burying the bad publicity about America’s food production coming from books like Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss, and Pandora’s Lunchbox by Melanie Warner. Representing multinational food, biotech, and chemical companies who stand to lose billions if Americans ever wake up to the scandal that is the “foods” they eat, the consortium adopts the tried and tested method of public relations bullshit that has given them their billions up to now: pretend to be concerned about the public’s health, about feeding a hungry world, about caring for people—by pretending to tell the “real story and dispel misperceptions about modern food production technology.” Ah yes, dispel misperceptions. Tell the real story. Believe that, and there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

            From one angle, though, this is good news. Clearly, the hucksters are worried by the books mentioned above. I’ve already written about Moss’s book. Here I’ll go into some highlights of Melanie Warner’s book, Pandora’s Lunchbox. Like Moss’s, it is at once revealing and infuriating because it lays bare more of the story—this from the chemical additives side—of the crap that is being purveyed to the largely unsuspecting American public. My guess is that in a hundred years, when scholars look back at these times (assuming there is anyone left), they’ll scratch their heads in amazement that Americans could have been so stupid as to eat the adulterated puke sold to them as food. Actually, the question of whether this stuff can be called “food” is a good place to begin. And amazingly, it begins with those conservative darlings, the Koch brothers. Yes, the very same scoundrels who are behind several right-wing think tanks and the election of Scott Walker as governor of Wisconsin, are also behind the fracking process that gave us the Milk Protein Concentrate that now infests cheeses and milk and frozen pizzas and whipped toppings. Not surprisingly, it is an industrial process—a spinoff of the method used to crack crude oil (the Koch’s main business) into various hydrocarbon molecules to give us gasoline. Koch Membrane Systems, that is, developed “highly sophisticated membranes made from a type of plastic called polyethersulfone” to produce the ultrafiltration and microfiltration technology that can take milk apart by “separating it into molecular-sized fractions.” Then it can be made into new ingredients for processed foods: milk protein concentrate to help thicken yogurt and replace real cheese in Kraft’s Singles; whey protein concentrate to give us low-fat ice cream and half and half; casein and caseinate to yield imitation cheese for frozen pizzas and whipped toppings. Of course, the FDA, in a rare moment of conscience in 2002, told Kraft that rules for processed cheese don’t allow the use of milk protein concentrate. Probably figuring that Americans don’t read labels anyway, Kraft responded by simply changing their label: in very small letters, their individually-wrapped Singles now say “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product” rather than “cheese food.” Product, not food. It could stand for the entire American food industry—though neither McDonald’s nor Burger King calls their specialties “cheese-product burgers.” People might find that unappetizing.

            Melanie Warner caps this rather horrifying story with the question: But is it cheese? Loaded with twice the amount of sodium as Cabot Cheddar (no less than 10 sodium-based chemicals are used as emulsifiers, acidity regulators, preservatives and god knows what else), the “cheese” product called Singles is made to last. Possibly worse than the additives is what gets destroyed in the machining of such a product: the beneficial bacteria, called probiotics, that real cheese has as a consequence of its formation in the first place, and its aging in the second place (the longer a cheese ages, the greater the number of living organisms it has). These living bacteria in cheese feed on lactose, breaking it down so we eaters don’t have to. They contribute in other ways to our stomach microbiota, which aid in digestion to such a degree that some researchers call the microbiota of the gastrointestinal tract “an essential organ on par with the brain.” The bacteria there outnumber the cells in our entire body, and contain a hundred times more genes than the human genome; we could not eat without them. Cheese bacteria are even thought to ward off infection and stabilize blood pressure. And the process that produces “processed cheese product” is specifically designed to kill them off. Insane? Of course; but a “cheese product” whose bacteria is killed off doesn’t spoil. It lasts forever. So that’s what you get in your gut from Kraft.

            This is the central idea in Warner’s book (she calls it a paradox; it is really a massive understatement): “the fact that nutrition and convenience are sometimes deeply at odds” (59). And the conflict happens because of the violent industrial processes that are used to convert real foods (like oats, milk, wheat, chicken) into malleable and long-lasting “products.” The fracking of milk is one example. Another is what happens to grains to make Cheerios, Froot Loops, and Cheetos. As I said in my last post, my father refused to allow American cereals in our house, instead buying us wheat germ, which he insisted was the healthiest part of the wheat and which was routinely removed from commercial grains and flours. He was right. Though Harvey Kellogg—who invented the original Corn Flakes—was a health nut, his brother W.K. was a marketer who really built the giant company. First he ‘improved’ Corn Flakes by removing the germ as well as the bran from the corn, leaving only the starchy center. He did this to make the cereal longer lasting: the enzymes in the beneficial germ cause corn and wheat oils to go rancid. But that was only the beginning. The real killer process came later. Known as “extrusion,” it takes place in huge machines that Warner describes as “oversized jackhammers.” Inside a long barrel, “starch, sugar and protein molecules are ripped apart by twisting screws that generate large amounts of heat and pressure” in a process referred to as “plasticization.” (You couldn’t invent such apt terminology!) This precisely describes the “harsh and nutritionally devastating way of processing cereal”, which “swells the starch granule,” until it breaks, “spilling its guts into the solution it’s in,” thus forming a thick, homogenized mass that can then be molded into any “fun” shape the maker wants. Cheerios. Alpha Bits. The only problem is that the nutrients that are lost in the process are those essential vitamins A, B1, C, E, and folate. Nor are the nutrients the only things that “flash off” in the production: so too does natural flavor, color, and everything else of value. All these are then put back in—in their industrially isolated form, of course—so the resulting construct tastes and looks less like cardboard, and can be advertised as “super-nutritious” cereal.

            Nor is this all. The “mush” that is shaped into “cereal” no longer has the crunch or fiber our stomachs have evolved to work on in digestion. Warner writes that this

“appears profoundly to alter energy metabolism and the dynamics of hunger and satiety. When starches arrive in our stomachs already broken down, they enter our bloodstream rapidly (sugar rush), causing a spike in insulin and potentially fostering a dynamic that can lead to the condition known as insulin resistance, which is a precursor to type II diabetes (64).

Rats fed on 40 brands of such cereal for 12 weeks showed countless nutritional deficiencies, lacking among other things the key phytochemicals like carotenoids, flavonols, and polyphenols. Of course, food scientists are busy synthesizing all these things, including a fake fiber that is now being added to cookies and other snacks—this time by rescuing waste water from french fry factories, isolating the starch leached off from the fried potatoes, and then treating the starch with chemicals to “strengthen the joints between molecules so they can’t be broken during digestion.” This synthetic “fiber” mimics the action of fiber requiring more digestive action, but is it really fiber? The World Health Organization has doubts, as does the Institute of Medicine; though the FDA, of course, approves.

            I could go on. I could write about the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) scandal, where the FDA, faced with the 5,000 or so additives in food, decided in 1958 that some of these, like spices, salt, vinegar, and yeast, were well-known enough to be GRAS, and therefore wouldn’t need to be submitted for full review. Except that food companies began slipping other chemicals through this loophole. As if this weren’t bad enough, in 1997, the GRAS rules were eased even more, so that a company using a new additive could simply assess its safety on its own, and notify the FDA that it was safe. So at this moment, just about anything goes. Or the horrors of soy, especially soybean oil—now used almost exclusively to fry those French fries everyone loves so much, but which has toxic aldehydes “so reactive that they can interfere with both enzyme and hormone production as well as protein synthesis” (137). Soy oil, by the way, is made with hexane—the fraction of crude oil used to make gasoline (again, not because it’s the only process, but because hexane allows the extraction of 99% of the oil from soybeans, rather than the previous 70%!) Not to worry, though; Monsanto and DuPont are even now creating a genetically modified soybean to make the oil’s profile more like olive oil. Of course, that won’t help the omega 6 problem, but then, one can’t have everything. Oh, and soy protein, produced mostly by a corporation called Solae, is used everywhere to “bulk up” meats and keep them juicier longer—which Solae describes as being necessary for meats going through “high abuse circumstances.” Like the chicken made by Tyson, which is pounded and beaten under high pressure to the point where the resulting mush can be bulked up with soy protein (no one knows in what amount) and shaped to make its dinosaur nuggets, BBQ Chicken Chips and Popcorn Chicken Bites all the kids in school lunch programs love so much.

            But I think you get the picture. The American food industry is a virtual war machine, beating and pounding and extruding natural foods (well, sort of natural; the mayhem that’s perpetrated on natural grains in GM and pesticide and herbicide farming constitutes a crime against nature even before it gets to the Kellogg’s and Kraft’s of our world) into the living death that is processed food. No wonder those who eat it come to resemble zombies so much. This really gets to the final point of Warner’s book. She points out that even where the rare food executive tries to focus on nutrition and health, the deck is so stacked in favor of profits that it is impossible. In 2011, for example, a new head of Pepsico named Indra Nooyi, tried to remove artificial ingredients from their snack products like Tostitos, emphasized sales of fruit and vegetable drinks, and gave talks about healthy snacks and drinks. Then, according to Warner, “investors and Pepsi bottlers freaked out.” In a 2011 report in Beverage Digest, Pepsi-Cola, the company standard, had slipped to third most popular beverage behind both Coke and Diet Coke. Analysts attributed the drop to “increased focus on its better-for-you portfolio.” And one Pepsi bottler put it all in perspective with this complaint: “Is she (Nooyi) ashamed of selling carbonated sugar water?” Nooyi, as expected, did a 180, initiating a huge advertising campaign to restore the primacy of “carbonated sugar water.” The moral of the story: morality is for losers. The only path for an American corporation is the constant battle to be Number 1.

            What Warner does with this story, though, is to let corporations off the hook. She essentially ends her book with the truism that Americans cannot expect corporate food manufacturers to do anything other than what they are now doing—giving the public what it appears to want, and seeking ever-larger profits doing it. Those that try a different tack are quickly punished by loss of sales and profits and revolts from their stockholders. Therefore, it is up to mothers and families to get healthy: “the choice about what we feed ourselves and our children is ultimately ours,” concludes Warner.

            This is true, of course. But Warner herself has shown, chapter and verse, how the deck is heavily stacked against the consumer. Corporations invest billions of dollars to con harried mothers into buying easily prepared (mostly pre-prepared) foods, processed foods heightened with chemicals that mimic and often out-perform natural tastes, in a massive fakery that few can resist. They are aided by government agencies that fear antagonizing the huge businesses that they depend on, and thus validate their piracy. What is needed, in the face of all this, is outrage. American consumers need to be outraged by the selling and promotion of “carbonated sugar water.” They need to be outraged by the massive advertising that convinces their children from their earliest years that food is “fun,” that food is “sweet,” that food comes in plastic from machines rather than from the good earth. They need to be outraged by being the subjects of a massive experiment in the chemicalization of food, of the poisoning of their bodies. Then they need to be make their outrage known—to the representatives at both the state and national levels, to the agencies charged with protecting their food, the FDA and the USDA, to the reporters who mostly remain silent about the scandal that is the American food industry, to the food industry itself—up to and including demanding jail terms for executives who continue to feed them poison. And then they need to stop buying the shit that is fed to them and return, by whatever means necessary, to the knowledge of what real food really is. And the practice of preparing it, eating it, enjoying it as it was meant to be enjoyed before these purveyors of adulterated slop got a prime place at their table.

Lawrence DiStasi

Capitalism on Life Support

There are increasing numbers of thinkers who seem to be coming to similar conclusions about our economic system, i.e., that capitalism, which only a few short years ago was being hailed as the greatest economic system ever conceived, with no rivals and no sign of anything ever replacing it, is now near, if not collapse, then serious revision. The latest foray into this line of thinking comes from Jerry Mander’s latest book, The Capitalism Papers (Counterpoint: 2012). Though Mander outlines several key structural problems with capitalism as we know it (amoral, antidemocratic, dependent on war and inequality, and unconducive to happiness), the most serious problem Mander focuses on is capitalism’s need to grow. Growth is the soft underbelly of capitalism, at least in the 21^st century. And the reason growth is problematic, which I’ve addressed before, is that a constantly growing economy—which virtually every politician and economist always calls for as the solution to our problems—can no longer be sustained by the earth. Growing the economy is shrinking the ecology. We are running out of everything that capitalism needs and plunders from the earth—its soil, its fish, its water, its minerals, its fossil fuels, its plants and animals. For centuries, capitalists could steal these natural resources without fear of depletion, because there always seemed to be more. The entire “new world” was a bonanza of new resources, and within a short time of its “discovery” was being plundered for each of them in turn: timber, iron ore, precious and other metals, oil deposits, topsoil itself, and so on. It might even be said that the “discovery” of all this wealth gave the world (i.e. European nations devoted to exploitation) a false sense of security. No one could ever exhaust so fantastic a bounty of natural resources as the north and south American continents possessed.

            Alas, depletion has come to pass. Worse, along with the depletion has come the poisoning of what is left via chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and, with the increased burning of fossil fuels, the menace of global warming due to the accumulation of CO₂ as combustion’s inevitable by-product. And all of this depletion is driven to ever more insane levels by the form of corporate capitalism that has prevailed for a century—“never-ending wealth accumulation, laissez-faire governance, the free movement of capital, strict hierarchies, and manipulation of all political contexts that might otherwise seek to control it.” Nor are these simply aspects of some bad apples in the corporate barrel. Mander, who himself spent his early years as a capitalist running his own advertising firm, points out that the structure of corporations demands fealty to one thing only: ever-expanding profit. Even if there were a few corporate executives willing to make moral decisions, they could not do so because their duty to their stockholders demands policies and actions that increase profits and hence stock prices. Mander says it this way: “A corporation is itself essentially a machine…in which human morality is anomalous” (61). Or again, “Whatever the personal feelings and inclinations of employees who work for it, the priorities of the corporate entity are always the same, focused like a laser on profit, growth, self-interest, economic domination, accumulation of capital, and shareholder benefits” (60). In other words, the problem lies at the very heart of corporate capitalism, and this very core puts it at odds not only with human morality and well-being, but with the very Nature upon which it depends for its resources:

            What is exquisitely clear is that the inherent aspects of capitalism, especially when operating on a large scale, make it structurally incompatible with the survival of nature, the well being of humans, and of the society we have tried to build around it. (14)

            Of course, the immediate question becomes, well, if this structure is so productive of negatives, why don’t people or governments change it? That answer, as we all probably know by now, is that corporate capitalism, being the accumulation of capital (money), uses that money to keep itself in place in a very simple way: It buys the government under which it operates. In some cases, it overwhelms whole nations with rules (such as those promulgated by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization) that make it impossible for even a nation to survive unless it knuckles under to the exploitative export economy it might otherwise seek to avoid. Loans from the World Bank are conditioned on turning what might have once been a self-sufficient national economy (with its people feeding themselves) into an export economy focused on cash crops or cheap goods for trade. The beneficiaries are, of course, the corporations that profit from those traded goods. Nations that refuse are targeted as “socialist” or “communist” as in the case of Venezuela or Bolivia or Cuba. Domestically, the power of our billionaires to shape and control legislation becomes so pervasive that democracy degenerates into a sick joke. The Koch Brothers, with a combined net worth of $42 billion, finance not only think-tanks promoting their agenda, and organizations and scientists who cast doubt on global warming science, but also allegedly ‘grass-roots’ movements like the Tea Party to make it appear that the ‘people’ are on their side. Sheldon Adelson buys a politician like Newt Gingrich outright, and singlehandedly keeps him in the running for the Republican presidential nomination. He also, through the millions he gives to Republican senators, all but derails the nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense—because of less-than-fawning remarks the latter once made about Israel. Mander tells us a vignette relating to this. Doug Tompkins, who made a fortune with the Esprit corporation, turned his millions to environmental causes by supporting foundations devoted to projects like saving the rain forests. Mander, hired by Tompkins to run one of his operations, at one point gave Tompkins his best advice: instead of investing in think-tanks and foundations, invest in buying a senator or representative or several; then they can carry the legislation you really must have in order to accomplish something. Tompkins was revolted by the prospect, and refused. But the point was clear: the United States government, especially after the Citizens United decision, is up for sale. The people, with their votes, mean hardly anything anymore. The agenda and the candidates are designed, set, activated and accomplished by lobbyists working on behalf of banks, Wall Street brokers, and major players in corporate America.

            The reason, in large part, can be traced to television. Here is where Mander is at his best, because, having worked in advertising for much of his adult life, he knows whereof he speaks. Television now controls almost the entire political (and economic/mental) life of America and the rest of the world. This is because any candidate must advertise on TV if he is to have even a chance to compete for state or national office. The amounts needed to finance TV commercials are staggering. In the last election, President Obama spent nearly a billion dollars to win his re-election. For members of Congress, the demand is equally insatiable: to finance an election, and then a re-election, a Congressperson must begin fundraising for the next campaign the very day he/she is elected. This critical need for money gives big corporate donors the inside track where influence is concerned, and so allows democracy to be bought and sold in broad daylight. It goes without saying that the interests of such big money donors do not usually accord with the health of most human beings or the planet itself.

            Mander’s chapter on the influence of television—not only in securing elections, but in shaping the daily life and thought of the entire planet, and thereby convincing people that corporate capitalism and its useless products offer the best of all possible worlds—is worth the price of the book alone. He calls it “The Privatization of Consciousness,” and what he means is that modern consciousness, far from being shaped by parents or families or a common vision of what it means to be human, is shaped, in private and for private ends, by television advertising. And of course the private ends to which television advertising owes its fealty and dedicates its power is corporate capitalism. It is essentially a one-way street: corporate advertisers speak, and everyone else has to listen. Mander traces this development to the need, right after WWII, of American corporations to make use of factories lying idle with no armaments to produce. What could possibly re-occupy all that production capacity? Consumer goods; consumers would have to be persuaded to buy more and more. The situation was similar to that following WWI, only this time, a new powerful medium was ready to be used: television and the images it broadcast. As Mander puts it, advertising has

effectively reshaped the consciousness of the United States and the entire planet: our self-image, the way we aspire to live, our habits, our thoughts, our references, desires, memories. (175)

In dollar terms, total U.S. advertising amounted to a mere $2 billion in 1940, but by 2010, the total had skyrocketed to $150 billion, most of it dedicated to getting you to buy what you do not need (what you do need, like food, water, basic clothing, requires no advertising.)

Most important of all is Mander’s discussion not only about how pervasive TV viewing is, even among infants, but how powerful it is even with those, and I include myself among them, who think they are immune to its influence. The power lies in the way TV is able to embed images in our brains, unimpeded by either logic or our belief in our ability to resist. It’s evolutionary: we have evolved to believe what we see. Equally important, images do not communicate through the language of logic; rather “Images ride a freeway into your brain and remain there permanently. No thought is involved.” You may say, “I don’t believe this,” but the images remain anyway. This is what Mander’s onetime partner, Howard Gossage, called the “dirty little secret” of advertisers: that their “silly superficial meaningless trivial imagery nonetheless goes into your brain and doesn’t come back out. Once in, you can’t get rid of the images.” To test this, just think “Jolly Green Giant” or “Ronald McDonald” or that little green Geico gecko. And note that the images don’t make any claims about their products nor do they try to persuade you about their value in any way: all is association, imagery, suggestion. As Mander puts it:

…the problem is the image itself. Once it is ingested, it becomes our frame of reference. Over time, we begin to imitate the image. We slowly begin to merge with the imagery…We absorb the advertising. We become what we see. And we share its values. (183)

Of course, when it comes to political advertising, the same principles apply, and are

being used more and more effectively. As an example, Mander cites the case of the swift boating of John Kerry when he ran for president. The commercials planted an image in the public’s mind that had almost no relation to the truth. But the truth didn’t matter. It was the images that mattered, and that Kerry failed to respond to early on, thinking they were so preposterous no one would believe them. He was wrong. The images took hold, unrefuted, and by the time Kerry started to hold press conferences to logically refute them, the game was lost. And he lost.

            Mander’s answer to this is the answer provided in several Scandinavian countries. Paid political advertising is banned in electoral campaigns, and candidates are all provided with equal amounts of free time on television. I have proposed this myself. But as Mander notes, “It would be nearly impossible to implement such a system in the United States, where the television industry depends on the income and has the lobbying power to demand it.” It now also has Citizens United. Still, it’s one of his major recommendations for finding an alternative to our present corporate capitalist system. There are many others, including cooperatives, like those that started in Mondragon Spain, and local businesses that are legally prevented from going anything like global. But it may be that short of a serious crisis and revolution, none of these suggestions has any more chance of working than free TV time for candidates. The power of corporate capitalism is simply too great right now. On the other hand, the residual anger and frustration over the financial collapse and bailout of the very banks who brought it on five years ago, and the increasing public knowledge of how virtually every politician is bought and paid for by corporate cash, may soon start to result in something that no one can prevent. I for one certainly hope so. And just the fact that what would have been anathema a few years ago—the questioning of free markets, globalization, capitalism itself, and the actual mention of heresies like socialism and Marxism—has now become more and more common, suggests that something is happening here, Mr. Jones.  And no one quite knows, yet, what it is.

Lawrence DiStasi