Tracking Killer Cops

Rebecca K. Smith

Last week, two stories of police shootings on opposite sides of the country made the news. The Seattle Times reported the story of a man who was sleeping in bed when two police officers opened his bedroom door, demanded an ID, and when he reached for his wallet to give them his ID, the officers opened fire and shot him 16 times. The officers had arrived at the house with a warrant for his housemate for failing to check in with a probation officer, and they had already removed his housemate from the house at that time.  The victim survived but had to go through multiple surgeries and spend months in recovery. His medical bills were hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he will likely never fully recover and never work again. He filed a civil lawsuit for excessive force in federal court and the case eventually settled for $5.5 million.

On the opposite side of the country, the Washington Post reported the story of a Pennsylvania police officer who attempted to pull a man over for expired emission tags, and after the man drove away and then ran on foot, the officer shot him with a Taser two times in the back, and then shot him twice in the back and killed him after he fell to the ground. Reminiscent of the shooting of Oscar Grant in Oakland, the man was unarmed, lying face down on the ground, and had nothing in his hands at the time the officer shot him in the back and killed him. Ironically, the officer’s Taser camera recorded the fatal shooting, and provided the local district attorney with evidence to file criminal homicide charges against the officer.

What these stories have in common is the presence of police officers that violently and unnecessarily overreacted and caused irreparable harm to unarmed civilians who were not criminals and posed no danger to anyone. These officers operated under the assumption to shoot first, and ask questions later.   As civilian policing becomes more and more militarized, this combat mentality is having devastating consequences. We have a justice system in this country that requires probable cause to arrest, innocent until proven guilty, and trial by jury before conviction and sentencing. Even if the individual is convicted, the death penalty is usually not issued as the sentence. Our justice system is turned on its head when police officers are free to act as judge, jury, and executioner and carry out the death penalty as their first response to a stressful situation.

Amid the seemingly never-ending news of police shootings and killings of unarmed civilians, there is a rising public demand for more police accountability. To placate this growing demand, a few months ago, Congress passed a new version of the Death in Custody Reporting Act, 42 U.S.C. 13727. This law, which is a revised version of a law that has been on the books for over a decade, requires state and federal law enforcement agencies to report how many people are killed by their police officers. The idea is that all of the state and federal law enforcement agencies will report these police-caused deaths to the U.S. Attorney General, who will then analyze the data and publish reports with that information. Although the law never really worked in the past, politicians promise that this version will work because there are penalties now if the law enforcement agencies do not comply.

The language of the law states that the states must report to the Attorney General on a quarterly basis the following information: “information regarding the death of any person who is detained, under arrest, or is in the process of being arrested, is en route to be incarcerated, or is incarcerated at a municipal or county jail, State prison, State-run boot camp prison, boot camp prison that is contracted out by the State, any State or local contract facility, or other local or State correctional facility (including any juvenile facility).”

For each person killed by police, each state must report:

“(1) the name, gender, race, ethnicity, and age of the deceased; (2) the date, time, and location of death; (3) the law enforcement agency that detained, arrested, or was in the process of arresting the deceased; and (4) a brief description of the circumstances surrounding the death.”

If a state does not comply, the Attorney General may, in her discretion, choose to withhold up to 10% of federal funds for law enforcement operations in that state. The key word here is “discretion.” This means that the Attorney General can also choose not to issue any penalty at all for noncompliance, which basically renders the law toothless. Also, the law does not apply to any state that can prove that complying with the law is unconstitutional under its state constitution.

A separate provision of the law also sets forth substantially the same requirements for all federal law enforcement agencies.

If any data is actually provided, the Attorney General must complete a report by December 18, 2016 that “examine[s] the relationship, if any, between the number of such deaths and the actions of management of such jails, prisons, and other specified facilities relating to such deaths.” All data from state and federal law enforcement agencies must be included in this report.

We can imagine what the report would find if all of the law enforcement agencies in the country actually provided all the required data under this law. So is there any way to make sure that our local law enforcement agencies are complying with this law? One way to check up on your local law enforcement agency to see if it is complying is to file a public records request under your state’s public records laws for any documents that indicate whether or not your local law enforcement agency is complying with the reporting requirements of the Death in Custody Reporting Act. Additionally, if you are seeking this information from a federal law enforcement agency, you can file a similar public records request under the Freedom of Information Act.

If you decide to file these record requests in your community, let us know what you find out.

Anti-Israel and the Myth of Anti-Semitism

Robert Fantina

To believe some news reports, one would think that a second Holocaust is upon us. Anti-Semitism, we are told darkly, is rearing its ugly head in a degree not seen since Nazi Germany. This poses a threat not only to all Jews, but also to all freedom-loving people around the world.

It is, once again, time for a reality check. Opposition to Israeli polices does not equate to anti-Semitism. Author and lecturer Norman Finklestein, the son of Holocaust survivors, put it succinctly in 2006, when he said this: “Whenever Israel faces a public relations debacle its apologists sound the alarm that a “new anti-Semitism” is upon us.” Let’s look at some of the recent events that have sparked the current anti-Semitism hysteria.

The Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement. This is a global effort to focus attention on the brutal apartheid regime of Israel by not doing business with companies operating in the occupied West Bank. It also includes the very successful efforts to convince entertainers and academics not to appear in Israel. It is not anti-Semitic; it is simply pro-freedom, and that means freedom for Palestine.

Southampton University was scheduled to host a conference this month, entitled ‘International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism’. Organizers say that the conference will “engage controversial questions concerning the manner of Israel’s foundation and its nature, including ongoing forced displacements of Palestinians and associated injustices”. This conference incurred the wrath of the Zionist right, with statements saying that the aim of the conference is to delegitimize Israel. In a serious blow against academic freedom, the university has withdrawn its support for the conference.

During last summer’s genocidal onslaught by Israel against Palestine, university Professor Steven Salaita tweeted his displeasure and disapproval of that mass murder. He had been offered a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he and his wife had both resigned their positions, and sold their house in anticipation of the move to Illinois. However, at the last minute, the offer from the university was rescinded, due to those very tweets. By criticizing Israel, he was accused of being anti-Semitic.

Accusing people who support the BDS movement of being anti-Semitic has become all the rage in Zionist circles. Some examples:

* Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said last month that the BDS movement is “the 21st century form of 20th century anti-Semitism.” He further said, astonishingly, that criticism of Israel is the same thing as criticism of Jews. Zionists are desperate to make that connection, in the vain hope that it will successfully cause people to hesitate criticizing Israel, not wanting to be labelled anti-Semitic. Unfortunately for them, society has, for the most part, moved past that point.

* New York Senator Charles Schumer (D) said this: “It is very suspicious that those who promote boycotting Israel do not seek boycotts against any other nations in the world.” That is like saying that people who donate exclusively to the American Cancer Society don’t care about heart disease. They have simply chosen, for any of a variety of reasons, to support that cause. People involved in the BDS movement focus on Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights.

* Former Pink Floyd band member Roger Waters, an outspoken critic of Israel’s apartheid regime, and a supporter of the BDS movement, has denied being anti-Semitic. In response to comments made by Gerald Ronson, chairman of the Jewish Community Security Trust, suggesting that Mr. Waters was an anti-Semite, Mr. Waters said this: “On a personal note, Mr Ronson, my father, the son of a coal miner from County Durham, pulled himself up by his bootstraps, eventually got a degree from Durham University, went off and taught divinity, history, and English in Jerusalem between 1935 and 1938, and subsequently died in Italy on February 18, 1944 fighting the Nazi menace. Do not dare to presume to preach to me, my father’s son, about anti-Semitism or human rights.”

One wonders why there isn’t any talk about anti-Arab attitudes. Let’s look at some recent evidence.

Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Affairs Minister, in discussing the perceived loyalty or disloyalty of Israeli Arabs, who comprise approximately 20% of Israel’s population, said this on March 8: “Whoever’s with us, should get everything. Those who are against us, there’s nothing to be done — we need to pick up an ax and cut off his head. Otherwise we won’t survive here.”

During Israel’s bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip in 2014, during which more than 2,000 Palestinians, including more than 500 children, were killed, The Times of Israel and the 5 Towns Jewish Timespublished an article entitled ‘When Genocide is
Permissible’. In it were these words: “If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide, is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?”

And as long as the topic of genocide has reared its ugly head, let’s talk about Israel’s onslaught of the summer of 2014. Israel used Palestinian children has human shields; assassinated unarmed children playing on a beach; bombed hospitals, mosques and homes; bombed United Nations schools that were being used as refugee centers, despite having it confirmed more than ten times that these refugee centers were sponsored by the U.N. All this is in violation of international law. Israel, and some of the world community, said this was all done to ‘defend’ itself from Palestinian fireworks. International law is clear: an occupied country has every right to oppose the occupying force. Even putting that aside, it is illogical to suggest that an occupying force can ‘defend’ itself from its victim. The foxes, when raiding the henhouse, aren’t defending themselves from the hens.

The old narratives about Israel and Palestine are no longer valid. Zionists in the U.S., those in Congress who bow and scrape before the sacred AIPAC (American Israel Political Affairs Committee) altar in order to finance their reelection campaigns, and those on the religious right, are quick to paint critics of Israel as anti-Semites. Occasionally, although not often, the old canard of ‘self-hating Jew’ is thrown at Jews who criticize Israel. Both of these tired and worn labels no longer stick; they are the final weapons of desperate people who cannot justify the savagery Israel constantly commits against the Palestinians and seek to deflect attention from those atrocities.

For decades, this strategy worked, but those days are now in the past. It is arguable that Israel’s savage mass murder last summer was a turning point; the news media might have whitewashed this atrocity, but the Twittersphere, Facebook, Instagram and other social media tools brought it all home to people around the world. The old narrative, that of poor, vulnerable little Israel striving to do nothing more than to survive, is over. The truth is now widely known, and while resisted by the U.S. Congress, even its days of denial are numbered. Israel Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu put the final nail in that coffin when he proclaimed that there would be no independent Palestine during his administration. Change comes slowly, especially in the halls of U.S. governance, but it does happen. It cannot come soon enough for Palestine.

Nothing is Right in the Middle East

Andre Vltchek

There is nothing, absolutely nothing right in the Middle East these days. There seems to be no hope left, and no fervor. All that was pure was dragged through filth. All that was great here was stolen or smashed by the outsiders. Enthusiasm had been ridiculed, then drowned, or burned to ashes, or shattered by tanks and missiles.

Corruption thrives – corruption that inundated this entire region since the early days of Western colonialism, and then was sustained through the present-day imperialist global regime.

The land of the Middle East is tired; it is crying from exhaustion. It is scarred by wars. It is dotted with oil wells and rotting armor vehicles. There are corpses everywhere; buried, turned into dust, but still present in minds of those who are alive. There are millions of corpses, tens of millions of victims, shouting in their own, voiceless way, not willing to leave anyone in peace, pointing fingers, accusing!

This land is where so much began. Europe was nothing, when Byblos and Erbil stood tall, when a fabled civilization was forming in Mesopotamia, when Aleppo, Cairo and Al-Quds could only be rivaled by the great cities of China…

And this is where greatness, progress, decency and kindness were broken and bathed in blood by the crusaders, and later by the colonialist scum.

Europeans like to say that this part of the world is now ‘backward’, because it never experienced renaissance, but before it was broken and humiliated; it went much farther than renaissance, following its own way and direction. A primitive and aggressive medieval Europe took most of the knowledge from here.

All this means nothing now. Almost nothing is left of the glorious past. Grand Arab cities, once exhibiting their fabulous socialist concepts, including public and free hospitals and universities, even several centuries before Karl Marx was born, are now choking in smog, polluted, with almost nothing public remaining. Everything is privatized, and corrupt monarchs, generals and mafias are firmly in charge, from Egypt to the Gulf.

People wanted to have it exactly the opposite way. After the WWII, from North Africa to Iran, they were opting for various socialist concepts. But they were never allowed to have it their own way! Everything secular and progressive was smashed, destroyed by the Western masters of the world. And then came the second wave of semi-socialist states: Libya, Iraq and Syria, and they were bombed and destroyed as well, as nothing socialist, nothing that serves the people is ever allowed to survive in the ‘third world’ by Washington, London and Paris.

Millions died. Western imperialism orchestrated coups, sent brothers against brothers, bombed civilians and invaded directly, when all other means to achieve its hegemonic goals failed.

It created, it ‘educated’ a substantial layer of cynical servers of the Empire, the layer of new elites who are accountable to the governments in Washington, London and Paris, and treat their own people with spite and brutality. This layer is now ruling almost entire region, is fully backed by the West, and therefore there is extremely difficult to remove it.

Recently, at the “American University” in Beirut, one of the local academics told me “this region is doomed because of corruption”. But where did corruption come from, I wondered aloud. One after another, secular and socialist leaders in the Arab world were removed, overthrown. The Empire put the lowest grade of thugs, the most regressive monarchs and dictators, on the thrones.

The truth is, like in Africa, the people of the Middle East lost all hope that they could ever be allowed to elect the governments that would defend them and represent their interests. They sank to bare ‘survival mode’, to extreme individualism, to nepotism and to cynicism. They had to, in order to survive, in order to make their families and clans to stay afloat in the world forced on them by the others.

The result is atrocious: one of the most advanced civilizations on earth was converted into one of the most regressive.

***

And as a result, there is bitterness, humiliation and shame in the entire Middle East. There is an unhealthy, unnatural mood.

The thugs in Beirut, Amman, Erbil, Riyadh and Cairo are driving their shiny SUV’s and latest European sedans. New and newer luxury malls are offering top designer brands for those who make huge profits from the refugee crises triggered by the Empire, or from the crude which is being extracted by mistreated migrant workers. Humiliated Southeast Asian maids, often tortured, raped and abused, are sitting on the marble floors of the shopping centers, waiting for their masters who are engaging in unbridled food and shopping orgies, spending money that they never had to work for.

Collaborators are extremely well rewarded, for serving the Empire directly, for keeping business rolling and oil wells pumping, for staffing the UN agencies and through them providing legitimacy to this grotesque state of things, for brainwashing local youth in West-sponsored schools and universities.

All this is extremely hard to observe and to stomach, unless one is on a certain ‘wave’, immunized and indifferent, lobotomized, resigned to this state of the world.

The Middle East is of course not the exception – it is just a part of what I often describe as the ‘belt’ of client states of the West; a belt that winds from Indonesia through almost the entirety of Southeast Asia, then via the sub-Continent and the Middle East, down to Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.

***

Now Saudi Arabia is bombing Yemen. It does it in order to give full support to the outgoing pro-Western regime, and in order to damage Shi’a Muslims. Recent Saudi actions, as so many previous actions by that brutal client state of Washington, will open the doors to terrorism, and will kill thousands of innocent people. Shockingly, that is probably part of the plan.

I am now constantly invited to talk shows and radio and television interviews, to speak on the topic. But what more could be said and added?

The horrors of Western, Israeli, Saudi and Turkish aggressions (direct and indirect) are repeating themselves, year after year, in various parts of the Middle East. People are killed, many people, even children. There are some protests, some accusations, some ‘noise’, but at the end, the aggressors get away with everything. It is partially because the mass media in the West is twisting all the facts, again and again, and it does it extremely successfully. And most of the Arab media outlets are taking Western propaganda directly from the source, feeding it to their own people, shamelessly.

It is also because there is no effective international legal system in place that could punish aggressors.

The UN is nowhere to be found, when the acts or real terror are committed. Once in a while it is ‘concerned’, it even ‘condemns’ aggressors. But there are never any sanctions or embargos imposed against Israel or the United States, even Saudi Arabia. It is understood that the West and its allies are ‘above the law’.

This sends powerful signals to the rulers of the Middle East. The Egyptian military, which killed thousands of poor people right after it grabbed the power in a 2014 coup (which is commonly not defined as a coup, there), is now once again ‘eligible for US military aid’.

Fully prostituted Egyptian elites danced on the streets of Cairo when the coup took place, as did the elites in Chile, in 1973. I saw them, when I was making a documentary film for the South American Telesur, a film on how the West derailed the Arab Spring. They were posing for my cameras, cheering and hugging me, thinking that I am one of their handlers from the US or Europe.

Recently, I found an Egyptian UN staffer staring threateningly into my face:

“A coup?” she whispered. “You call it a coup? Egyptian people don’t call it a coup.”

How would I dare to argue with such a respectable representative of the Egyptian nation? I noticed that the pro-Western Egyptian elites love to pose as ‘Egyptian people’, as those species that are far removed from their mansions and chauffer-driven limousines.

***

There are tens of millions of people displaced in this part of the world. They come from Iraq and Syria, and from Palestine. There are new refugees and decades old refugees. Now, most certainly, there will be millions of Yemeni refugees.

In Lebanon alone, 2 million Syrian refugees live all over the place, some renting huts and houses, others, if the can afford it, leasing apartments in Beirut. But the UN and local authorities do not even register hundreds of thousands of them, those in Bekaa Valley and elsewhere. Refugees told me that many of them get turned away. If there is no registration, there are no food rations, no education for children and no medical care.

I saw refugees from several Iraqi cities, in Erbil, in Iraqi administered Kurdistan. They were escaping from the ISIS, which were created by the West.

A nuclear scientist Ishmael Khalil, originally from Tikrit University, told me: “All that I had was destroyed… Americans are the main reason for this insanity – for the total destruction of Iraq. Don’t just just me, ask any child, and you will hear the same thing… We all used to belong to a great and proud nation. Now everything is fragmented, and ruined. We have nothing – all of us have become beggars and refugees in our own land… I escaped five months ago, after ISIS devastated my university. And we all know who is behind them: the allies of the West: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others…”

Then I stood by what was left of a bridge, connecting the two shores of the Khazer River, just a few kilometers from the city of Mosul. ISIS blew up the bridge. A few villages around it were flattened by the US bombing. A Kurdish colonel who was showing me the area was proud to mention that he was trained in the UK and US. It felt like total insanity – all forces united in destroying Iraq, had the same sources: the US, the NATO, and the West!

A few kilometers from the frontline were oil fields, but local people said that oil companies were just stealing their land; nothing was coming back to local communities. As the flames of the oil refineries were burning, local people were digging out roots and herbs, in order to survive.

And there was a camp for Syrian refugees, too, nearby. But refugees were screened. Only those who expressed their hatred for the President al-Assad were allowed to stay.

***

Beirut is symbolic to what is happening in the entire Middle East.

Once glorious, the city now ranks near the bottom of quality of life indexes. With basically no public transportation, it is choking, polluted and jammed. Electric blackouts are common. Miserable neighborhoods are all around. Education and medical care are mostly private and unaffordable to the great majority. Dirty money propels construction of expensive condominiums, posh malls and overpriced restaurants.

Luxury cars are everywhere. Expensive condominiums, yachts, vehicles and designer clothes are the only measure of worth.

It is all thoroughly grotesque, considering that there are 2 million Syrian refugees struggling all over this tiny country. There are old Palestinian refugees in depressing camps. There are the hated and discriminated Bedouins, there are the abused Asian and African maids…

“Work is punishment”, says local credo. Nobody bothers to work too much.

There is plenty of money, but most of it does not come from work. Huge amounts come from drugs, from ‘accommodating refugees’, from business in Africa and elsewhere, from remittances of those who work in the Gulf.

Israel is next door. It is threatening, and periodically it attacks.

Hezbollah is the only large movement in the country that is fighting for social welfare of the people. It is also fighting Israel whenever it invades. And now, it is locked in an epic battle with ISIS. But it is on the terrorist list of the West, because it is Shi’a, and because it is too ‘socialist’ and too critical of the West.

In Beirut, everything goes. The rich are burning their money like paper. They ride their luxury cars and bikes without mufflers, run people over on pedestrian crossings, and never yield. They are mostly educated in the West and trilingual (Arabic, French and English). They commute back and forth to Europe as if it is a next-door village.

The need of the upper classes to show-off is all that matters in Beirut.

The poor – the majority of the Lebanese people – do not exist. One never hears about them. They are irrelevant.

***

Those who rule over the Middle East are corrupt, cynical, and unpatriotic.

And they are scared, because they know that they have betrayed their own people.

The more scared they are, the more brutal are their tactics. I see them in action, in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere.

Most of the left-wing movements and parties in the Middle East were destroyed, bought or derailed. Politics are about clans and religious sects and money. There is hardly any ideology left. There is no knowledge about Venezuela and Ecuador, China and Russia. The poor people love Russia, because “it stands against the West”, but there is very little understanding of the world outside the Middle East and the old colonial master – Europe.

Nothing feels right in the Middle East, these days.

New reports are coming in, alleging Israel of interrogating, torturing young Palestinian children.

Yemen, that ancient land with which I fell in love with from first sight, many years ago, is bleeding and burning.

Two cradles of civilization – Iraq and Syria – are totally torn to pieces, devastated.

Libya is breaking apart, most likely beyond repair, absolutely finished as a country.

Egypt is once again squeezed in an horrendous military grip.

Shi’a people in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are suffering great discrimination and violence.

People are dying; people are displaced, discriminated against. There is no justice, no social justice for the majority, the same scenario like in Indonesia, like in sub-Continent, like in East Africa, like everywhere where the Western imperialism and neoliberalism managed to have their way.

The West worked very hard to turn the Middle East into what it is now. It took centuries to transfigure this culturally deep and great part of the world into the horror show. But it is done!

The rest of the world should watch and learn. This should not be allowed to happen elsewhere. The “Southeast Asia – East Africa Corridor” is what the West wants to convert entire planet into. But it will not succeed, because there is Latin America, China, Russia, Iran, South African, Eritrea and other proud and determined nations standing on its way.

And the Middle East, one day, will stand up, too! The people will demand what is theirs. They will demand justice. Recently, they tried but they were smashed. I have no doubt that they will not give up – they will try again and again, until they win.

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.