The Meaning of Magna Carta in the Era of Privatization

Peter Linebaugh

“No free man [homo liber] shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land,” says Chapter 39 of Magna Carta.

It put King John under law.  It should do the same to government now.  And, with an eye to the future and interpreting even more deeply, those last two phrases might lead to law that comes from equals and law that begins with land, not the state.

A phrase from chapter 7 of Magna Carta, “… and she shall have in the meantime her reasonable estovers in the common,” introduces us to the principle of the commons which should become the material basis of our economies of equalization based on land

Carpenter’s Magna Carta

The principle of the commons arises in two places in the bundle of charters known together as “Magna Carta.”  One is in chapter 7 of Magna Carta (1217) and the other is the Charter of the Forest (also 1217). Despite appearances – nearly 600 pages, a glossary, a translation, a bibliography, two appendices, notes, an index, a map – David Carpenter’s Magna Carta with a New Commentary is not the disinterested, a-political, monumental, scholarly tome it seems. You won’t find “estovers in the common” in these pages, and little on the Charter of the Forest?  How can this be?

David Carpenter is a professor at King’s College, London, and a prominent scholar serving on the Parliamentary 800th anniversary committee. His father was canon of Westminster Abbey. He provides us with a kind of scholarly apostolic succession which began in 1968 with him listening with one or two others to John Mason’s lectures in the chapter house of Oxford cathedral. Mason learned from Sir Goronwy Edwards who was taught by T.F. Tout  “who in turn had been taught by Stubbs himself,” the Victorian Regius Professor of History and Bishop of Oxford! There is an unintended Monty Python element to this book, with Magna Carta replacing the holy grail.

Also in the 1960s C.F. Holt published a scholarly book on Magna Carta. Carpenter sent him a list of errors, and Holt responded with a postcard pointing out one of Carpenter’s mistakes (on the date of the death of King John).  Thus do scholars quibble on.  I among them, for I recommend that you search out William Morris’ account of John’s death, coming as it does from the folk knowledge of fourteenth century peasants.

Although Carpenter nods to “the rule of law” he is not really concerned with fundamental law as was Edward Coke, the jurist who opposed the Stuart kings, nor with natural law, or even customary law. He quantifies key words in Magna Carta such as “kingdom” (21 times) or “land” (ten times) or “England” (14 times) – but if you were to quantify “rule of law” in his book I doubt it would much exceed two or three.

He pays as much attention to “rule of law” as he does to “the great jet airplanes” taking off from Heathrow and retracting their landing gear over Runnymede.  He writes, “it is as though they are carrying the Charter to the four corners of the world.”  The Lincoln Charter (it’s “the most finely written”) was sent to USA in 1939 where it remained through the war.  Later, it toured Australia.  “Before one of its last trips, I myself saw the specially made bomb-proof container in which it was to wing its way again across the Atlantic.”  He will tell us when he has a “brainwave.”

King John was a cruel man, drowning his own nephew, Arthur, with his own hands.  He starved to death Matilda and her eldest son.  So “desperate was the mother that she had eaten her son’s cheeks.” John was one of the “Norman banditti” (Thomas Paine) who claimed the forests as their own.

These forests were in twenty of England’s counties covering one third of the kingdom.  The King and his foresters squeezed the people of the forests, and these malpractises caused rebellion. “The Charter was above all about money.  Its overwhelming aim was to restrict the king’s ability to take it from his subjects.” Thus all the provisions about various royal taxes and levies, such as tallage, aids, scutages, amercements.  The King wanted money to make war. Carpenter does not venture into the European wars and global commerce as part of the impetus behind the centralization of the state.

Instead, the description of the medieval economy relies on time-tested clichés – “rise of population,” “age of expansion” – yet he will say that it is impossible to generalize. England had a population of perhaps three and a half million people, nine-tenths of whom were peasants of whom two-fifths were unfree (villeins, serfs, bonded) and three-fifths free (rustics, cottagers, sokemen). “It offered nothing to the unfree peasant,” yet this is not quite true because the Forest Charter explicitly says no one shall suffer loss of life or limb for forest offences.  By this account, the book is about several thousand knights and about a hundred barons and earls who spoke French.

Medieval scribal skills

This is a book about documents, which is both its glory and its downfall.  We must distinguish the interpretation of documents from the interpretation of history. Like Jean Mabillon or Marc Bloch, students of medieval charters in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries respectively, the medievalist must be expert in chronology, languages, philology, epigraphy, and handwriting.  The interpretation of documents involves authentication, verification, preservation, translation, collation, and exegesis.

In contrast, the interpretation of history brings in philosophy – materialist or idealist, determinist or voluntarist; it brings in rhetoric – a grand narrative or random stories; it brings in politics too – top down history or history from bottom up. These other interpretations employ other types of evidence:  oral history, the evolution of plants and animals, archaeology, stones, tools and weapons, material artefacts of all kinds, song, poetry, even dance and body movement, Antarctic ice, radio-activity, all these open windows into the past.  For medieval history, trees were the milieu of life. Without other such sources we are bound to a kind of scribal solipsism. Still….

There is delight in watching a skilled medievalist at work, we are invited so to speak into the workshop of someone who loves his craft, and Carpenter loves Magna Carta as text and artefact. We deal with a bundle of documents such as engrossments, copies, and confirmations.  The charter sealed in 1215 was a peace treaty concluding a civil war between King and barons, at least temporarily.  The sequels were several, 1216, 1217 which contained some amendments, and 1225. Carpenter writes, “The texts of the 1225 Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest became definitive.”  He calls the 1225 version “the final and definitive Magna Carta.”  After the confirmation of 1300 two charters, the Charters of Liberty, became the first law published in England’s Statutes of the Realm.

Of the 1215 charter four engrossments survive and at least thirty-four copies. There is but a single surviving engrossment of the 1216 charter and no copies. Four engrossments of the 1217 charter and twelve copies survive, and four of the 1225 charter and twenty-three copies. The copies are found in cartularies, chronicles, and statute books and these are found in abbeys, priories, cathedrals, castles, and estates. Then there were confirmations in 1265, 1297, and 1300.

As for the four engrossments of 1215, two are preserved in the British Library, and the others are in Lincoln Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral. They are written on parchment of different sizes, one of 86 lines another of 54. It would take about eight hours to write one out. It was written in Latin and translated right away into French (the language of the rulers). It wasn’t proclaimed in English until 1300 and notwritten in English until the sixteenth century.

The commons and history disappeared

At first the Magna Carta of 1215 was not even named that, and it couldn’t have been, at least at the time, 1215. The 1217 Charter was accompanied by a second charter, the Charter of the Forest. The name Magna Carta (in maiori carta) implies the little one (in minori carta). The term “magna carta” was first used as “prompted by the second thoughts of a drafting clerk, the name Magna Carta enters history.”

The choice made among all these documents determines the outcome of interpretation. The Charter of the Forest is largely excluded, and the emendation to chapter 7 made in 1217 concerning the widow’s reasonable estovers in the common – rationabile estoverium suum interium de communii – is absent altogether. Because of this omission the principle of the commons cannot be extracted. “Estover” does not appear in this book, not in the glossary, not in the commentary on chapter seven, not in the index. These are serious flaws, and they rupture the historical continuity of interpretation – of Coke in the seventeenth century, Blackstone in the eighteenth, Stubbs in the nineteenth, MacKechnie and Holt in the twentieth century. This is disappointing.

Yet the first printed edition of Magna Carta, that of George Ferrers in 1534 includes it – “she shal haue in the meane tyme her reasonable estouers of the comen”.  Richard Thomson’s An Historical Essay on the Magna Charta of King John, early nineteenth century (1829) scholarship, translates, “As she shall have her reasonable Estover within a common term.”  Edward Coke in The second part of the institutes of the laws of England, refers to “her reasonable estovers of the common.”

Coke annotates the phrase, explaining that the word “estover” comes from the French and it refers to “things that concern the nourishment, or maintenance of man wherein is contained meat, drink, garments, and habitation.” He adds that, “When estovers are restrained to woods, it signifieth housebote, hedgebote, and ploughbote,” or as we might say estovers meant wood taken for home repairs, for fencing, or for tools. He takes it for sustenance. Coke does not mention fuel, yet wood was the principle energy source, equivalent to petroleum today. Stubbs believed estovers referred to firewood. American commentators expounded it simply, “Estovers of common were a share of the produce.”

The gloss on estovers takes us to an ecological history of English woodlands and their human uses. These depended on social class. They may be taken away, they may be restored. A strength of Carpenter’s interpretation is its emphasis on reparation (return of the forest) and the right of resistance. Forest rights or customs were subject to negotiation, and generations of local and social history in England have contributed to that chronicle; it is a local and a popular endeavor going back to the Robin Hood ballads and including the twentieth century schools of social history.

To those common rights or customs we would add those mentioned in the Charter of the Forest, chiminage, herbage, pannage, and the government of them through the swanimote courts. Assarts were bits of land cleared from the forest for arable uses. Purprestures was forest land taken for buildings. Chiminage was the right to use roads without paying tolls; herbage, the right to put cattle or sheep to graze; pannage, the right to put pigs in the forests for mast. An economy which was not based exclusively on money or commodity production could be built up from such customs, a collection of common customs.

“A merchant has merchandise, a rustic his wainage,” i.e., the seed, the ploughs, the plough team, the grain in the stalk. Economically speaking, we might call them the means of production. Without them the peasant could not be taxed, for he or she would have produced nothing to tax!  Magna Carta refers to wainage in chapters five and chapter twenty in translations of the 1215 charter, but not in the translations of the 1225 charter.

A work in progress

Can this concept not be employed in the struggle against Monsanto and ‘Frankenstein’ foods? It depends on the willingness of lawyers, advocates, barristers to make the argument. It depends on judges accepting the type of argument. It depends on legislators backing it up. These in turn depend upon the movement of those possessing seeds and who have a stake in their integrity. These people are the indigenous cultivators, from Bangla Desh to Chiapas. The world’s seed plasm is in their hands. This surely is the gloss we need to put on “the commune of the land,” a powerful phrase which Carpenter extols as a constitutional notion rather than the material reality it ought to become.

Coke referred to the two charters as “two glorious Lights.” One of these lights is put out. Like Macbeth, Carpenter is “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in”; he has allowed the 1215 charter to enclose his view.

But we may ask, why was chapter 7 emended? What difference does two years make? What had happened? War resumed, and war is a widow-maker. John was never defeated in the field in battle, and his castles remained firm. Roger of Wendover, the St. Alban’s monastic chronicler, described John’s soldiers: “The whole land was covered with these limbs of the devil like locusts, who assembled to blot out every thing from the face of the earth: for, running about with drawn swords and knives, they ransacked towns, houses, cemeteries, and churches, robbing everyone, sparing neither women nor children.”

Maitland wrote that Magna Carta was caught between “theoretical sanctity and practical insecurity.” Yes, he wrote at a moment of high imperialism and glorification of the Anglo-Saxon race. Yet people of color leading national liberations, Gandhi, Mandela, and Sun Yet-Sen appealed to it, against empire and racism.

Let us say rather that it is caught between a totem of propaganda and a political text of potentiality. As of late February 2015, when I consulted the website of the quasi-official Magna Carta Project I was pleased to read “this project represents a work in progress.  It is currently not complete and the material is subject to change.” The same may be said of Magna Carta – a work in progress, subject to change.

To say that each rested on a “mistake” depending on the 1217 or 1225 charters, while true, is pedantic, if not pettifogging, because it omits the human struggles that produced new interpretations – the English Revolution of the 1640s, for instance, or the American Declaration of Independence, or the abolitionist movement against slavery, or the struggles for national liberation.

Downing the master’s tools

Our own epoch is one against privatization and the ideology of neo-liberalism. Opposition can be conducted in the name of the commons, that is, of subsistence for all. That is the framework of current interpretation which will necessarily be disestablishmentarian, i.e. not part of the Establishment of church, monarch, and money. Can a document sorting out ruling class differences 800 years ago be used in the necessary project of abolishing the ruling class altogether? The master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, says Audre Lorde. Perhaps she is right. We must develop tools of our own.

Meanwhile, how would we use this inheritance? We need to address the commons as a solution to our own needs, for water, air, land, fire, and (as we must add) mind. We want equalization, or the abolition of the economic class system of exploitation. We need a different conception of property, neither State nor individual, and a different conception of ‘man’. Magna Carta gave us homo liber, or “free man”; Carl Linneas gave us homo sapiens, or “wise man”; E.P. Thompson spoke of homo economicus, or “economic man.”  Our era of privatization has produced another ideal historical species of man, one opposed to the commons, and deriving etymologically from the Greek work for private, I meanhomo idioticus. He is idiotically polluting the air and waters, engrossing the land and forests, and creating misery in his ceaseless, selfish accumulation and wars of drones.

The book ends with a similar global trope with which it began, the jet airplanes of Heathrow. A soaring piece of rhetoric, as the deafening noise of the jet engines roar over the meadow, but also an unfortunate piece of rhetoric. The Americans have taken over Runnymede getting it wrong with their little rotunda, as it is not ‘freedom under law’ as they say on the granite, cylindrical plinth in the meadow but the king, and the thing bears the single star, symbol of the US Air Force. The least the committee could do is to destroy this ugly symbol, and if it doesn’t who will?

Free Trade, Corporate Plunder and the War on Working People

Colin Todhunter

Prior to last year’s national elections in India, there were calls for a Thatcherite revolution to fast-track the country towards privatisation and neo-liberalism. Under successive Thatcher-led governments in the eighties, however, inequalities skyrocketed in Britain and economic growth was no better than in the seventies.

Traditional manufacturing was decimated and international finance became the bedrock of the ‘new’ economy. Jobs disappeared over the horizon to cheap labour economies, corporations bought up public utilities, the rich got richer and many of Britain’s towns and cities in its former industrial heartland became shadows of their former selves. Low paid, insecure, non-unionised labour is now the norm and unemployment and underemployment are rife. Destroying ordinary people’s livelihoods was done in the name of ‘the national interest’. Destroying industry was done in the name of ‘efficiency’.

In 2010, 28 percent of the UK workforce, some 10.6 million people, either did not have a job, or had stopped looking for one. And that figure was calculated before many public sector jobs were slashed under the lie of ‘austerity’.

Today, much of the mainstream political and media rhetoric revolves around the need to create jobs, facilitate ‘free’ trade, ensure growth and make ‘the nation’ competitive. The endless, tedious mantra says ordinary people have to be ‘flexible’, ‘tighten their belts, expect to do a ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ and let the market decide. This creates jobs. This fuels ‘growth’. Unfortunately, it does neither. What we have is austerity. What we have is an on-going economic crisis, a huge national debt, rule by profligate bankers and corporate entities and mass surveillance to keep ordinary people in check.

So what might the future hold? Unfortunately, more of the same.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being negotiated between the EU and US is intended to be the biggest trade deal in history. The EU and US together account for 40 percent of global economic output. The European Commission tries to sell the deal to the public by claiming that the agreement will increase GDP by one percent and will entail massive job creation.

However, these claims are not supported even by its own studies, which predict a growth rate of just 0.01 percent GDP over the next ten years and the potential loss of jobs in several sectors, including agriculture. Corporations are lobbying EU-US trade negotiators to use the deal to weaken food safety, labour, health and environmental standards and undermine digital rights. Negotiations are shrouded in secrecy and are being driven by corporate interests. And the outcome could entail the bypassing of any democratic processes in order to push through corporate-friendly policies. The proposed agreement represents little more than a corporate power grab.

It should come as little surprise that this is the case. Based on a recent report, the European Commission’s trade and investment policy reveals a bunch of unelected technocrats who care little about what ordinary people want and negotiate on behalf of big business. The Commission has eagerly pursued a corporate agenda and has pushed for policies in sync with the interests of big business. It is effectively a captive but willing servant of a corporate agenda. Big business has been able to translate its massive wealth into political influence to render the European Commission a “disgrace to the democratic traditions of Europe.”

This proposed trade agreement (and others like it being negotiated across the world) is based on a firm belief in ‘the market’ (a euphemism for subsidies for the rich, cronyism, rigged markets and cartels) and the intense dislike of state intervention and state provision of goods and services. The ‘free market’ doctrine that underpins this belief attempts to convince people that nations can prosper by having austerity imposed on them and by embracing neo-liberalism and ‘free’ trade. This is a smokescreen that the financial-corporate elites hide behind while continuing to enrich themselves and secure taxpayer handouts, whether in the form of bank bailouts or other huge amounts of corporate dole.

In much of the West, the actual reality of neo-liberalism and the market is stagnating or declining wages in real terms, high levels of personal debt and a permanent underclass, while the rich and their corporations to rake in record profits and salt away wealth in tax havens.

Corporate plunder in India 

Thatcher was a handmaiden of the rich. Her role was to destroy ‘subversive’ or socialist tendencies within Britain and to shatter the post-1945 Keynesian consensus based on full employment, fairness and a robust welfare state. She tilted the balance of power in favour of elite interests by embarking on a pro-privatisation, anti-trade union/anti-welfare state policy agenda. Sections of the public regarded Thatcher as a strong leader who would get things done, where others before her had been too weak and dithered. In India, Narendra Modi has been portrayed in a similar light.

His government is attempting to move ahead with ‘reforms’ that others dragged their feet on. To date, India has experienced a brand of ‘neo-liberalism lite’. Yet what we have seen thus far has been state-backed violence and human rights abuses to ‘secure’ tribal areas for rich foreign and Indian corporations, increasing inequalities, more illicit money than ever pouring into Swiss bank accounts and massive corruption and cronyism.

Under Modi are we to witness an accelerated ‘restructuring’ of agriculture in favour of Western agribusiness? Will more farmers be forced from their land on behalf of commercial interests? Officialdom wants to depopulate rural areas by shifting over 600 million to cities. It begs the question: in an age of increasing automation, how will hundreds of millions of agriculture sector workers earn their livelihoods once they have left the land?

What type of already filthy and overburdened urban centres can play host to such a gigantic mass of humanity who were deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ in rural India and will possibly be (indeed, already are) deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ once in the cities?

Gandhi stated that the future of India lies in its villages. Rural society was regarded as India’s bedrock. But now that bedrock is being dug up. Global agritech companies have been granted license to influence key aspects of agriculture by controlling seeds and chemical inputs and by funding and thus distorting the biotech research agenda and aspects of overall development policy.

Part of that ‘development’ agenda is based on dismantling the Public Distribution System for food. Policy analyst Devinder Sharma notes that the government may eventually stop supporting farmers by doing away with the system of announcing the minimum support price for farmers and thereby reduce the subsidy outgo. He argues that farmers would be encouraged to grow cash crops for supermarkets and to ‘compete’ in a market based on trade policies that work in favour of big landowners and heavily subsidised Western agriculture.

By shifting towards a commercialised system that would also give the poor cash to buy food in the market place, rather than the almost half a million ‘ration shops’ that currently exist, the result will be what the WTO/ World Bank/IMF have been telling India to for a long time: to displace the farming population so that agribusiness can find a stronghold in India.

We need only look at what happened to the soy industry in India during the nineties, or last year’s report by GRAIN, to see how small farmers are forced from their land to benefit powerful global agritech. If it cannot be achieved by unfair trade policies and other duplicitous practices, it is achieved by repression and violence, as Helena Paul notes:

“Repression and displacement, often violent, of remaining rural populations, illness, falling local food production have all featured in this picture. Indigenous communities have been displaced and reduced to living on the capital’s rubbish dumps. This is a crime that we can rightly call genocide – the extinguishment of entire Peoples, their culture, their way of life and their environment.”

Although Helena Paul is referring to the situation in Paraguay, what she describes could well apply to India or elsewhere.

In addition, the secretive corporate-driven trade agreement being negotiated between the EU and India could fundamentally restructure Indian society in favour of Western corporate interests and adversely impact hundreds of millions and their livelihoods and traditional ways of living. And as with the proposed US-EU agreement, powerful transnational corporations would be able to by-pass national legislation that was implemented to safeguard the public’s rights. Governments could be sued by multinational companies for billions of dollars in private arbitration panels outside of national courts if laws, policies, court decisions or other actions are perceived to interfere with their investments.

A massive shift in global power and wealth from poor to rich

Current negotiations over ‘free’ trade agreements have little to do with free trade. They are more concerned with loosening regulatory barriers and bypassing any democratic processes to allow large corporations to destroy competition and siphon off wealth to the detriment of smaller, locally based firms and producers.

The planet’s super rich comprise a global elite. It is not a unified elite. But whether based in China, Russia or India, its members have to varying extents been incorporated into the Anglo-American system of trade and finance. For them, the ability to ‘do business’ is what matters, not national identity or the ability to empathise with someone toiling in a field who happened to be born on the same land mass. And in order ‘to do business’, government machinery has been corrupted and bent to serve their ends. In turn, organisations that were intended to be ‘by’ and ‘for’ ordinary working people have been successfully infiltrated and dealt with.

The increasing global takeover of agriculture by powerful agribusiness, the selling off of industrial developments built with public money and strategic assets and secretive corporate-driven trade agreements represent a massive corporate heist of wealth and power across the world. The world’s super rich regard ‘nations’ as population holding centres to be exploited whereby people are stripped of control of their livelihoods for personal gain. Whether it concerns rich oligarchs in the US or India’s billionaire business men, corporate profits and personal gain trump any notion of the ‘national interest’.

Still want a Thatcherite revolution?

The Fight Against Factory Farm Meat

Ronnie Cummins

For the first time since the advent of industrial agriculture, the federal government is considering advising Americans to eat “less red and processed meat.”

That advice is the outcome of studies conducted by an independent panel of “experts” which was asked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for recommended changes to the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.

The February 19 “eat less red and processed meat” pronouncement by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) was reported widely in mainstream media. It set off a heated debate about whether or not consumers should eat meat, a debate that included the standard name-calling by factory farm front groups, including the Farm Bureau, denouncing consumers and environmentalists (and their alleged pawns on the DGAC) for being “anti-meat” and “anti-farmer.”

Unfortunately in its recommendations, the DGAC didn’t really come out and tell us the whole truth, which would go something like this: “Americans should eat less, or rather no red and processed meat from filthy, inhumane factory farms or feedlots, where the animals are cruelly crammed together and routinely fed a diet of herbicide-drenched, genetically engineered grains, supplemented by a witch’s brew of antibiotics, artificial hormones, steroids, blood, manure and slaughterhouse waste, contributing to a deadly public health epidemic of obesity, heart disease, cancer, antibiotic resistance, hormone disruption and food allergies.”

If the DGAC had really told us the truth about America’s red meat horror show (95 percent of our red meat comes from these Confined Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs), we’d be having a conversation about how we can get rid of factory farms, instead of a rather abstract debate on the ethics of eating meat.

With a real debate we could conceivably start to change the self-destructive purchasing and eating habits (the average American carnivore consumes nine ounces or more of toxic CAFO meat and animal products daily) of most Americans. Instead we are having a slightly more high-volume replay of the same old debate, whereby vegetarians and vegans, constituting approximately 5 percent of the population, tell the other 95 percent, who are omnivores, to stop eating meat. Nothing much ever comes of that particular debate, which leaves thousands of hard-working, conscientious ranchers, and millions of health-, environment- and humane-minded omnivores, out of the conversation.

I say thousands of “hard-working, conscientious,” ranchers are being left out of the conversation because I know lots of them.

North American cattle ranchers, for the most part, have no love for Cargill, Tyson, Monsanto, JBS, Smithfield, Elanco (animal drugs) or McDonald’s. Most of these ranchers practice traditional animal husbandry, conscientiously taking care of their animals from birth. They graze their cattle free-range on grass, as nature intended, before they’re forced to sell these heretofore-healthy animals at rock-bottom prices to the monopolistic meat cartel.

Before these hapless creatures are dragged away to hell, to be fattened up on GMO grains and drugged up in America’s CAFOs, their meat is high in beneficial Omega 3 and conjugated linoleic acids (LA), and low in “bad” fats.

Unfortunately by the time their abused and contaminated carcasses arrive, all neatly packaged, at your local supermarket, restaurant or school cafeteria, the meat is low in Omega 3 and good “fats,” and routinely tainted by harmful bacteria, not to mention pesticide, steroid and antibiotic residues. What was once a healthy food has now become a literal poison that clogs up your veins, makes you fat, and heightens your risk of heart attack or cancer.

I mention millions of “health-, environment-, and humane-minded” consumers being left out of the “meat versus no meat” conversation because, as director of the two million-strong, Organic Consumers Association, I talk and exchange emails with conscious consumers every day.

No organic consumer, vegetarian or omnivore I’ve ever encountered consciously supports the cruelty of intensive confinement for farm animals. Nor do they support feeding herbivores genetically engineered, herbicide-drenched grains, mixed with slaughterhouse waste. No one supports dosing factory farmed animals with antibiotics and hormones that then end up in your kid’s hamburger at school (unless it’s organic or 100-percent grass-fed.)

No one in their right mind, or at least no one who has ever experienced a factory farm first-hand or even read a book or watched a video about what’s going on, supports CAFOs. That’s why corporate agribusiness is working overtime to pass state “Ag Gag” laws making it a crime to take photos of CAFOs. That’s why the beef cartel and Big Food spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to keep you in the dark about CAFOs, about whether or not your food contains genetically engineered ingredients, and about the country-of-origin of your food.

If CAFO meat and animal products had to be labeled (a proposition I support wholeheartedly), the entire factory farm industry would collapse. If CAFO meat had to be labeled, not only in grocery stores but also in restaurants, McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and the rest would immediately be on the phone, contacting ranchers directly to buy their grass-fed, healthy, free- range beef.

Before we go any further, let’s identify the real culprits in this CAFO horror show.

Four multi-billion dollar transnational companies—Tyson JBS, Cargill and Smithfield—produce about 85 percent of the factory farm meat in the U.S., making it difficult for ranchers to sell their livestock to anyone but the Big Four. And of course these same Big Four companies, along with their front groups such as the North American Meat Institute, are lobbying the government to ditch the 2015 dietary guidelines to “eat less red and processed meat” recommendation because they understand what that recommendation will do to their bottom lines.

But what the Big Four fear even more is the thought of consumers waking up to the horrors of factory farms, and the filthy, contaminated meat that comes out of these animal prisons.

Fortunately, demand for healthier, sustainably raised grass-fed beef is growing rapidly. Here in Minneapolis-St. Paul where I spend a good part of the year, there are now over 100 restaurants that offer grass-fed beef on their menus. Local co-ops and natural food grocery stores are barely able to keep up with the increasing consumer demand.

But unfortunately 95 percent of beef today still comes from factory farms and feedlots. Meanwhile most of the 100-percent grass-fed meat sold at restaurants such as Chipotle or Carl’s Jr. (a popular chain on the West Coast) is imported from Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay and Argentina, rather than produced here in the US. Why? It’s not because consumers don’t want healthier, more humanely raised 100-percent grass fed beef. It’s because Cargill and Big Food have monopolized the market by brainwashing the public into believing that cheap CAFO meat is OK, while controlling nearly all of the meat processing plants in the country.

The time has come to shift the American diet away from unhealthy, inhumane, GMO factory farmed food. But as Kendra Kimbirauskas of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP) pointed out at her TEDx talk  in New York City recently, we, conscious consumers and farmers, “need to get on common ground” and stop “in-fighting over whether to eat ethical meat, go meat-free, or advocate for bigger cages…” As Kimbirauskas emphasizes, we need to enlist environmentalists in our anti-CAFO campaigning as well.

“As long as animals are in factory farms, they are polluting our environment”… And, Kimbirauskas added, “Those most impacted by the problem (farmers and rural people adjacent to CAFOs) need to be most visible in the fight to change It.”

Meat (along with eggs and dairy products) from factory farms is literally killing people with diet-related diseases. Factory farms are a disaster, not only for the animals, but also for the communities where manure and chemical fertilizers and pesticides pollute the air, the soil, streams, lakes, rivers and drinking water.

Factory farms and the GMO farms that supply them with animal feed are a disaster for the climate as well, releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases, including CO2, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. The grasslands that support grass -ed beef, on the other hand, if grazed properly, sequester CO2 from the air and put it in the soil, while drastically reducing or eliminating altogether methane and nitrous oxide emissions.

It’s time to stop fighting among ourselves about whether or not to eat meat. Americans need to boycott all factory farmed meat and animal products. Period.

Beyond boycotting CAFO products, if consumers care about their health and the health of the planet, we need to reduce our consumption of sustainable grass-fed animal products to approximately three or four ounces a day (not nine ounces a day, the current average).

We are what we eat. We must get rid of factory farms and put the Earth’s billions of confined farm animals back outside on the land, grazing and foraging, where they belong.

Whose Democracy?

Julie Wark

Just before Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975, I had the immense good fortune to be studying Anthropology, Sociology and Politics at the country’s ten-year-old university (UPNG). It was a kind of decolonisation laboratory in which boffins from everywhere, shared their expertise in everything: tropical medicine and agriculture, public administration, development studies, Third World literature, and much more. They were agitated years of intellectual ferment, student (and teacher) activism, Marxism, feminism, opposition to the Vietnam War, small-is-beautiful, free love and parties, lots of parties. Many of us believed that Papua New Guinea would be different. It could never be just another neo-colony. Its future leaders were fellow students and friends. We were tear-gassed together at demonstrations over Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor and, side by side, fought the bureaucrats to get a students’ vegetable garden (the dining room slop was a prelude to nutritional disease). Several of those friends became politicians in this marvellous, resource-rich country and did their bit to make it one of the most corrupt in the world with extremely high levels of (mainly sexual) violence and over 50% of the population below the poverty line ($1/day). Some of those scintillating teachers went on to unexceptionable careers elsewhere. Ken Good remained outspoken and exceptional.

A respected Africanist, Ken Good was deported from Rhodesia in the early 1970s for hurting Ian Smith’s feelings with his caustic, accurate tongue and, in 2005, as a “threat to national security” from Botswana, where he was Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Botswana. Why? Because he had co-authored and circulated a paper titled “Presidential Succession in Botswana: No Model for Africa”. The Attorney General referred to the frail 72-year-old as an “outlaw”.

The future outlaw was one of my teachers at UPNG, the best I ever had. Forty years on, he is a dear friend. I give this background not just to be upfront about my partisanship, but in particular because Ken the man can’t be separated from his writing. An unwavering critic of any anti-democratic establishment, champion of the underdog and now in his eighties, he is still feisty and still fighting. His new book, Trust in the Capacities of the People, Distrust in Elites, distills the essence of Good. Trust the people. Don’t trust the elites. The political best seller list of The New York Times, March 2015, features American Sniper in first place, followed by more SEALs, another sniper, a hedge-fund manager and an Obama campaign strategist in the top ten. If you want to find a publisher who’ll take on a title like Ken’s, it won’t be easy. It wasn’t easy. Now the book is finally out, it costs $83.64 on Amazon, an inaccessible price which (together with snipers, SEALs and Co. crowding the political panorama) suggests that democracy is up against the wall. Good has plenty to say about that but the elite-gripped media won’t be putting this book on any bestseller list. A voice like Ken’s upsets people like the great expert on “democracy” Festus Mogae, former President of Botswana, and the 1% who are set to own more than the rest of the world by 2016. Democracy is very unwell but this enkheiridion has not ousted the SEALs from bestseller lists. This flies in the face of logic, to say the least.

Ken Good’s democracy is about grassroots organisation, radical education and the ever-burning ideals of freedom, justice and respect for the dignity of all humans, a socio-political process and society in which people make decisions on matters that affect them. If “representative democracy” is the fiefdom of competing elites who get elected because of their wealth and celebrity – Warren Buffet’s class warfare (“it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”) – Good’s participatory democracy is the “aspiration and impulse by determined men and women” who, battling deeply entrenched power disparities, fail more often than they succeed, knowing that others will try again, guided by the “natural truth and lustre” of eternal principles: “[P]osterity we doubt not shall reap the benefits of our endeavours whatever shall become of us” (Freeborn John Lilburne, 1648).

Good roams widely in space and time, showing how these principles have always shone and still shine today. He begins with democratic Athens (508 – 322 BCE), where the “political disempowerment of the elites was the vital accompaniment which made possible and extended the power of the people” (p. viii) for almost two centuries during which the demos was “a self-conscious and a determined actor in its own right” (p. 17). In these times of almost constant warfare the system did not collapse due to internal contradictions but was brought down by an external force: Alexander the Great. Good sagely notes the contrast between its longevity and the brevity of twentieth-century totalitarian states. Hitler’s Thousand Years’ Reich lasted only twelve years.

The next study is “Britain’s long and profoundly incomplete democratization”. The background in the mid-seventeenth century was feudalism in extremis, the rise of capitalism in commercial agriculture and trade, and the clashes between Catholicism and protestant faiths, and the parliament (of merchants and Grandees) against King Charles I. The Civil War (1642 – 1651) took about half a million lives, if conflicts in Scotland and Ireland are included (p.22). The poor (some 100,000), represented by the Levellers, stepped into theequation, calling for popular sovereignty, accountability and respect for the rights of even “the poorest he that is in England” (p.25). There is a proviso or cautionary note here, though. Good (p. 26) cites Lilburne’s biographer Pauline Gregg: “the spirit of Leveller teaching was more revolutionary than its content, and a spirit of equalitarianism was present in their doctrine. But this egalitarianism did not encourage them to ally with the dispossessed below them.”

In the late 1690s and early 1700s the poor people’s heroes were robbers and men and women who actively resisted the rich and powerful. The “thanatocracy” (Peter Linebaugh’s coinage) responded with “legal massacre”. Every six weeks a jury of small landowners, doing the oligarchy’s dirty work, determined who would die on London’s “hanging days”, eight or so a year”, when three to five people strung from the “Tyburn tree” drove home the lesson: don’t cross the rich. Hundreds were hanged, mostly Irish men and women, sailors, weavers and butchers, plus some members of the city’s sizeable black community. “The deeply corrupt oligarchy was hanging multitudes of the poor for trivial and often necessary theft (for survival’s sake), while they themselves practiced theft and avarice on a giant scale” (p. 30). The rise of industrial capitalism, the calibrated wage system and ever-harsher factory discipline eventually rendered the hanging spectacle obsolete in England but it survived well into the twentieth century in the British possession of Kenya, where 1,090 Kikuyu – “Mau Mau insurrectionists” – went to the gallows between 1952 and 1960. Methods that are unacceptable or outdated at home can always be used elsewhere (“targeted” killings, for example).

Industrialisation brought great social turbulence. “The transformation of the organization of production was a potent, totalizing process” (p. 36). As an 1832 report described it in almost Blakean terms, “men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam” (p. 37). The brutality of the system meant that the oligarchy needed protection. By 1814 some 890,000 men were under arms and “routinely employed” (p. 42) against unarmed civilians.

Yet, through the Chartist Movement (1838 – 1858) and the few means available to the poorest people – crime, riots and insurrection – some two to three million people kept resisting. Workers set up self-help organisations, co-ops, benevolent societies, educational groups, sick and burial societies, trade unions and finally a Labour Party. Through solidarity and resistance built on an ancient democratic culture the people, demanding universal suffrage, strove to topple a thoroughly corrupt state system and thus to achieve clean government and participatory democracy. What followed was far from that.

[…] the successes of the working-classes were intermixed with failure. They had placed trust in their own capacities to construct a range of self-help organizations, and their trust had been vindicated broadly and deeply in improved living and work conditions, in their heightened participatory capacities and in the reduction of corruption. But they had failed to control the elites which eventually arose in the Labour Party […]. Participatory values and institutions were gradually incorporated into a passive and elite-dominated liberal model of democracy, and caused to atrophy. The erosion of the cultural world of labor neared completion by the 1990s. The cultural world of popular democracy largely went with it.”

In his compelling chapter on South Africa, trenchantly subtitled “The People versus a Militarist, Predominant Ethno-Nationalist Elite”, Good takes apart the myth of the “Struggle Heroes”, the fable that “democracy is the gift of great men who sometimes come together in almost ‘miraculous’ circumstances, like Nelson Mandela and F. W. De Klerk, 1990 – 1994, to confer good government on their fortunate people” (p. ix). Mainstream newspapers are full of stories about the prison woes of the girlfriend-killing celebrity athlete Oscar Pistorius, but hardly anyone dares to broach the deplorable political and social legacy of Mandela’s African National Congress, which helped to shape this violent culture. Neither does Good flinch from describing the crimes and immunity of Madikizela-Mandela (otherwise known as Winnie), or the “authoritarianism and elitism lurking in [Nelson] Mandela’s thinking” (p. 102) and how the Great Man principle gagged critics. “[R]ule by the heroes of the struggle was itself essentially democratic” (p. 103). So the heroes said.

The heroes wrought a government notable for its factionalism and greed. President Zuma’s South Africa is effectively leaderless as he works hard to control his party’s warring factions, attend to his six (last count) wives and accumulate wealth. The upshot is patent in a few figures (p. 208). In 2011 a majority of South Africa’s people were living in poverty; 58% earned some $US30 (€24) a month; 36% were jobless but, for the under-35s, unemployment stood at 73%. Poverty is worsening. The number of people living on less than $1 day rose from 1.9 million in 1996 to 4.2 million in 2005. All this goes hand in hand with “State incapacity and the indifference of the ruling elite” (p. 209). “State incapacity” includes indifference to such vital areas as water and sanitation, housing, education, and a disinclination to address endemic violence. After all, the “State” has fortress-houses complete with armed guards.

Chapter Six, devoted to the little-known “living politics” of a “Determined Autonomous Movement of the Poor”, is perhaps Good’s most outstanding contribution in this book. It was widely believed that the end of apartheid would mean the end of shantytowns and squatter settlements. The situation was extreme: in 1994 the urban housing shortage was rocketing at the rate of 178,000 households a year. Living conditions in many settlements were appalling with, for example, 6,000 people sharing six toilets, disposing (or not) of their own refuse, trying to ensure that kids didn’t knock over candles, and hours of queuing for the tap.

One young man, S’bu Zikode, who had lived in one of Durban’s slum settlements, decided to change things. At the age of 25 he became chairperson of the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) and set about “restructur[ing] everything in terms of democracy” (p. 202). The KRDC mobilised the young people through youth activities and tried to work with ANC organisations and the Durban City Council to address the community’s problems. Lies and broken promises led them to take action on their own terms. A new organisation was formed by and for shanty dwellers, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), which came to represent tens of thousands of people in at least thirty settlements. The AbM democratised the administration of settlements, halted evictions, won some concessions regarding services, illegally connected electricity, built toilets, introduced crèches, and combated the exclusion of the poor from the life and amenities of the cities. This gave rise to close-knit, very active, thinking and demanding communities.

Of course repression wasn’t long in coming but even when its leaders had to go into hiding the movement persisted because, echoing the Levellers, they declared they had the moral strength of “those who know who they are … what they stand for … and speak the truth” (p. 206). State violence against protestors came shockingly to a head on 16 August 2012 at the Marikana platinum mine when 34 miners were shot dead by the police and almost 80 were injured. The “Tyburn tree” now spoke in the form of bullets: look what you get when you step out of line. The South African police killed 566 people in 2009 and 2010. This is war against the poor. People like AbM members or miners living and working in harsh, dangerous conditions, who want to participate in and influence the decisions affecting their daily lives, are “outlaws”, an enemy of the state. The linkages between militarism, criminality and the ANC were made very clear with the Marikana massacre, and the product of this culture of violence and impunity is a governing elite that is incapable of managing a modern state.

The poor, working with non-corrupt members of the trade unions, especially COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions), are trying to forge a political majority from a social majority. Like AbM, the Unemployed People’s Movement has declared that its mission is to humanise politics and “keep working to unite all the struggles – in the shacks, on the mines and on the farms – into a revolutionary mass movement of the working class and the poor that can change this society from below” (p. 224) Good points out that no country, not even the ANC’s South Africa, can be properly understood in isolation from the rest of the world. Internally generated elitism is a danger everywhere. And local elites, however repressive they may be, are small fry by comparison with global elites and their self-enriching institutions like the WTO which are fast destroying the planet.

The two masterly chapters on South Africa are separated – an error of structure, I think – by chapters 4 and 5, “Democracy in the Capitalist Heartlands: Alienation and Dysfunctionalities” and “Democratization from Portugal to Poland, 1970s-1990s, and in Tunisia and Egypt Since 2010”. The former deals with the liberal form of capitalist democracy prevailing in Britain and the United States for some 150 years but now discredited by widespread alienation, corruption, dysfunctional institutions, draconian definitions of “national security”, gag laws, contempt for the masses and greed of the elites. This is now being countered by participatory democracy with a clear ideology of institutionally supported equality. Over hundreds of years, people struggled to achieve this in Britain. More recently, as the mega-rich 1% aggressively pits itself against the rest of us, it has also been aspired to in Portugal, Poland, Tunisia, Egypt, Iceland and elsewhere. As Good observes, it is always necessary to know what kind of “democracy” is being talked about:

The exemplars of democracy now are patently no longer the United States and Britain, not the established liberal systems, but popular movements built on civic groups imbued with resonant ideas about inequalities, in the struggles for democratization in South Africa, Tunisia and elsewhere. Failures will almost certainly be more numerous than successes, but democracy as a process of struggle and revolution is again center stage, and is being separated off from liberal, elitist Anglo-American models. In Iceland the greed of some 30 individuals collapsed the financial system, but the other 320,000 people have been reconstructing the framework of their government since 2009 in innovative and participatory ways reminiscent of Athens.

In sum, the book’s key argument is that participatory democracy is insistently appearing in many places where the liberal capitalist democratic model has unquestionably failed.

Apart from his scathing critique of liberal “democracy”, Good shows that grassroots organisation for democracy and social justice is no wild utopian scheme but a real possibility. A recent openDemocracy article titled “Reinventing Urban Democracy in Barcelona” describes the “citizen’s platform” (rather than political party in the old sense of the word) Barcelona en comú (literally Barcelona in Common), grist to Good’s mill although it appeared after he finished his book. With a name which conjures up the English commoners and their struggle against the enclosures, this strong contender for the City Council elections in May has invented a “newly resonant language of rights and democracy”. Very well-organised and disciplined, Barcelona en Comú grew out of the anti-evictions movement and the model is being taken up in other cities. In 2014, the WHO calculated that the 54% of the world’s population was urban-dwelling. Taking over municipal power might prove to be a very effective way of making participatory democracy workable on a smaller but linked-up scale. Watch this space…

Ken Good is a no-nonsense visionary who is keenly aware of the importance of history. In her recent book on climate change, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein shows how the neo-thanatocracy is doing its best to kill the whole planet but stresses that “social movements have grabbed the wheel of history before and might just do it again”. Ken Good trusts the people and so did the Leveller Thomas Rainsborough (1610 – 1648): “Either poverty must use the power of democracy to destroy the power of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy democracy” (p. 25).

Dangerous Herbs May be in Your Food: Unlabeled

Martha Rosenberg

What if you took a spoonful of your morning cereal and had an allergic reaction or even felt tranquillized? But when you looked at the package labeling there were no ingredients that would seem to be red flags? Increasingly, thanks to an FDA loophole, food makers use additives and chemicals that they and not the FDA have declare “safe” and the ingredients do not appear on the labels. Sometimes the FDA does not even know they are added to the food products.

For example, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council(NRDC), the bitter alkaloid of the cacao plant theobromine can be in beverages, chewing gum, tea, soy milk, gelatin, candy, yogurt and fruit smoothies with no mention on the label. The peanut-related legume sweet lupin can be in baked goods, dairy products, gelatin, meats, and candy with no mention on the label. The chemical epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) may be found in teas, sport drinks and other beverages, says NRDC, with no mention on the label despite its links to leukemia. Nice.

How did this happen?  There has been a “growth in the marketplace of beverages and other conventional foods that contain novel substances, such as added botanical ingredients or their extracts,” says the FDA. “Some of these substances have not previously been used in conventional foods and may be unapproved food additives. Other substances that have been present in the food supply for many years are now being added to beverages and other conventional foods at levels in excess of their traditional use levels, or in new beverages or other conventional foods.” Nice.

For over 50 years, everyday ingredients like vinegar, vegetable oil or sugar have been allowed in food as part of the FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) program.   Food companies and their supplier did not have to prove them safe and go through a lengthy approval process.

But since the late 1990s, the GRAS program has become a dangerous “honor system” in which food makers can simply declare their additives and chemicals safe and put them in the food supply, neither petitioning the FDA for a GRAS designation or sometimes informing the FDA the additives are being used!

A recent expose by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) about GRAS in which it refers to the program as “Generally Recognized as Secret,” reveals a don’t ask/don’t tell system in which as many as 1,000 additives have been self-declared “safe” by the companies that make them but not the FDA. In many cases, neither the FDA or consumers know the ingredients are in the food; in other cases, ingredients the FDA has specifically rejected as GRAS still are used in food–sometimes, ironically named on the label.

And it gets worse. Many of the companies making the additives are headquartered overseas like the China-based Hanzhong TRG Biotech and NutraMax.  China has a poor consumer safety record say U.S. officials with many imports rejected because of “pesticides, bacteria and filth.” In 2007, tainted pet food from China killed many U.S. dogs and cats.

When additives are imported, it make the GRAS situation “triply difficult” for the FDA, Erik Olsen, senior strategic director for health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council told me, especially when the companies self-declare them as safe. The FDA does not realize the additive is being used, has not, as an agency, evaluated the additive’s safety and it lacks a mechanism for assessing the safety of imported products. Buyer beware.

Why would additive makers ever petition the FDA for a GRAS determination as opposed to self-declare an ingredient safe in the “honor system” we asked Dr. Olsen. Doesn’t petitioning the FDA just result in a delay and risk an online “rejection letter” if the ingredient doesn’t make it? Yes, he told us, but an FDA determination could help additive makers sell their products to food companies who would likely be liable if an ingredient proved dangerous.

Rules for what proves “safety” are also vague, Dr. Olsen told us. It is largely assumed that if a company self-declares its product “GRAS” and markets it, there exists corroborating scientific or clinical evidence somewhere if the FDA should ever want to see it. But NRDC investigations found that sometimes the proof of safety boils down one paltry published study. Almost none of the companies NRDC contacted would provide information about their GRAS determination–often citing “proprietary” reasons–though several assured NRDC their products were safe and some provided supporting studies. Four companies said they would provide safety information about five additives if NRDC swore to keep it confidential. We’re eating it but it’s a secret?

Who are the additive companies? A quick glance shows a roster of chemical, drug and biotech companies as opposed to well known food corporations–names like Merck eprova AG, located in Switzerland and BASF Cognis Nutrition and Health, part of BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, based in Germany with 66 U.S. subsidiaries. Yum.

What products are their ingredients found in? That is the ultimate question, says Dr. Olsen. The information is not provided by the companies and of course it does not appear on the food labels. After all, it is Generally Recognized as Safe.

Here are some ingredients that may be in your food or beverages without being on the label.

Fo Ti (Shou Wu Pian/ Ho Shou Wu)

Fo Ti made from the tuber of the climbing knotweed (Polygonum multiflorum) has been a popular Asian remedy for cancer, tuberculosis, diabetes, hypertension, infections, erectile dysfunction, infertility, muscle soreness, headache, dizziness, graying of the hair and constipation. It is used as a tonic in liver and kidney conditions and to fortify muscles and bones. But, according to the National Institutes of Health,  “a large case series of clinically apparent acute liver injury ha[s] been attributed to use of Shou Wu Pian.” The liver toxicity “resembles acute viral hepatitis with onset of fatigue, nausea and right upper quadrant pain followed by jaundice,” says the NIH and “liver biopsy shows changes typical of acute hepatitis.”

Kava Kava

Kava is a plant that grows in the western Pacific. Prized for its mental effects like  sedation, relaxation and relief of anxiety, it became a popular supplement in the U.S. for treating anxiety, depression, insomnia, stress and menopausal symptoms. But in 2002, the FDA warned consumers and health care professionals of the potential risk of severe liver injury from kava kava including hepatitis, cirrhosis, and liver failure. In its letter to health care professionals, the FDA noted that Germany and Switzerland took kava kava off the market after “approximately 25 reports of hepatic toxicity associated with the use of products containing kava extracts have been reported in these countries.”

Lobelia

Lobelia is the name for several flowering plants that grow in tropical and warm climates  of the world and are used as herbal remedies. The plant was frequently used for respiratory problems in Native American societies and became known as Indian tobacco while it was also called “asthmador” from its use in Appalachian folk medicine. Like tobacco, with which it shares some properties, lobelia is known to cause nausea, vomiting and dizziness. But according to WebMD, that’s just the beginning of it risks. Lobelia is considered “likely unsafe for most people when taken by mouth,” writes the health website. An overdose may cause “serious toxic effects” like convulsions, collapse, coma, and possibly death. GRAS?

Black Cohosh and Other Female Hormones

Because or its high estrogen content, black cohosh is called “possibly unsafe” by WebMD and capable of worsening breast cancer and other hormone-linked conditions like endometriosis, fibroids and ovarian and uterine cancer. There are also reports of black cohosh links to liver damage and rejection of transplanted kidneys. Black cohosh is hardly the only hormonally active additive which NRDC believes are in food products with undisclosed GRAS safety determinations. Chasteberry, astragalus, red clover, milk thistle,  ginseng, fenugreek, hops and of course soy and flax also pack a big estrogen wallop. Certainly such herbs are not necessarily safe in people with hormone-fed cancers and they should be on the label.

Hydroxyzine HCL

It was with shock that I discovered hydroxyzine HCL on NRDC’s list of undisclosed GRAS safety determinations and presumably unlabeled in the food supply. It is the same ingredient found in Vistaril and Atarax, two prescription drugs used to treat anxiety, allergies and to control nausea and vomiting! According to Drugs.com, hydroxyzine may impair thinking and reaction time, making driving dangerous. It is also dangerous when used with alcohol. Hydroxyzine may be considered Generally Recognized as Safe by its manufacturer, NutraMax, but it is also related to the popular allergy drug Zyrtec. Infact, the medical site Medicinenet writes, “The active form of hydroxyzine is a drug called cetirizine (Zyrtec).”

Pope Francis and the Scourges of Our Time

Kathy Kelly

Here in Lexington federal prison’s Atwood Hall, squinting through the front doorway, I spotted a rust-red horse swiftly cantering across a nearby field. The setting sun cast a glow across the grasses and trees as the horse sped past. “Reminds me of the Pope,” I murmured to no one in particular. “What’s that?” Tiza asked. I tried to explain that once, when I asked a close friend his opinion of the Pope, shortly after Catholic bishops had elected Pope Francis, my friend had said, “The horse is out of the stable! And galloping.”

I love the image. Here is a Pope who, upon learning that a chaplain in a Chinese prison couldn’t afford to buy the traditional “moon pies” for every prisoner to celebrate the harvest moon, cut a check to cover the remaining cost.  This Pope loves the tango dance. On his birthday, tango dancers filled St. Peter’s Square at the time when ringing bells call on believers to kneel and recite the Angelus.

In September, 2015, Pope Francis will visit New York City, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. Tiza and I wondered if he would visit a prison. “If he does, he should come here,” Tiza insisted, “and not go to some showcase place!” I don’t think he’ll be able to put Kentucky on his agenda, but it’s not outlandish to imagine the Pope visiting a U.S. prison. He consistently emphasizes our chance to choose the works of mercy rather than the works of war: to visit those who are sick, those who are in prison; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bury the dead. Never to turn our heads, say “it was their own damn fault”; never to choose wars and weapons, the burning of fields, destruction of homes, slaughter of the living.

Women here pray for the Pope every week, their prayers guided by a Jesuit priest, a tall, balding man with a long, white beard and a kindly manner. “He’s the one who looks like a mountain man,” Tiza once told me.

At the beginning of a 40-day season of atonement called Lent, the priest’s message was stark and simple: “Our world is very sick.” He asked the women before him to recall how each might feel, as a mother, if her child is sick. “Nothing else matters,” said the priest. “You’re focused on your child.” He urged us to focus on healing an ailing world with just as much fervor. Following his words, we joined in prayer for the Pope, a symbol of unity, collecting our desires for a world at peace, where people’s basic needs are met and all children can thrive.

Photo: Chris Downer.

A few evenings later, while walking up the stairs toward my 3rd floor room, I heard a woman wailing. “Not my baby!” she cried, in pure anguish. “Not my baby!” She had collapsed to the floor in the middle of a phone call telling her that her four year old child had been rushed to the hospital, unconscious. Her closest friends were soon at her side, holding her, soothing her. Word spread through the prison. After the 9:00 PM “count,” women did what they could. Dozens of women filled the first floor chapel, praying for hours for the prisoner, for her child, for the child’s caregivers, for the hospital personnel.  Word arrived, the next day, that the child had regained consciousness.

The good priest had chosen a metaphor that women here could readily understand.

Gypsi, one of my roommates, saves her funds for phone calls, twice a week, with her small daughters, age 3 and 5. Prisoners can make 15 minute calls, at 21 cents per minute.

One night, Gypsi came back from her call, red-eyed but smiling. Meekah, her younger daughter, can trade song verses with Gypsi. “Momma, let’s sing one more!” Meekah had cried. “Please sing another song!” But, instead, a loud beep signaled that the call was over.

I just finished reading an exquisite book, Yashar Kemal’s Memed My Hawk (2005, NYRB Classics 50th Anniversary Edition), with a subplot about two women wrongfully imprisoned. Iraz thinks longingly of her son Riza, while Hatche remembers Memed, the young love of her life.

“As the days passed, Iraz and Hatche… shared everything, including their troubles.  Hatche knew Riza’s height, his black eyes, his slim fingers, his dancing, his childhood, what he had done as a child, with what trouble Iraz had brought him up, the whole story… down to the last detail, as if she had lived through and seen it all herself.  It was the same with Iraz.  She too knew everything about Memed, from the day he and Hatche had first played together as children.”

Yes, it’s like that among women in prison. Tremendous focus. And yet, as Kemal adds, “Anyone going to prison for the first time is confused on entering so different a world. One feels lost in an endless forest, far away, as if all ties with the earth, with home and family, friends and loved ones, with everything, have been broken. It is also like sinking into a deep and desolate emptiness.”

Broken. On empty.

Worldwide, impoverishment shackles women to unspeakably harsh conditions and makes them vulnerable to predators. Lacking protection, they are sold into human trafficking rings, subjected to forced labor, forced prostitution and forced removal. Widows and orphans find themselves penniless and defenseless. More than 115 million widows live in extreme poverty around the world, with a half billion children dependent on their care and support: Gary Haugen, in The Locust Effect (2014, Oxford University Press), presents in careful and disheartening detail a discussion of the sea change needed to uphold the rights of impoverished women and children. Sadly, in many places, traditions and customs regard women as being less valuable, subordinating them and treating them as property.

Sometimes, we have to interrupt ourselves in our relative comfort and estimate how we can bring to bear our best resources in the name of changing criminal, wrongful patterns.

Pope Francis faces an extraordinary possibility. He could rely on Catholic teaching which proclaims that humans are all part of “one bread, one body,” emphasizing that women and men are equal to each other; and he could promote an exemplary practical consequence of this teaching by embracing “the priesthood of all believers,” welcoming women as well as men to follow a vocation into ordained ministry. It would be a dramatic change, an arrow pointing toward new expectations and possibilities regarding the status of women.

Coretta Scott King says that in the moments after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, turned to her and said, “This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society.” She could only agree that he was right; and he was. Yet his service to equality and his fierce courage to reject violence couldn’t be killed. He took us with him to that mountaintop, entrusting to us a new vision and a way forward.

Pope Francis must indeed feel the challenge of the past century’s social justice visionaries, many of them cruelly vilified and rejected – many sent by violence from the world. Assassination is on the rise: the “kill list” is now an openly acknowledged part of U.S. policy. I know that women here will continue to pray for a sick society, and for the Pope, long after I leave.

I will continue to feel deeply moved by our “mountain man”‘s humble, direct plea, asking us to focus for forty days on our very sick world. Lent ends today, “Good Friday” is tomorrow.  Saturday is the anniversary of our loss of Dr. King, who, on an April 4th exactly one year before his death, told us that “we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.”

In just a few more weeks, I’ll be moving on from here. The other members of our congregation will remain, and, along with so many of the world’s most expendable people, will remain nearly invisible to corporate forces driving humanity to nightmarish war, horrifying inequalities in wealth and education, and the irreversible destruction of natural resources nearly as precious as the squandered hopes of these women.

Where you stand determines what you see. Transformation of the Jericho Road must begin with actually stopping there. In Atwood Hall, our “mountain man” earnestly spoke to us as the people with whom the transformation starts, as people both vital and central to the healing he yearns for. If it comes, it will have started in a million places like this one.

Recognizing our need to support one another, to overcome the scourges of our time, to pick up a pace commensurate to the needs of those surrounding us, focused on our sick society with the same determination to heal that we would bring to a very sick child, we all have the task of going beyond our places of comfort, of escaping the stable and trotting if we can’t manage to gallop, of building new affinities in which to imagine and then co-create a better world. I hope the Pope will pick up the scent of spring renewal, maybe even imagine a Kentucky Derby, as he prepares to speak a clarion and expansive wake-up call, calling us to sing another song, a new song: just as we’ve called to him.

Militia Woes in Iraq

Binoy Kampmark

Well it might be that successes are being registered against the menace that is ISIS, but today’s militia victor is the next agent of revenge and instability. Sectarianism remains a self-sustaining cycle. At Amerli in August 2014, Sunni Iraqis saw the lifting of the ISIS siege that had lasted a gruelling three months.

The vacuum of power left by the departure of ISIS forces was significant. Those moving in to man the new reins of power were not the Iraqi or Kurdish regular forces but their uncomfortably co-opted allies, the Shia militias who have proven their mettle in battle. In a Human Rights Watch report aptly titled After Liberation Came Destruction (Mar 18), optimism gives way to bloody reprisals. There was looting by government militias and volunteer fighters of Sunni villages and neighbourhoods around the Amerli area. Homes and businesses were torched. Abductions were facilitated.

“Through satellite imagery analysis Human Rights Watch confirmed building destruction in 30 out of 35 villages examined in a 500 kilometre square area around Amerli.” While HRW admitted not being able to “determine the level of organization at which the documented attacks took place,” a range of motivations were noted: standard revenge attacks on civilians accused of colluding with ISIS forces; collective, sect-directed punishments against Sunnis and an assortment of other minorities.

We see another repeat of the messy outcome of Amerli in what is now being termed the “liberation of Tikrit”. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Haider al-Abbadi claimed that his forces had retaken neighbourhoods on the western and southern edges of the city, readying to control the rest of the city. Such suggestions seem premature – as are most proclamations of victory in the current Iraqi conflict.

Notwithstanding that, the drive to push ISIS out is being pictured as a clear story of salvation. That necessarily implies that their cruelties will be highlighted with round the clock perseverance. It was Tikrit which bore witness to the reported killing of Shiite air force cadets at the hands of ISIS recruits last year. There are also reports of mass graves and the destruction of monuments. The vengeful ghost of Amerli lingers, and the combatants know it.

The role of US forces in the fight for Tikrit has also been noted, with Abbadi requesting US-led air strikes last Thursday. But Washington is handling its role in the retaking of Tikrit with some difficulty – it doesn’t want to be seen to be aiding Tehran’s cause either. Invariably, both wish for the defeat of the same foe, but both are also aiding each other’s efforts through the quirkiness of providence. (The US logistical role in Yemen, by way of contrast, is directed against Shia Houthis.)

The insistence by US forces on conventional Iraqi command and control in such operations is a moot point – the real muscularity in the fight remains with the highly motivated Shia units. Qassem Suleimani, chief of Iran’s al-Quds wing of the Revolutionary Guard, remains the coordinating hand behind the Shia mission in Iraq. The proliferation of coordinated Shia militias, be they in Iraq proper, or in Syria, is proving to be no accident, with vigorous watering taking place from Tehran’s accounts.

The fallen star of the US security establishment, Gen. David Petraeus, told the Washington Post last month of his looming fears regarding the instability arising from repelling, and ultimately expelling ISIS. The Islamic State was a violent aberration; the Shiite militias, in contrast, were part of a broader geopolitical power play, a potential open door to Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs.

Admitting that such militia members did effectively restrain the onslaught of ISIS after a declared “fatwa by Shia leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani,” he also conceded that their effect was very much like that of an ethnic juggernaut, merciless expelling those before them. Sunni fighters, and civilians, have been caught in the whirlwind. “Thus, they have, to a degree, been both part of Iraq’s salvation but also the most serious threat to the all-important effort of once again getting the Sunni Arab population in Iraq to feel that it has a stake in the success of Iraq rather than a stake in its failure.”

Such fabric, once torn, is nigh impossible to fix. The Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq was papered over by a brutal regime that had, previously, the darkest blessings of Western powers. Iran was the satanic enemy of choice, and the rhetoric still pivots on that language: the fear of the Persians with their regional, nuclear-toting aspirations.

Then came the hysterical moralising, the zealotry of regime change by a Washington-led carnival of neoconservatives. As King Abdullah II of Jordan warned over a decade ago, the removal of Saddam Hussein would precipitate an Iranian-directed “Shia crescent” stretching from Lebanon to Saudi Arabia. The rupture remains, and all sides have a stake in that failure. All that matters is simply minimising such failings in a vicious sectarian calculus. The rest is academic.