TOO MUCH (Annals of Inequality— 19 August 2013)

	August 19, 2013
THIS WEEK
Just when did modern executive pay start down the road to abominable excess? We now have a much better idea, thanks to Duff McDonald, the author of a new history on the McKinsey corporate consulting empire. McDonald, we learned last week, has identified the “godfather of CEO megapay.”That godfather, McKinsey consultant Arch Patton, started studying executive pay back in the 1950s, a humbling time for CEOs. His surveys revealed that executive pay, after inflation, had actually been shrinking since the late 1930s. America’s CEOs would soon become huge Arch Patton fans, and Patton’s executive pay consulting — he helped corporations put in place new bonus plans — would become a huge cash cow for McKinsey. But Patton himself would start having second thoughts. By the 1980s, CEO pay had started soaring significantly, and Patton was telling reporters he felt “guilty” about the soar. In 1982, CEOs were making 42 times worker pay. Patton considered that far too wide a gap. So does Rep. Barbara Lee. She now has a bill before Congress that discourages any pay gap wider than 25 times. Our current gap? Over 350 times. This week in Too Much, more on Lee’s bill and the obstacles she’s facing.	About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good Subscribe to Too Much Join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
GREED AT A GLANCE
Some of us may be rich, some poor, but deep down we all have the same make-up, right? Not so fast, say researchers at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health. Inequality, they note in a new study, is differentiating our insides. Rich Americans, for instance, show higher levels of oxybenzone, an ingredient in sunscreen lotions that some experts link to skin cancer. Poor Americans show more Bisphenol-A, a banned substance in Europe that still lines food cans in the United States. These new findings, says researcher Jessica Tyrrell, should help policy makers understand that toxins threaten people at all income levels. The difference? The rich can more easily dodge the dangers . . .In our contemporary age of hyper “financialization,” Americans of means don’t just lobby government officials. They place bets on the decisions they expect these officials to make. The latest hedge fund to score a betting windfall: GSO Capital Partners, a Blackstone Group unit, scored a $100 million payday this May betting that New York insurance regulators would opt to protect big banks over average citizens with bonds in their retirement portfolios. Darren Richmond, the orchestrator of Blackstone’s winning bet, apparently turned so nervous worrying about the outcome that he had to go out on a 10-mile run to “de-stress.” In the world of luxury, says cultural commentator Jill Lawless, “a higher level of extravagance exists to set the super-rich apart from the merely affluent.” Take handbags, Lawless suggests in a new analysis. Luxury handbag maker Hermes offers its coveted Birkin model, a crowd-pleaser since the 1980s, for as little as $10,000. But that same design, with a little fabric-switching and jewel-stitching, can turn into a bag fit only for the wrist of the super rich. Hermes has introduced four new Birkins “crafted from gold and studded with precious gems.” The company, Hermes CEO Patrick Thomas admits, has gone “a bit crazy” with these four new clutches. Two years in the making, they feature “thousands of individually crafted diamonds.” The price: $1.9 million each.	Quote of the Week “If nobody dreamed of a better world, what would there be to wake up to?” Gary Younge, The Misremembering of ‘I Have a Dream,’ The Nation, August 14, 2013
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
In business circles, they like to describe AOL’s Tim Armstrong as an “impetuous CEO who fires from the hip.” Armstrong, a former Google hotshot, earlier this month fired away literally. He sacked Abel Lenz, the creative director of AOL’s local news network Patch, during a conference call with a thousand employees on it. Abel’s sin? He was filming his boss, a common practice in previous such calls. Armstrong’s tirade against Abel — “Abel, put that camera down right now. Abel, you’re fired! Out!” — would quickly go viral online. Last week Armstrong “apologized,” without reinstating Abel. But he still owes an apology to the hundreds of Patch staffers about to be axed. Patch is stumbling, and the Columbia Journalism Review is blaming poor management. CEO Armstrong’s compensation, meanwhile, last year totaled $12.07 million.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend
IMAGES OF INEQUALITY
Graph the top 1 percent share of America’s income over the last 100 years, former labor secretary Robert Reich marvels in the engaging new feature film Inequality for All, and you get a veritable suspension bridge: an almost identical hyperconcentration of income in the 1920s and then again today. Inequality for All will debut in theaters September 27. Just released: the film’s official trailer.	Web Gem BornRich/ An eight-year-old genuflection to excess that “curates the good things in life” — and regularly supplies ample evidence that wealth today sits far too concentrated.
PROGRESS AND PROMISE
Earlier this month Senators Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced the Stop Subsidizing Multimillion Dollar Corporate Bonuses Act, legislation that would prevent U.S. corporations from deducting off their taxes — as they routinely do now — any individual executive compensation that runs over $1 million. This S.1476 reflects the spirit of an even stiffer bill that Rep. Barbara Lee has introduced in the House. Her Income Equity Act, H.R. 199, would deny corporations tax deductions on any executive pay over $500,000 — or 25 times the compensation of a corporation’s lowest-paid employee. With the current nearly unlimited deductibility of executive pay, Lee notes, ordinary American taxpayers “are actually subsidizing” the income inequality that excessive executive compensation creates.	Take Action on Inequality Fast food CEOs average $25,000 in pay per day, over twice what fast food workers average for an entire year, notes Fast Food Forward, the new advocacy group now running a national petition drive to narrow the industry’s CEO-worker gap.
inequality by the numbers
	Stat of the Week Two new infographics are compellingly illustrating how inequality hurts. Some 44 percent of Americans, notes Paycheck-to-Paycheck, lack enough savings to get through three months jobless. The SAT test score gap between rich and poor kids, adds The Rich Get Richer, has widened by 40 percent over the last 50 years — and now nearly doubles the black/white SAT gap.
IN FOCUS
Why Can’t Democracy Trump Inequality?Voters of modest means outnumber voters of excessive means in every election. Yet public policy in America essentially comforts only the already comfortable. Four political scientists have an explanation. Fifty years ago, average Americans lived in a society that had been growing — and had become — much more equal. In 1963, of every $100 in personal income, less than $10 went to the nation’s richest 1 percent. Americans today live in a land much more unequal. The nation’s top 1 percent are taking just under 20 percent of America’s income, double the 1963 level. But no Americans, in all the years since 1963, have ever voted for doubling the income share of America’s most affluent. No candidates, in all those years, have ever campaigned on a platform that called for enriching the already rich. Yet the rich have been enriched. America’s top 0.01 percent reported incomes in 1963 that averaged $4.1 million in today’s dollars. In 2011, the most recent year with stats available, our top 0.01 percent averaged $23.7 million, nearly six times more than their counterparts in 1963, after taking inflation into account. This colossal upward redistribution of income took years to unfold, and — for many of those years — most Americans didn’t even realize that some grand redistribution was even taking place. Few Americans remain that clueless today. Most of us now have a fairly clear sense that American society has become fundamentally — and dangerously — more unequal. The starkly contrasting fortunes of America’s 1 and 99 percent have become a staple of America’s political discourse. So why is this stark contrast continuing to get even starker? Americans do, after all, live amid democratic institutions. Why haven’t the American people, through these institutions, been able to undo the public policies that squeeze the bottom 99 percent and lavishly reward the crew at the top? Why, in other words, hasn’t democracy slowed rising inequality? Four political scientists are taking a crack at answering exactly this question in the current issue of the American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives, a special issue devoted to debating America’s vast gulf between the rich and everyone else. The four analysts — Stanford’s Adam Bonica, Princeton’s Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole from the University of Georgia, and NYU’s Howard Rosenthal — lay out a nuanced reading of the American political scene that explores the interplay of a wide variety of factors, everything from the impact of the partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts to voter turnout by income level. But one particular reality dramatically drives their analysis: Societies that let wealth concentrate at enormously intense levels will quite predictably end up with a wealthy who can concentrate enormous resources on getting their way. These wealthy underwrite political campaigns. They spend fortunes on lobbying. They keep politicians and bureaucrats “friendly” to their interests with a “revolving door” that promises lucrative employment in the private sector. Bonica, McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal do an especially engaging job exploring, with both data and anecdotal evidence, just how deeply America’s super rich have come to dominate the nation’s election process. One example from their new paper: Back in 1980, no American gave out more in federal election political contributions than Cecil Haden, the owner of a tugboat company. Haden contributed all of $1.72 million, in today’s dollars, almost six times more than any other political contributor in 1980. In the 2012 election cycle, by contrast, just one deep-pocket couple alone, gaming industry giant Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, together shelled out $103.4 million to bend politics in their favored wealth-concentrating direction. The Adelsons sit comfortably within the richest 0.01 percent of America’s voting age population. Over 40 percent of the contributions to American political campaigns are now emanating from this super-rich elite strata. In the 1980s, campaign contributions from the top 0.01 percent roughly equaled the campaign contributions from all of organized labor. In 2012, note political scientists Bonica, McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal in their new analysis, America’s top 0.01 percent all by themselves “outspent labor by more than a 4:1 margin.” Donors in this top 0.01 percent, their analysis adds, “give pretty evenly to Democrats and Republicans” — and they get a pretty good return on their investment. Both “Democrats as well as Republicans,” the four analysts observe, have come to “rely on big donors.” The results from this reliance? Back in the 1930s, Democrats in Congress put in place the financial industry regulations that helped create a more equal mid-20th century America. In our time, Democrats have helped undo these regulations. In 1993, a large cohort of Democrats in Congress backed the legislation that ended restrictions on interstate banking. In 1999, Democrats helped pass the bill that let federally insured commercial banks make speculative investments. The next year, a block of congressional Democrats blessed the measure that prevented the regulation of “derivatives,” the exotic new financial bets that would go on to wreak economic havoc in 2008. We’ll never be able to fully “gauge the effect of the Democrats’ reliance on contributions from the wealthy,” acknowledge political scientists Bonica, McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal. But at the least, they continue, this reliance “does likely preclude a strong focus on redistributive policies” that would in any significant way discomfort the movers and shakers who top America’s moneyed class. Conventional economists, the four analysts add, tend to ascribe rising inequality to broad trends like globalization and technological change — and ignore the political decisions that determine how these trends play out in real life. New technologies, for instance, don’t automatically have to concentrate wealth — and these new technologies wouldn’t have that impact if intellectual property laws, a product of political give-and-take, better protected the public interest. But too many lawmakers and other elected leaders can’t see that “public interest.” Cascades of cash — from America’s super rich — have them conveniently blinded.	New Wisdom on Wealth Matt Bruenig, What to Do About Social Capital Inequality, PolicyShop, August 13, 2013. How we can reduce the income-concentrating impact of insider networks. Matthew O’Brien, Why Is Inequality So Much Higher in the U.S. Than in France? Atlantic, August 14, 2013. Blame Wall Street. Colin Gordon, Mind the Gap, Dissent, August 15, 2013. The overall health of the economy hasn’t battered America’s workers. A dramatic change in the nation’s distribution of rewards has. Check online for the intro to The Rich Don’t Always Win, the new book about the triumph over America’s original plutocracy by Too Much editor Sam Pizzigati.
NEW AND notable
Creating a New System for Creating WealthA Symposium on Alternatives to Capitalism. Papers by Gar Alperovitz and Steve Dubb, Thomas Hanna, Joe Guinan, Marjorie Kelly, Thad Williamson, and Joel Rogers. The Good Society: the journal of the Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society. Penn State University Press, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2013. Scholars and activists around the Democracy Collaborative are launching a new initiative they call the “Next System Project.” The goal: to generate “alternative models — different from both corporate capitalism and state socialism — capable of delivering superior ecological, social, and economic outcomes.” Just what does that mean? The current issue of the Good Society journal — available online free now through the end of August — sports a half-dozen papers that offer a tantalizing glimpse at a variety of visionary yet practical paths out of “America’s Lockean rock ‘n’ roll political wilderness.” Almost all these paths aim to encourage “more cooperative ways of producing wealth.” Take a look. You might find a path you’d like to follow.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend who might want to subscribe
About Too Much
Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies \| 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 \| (202) 234-9382 \| Editor: Sam Pizzigati. \| E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org \| Unsubscribe.

OpEds: Oh What Fun It is to Kill Our Fellow Creatures

By Dick Meister

No comment. Let your inner decency tell you what this is all about.

In the matter of gun control, our main concern is rightly for the human victims of mass shootings. But what of the other defenseless animals that die at the hands of humans?

Of course it’s tragic that so many young people and others have been slain by wielders of military-style assault weapons. And it’s certain that such weapons should be limited to military uses and recreational target shooting.

[pullquote]

“When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man, we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of God, we call him a sportsman.” – Joseph Wood Krutch

[/pullquote]

But what of the hunting rifles that are cited as legitimate simply because they are not rapid-fire weapons, the guns that are used by hunters to kill so many of our fellow beings in the name of sport?

This is not to argue that tighter controls should – or should not – be put on guns used in hunting. But we should recognize the more than 12 million U.S. “sportsmen” who wield the guns for what they really are.

However much they attempt to romanticize what they do, it amounts to this: They are people who find great fun – many claim even deep meaning – in hunting down and killing fellow creatures of the winged and four-legged variety. They are animal killers. They are not sportsmen.

They find it amusing to stalk and kill other animals. For some, it’s even more than amusing. They find hunting to be downright spiritual, if not orgasmic.

Consider Tom Stienstra of the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the country’s leading outdoors writers. He’s written that to hunt is to experience “the raw essence of life and death … to strip away the layers of civilization.”

Stienstra described his thrill in stalking two bucks. He crept along under cover of one large rock and then another until “finally I was ready … My breath quickened. I put a cartridge in the chamber of my .300 Winchester Magnum, took a few easy breaths to calm a pounding heart, then rose above the rock, using it to steady my aim …”

Stienstra, alas, wasn’t able to experience death. For even though he presumably had been freed of civilized restraints, he never got a shot at the animals. By the time he rose to try to catch them unawares, they had vanished. The unarmed beasts had outsmarted one of their human stalkers.
State and federal agencies that deal with hunting generally side with animal killers such as Stienstra, although what’s needed are government efforts to better protect the animals and their habitats.

What we’ve been getting instead are government efforts that expose animals to even greater danger. For one of the agencies’ primary goals has been to overcome public sentiment against hunting that’s come with urbanization, environmental awareness and the growth of the animal rights and anti-gun movements.

But aren’t hunters and their government allies major supporters of attempts by environmentalists to preserve open space? Sure, but they take that position, not for the animals’ sake, but because open space is where the hunters’ prey lives. Without open space, they’d have nothing to shoot at, nothing to kill.

Once, a long, long time ago, we had to hunt and kill in order to survive. But this is the 21st century, is it not?

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. Contact him through his website,www.dickmeister.com.

Guest Editorials: The Buddha’s last lesson was for humane work

Prefatory Note:
The reports that test-tube burgers are finally a reality, and that in the near future humans may at last, after many thousands of years, begin replacing the meat from cows and other conveniently designated “food animals” with meat produced without animal suffering, is colossal good news for animal defenders everywhere. Of the many atrocities we visit on animals, factory farming is without a doubt the most harrowing form of animal enslavement, but, of equal importance, it is also a lethal ecological activity of global dimensions. I wish there were hyperbole in this, but there isn’t. Just Google factory farming and the environment and hundreds if not thousands of pages will turn up.

Thus, in good faith, no one with any degree of awareness about today’s troubled world can claim innocence about this connection. Indeed, any person who gives a damn about the environment, who is serious about the way our species and its institutionalized business tentacles are destroying the only planet we have, regardless of how deeply s/he cares for animals, should stop eating them, strictly on account of this dreadful effect. In fact, no true environmentalist can munch on animal foods without falling into a huge contradiction. The guest editorial we reproduce below was penned by the publisher and editor of ANIMAL PEOPLE, Kim Bartlett and Merritt Clifton, in 2003, but the thoughts, sentiments, and information remain fresh and germane to the new development that now captures our attention. —Patrice Greanville

_________________________________________

[Originally published SEPTEMBER 2003]

The ANIMAL PEOPLE editorial team will be traveling in China when most readers receive this edition. We will meet with many of the people who are building pro-animal institutions in the world’s most populous nation, will visit the Animals Asia Foundation sanctuary for rescued bile farm bears in Chengu, and will then join delegates from throughout Asia at the Asia for Animals conference in Hong Kong.

Hosted by the Hong Kong SPCA, Asia for Animals is to focus on dogs and catsbut dogs and cats are eaten in many parts of Asia, while the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic of 2002-2003 established the relationship of live markets selling dogs, cats, and wildlife as meat with the spread of human disease.

Any discussion of humane work inevitably circles back around to the first and biggest of all humane issues, and perhaps of all ethical issues: killing animals for meat.

“History’s first ideological and philosophical argument may have been the conflict between vegetarianism and carnivorism, depicted in the rivalry between Cain and Abel,” wrote Richard Schwartz in Judaism & Vegetarianism(1988).

The vegetarian Cain eventually murdered Abel, the herdsman favored by God. Scribes and scholars have struggled over interpretations of the allegorical story ever since, while affirming the importance of the ethical issues it raises by including versions in Jewish scripture, the Christian “Old Testament,” and the Quran.

Moses appears to have retained leadership of the Hebrews by bringing forth a set of Ten Commandments which omitted explicit mention of animals in declaring “Thou shall not kill,” while introducing as part of “Mosaic Law” a set of rules for humane slaughter and the care of work animals.

In effect, Moses may have introduced the compromise accepted by most humane institutions ever since. He may have agreed that animals could be eaten if they were raised and killed “humanely” because this was the most he could convince others to accept.

The Brahmins, who were perhaps also refugees from Egypt, in comparably ancient times appear to have introduced abstention from meat to India as a central tenet of upper-caste Hinduism. When Brahmin teachings were corrupted by the continued practice of animal sacrifice among tribal peoples they conquered, Mahavir and Sidhartha Gautama Buddha founded Jainism and Buddhism as vegetarian Hindu reform movements.

Reconciliation of Buddhism with meat-eating came long after the Buddha’s own time and far from his homeland, where followers remembered more vividly that he was killed when someone slipped a morsel of pork into his begging bowl.

The symbolism of that incident is relevant today to animal advocates of every religion, or none.

The point the Buddha made by his death, however accidental, is that if an animal advocate accepts eating meat in any form, that ethical compromise can ultimately poison the cause. If animals may be killed for meat, for example, it is difficult to argue that it is unethical to kill animals in experiments which might benefit millions of people and some animals too. If animals may be killed for meat, certainly it is not more harmful or disrespectful of their lives to use them for entertainment, or to wear their hides and pelts.

If any of this may be done with animals of one species, why not with animals of other species? Why not with humans?

Troubled by such questions, but reluctant to risk alienating donors, the secular humane societies of recent times have mostly compromised, like Moses, sacrificing moral clarity to institutional pragmatism.

Formed in 1824, the London SPCA in 1832 foreshadowed the direction of the cause for nearly 200 years by ousting Jewish financial saviour Lewis Gompertz because he urged that SPCA functions be vegetarian. Then, having attracted the broader support that the meat-eaters feared Gompertz would alienate, the organization in 1840 became the Royal SPCA by in effect giving up opposition to vivisection to win a royal charter.

That created openings for the rise of the next generation of British animal advocacy groups, including the National Canine Defence League, now a world leader in promoting dog-and-cat welfare but originally an anti-vivisection society.

Causes grow by developing institutional influence; becoming corrupted, at least in the vision of the most determined reformers; splitting, and eventually revitalizing themselves.

Critical to understand, in either building or revitalizing a cause, is that a reformer succeeds to the extent that the reformer is able to make the public feel uncomfortable enough about abuse and injustice to seek the creation, improvement, or replacement of institutions.

A reformer is thereby an instrument of social instability. Institutions, however, even when built by reformers, do not actually exist to solve the problems that motivate reformers. Rather, institutions exist to alleviate the discomfort that afflicts society as result of the work of reformers. The central purpose of any institution is to restore and maintain social stability.

This may be achieved by solving the problems that motivate reformers, but may also be achieved by providing the public with a means of assuaging their consciences through pretending that something is being done about the problems, whether that is true or not.

Reformers are by nature radical; institutions are conservative. Radicals serve ideal visions; institutions serve reality.

Thus, in the name of reality, the American Humane Association and American SPCA during the 1890s gave up opposition to sport hunting (and later, to use of shelter animals in research) to gain, respectively, the franchise to operate orphanages for New York state and the New York City animal control contract. These economically stabilizing deals lasted until 1950 and 1994.

The late Cleveland Amory cofounded the Humane Society of the U.S. in 1954 in hopes of forcing the AHA and ASPCA to retract their endorsement of the use of shelter animals in research, as they eventually did. Amory meanwhile started the Fund for Animals in 1968 to oblige both organizations and HSUS to stand up against sport hunting.

Amory won that struggle, too, and along the way came to a critical realization. Decades before Amory died in 1998, he understood that even though he himself never succeeded in becoming a vegetarian, and even though the Fund has little direct involvement in dietary issues, Fund policy and Fund events had to eschew meat-eating, as the first and strongest defense against loss of moral leadership. Amory endorsed the adoption of vegetarianism as a central goal of the animal rights movement and agreed with ANIMAL PEOPLE that humane societies should not serve meat at public functions, as a gesture toward integrity, even if every member eats meat at every meal at home.

Less meat can succeed

Humane society directors and board members who fear losing donor support if they quit serving meat at public events might note the fundraising success of the San Francisco SPCA, raising $11.5 million per year, and Best Friends, which raised $15.7 million last year. The SF/SPCA has officially practiced and promoted vegetarianism for approximately ten years; Best Friends has been stalwartly vegetarian from inception.

The Richmond SPCA, of Richmond, Virginia, has not been nearly that brave, but did quietly de-emphasize meat during a recent three-year series of weekly luncheons that raised $14.2 million to build a new shelter and bankroll an effort to make Richmond the first no-kill city in the U.S. South.

The fundraising achievement is especially noteworthy because Richmond is a third the size of San Francisco and much less affluent. Unlike the SF/SPCA and Best Friends, the Richmond SPCA is not nationally prominent, and does not have a support base extending beyond just a few miles up the Shenandoah Valley. Neither is Richmond noted for warmly receiving change. The last time anyone led a revolution in Richmond may have been during the 1863-1865 struggle remembered locally as the War Between the States.

Fought in a futile effort to preserve slavery, that war remains fresh in memory in the Shenandoah Valley. The American SPCA, Massachusetts SPCA, Pennsylvania SPCA, and Women’s Humane Society of Philadephia were all begun soon afterward by Abolitionists who extended their concerns to animals, but the first “humane society” in Richmond may have been the insane asylum for depressed and destitute ex-slaveowners depicted by Ross Lockridge Jr. in his 1948 novel Raintree County. The character played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1957 filmRaintree County briefly inhabited the asylum, but she cannot quite be claimed as a fictional Richmond SPCA alumnus because the present humane society was formed a generation later, in 1891, albeit with overlapping community support.

Knowing that local controversies may smolder for generations, and already under bitter attack from traditionalists for moving toward no-kill sheltering, Richmond SPCA executive director Robin Starr did nothing to draw attention to her de-emphasis of meat.

She also compromised considerably. “We served no red meat,” Starr told ANIMAL PEOPLE. “Most of the meals were fish. Some were vegetarian, and a few were chicken.” As ANIMAL PEOPLE has often pointed out, the universe of suffering is greatly expanded instead of reduced, if in lieu of eating one pig or cow, people eat more than 100 chickens or fish. In ecological terms, raising the chickens or catching the fish is far more harmful. Yet meat-eaters tend to perceive giving up red meat as a first step toward giving up meat entirely, and vegetarian converts often go through a phase of eating fish or chicken instead of red meat before becoming vegetarians in earnest.

Wholly meatless meals could still become controversial in Richmond, and Starr is anxious about the possibility. Her experiment with de-emphasizing meat, however, was a resounding success. Week after week, instead of asking anyone to make a donation on the spot, Starr gave her guests donation envelopes to take home. The SF/SPCA is noted for raising 25% more money per city resident than the U.S. normbut the donation envelopes returned to the Richmond SPCA 33% more per city resident than even the SF/SPCA brings in.

Though concerned in day-to-day work almost exclusively with dogs and cats, the Richmond SPCA embraces as its mission “leading the way for the South in a new standard for compassionate treatment of animals,” meaning all animals. In Richmond the example as regards eating animals remains inconsistent, but Starr recognizes the imperative implicit in the no-kill philosophy that no sentient being should be treated as a mere commodity.

The influential No Kill Conference series of 1995-2001 featured meatless meals from the start, and so has the Conference on Homeless Animal Management & Policy (CHAMP), succeeding it. Though some of the organizers and sponsors are vegetarians, some are not; but even among those who are not, there seems to be unanimous agreement that killing animals should not be part of advancing the idea of compassion for animals.

This is a significant turnabout from the agrarian attitude that once prevailed in humane work. Fifty years ago the hottest topics in animal advocacy were the introduction in Congress of the first edition of the bill that in 1959 became the Humane Slaughter Act, and the formation of two San Francisco SPCA subsidiaries to promote regionally and nationally the use of decompression chambers to kill homeless dogs and cats.

Under the direction of Richard Avanzino, 1976-1998, the SF/SPCA led a successful national drive to abolish animal killing by decompression, and in 1994 San Francisco became the first U.S. no-kill city, but in the 1950s the attitudes of major humane organizations toward farm animals and companion animals appear to have differed mainly as regards the disposal of remains. Farm animals were to be eaten, while longtime Massachusetts SPCA education officer William Allen Swallow postulated in The Quality of Mercy, a 1963 “history of the humane movement in the United States,” that the future of the cause would be running pet cemeteries.

There were contrary voices, including E.B. White, who published the anti-meat children’s classic Charlotte’s Webin 1952; Elizabeth Lewyt, who with friends cofounded the no-kill North Shore Animal League in 1954; Walt Disney, whose 1955 animated feature Lady & The Tramp exposed the plight of homeless dogs and cats more vividly and realistically than any previous screen treatment; and Alice Harrington, who founded Friends of Animals in 1957 to operate the first low-cost pet sterilization program in the U.S.

All, however, were so far outside the mainstream that Swallow mentioned none of them, even though in retrospect they were perhaps the most presciently influential animal advocates of their era.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kim Bartlett, president and publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE (AP), has spent all her adult life working for animal liberation, advancing the cause via publications, tireless personal on-site activism (cat and dog and other animal rescue), and the incubation of new animal defense organizations around the globe.

AP’s editor Merritt Clifton is one of America’s leading environmental and animal issues journalists. A reporter, editor, columnist, and foreign correspondent since 1968, specializing in animal and habitat-related coverage since 1978, Clifton was a founding member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and is a four-time winner of national awards for investigative reporting.

Giggles, the fawn, removed and killed by armed commando that raided animal shelter

When will this madness stop?

This happened in Wisconsin. And it makes me sick. It doesn’t get worse than this. How nauseating and moronic, not to mention pitiless toward animals, can regulations governing the life and death of wildlife get? Not to mention the stupid and uncompassionate people who enforce them. Who are the politicians who pass such laws? As my fellow animal defender Natalia Jarnstedt puts it, with justifiable rage, “These morons killed the fawn “just because” it was kept at a regular shelter, not a rehabber – it’s their policy! Killing fawns and breaking compassionate people’s hearts is their game!” I have to agree. And what a waste of police and social resources!—Patrice Greanville

Outrage grows as word spreads about baby deer’s death in freak raid (Video)

By: Penny Eims

A ripple of disbelief and rage is spreading across the nation as word spreads about a bizarre raid on the Society of St. Francis in Kenosha, Wis., reported Thursday’s WND News.

The raid, complete with multiple squad cars and several armed officers from the state Department of Natural Resources, was organized after DNR officials received a tip about a two-week-old fawn who was being cared for by the no-kill animal shelter.

The young deer, named “Giggles,” was being cared for by the rescue agency until she could be transferred to a wildlife shelter.

But Giggles never had the opportunity to be transferred because the DNR agents who descended upon the shelter killed her instead.

A shelter employee stated:

“I was thinking in my mind they were going to take the deer and take it to a wildlife shelter, and here they come carrying the baby deer over their shoulder. She was in a body bag,”

Giggles the 2-wk-old fawn

Photo credit:

Via WND News

DNR Supervisor Jennifer Niemeyer defended the agents’ actions, stating that the fawn was killed because she posed a potential danger of disease and danger to humans.

The shelter intends to file a suit against the DNR because they seized Giggles without a court hearing.

No word on how the potential for disease from a baby deer is any greater to the general public than to hunters who handle their “kill,” or to police and/or wildlife officials who remove deer carcasses from the road after they have been killed by a motor vehicle.

ADDENDUM

The Associated Press version

Wisconsin DNR defends removing fawn from shelter, killing it
Associated Press
POSTED: 08/02/2013 12:01:00 AM CDT | UPDATED: 72 MIN. AGO

KENOSHA, Wis. — Wisconsin wildlife officials defended their decision to remove a fawn from a no-kill shelter and euthanize it, saying state law requires such action to prevent the spread of disease.

The fawn, named Giggles, was brought to the St. Francis Society shelter near the state line by an Illinois family who believed the animal had lost its mother.

Shelter workers told WISN-TV the fawn had been there about two weeks when armed Department of Natural Resources agents showed up with a search warrant and took the animal. The DNR began investigating after receiving two anonymous calls about the deer.

Wisconsin law prohibits people from taking animals from the wild or keeping a wild animal without a permit.

Shelter employee Ray Schulze said he told DNR agents the fawn was scheduled to go to an animal preserve in Illinois the next day but they took Giggles anyway.

“Then here they come, carrying the baby deer over their shoulder, like a bag of — she was in a body bag,” Schulze said. “I said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s our policy.'”

DNR Warden Supervisor Jennifer Niemeyer told the television station that state law requires animals like the fawn to be euthanized because they could spread disease.

DNR spokesman Bill Cosh told the Associated Press on Friday that the main concern with deer is chronic wasting disease, a fatal illness that affects the nervous system. CWD has been found in 17 states. To help prevent its spread, state and federal laws bar moving deer illegally taken from the wild to rehabilitation facilities in other states without authorization.

“These are always difficult situations for both parties involved, and we are empathetic to the fact of what happened because we know in our heart of hearts, they tried to do the right thing,” Niemeyer told the television station.

She said the fawn was not killed at the shelter, but tranquilized and euthanized later.

“I don’t care where they would have killed her, it would have been wrong,” shelter President Cindy Schultz said.

Is There Anything Truly Sustainable or Humane About Eating Meat?

An Interview with Animal Rights Activist Lee Hall

For the crime of simply being: every single one sentenced to death. Who gave US this right?

For the crime of simply being: every single one sentenced to death. Who gave US the right?

by JOSHUA FRANK, Counterpunch

Natural food sections in our grocery stores are chock full of them. The ethical foodies seek them out. They’re intended to inform the consumer about where our food comes from and how it’s produced: “Sustainable,” “organic,” “free-range,” “local” products — we’ve all seen the terms and we hope they genuinely convey what they imply.

But what do they really mean? What’s the truth behind the label? Can meat ever really be sustainable? Is purchasing local a good thing for the environment? Not always, says activist, author and educator Lee Hall, who serves as legal affairs VP for Friends of Animals. Hall is also an active supporter of HumaneMyth.org, a group that seeks to expose the facts behind our misleading food labels and farming practices.

I spoke with Hall, a CounterPunch writer and contributing editor, whose latest book on animal-rights theory and advocacy, On Their Own Terms: Bringing Animal-Rights Philosophy Down to Earth is out now.

Joshua Frank: As someone who frequently shops at farmer’s markets and natural food stores, I have noticed a rapidly growing trend toward so-called ethical eating. People are becoming aware of the dark side of industrialized farming, and as a result more and more animal products are being labeled with terms like “cage free,” “humane certified” and “organic.”

Lee Hall: You’re right; this trend is growing fast and the advertising hype that’s driven by enterprises such as Whole Foods have a lot to do with it, as does the reality that global warming really is upon us. Climate disruption is the most frightening thing since the bomb (and that’s not gone). People are looking for pacifiers. People want to be able to say they’ve grasped the inconvenient truth but they still want peace of mind. If they’ve got money, they’ll pay a bit more these days for that.

JF: But you’ve argued that these are simply marketing terms that do not necessarily mean what they convey to consumers. Can you explain why? What’s the reality behind these terms?

LH: First, they’re usually just marketing ploys. There’s no legally binding definition for cage-free eggs, for example. These items are bought by people who want to believe the birds were treated OK. That’s well-meaning. But think about what’s going on. Packing a mass of birds into a shed isn’t much better than jamming them into a cage. Cannibalism increases in shed situations where so-called cage-free chickens lay eggs, as does bone breakage. Recall that birds who are purpose-bred to lay eggs do that a lot. So they’re always short of calcium; it leaves their bodies and goes into the shells. That means osteoporosis is common in commercial birds. I don’t mean to be a party pooper here; I assure you there are great vegan recipes for just about anything you’re making with eggs now.

I know some people will say: Oh, but my eggs, my ham — it really does come from a good farm; look at their Web site and all the greenery! Well, you must have a lot of money to eat that way all the time. But even if the animal farms you support are spacious, think about the ramifications. More space for agribusiness concerns, less free animals in wild spaces. Just like suburban development, farms take up a lot of land. Why would we as a society continue to think this is a good trend?

JF: What about grass-fed cattle? Michael Pollan and others have touted the alleged environmental and ethical benefits of eating free-range beef as opposed to cows raised in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). Isn’t this method of raising animals qualitatively better?

LH: To my mind, Michael Pollan’s arguments are clever, but ultimately unconvincing. Eight years ago, Pollan wanted to be assured that eating the flesh of cattle could be done without barbarism. This was no easy feat. To prove the thesis of compassionate carnivorism, this contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine actually bought a calf. Pollan chronicled the growth of the little Black Angus steer from a nursing baby up until the end of it all. The animal was killed a few weeks after turning one year of age.

Do you remember the name Pollan referred to that calf by? Number 534. Compassionate, isn’t? Now we’re supposed to believe that there’s no ecological barbarism in eating these animals either — if it’s done on pastures, not in factories. Balderdash. As the human population continues to rise, as biofuels compete with agricultural land, as energy and water become concentrated in fewer hands, mass production will be the norm. Only a select few will have the opportunity to eat that grass-fed flesh Pollan’s touting.

And what happens to the wolves, coyotes, bobcats, and other animals who once roamed the land made over to farm sprawl?

If you really want to tread lightly on the earth and its conscious life, the answer is to stop breeding these poor beings only to betray them and stop annihilating wildlands for malls — and the farms too. There’s a great saying ascribed to Confucius: “The way out is via the door.”

JF: I’ve always been skeptical of the free-range cattle notion. Spending a considerable amount of time hiking around the rural West, I have seen many grass-fed cattle roaming our public lands and shitting in and around some of the state’s remaining wild rivers. A study by UC Davis Medical Center recently confirmed that free-roaming livestock are polluting rivers in the Sierras with their waste.

LH: That study is on to something: water on public lands and wilderness areas are dirtiest where cattle graze. And what a word from an ethical point of view. Livestock. Live today, stock tomorrow. It’s really a bane, this notion that conscious life can and should be a commodity. Imagine if we dared to challenge that. Environmental advocacy would be revolutionized overnight.

This is what the locavores aren’t talking about. Cows aren’t part of the natural biocommunity. As commercial cows became widespread, their free-living ancestors, the aurochs, went extinct in the seventeenth century, when a poacher shot the last one in Poland. Free-range? Not really. The ones we see today are purpose-bred animals, imposed on the land.

JF: Since you bring up the locavore movement, I’m reminded of Prof. James McWilliams at Texas State University who has argued that “If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to the farmer’s market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian.” Why do you think the broader environmental movement has yet to fully embrace vegetarianism as one way to challenge climate change?

LH: Much of what we call the environmental movement relies on donations. So there’s a hydraulic pull to behave as though laws and lawmakers should fix things. That’s convenient. Potential donors aren’t challenged to make personal changes.

At the same time, the moneyed donors non-profits hope to attract will find comfort in promotions of “humane, sustainable, all-natural meat” and the like. Rarely do environmental groups ask potential supporters to begin with the personal, essential paradigm shift that a full vegetarian commitment involves.

What underlies this hesitance? Well, imagine the Catholic authorities’ initial resistance to the Copernican revolution. People had to leave their comfort zone to grasp the reality the universe does not revolve around the human being. Galileo got the picture, and wound up under house arrest.

Suggest that humans are part of the biocommunity rather than in charge of it? Say the universe does not revolve around us? Humanity is not quite ready to accept that reality — although everything from the climate to the extinction rate is telling us the time has come to do so.

JF: In 2006 the UN Dept. of Food and Agriculture reported that the world’s cattle industry was responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions, by CO2 equivalence, than all the vehicles on the road. Even if big environmental groups aren’t addressing this very serious problem, why do you think popular climate activists, such as Al Gore and Bill McKibben, aren’t talking about this issue in any substantive manner?

LH: Al Gore, pressed on this issue, has said, “Cutting back is a responsible alternative” but Gore is not a vegetarian. Likewise Bill McKibben — who, in the March/April 2010 issue of Orion, criticized factory farming, but gave grass-fed beef a pass. If they haven’t seen fit to personally get beyond animal agribusiness, they aren’t prepared to take vegetarianism seriously in their public commentaries.

Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, assistant professors in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, observed in 2006 that a fully vegetarian diet is the most energy-efficient. Fish and red meat virtually tied as the least efficient. And while the average person on our landmass puts out four tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent a year, each person who goes vegan cuts that by some 1.5 tons. How’s that for direct action?

Professor Eshel, once a cattle farmer in Israel, became a proponent of vegan-organic farming. What I’ve seen Eshel say to interviewers that I’ve not yet seen from Gore or McKibben is the understanding that animals have thoughts, and their death is a dreadful sight. That understanding — a queasy response to violent human privilege — is a vital characteristic of people who undergo a personal paradigm shift.

There’s some genuine transformation going on, with knowledge-sharing in and between communities; it’s happening, for example, through the vegan-organic movement. We need to look for people who show our population what to strive for, not what we can settle for.

JF: Let’s talk a bit more about some of the locavores. In Portland, Oregon, for example, the movement is so substantial that even Oprah’s magazine has lauded a local chef and former vegetarian for her “sustainable” food practices. Of course, her menu is loaded with meat, including foie-gras of all things.

Hip Portland is even home to the so-called “Ethical Butcher,” a former vegan, whose love for the environment and animals has caused him to give up his plant-based diet and embrace “humane” animal slaughtering. How should environmentalists and animal rights activists challenge this aspect of the locavore movement that seems so dominant these days?

LH: First the PR agents need to assure us that whatever they’re marketing — sausages, aircraft, bottled water — is ecologically benign. Also known as greenwash.

Then they want to assure us that animals are happy to be farmed and eaten. Also known as hogwash. So there are two faulty claims that environmentalists and animal advocates, together, can and should challenge: that animal agribusiness can be kind and that it can be green.

It was an uncle’s “idyllic” farm that impelled Vegan Society founder Donald Watson to organize a movement. As a child visiting the farm, Donald was always greeted by a pair of pigs — until the day one was killed. Donald couldn’t forget the screams, and henceforth regarded the farm as Death Row. The folks at HumaneMyth.org have gathered some intriguing samples of “happy meat” PR, coupled with counterpoints offered by people in the know.

And no matter how they’re grown or how far their bodies are transported, the cows, lambs, pigs, and birds raised as food on any local farm are potent emitters of methane — regardless, too, of where their feed came from. And their manure produces nitrous oxide, which has nearly 300 times the immediate warming effect of C02.

A comprehensive study, funded by Britain’s Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, was conducted earlier this decade and released by Adrian Williams of Cranfield University. It showed that free-range chickens, used for eggs or flesh, have a 15-20 percent greater impact on global warming than factory-caged birds. That’s because “sustainable” chickens take longer to raise, and eat more feed. Not that I’m endorsing high-volume farming. I’ve found it’s quite easy, once you make the initial adjustment, to cook without ever selecting animal products at all.

Joshua Frank, Managing Editor of CounterPunch, is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, and of Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is now available in Kindle format. He can be reached at brickburner@gmail.com.