Month: May 2000

And the Winner of the 1996 Presidential Election Is … Archer Daniels Midland

ADM — Socialist Supermarket to the World

Why should the major networks have any qualm about calling the presidential winner early when it’s already
clear ADM and its CEO Dwayne Andreas are the big winners regardless of
how the race between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton turns out?

������Andreas and ADM are equal opportunity
givers. According to a Cato Institute study, ADM and its associates have
donated more than $4 million to the two major parties since the late 1970s.
In return the parties have treated ADM well, creating over $3 billion
in subsidies and special government protections according to the Cato
Institute.

������Concerned Americans don’t have
to go all the way to China to find what’s wrong with socialized agriculture;
ADM is a prime example funded by the United States government.

Price Fixers Extraordinaire

������Aside from their ubiquitous “Supermarket
to the World” commercials, ADM popped into the national consciousness
this summer when the Justice Department began investigating it for illegally
attempting to fix prices on several agricultural commodities, including
lysine, citric acid and high fructose corn syrup (one of the ingredients
in cola).

������At last report ADM was trying to
reach a settlement agreement on price-fixing charges by paying a fine
of up to $200 million to the government, while a federal grand jury was
expected to hand down criminal indictments against Michael Andreas, ADM
executive vice president, and Terrence Wilson, head of ADM’s corn-processing
division.

������ADM’s price fixing is a textbook
study about monopoly and price fixing. Although people commonly believe
monopoly and price fixing are the result of free and unfettered competition,
in fact those thrive only where governments intervene to protect firms
from competition on the marketplace. The swirl of regulations, subsidies
and special market protection enabled ADM to attempt to fix prices.

������More importantly, though, ADM executives
must think the U.S. government is being a little schizophrenic. After
all, the legislation that ADM asks for and usually receives causes much
more harm to American consumers, and does exactly what ADM is being punished
for now — it fixes prices for consumers at far higher prices than normal
market forces would allow.

������Perhaps it’s time the Justice
Department conducted an anti-trust investigation of Congress!

ADM: The Mother of All Welfare Mothers

������According to James Bovard’s
excellent study, “Archer Daniels Midland: A Case Study In Corporate
Welfare,” published by the Cato Institute, ADM is the single largest
welfare recipient in the United States. Bovard found that 43 percent of
ADM’s annual profits come from markets that simply wouldn’t
exist without subsidies or protection.

������Bovard estimates that regulations
and subsidies benefiting ADM cost the U.S. economy up to $40 billion from
1980 to 1995. According to Bovard, every $1 in profits to ADM from its
corn sweetener division costs U.S. consumers $10.

������ADM essentially earns money the
old fashion way — through government handouts.

������In a bit of hilarious irony, in 1994
the Horatio Alger Association, which according to its materials gives
awards to “individuals in our society who have succeeded in the face
of adversity,” honored Andreas for his stellar climb from poor son
of a Menonite farmer to the hardest working leech in America. Apparently
the great American dream now includes getting Congress to set up your
very own medieval fiefdom.

It’s Raining Money

������Andreas knows how the system works
and how to profit from it. He uses a vast network of friends and business
associates to funnel millions of dollars to candidates of both parties.

������One of the major recipients of Andreas’
good will has been former Republican Sen. Bob Dole. According to the Center
for Public Integrity, ADM-related donors contributed $217,800 to Dole
over his career, putting them fourth on the list of all-time career Donors
to Dole’s campaigns. In addition to the out and out contributions,
ADM also contributes to Dole and Dole-related enterprises in other ways.

������Both Bob and Elizabeth Dole have
used ADM’s corporate jet to fly them across the country. Bob Dole
reimburses ADM for the price of a first class ticket on a commercial airline
to avoid having the use of the private jet be considered a campaign contribution,
whereas Elizabeth Dole usually uses the excuse that she was flown at the
request of one charity group or another who wanted her to speak. In one
instance, several executives tagged along with Elizabeth Dole on one of
her jaunts, but her press secretary made certain to emphasize that in
no way was ADM trying to buy access to a politically connected individual.
Perhaps ADM executives simply find Elizabeth Dole a heart conversationalist.

������It’s wrong, however, to imply
this sort of graft is anything but standard operating procedure for politicians.
In fact Bill Clinton has been much more brazen than Dole.

������In June 1994 Bill Clinton received
a $100,000 check from ADM-related concerns. A few days later the Clinton
administration announced a new rule requiring gasoline sold in the 9 most
polluted cities to contain at least 30% ethanol additives by 1996. The
government’s ethanol subsidies are little more than ADM subsidies;
the company takes in up to $2.1 billion revenues solely from ethanol and
ethanol-related subsidies and regulations. In this case, though, a federal
court blocked the proposed ethanol requirement.

������Aside from Clinton and Dole, the
list of politicians who accept ADM money reads like a Who’s Who of
Washington, DC. People such as Robert Byrd, Henry Espy, Henry Hyde, Connie
Mack, Charles Robb, Arlen Specter, and others who normally disagree on
a wide range of areas all agree that what’s in ADM’s interest
is in America’s interest (not to mention politician’s financial
interests).

������For ADM, though, the price of purchasing
politicians is downright cheap. Although corn prices are currently high
and likely to remain so for the short term, the new agricultural “reform”
bill passed by the 104th Congress and signed by Clinton will deliver guaranteed
payments of billions of dollars to agribusinesses such as ADM. Not a bad
return for a few million dollar investment.

The Solution: Get Government Out of People’s Lives

������The problem with many critics of
ADM is that their solution is essentially more of the same. Magazines
such as “Mother Jones” dutifully chronicle the absurdity of
a political system that allows for corporate welfare on the scale it is
practice in the United States, but in the end call for more government
under the “right people.” Under this view, the problem is merely
that a group of ultra-rich, unenlightened and greedy people calls the
shots in Washington, DC. If only the nation would replace them with not-so-rich,
enlightened, selfless, wonderful people surely then the system would work.

������This is no more than a fairy tale.
The problem is not that the wrong people run the system; the problem is
with the system itself. A government that has the power to increase or
decrease the price of farm commodities (or any commodity for that matter)
in order to benefit some at the expense of others will inevitably be used
for precisely that purpose. The solution is not better leaders; the solution
is a better system – one that does not sell our rights and livelihoods
to the highest bidders every few years.

As long as Americans continue to tolerate the constant intervention of the government into the economy and into their lives, the result will continue to be the rule not of the people by the people, but of ADM for ADM.

It’s Getting Better All the Time: A Review of ‘Myths of Rich and Poor’

By Brian Carnell

Myths
of Rich and Poor: Why WeÂ’re Better Off Than We Think
By W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm
Amazon.Com Price: $17.50

       EveryoneÂ’s heard the glum rhetoric:
the U.S.Myths of Rich and Poor
economy is no longer as competitive as it used to be.
Young adults today will never achieve the standard of
living their parents enjoyed. Large numbers of people are doomed to work
at low-paying McJobs flipping hamburgers.
       Economist W. Michael Cox and journalist
Richard
Alm have a reply to such notions: hogwash! Their book, Myths of Rich
and Poor, presents a detailed look at economic trends over the past
25 years that demonstrates Americans are living better than ever.
       How can this possibly be when
everybody knows that wages have been stagnant since the 1970s and the
government reports that more than 13 percent of Americans continue to
live in poverty? Alm and Cox argue persuasively that the mediaÂ’s obsession
on what Americans earn is misplaced; instead they argue the real
focus should be no what Americans consume.
       Consumption figures clearly show
an America with increasing prosperity. In the third quarter of 1997, for
example, a record 66 percent of American families owned their own homes.
Forty-one percent of poor families owned their own homes. Per capita
ownership of everything from large appliances to books is on the rise,
in large part because the amount of time people must spend working to
buy goods and services keeps declining.
       The discrepancy between wages, which
are down, and consumption, which is up, is caused by the ways in which
wages are measured. First, government measures miss a lot of the money
people earn from benefits, income transfer payments and other sources.
Alm and Cox note that while wages are down, per capita personal income
has risen 1.6 percent annually since 1974.
       Second, the governmentsÂ’ official
measure of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, overestimates the extent
of inflation by as much as 1 percent. Once adjusted for this effect, the
decline in wages actually disappears and results in a real wage increase
of 12 percent since 1978.
       Alm and Cox also dispense with the
horror stories of growing income inequality. Citing a long-running study
of 50,000 Americans by researchers at the University of Michigan, Alm
and Cox note that few people stay in the bottom-fifth of income levels
for long. Of the people in the University of Michigan study who were in
the bottom fifth of income earners in 1975, only 5 percent were still
there in 1991. As Alm and Cox put it, “Â…[the] data suggest that low
income is largely a transition experience for those willing to work, a
place Americans may visit but rarely stay.” Many of those in the
bottom fifth are young people beginning their career or older Americans
who may have large asset holdings but relatively low income.
       The real message of Myths of Rich
and Poor, however, is the role that the free market plays in promoting
technological change and invention that improve the living standards of
all Americans. In a chapter appropriately titled “New and Improved,”
they note consumers today can buy many products that didnÂ’t even exist
in the early 1970s, and the 1990s versions of 1970s products are usually
much cheaper and of much higher quality. TodayÂ’s 19-inch color television
is not only much cheaper but also of vastly superior quality than one
consumers could buy in the early 1970s. Bulky calculators that cost $120
in 1972 have been replaced by wafer thin models costing $10 and less.
The improvement in performance and price of computers since 1970 has been
one of the most extraordinary economic events of this century.
       Alm and Cox characterize this constant
innovation and improvement as “churn.” But economic churn has
its downside and its detractors – for every improvement in process or
products, some special interest group pleads to be protected from superior
products. Detroit whined about Japanese cars in the 1980s. U.S. high-tech
industry complained about cheap memory chips from Asia. Today big steel
companies complain they are undercut by smaller domestic firms and large
foreign companies. And the cry is always the same – pass protectionist
legislation to save American jobs and firms.
       Alm and Cox remind us that adopting
such regulatory regimens would have meant stifling past innovations that
we now take for granted, and adopting them today would mean stifling future
innovations that today we can only begin to imagine. The constant churning
of the economy has created levels of wealth unimaginable at the beginning
of this century – today most of those in the bottom fifth of wage earners
enjoy higher consumption levels than did their middle class counterparts
only a couple generations ago.
       This point is made clear in Alm and
CoxÂ’s comparison of European economic performance with that of the United
States. Critics of the United States point to wages which are higher in
some European countries such as Germany than in the United States. But
as Alm and Cox point out, consumption figures show U.S. consumers consume
significantly more than their European counterparts – the United States
continues to lead the world in per capita ownership of everything from
dishwashers to televisions to VCRs to personal computers. How can Americans
earn less but consume more? The answer is that the wage figures arenÂ’t
very helpful since they donÂ’t take into account the cost of living. After
adjusting for this, it turns out the United States leads the world in
per capita income by a wide margin — $28,338 compared to JapanÂ’s $23,667
and GermanyÂ’s $21,594 per capita personal income.
       But the picture is even worse for
Europe since job creation has stagnated there since 1980. From 1980-1996,
for example, the United States added more than 27 million jobs. In the
same period, Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom managed to
add only 3.4 million jobs (and almost half of those were in the United
Kingdom which privatized many of its governmental functions during the
1980s). The massive regulatory apparatus in places like France and Italy
not only lower European standards of living but also hinder job creation
primarily by hindering innovation.
       Myths of Rich and Poor covers
an impressive array of issues, most of which canÂ’t be touched on in this
review, and is required reading for anyone trying to understand the economic
trends of the last 25 years.

… and E-Mail I Like

On the other hand, to balance the ad hominem attacks, I do receive a lot of
email asking for permission to recycle an essay on my web site. I actually landed
on article in an anthology this way, but for the most part it’s individuals
or groups who want to take one of my articles and reproduce it on their site.

In traditional publishing the short answer is no unless the requestor wants
to pay a fee. For example, a few weeks ago I got a nasty letter from an Associated
Press representative who demanded I remove an AP story that had been cut and
pasted into one of my discussion forums. The story included a link back to the
CNN web site where the article orignated from, but the AP representative wanted
the text removed so I complied.

I maintain a slightly different view of intellectual property. I do reserve
the right to prevent anyone from illicitly copying my material, but if you ask
nice I almost always say yes. The only time I say no is when I definitely don’t
want to be associated with the site doing the copying.

For example a couple years ago I noticed I was getting a lot of hits to my
site from what appeared to be a pornography site. When I visited their site
I was appalled. Both I and Elisabeth have written a few things about rape, and
this site had taken those essays and copied them wholesale without even trying
to change many of the links. Unfortunately the pages on rape tend to get a lot
of hits from people looking for pornographic depictions of rape situations and
this guy thought he would attract traffic by stealing our pages.

But unless you’re running a site like that, I’m generally flattered that people
would want to re-publish my stuff. Just fire off an email to me at [email protected]
with the URL for your site, along with what pages of mine you want to include
on your site.

Annoying E-Mail

I love getting feedback on the things I write — in fact I think enabling people
to give their own opinions is the most important part of running a web site.
On the other hand, there are certain questions that people ask me over and over,
usually through e-mail, that get a bit tedious to respond to (and so I usually
don’t).

The worst of these is the “What conspiracy are you working for?” variety. I
have a lot of controversial opinions and rather than do any research or actually
attempt to demonstrate that these opinions are wrong, quite a few people instead
e-mail me asking who is funding my site. I’ve been accused of being a lackey
of everyone from the big automakers (presumably because of my somewhat skeptical
views of global warming) to pharmaceutical companies because of my disdain for
the animal rights movement.

Such accusations are such archetypal examples of the ad hominem that
usually I do not even bother to reply to them but just zap such e-mail straight
into my archives folder. Ascertaining motivation (or lack thereof) provides
absolutely no information one way or the other about the validity of
an argument. Even if I were taking money from one group or another, it wouldn’t
affect the truth value of my arguments one iota.

(P.S. if you are part of a large multinational corporation who wants to lavish
millions of dollars on a small web site creator, I am eager to
sell out provided I have a legally binding contract guaranteeing me complete
editorial freedom.)

Hating the Pill

A couple weeks ago marked the 40th anniversary of the birth control pill — and in those 40 years it rivals (and probably beats) the computer as the single most important technological innovation of the last four decades. I was born well after the introduction of the Pill, and to me cheap, reliable contraceptives seem as natural and commonplace as long distance phone calls or routine air travel, which were revolutionary in their own right.

The funny thing about the Pill, though, is that ideologues throughout the political spectrum tend to hate it. The conservative version of the Pill is pretty straightforward — the Pill severed the link between sex and procreation and caused massive, largely negative, social upheaval. Writing for Frontpage.Com, for example, Chris Weinkopf (A Bitter Pill) laments that,

By effectively thwarting women’s reproductive systems, the Pill and the revolution it enabled granted sexual partners the confidence that one-night stands would not become lifetime obligations. Not surprisingly, women now complain that most men think of them as little more than sexual objects, and are unwilling to “commit.”

…by completely divorcing sex from the possibility of procreation, the Pill degraded the marital act from an expression of unconditional love, rooted in an openness to new life, to an exercise in physical and emotional gratification. This devaluation has no doubt contributed to the national rise in adultery — which experts estimates now affects at least half of all marriages — and the national divorce rate, which has more than doubled since 1960.

Weinkopf also blames the Pill for contributing to the problem of many children growing up fatherless, and complains that not only has the Pill not made a dent in the abortion rate, but that the Pill in fact is abortion. Some oral contraceptives work by inhibiting the ability of fertilized eggs from implanting on the wall of the uterus — and Weinkopf and others think interfering even with a fertilized egg at all is tantamount to murder (even though fertilized eggs often fail to implant due to any number of reasons without the Pill). Weinkopf posits some sort of active effort by “feminists [who have] succeeded for four decades in concealing from the American public … that it can cause abortions.” Perhaps there are some women who don’t know how the Pill works, though they could just read the package insert that comes with every prescription, but more likely even people concerned about the ethics of abortion don’t necessarily consider a handful of un-implanted cells to be a person.

Don’t think it’s just conservatives, though, who dislike the Pill. Radical feminists such as Mary Daly argue that the Pill is literally a poison designed by male scientists to benefit the patriarchy and make it easier to control women. In fact there is a strain of radical feminism that sees pretty much all scientific research into reproduction as a patriarchal attempt to further seize control of women.

One of the things Daly and others cite is the debate over whether or not the Pill contributes to an increased risk of some form of cancers and other side effects. While most of these risks are overblown by a media interested in hyping tales of disaster, no technology is risk free (witness the small number of men who have died because they ignored the warnings accompanying Viagra, which also causes a number of well-documented problems in certain men).

The fear of lawsuits, however, is one of the reasons that there have been so few new contraceptive drugs in the intervening years. In fact, one of the few new products that was put on the market — Norplant — immediately became the subject of a large number of lawsuits which have yet to be resolved.

It is not surprising that the Pill should have so many detractors — the Pill increased the amount of freedom that women and men had in sexual matters. As in any other area of life, freedom carries with it a great deal of responsibility and inevitably some people act irresponsibly. Yes, to some extent people have chosen to trivialize their marriage vows (though others have left bad marriages for good reasons) and too many men don’t take their responsibilities seriously.

On the other hand, the Pill also allows married couples to easily defer having children until they are older, wiser and better off financially. It allows people from turning one reckless night into a lifelong mistake.

Weinkopf, and I imagine many conservatives, finds it hard to believe Gloria Feldt’s claim that “the Pill has enabled women to take charge of … their lives,” but his real problem is that he doesn’t approve of how women (and men) have freely chosen to live their lives in the post-Pill era. In this view, he’s not all that different from the radical feminists.

Are They Really Just Spokespersons?

Are the people who act as “spokespersons” for animal rights terrorists really just innocent bystanders who happen to act as conduits for information after a crime has been committed? Or do they get advance warning of criminal actions and/or engage in the planning and execution of terrorist acts themselves?

Its that sort of line of questioning that Craig Rosebraugh is desperately trying to avoid answering. Rosebraugh is a spokesperson for the ALF/ELF has been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury regarding what he knows about a number of prominent terrorist attacks in the United States (Rosebraugh himself has been arrested a number of times at animal rights protests, and by his own account left an animal rights group he founded because of a disagreement over terrorist tactics).

Rosebraugh has been the source of communiques from animal rights and environmental terrorists involved in a number of high profiled crimes. Rosebraugh, for example, was the activists chosen by terrorists to take credit for the December 25, 1999 arson attack against a Boise Cascade regional office that did more than $1 million in damage.

In February of this year, federal agents obtained a search warrant for Rosebraugh’s apartment and apparently seized several computers and a large number of documents (including, according to an Americans for Medical Progress brief on the raid, photographs of a primate facility along with documents that appeared to come from the facility).

The grand jury has subpoenaed three times this year but refuses to testify. If he refuses to testify at a May 24, 2000 session of the grand jury, Rosebraugh could be jailed on contempt charges.

In a unintentionally hilarious press release on his behalf, the North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office pretty much made the grand jury’s case as far as why it might want to question someone who is supposedly only a “spokesperson” for the terrorists. The Liberation Front Press Office claims only to be a conduit for information, but in its press release first informs the readers that,

…you are needed to use any means necessary to send a message to the US government that destruction and exploitation of life for capitalist benefit will not be tolerated.

And then in the next paragraph, in case that message wasn’t explicit enough, the press release urges activists to protest the treatment of Rosebraugh even if that means …

…taking cover action against corporations and entities profiting off the destruction of the environment and exploitation of life, your energy is needed and necessary.

No wonder the grand jury wants to investigate these folks.

There were two other items of interest that are worth mentioning about the Liberation Front Press Office release.

First, the group actually tries to portray itself as concerned about “…the oppressive grand jury system.” Now there may indeed be genuine reasons to reform the grand jury process in the United States, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard the animal rights activists bring it up. In fact, as far as I can remember they have cheered whenever someone was indicted by this “oppressive grand jury system” for violating animal cruelty laws. Does the word “unprincipled” mean anything to these folks?

Second, they cast the attempts by the grand jury to question Rosebraugh as an attack on “freedom of speech.” This is bizarre coming from the “spokespersons” to terrorists who seem more interested in burning buildings to the ground rather than engaging in speech to attempt to persuade others to their views. To the contrary, the animal rights terrorists are interested in anything but free speech.

As PETA activist Bruce Friedrich noted many months ago, the animal rights movement has already all but lost the larger rhetorical battle in the United States. The vast majority of people in the United States today are clearly in the animal welfare camp, favoring eliminating outright cruelty to animals and favoring regulations to reduce animal suffering where it is still necessary, but still embracing the role of animal industries in their lives.

When the animal rights debate is kept on the free speech level, the activists lose, which is why they feel the need to commit acts of destruction. If they can’t actually persuade the American people of the rightness of their cause, maybe they can frighten those in animal industries to leave the business or raise the costs of staying in business to unacceptably high levels.

In this they are no different than the racists of the 1950s and 1960s who tried to use violence to forestall the change in attitudes about racial matters, or the extremists in the contemporary anti-abortion movement who also favor taking “any means necessary” to drive abortion providers out of business since they seem to have lost the larger battle to render abortion illegal (this analogy breaks down only in that respectable mainstream leaders of the anti-abortion cause are quick to denounce the terrorist element in their ranks, while the mainstream leaders in the animal rights movement see to actively court the terrorists and those who support them).

These folks aren’t interested in free speech, but rather in using classic strong arm tactics to silence anyone who dares disagree with them. If Rosebraugh indeed had advanced warning of planned criminal acts or actively participated in such planning, one can only hope a grand jury will get to the bottom of his involvement and return any appropriate indictments.

Source:

“Day of Action Against State Repression III Called for May 24.” North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office, press release, May 16, 2000.