Month: September 2003

"The Only Minor Difference"

After People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ travelling “Holocaust On Your Plate” display reached Washington state in August, The Spokesman Review published a scathing op-ed whose title accurately summed up the display — “PETA Stoops to New Lows With Exhibit.”

This as too much for animal rights activist Jim Robertson who, in a letter-to-the-editor, referred to the author that op-ed as an “imbecile” and added that (emphasis added),

If he had looked at the display with half an open mind, he should have seen that the parallels between the Holocaust and the treatment and mass murder of billions of factory-farmed animals are numerous — the only minor difference being the victims’ species. For example, while it dehumanized Jews to be herded onto “cattle cars” and kept in camps away from anything familiar to them, factory-farmed chickens are not only painfully debeaked, they are dechickenized — forced to live their entire lives in windowless barns with less space between them than plants in a greenhouse.

It almost makes you wonder how the Jews dared complain about being carted off in overcrowded rail cars — that was nothing compared to what the chickens have to endure.

Source:

PETA display’s comparisons valid. Jim Robertson, Letter-to-the-Editor, Spokesman Review (Washington), August 13, 2003.

Schwarzenegger vs. PETA

The San Francisco Chronicle reported in August that Arnold Schwarzenegger had asked People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to remove from their site a quote from Schwarzenegger that appears in the film, “Pumping Iron.”

In the documentary about the Mr. Universe competition, Schwarzenegger tells the filmmakers that “Milk is for babies.”

PETA has a page on its MilkSucks.Com web site in which it tries to link Schwarzenegger’s 26-year-old statement to PETA’s nonsensical claims about milk. In an effort to milk the media phenomenon over the California governor recall effort, PETA also apparently is trying to place a billboard featuring a photograph of Schwarzenegger with the “Milk is for babies” quote.

The Chronicle quoted an unnamed PETA source as saying,

That quote has been up for a long time and we suspect that they’re just trying to get it removed now because he doesn’t want to upset the dairy industry. It’s utterly ridiculous, so to speak.

Sources:

Arnold’s Campaign Concerns. San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 2003.

Pumping Iron, Dumping Milk. Press Release, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Undated.

Pacific Lumber's Rod Coronado Advertisements

Back in April, an amusing controversy broke out in Humboldt County, California over ads taken out by Pacific Lumber specifically targeting convicted animal rights extremist Rodney Coronado.

Coronado lives in Humboldt County these days and has apparently been quite active in a local campaign designed to stop Pacific Lumber from harvesting trees from an old-growth forest it owns.

Pacific Lumber paid for television, radio and newspaper ads that pointed out Coronado’s conviction for firebombing a Michigan State University research lab. The ads rightly noted that Coronado had in the past participated in and advocated for, “damaging property, endangering lives and terrorizing innocent people.”

The ad also included quotes from Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to contrast their version of nonviolence with what Coronado and his fellow extremists consider to be “nonviolence.”

At least one radio station, KHUM-FM, originally ran the advertisements but later dropped them arguing that they were too “inflammatory.” Of course setting a fire to a building is inflammatory. Simply telling people about a convicted arson is not.

An article on the ads in the North Coast Journal noted, in fact, that Coronado continues his past behavior,

Coronado, who has advocated property destruction against Pacific Lumber in the past, did not claim involvement in the apparent vandalizations of a front-end loader in the Freshwater area a few weeks ago. But he noted that the sabotage, if that’s what it was, occurred immediately after the resumption of helicopter logging. “If I was a resident in an area and I saw Pacific Lumber cutting down trees and taking them away with this helicopter, that would be a point where I might cross the line and say, ‘Screw this company.'”

Coronado seems to have had no problem finding like-minded people in the area. As a Pacific Lumber spokesman noted, the folks carrying out protests against Pacific Lumber were angered that the company tied them with Coronado, but on the other hand many of the protesters embrace Coronado. For example, here’s the North Coast Journal quoting one of these geniuses,

Lodgepole, a leader among the Greenwood Heights tree-sitters, said that Coronado is “a really passionate guy, and that can be twisted to seem like violent.” Lodgepole characterized the PALCO ads as “inaccurate” and “slanderous.”

“It’s total lies,” he said. “They’re holding a whole group of people responsible for one person’s action.”

Okay, lets see if we can follow the logic here. When Pacific Lumber says that Coronado is a convicted arsonist who advocates and participates in damaging property, etc., that is a total lie, except when its true in which case the evil company is “twisting” Coronado’s firebombing of a laboratory to make it “seem like violent.” And, on top of that, where would they ever get the idea that other people agree with Coronado’s views that burning down a building is a nonviolent act.

Coronado is apparently working with Earth First! now, among other things, and a press release apparently written by him went out under Earth First!’s imprimatur in April as well. The press release was pretty dull, except for an amusing final paragraph,

PL is also the target of a lawsuit by the Martin Luther King Jr. Society which is suing the company for the use of King’s image in their ad campaign which states, “Let their words speak for themselves.” The ads feature quotes from a lecture Coronado gave in Washington D.C. at American University in January discussing the legitimacy and use of illegal activities in history by social change movements. “This kind of attack on free speech should send chills to those who believe in our constitutional rights. Corporations like PL would love nothing more than to silence, through intimidation, outspoken critics who historically serve a vital role in effecting [sic] positive social and environmental changes in our society in a different time,” Coronado stated.

Which makes it all clear. Quoting someone accurately in an advertisement — an attack on free speech and intimidation. Firebombing a laboratory — nonviolent action.

Like I’ve said before, the more Coronado talks, the better I sleep at night.

Source:

Timber Company and Tree-Sitters: Can’t Beat ‘Em? Smear ‘Em! Press Release, Earth First!, April 23, 2003.

Eco-terrorism in Humboldt? PL ads spark controversy. Bob Dornan, North Coast Journal, April 24, 2003.

In Defense of Martha Stewart

Reason is the only magazine that I actually go out and buy even though I usually read all of the content first on their web site. Why? Because of excellent stories like Michael McMenamin’s St. Martha: Why Martha Stewart should go to heaven and the SEC
should go to hell.

Like many other libertarian-oriented folks, McMenamin argues that insider trading should not really be a crime in the first place — or, if it is to be a crime, the govenment should at least be required to define exactly what constitutes insider trading.

But you don’t have to go that far to realize there’s something a bit odd about the prosecution of Stewart. After all, the feds decided not to bring criminal charges of insider trading against Stewart (although it is pressing a civil case on those charges). Instead, the most serious criminal charge she faces is for saying publicly that she was not guilty of violating insider trading laws.

Yes, you read that right — Stewart is being prosecuted for saying she was innocent of a crime for which she was never charged. Welcome to the vagaries of securities law! As McMenamin writes,

The most serious criminal charge against her is not perjury or insider trading but securities fraud, based on the fact that she denied to the press, personally and through her lawyers, that she had engaged in insider trading. This was done, the feds say, not for the purpose of clearing her name, but only to prop up the stock price of her own publicly traded company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In other words, her crime is claiming to be innocent of a crime with which she was never charged.

As for the SECÂ’s civil case, it hinges on an elastic understanding of insider trading, an offense Congress has never defined. The justification for the ban on insider trading, which makes little economic or legal sense, is just as murky as the behavior covered by it. Given the difficulty of figuring out exactly what constitutes insider trading (let alone why itÂ’s illegal), it is entirely possible that Stewart and her lawyers werenÂ’t sure whether she had broken the rules. In any event, under existing case law, itÂ’s clear that she didnÂ’t.

McMenamin also goes in-depth about the heavy handed way in which Stewart is being treated compared to the relatively light treatment of other defendants who clearly engaged in more clearcut cases of large-scale insider trading.

Source:

St. Martha: Why Martha Stewart should go to heaven and the SEC
should go to hell. Michael McMenamin, Reason, October 2003.

Library Settles Internet Sexual Harassment Case

A Minneapolis decided in August to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against it by 12 librarians. The case nails the final coffin in any pretension that sexual harassment law is anything but a call to censorship.

The librarians sued because the Minneapolis library decided to offer unfiltered Internet access. Inevitably some patrons of the library chose to use the Internet to view pornography.

At which point the librarians sued claiming that their exposure to the pornography viewed by library patrons constituted a hostile working environment.

The federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission agreed in 2001 that there was probably cause that exposure to the INtenret pornography constituted a hostile working environment, but the Justice Department declined to sue the library on behalf of the plaintiffs. So they hired an attorney to pursue the case.

The library decided to settle by paying the librarians $435,000 and likely adding restrictions on Internet access for library patrons.

As Eugene Volokh noted in an article on the case back in 2001 for Reason, this case could have far reaching impact,

This is just the latest great leap forward for harassment law. Harassment law already forces employers to suppress sexually suggestive displays (not by any means limited to pornography), sexual jokes, politically offensive statements, and religious proselytizing.

During the Clinton scandals, employment experts sensibly suggested that employers had to suppress Clinton-Lewinsky jokes, because such jokes might have helped create a “sexually hostile work environment.” The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has argued that “educational harassment law” — a body of law developed by analogy to workplace harassment law — requires universities to implement student speech codes. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission has likewise argued that public accommodations harassment law outlaws American Indian team names and mascots, on the grounds that such symbols are racially offensive. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination forced a Boston bar to take down a display that supposedly expressed racist viewpoints.

Ah what a brave new world harassment law has opened up.

Sources:

Library settles with workers who sued over hostile work environment. WCCO.Com, August 15, 2003.

U.S. House Approves Funds to Combat Animal Fighting

On July 14 the U.S. House of Representatives approved an amendment to the Agricultural Appropriations bill that would take $800,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s budget for building repair and maintenance and instead allocate it to focus on enforcement of animal fighting laws.

The Blumenauer-Tancredo Animal Fighting Amendment passed the House on a vote of 222-179, but still must be added to the Senate’s version of the Agricultural Appropriations bill or it will likely be removed by the conference committee on the bill.

There was a rather spirited debate on the floor of the House over the wisdom of taking the money away from the USDA’s buildings fund and applying it to animal fighting enforcement. Rep. Henry Bonilla (R-Texas) urged the House to defeat the measure arguing that it was simply an attempt by some legislators to appease the Humane Society of the United States,

The Inspector General´s office has told us that enforcement of this will be done at a minimal level since this is a misdemeanor offense. Now, one could argue the pluses and minuses on whether it should be a more serious offense, but these are misdemeanors that are dealt with by local law enforcement agencies from around the country, and they cannot afford to devote their resources at the IG level because of this reason. The IG tells us that one case alone could cost $800,000.

Second, one of the reasons that debating this amendment today is that the Humane of the United States points out that this vote will be counted

year. The only reason that this item is even on their scorecard is that we have addressed all other of their concerns in this bill. We provided a $437,000 increase for animal welfare, $1.1 million more for regulatory enforcement in the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and fully funded the enforcement of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act in the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

If the sponsors of this amendment were serious about this, programs that the HSUS supported like the ones that I just mentioned are the ones that would be cut to pay for this amendment, but then that would force them to prioritize like the rest of us have to do.

If every Member of the House brought an amendment to the floor just because they did not get every last nickel that they wanted, we would be here all day and we could never get this bill done.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to not vote against this amendment simply because I am suggesting

, but vote against this amendment because of the following statement by an HSUS Vice
said, “The life of an ant and that of any child should be granted equal .”

This led presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), to respond,

As somebody who served in municipal government over the years, this is
came up in terms of activities that were taking place in some of the neighborhoods in my own community, and certainly people who heard about them and who were involved in the community understood that the level of violence and the level of animal cruelty was something that needed public attention.

We should have no tolerance for animal cruelty. We should have no tolerance for a system which degrades these creatures of God. And we also need to understand that, as the honorable chairman pointed out, the observation that was made official concerning the of and children, I do not think that he actually meant to equate the importance of an ant to a child, but what the statement meant to say was that all life here ought to be regarded with some degree of respect and that, in effect, when we try to come forward here and support animal welfare and support the rights of animals to not be treated cruelly, what we are doing here is, in effect, elevating our own humanity.

Like any good politician, Kucinich unsuccessfully tries to spin Michael Fox’s claim that ants and children deserve the same sort of consideration, which is not the same thing as saying that all life should be regarded “with some degree of respect.” Nice try, though, Dennis.

The full text of the debate over the amendment can be found here.