Libertarian Girl

Amy King was just doing her job that day, like John William Perry and so many other people. She was a flight attendant on United Airlines Flight 175 bound for Chicago, which was crashed into the south tower that would ultimately collapse on Officer Perry. She was 29 years old and working the flight with a fellow flight attendant, Michael “Mac” Tarrou, who was her boyfriend of two years. They both loved music and flying. In Chicago during a layover, they were going to see her family, and they planned to move to Florida to be closer to his.

Amy often flew to Chicago to surprise her sisters’ kids. She loved fashion design, and her boyfriend had a 12-year-old daughter and “loved music and songs” and “lived a peaceful life.” King “was the person who would have thought of everybody else.” King and Tarrou were particularly close to the other United attendants based in Boston.

Some descriptions of the passengers on Flight 175 can be found here. There were seven flight attendants on the plane that day, and they will continue to be remembered as victims of a larger conflict that they had no part in, people who didn’t matter to the hijackers that day but do matter to us.

Eight years have passed since that day, a day we all remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. So many lives killed, thankfully not as many as the initial estimates, but still so many lives, souls and people that it’s simply beyond comprehension. People generally have a difficult time processing large numbers and do better with individual stories. That is part of why I chose to participate this year in Project 2,996, in which bloggers memorialize some of these lives lost.

John William Perry was a police officer who, while not at the World Trade Center himself when the planes hit the towers, ran to Ground Zero to do what he could to help and gave his life trying to rescue people from the towers. Perry had graduated from New York University Law School and had been an activist in the ACLU and Libertarian Party, with a particular focus in the war on drugs and how misguided it is.

Incredibly, I did not choose John William Perry as my person, I was assigned to memorialize him, yet I had already independently come across a memorial site to him… a site in which he is remembered by a friend, as a good friend and a good person– “John Perry was one of my best friends and one of my all-time favorite people… He has made me laugh so much. I still miss him. I always will.” When you think about it, there aren’t too many higher, or more heartfelt, compliments someone could hope to receive beyond those simple yet important accolades, but I’ll try.

I came across Perry through a Google search because he was a libertarian and because he was interested in things libertarians in general are often interested in, such as cryonics. He was a member of the Libertarian Party and planned to run for office as a Libertarian, and like many libertarians, he believed in the power of private, unforced giving and practiced it.

Perry was also remarkable in other ways that are immediately evident to anyone reading about him. He was a police officer who obviously chose to be a police officer, who had graduated from a top law school and could have easily had a different career. He spoke multiple languages fluently, including Swedish, French, Spanish, and Russian (and was learning Albanian when he died!) He was a member of the National Guard and an avid volunteer, for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children and as a board member for the New York Civil Liberties Union, which won so many important battles against Rudy Giuliani during those years. His regard for other people did not stop at the New York City area or even America’s borders: he donated bulletproof vests to Russian police officers who lacked equipment.

As a police officer based in the Bronx, he stood against police brutality, racial profiling, vice laws, gun control, the War on Drugs, police corruption, and other abuses of power.

September 11th was going to be an eventful day in Perry’s life no matter what; it was to be his last day as a police officer, and he was signing his retirement papers and turning in his badge at 1 Police Plaza when he heard the news and rushed to the World Trade Center a few blocks away. He refused to leave the building while civilians were still in it who needed his assistance. Eyewitnesses said Perry was in the midst of helping a middle-aged woman who had fainted from a heart or asthma attack when the south tower collapsed above him.

Perry is memorialized at his alma mater, SUNY-Stonybrook, along with other classmates and alums who perished in the twin towers. The town of Hempstead, in Long Island, named a street John W. Perry Avenue in the officer’s honor. At the 2002 National Libertarian Party convention, he was given a lifetime achievement award.

If you would like to help remember John W. Perry and his bravery that day, as well as do your part to help a cause he believed in, you can make a donation to the John W. Perry Fund in his honor. The fund gives scholarships to students who have been prevented by a 1998 federal bill from receiving any financial aid or even taking work-study jobs to get through school, due to even minor (non-violent) drug possession charges.

Officer Perry was survived by his parents, Patricia and James, siblings Janice and Joel, and nephew Jimmy. While Perry had an interest and hope in the possibilities of cryonics that was also sadly cut off by the September 11th murderers, it is a certainty that the memory of John William Perry’s life and heroism will remain in the minds of many, and will live on in the future through the actions and dreams of those inspired by his giving spirit.

The Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine recently launched an ad campaign on the DC Metro system featuring Jasmine Messiah, an 8-year-old Miami girl who is a vegetarian and says her school has no vegetarian options available for her.

From Animals

The ad garnered more attention for asking why Obama supports different policies for his children than for others’ children, and the White House asking for the ads to be taken down, than it did for its actual content or purpose. I think the ad serves its purpose well. The fact is, Obama has no idea what food is served in the lunchrooms of American public schools because his daughters have never attended one, and neither did he. He went to the most exclusive private academy in Hawaii.

As for the mission of PCRM– I’m a vegetarian, so I agree with their mission of showing that vegetarian diets are in fact healthy (as confirmed by the American Diatetic Association in a recent statement) and expanding them. However, the concurrent goal of having the federal government step in to provide healthier school lunches is not one I can wholeheartedly endorse. I don’t think the federal government, and especially the USDA which works in tandem with agribusiness lobbyists to buy gruel for the nation’s schoolchildren, should be in the business of providing lunches at all.

However, we currently spend billions of the USDA’s budget on school lunches and other subsidized lunch programs that will not end anytime soon. IF we’re going to spend the money anyway, we might as well buy healthy food and not contribute to an obesity problem poor children are already more likely to have due to our other food policies. While vegetarian food, strictly speaking, is not necessarily healthier than meat-based meals 100% of the time (think cheese pizza vs. salmon), most of the time it is. Spending billions on meals for children and not including fruits and vegetables is pretty much a crime. This is true especially if we get some sort of public health care system in place (of course, we do already have that for those over 65), where we’ll be paying for treatment for heart attacks, statins, and strokes of grown-up schoolchildren with clogged arteries from years of mystery meat.

And there’s always the possibility, too, that Malia and Sasha might take notice: the last young girl to live in the White House, Chelsea Clinton, was a vegetarian. The Obama daughters attend the same school as Chelsea, Sidwell Friends, which has a Quaker affiliation; Quakers have historically been very friendly towards vegetarian diets due to their teachings of non-violence.

Canada has been in the news lately primarily for its health care system, which may be wonderful or lacking, depending on who you ask and who’s telling you. But while Canadians may or may not be boycotting their own health system for Michigan’s, others are boycotting Canada due to its seal hunt.

Rarely have I found a cause which should be so in line with libertarian thinking, yet is so misrepresented. Some libertarians who oppose the seal hunt even neglect to mention the primary reason this is such an easy choice for libertarians.

From Seal Hunt

Canada’s polar bears are dying because they don’t have enough seals to eat, yet Canada’s government each year subsidizes the world’s largest slaughter of marine mammals, the Canadian seal hunt.

From Seal Hunt

This is a favorite cause of Paul McCartney, as well as many animal rights activists. It’s also a cause close to the hearts of Canadian MPs– not surprising when you see the seal hunt described as “a make-work project for out-of-work fishermen”; one can’t help but wonder why our own government hasn’t tried to import seals as part of Obama’s economic stimulus plan, since these plans are based on the same central idea as that failed plan is (and which many animal rights activists might support in our own country!)

Each year, Canada uses taxpayer dollars to attempt to sell seal meat internationally, even though no one from anywhere but Taiwan and South Korea is willing to buy it (including Canadians, if that tells you anything). Canada also spends “R&D” (again, tax dollars) to market “seal oil” as a source of Omega 3 fatty acids in an attempt to make some sort of successful product from the seal hunt, but to little avail. There’s one product that can actually be sold from the seal hunt, the sealskins, and 80% of the sealskin that’s purchased is bought from a Norwegian company that receives significant financial backing from Norway’s government.

From Seal Hunt

Finally, while the United States has banned the import of seal skin since 1972 and the European Union since a few days ago, it has been the boycott of Canadian seafood by American buyers opposed to the seal hunt that has damaged Canada’s economy and, I predict, will force Canada to eventually end the seal slaughter.

This is certainly a case where free market boycotts and education can make more of an impact on the ending of a practice consumers object to, rather than countrywide bans. Even if the United States had not banned seal skins in 1972, there wouldn’t be much of a market for seal skins in America today simply because most Americans are revolted by the practice. You can see if your grocery store is participating in the boycott of Canadian seafood here.

This is the second in a series of posts on animal rights-related issues and how they could be solved in a libertarian fashion, perhaps more effectively than current methods the Humane Society is using. Yesterday’s and today’s posts focus on the Truth in Fur Labeling Act of 2009, and how the Humane Society might be better served using other methods to try to stop these deceptive companies and importers.

These retailers and importers have shown that they have no ethics– mislabeling fur or saying it’s not fur is clearly a deceptive business practice and is against the law, as the Humane Society asserts in their lawsuits, yet the companies have done it anyway. So why Truth in Fur Labeling Act of 2009“>work to get another law passed, one which these lawbreakers will inevitably ignore, too? Maybe this law has some magic fairy dust sprinkled on it that will make these scofflaw companies magically toe the legal line from now on?

My question to the Humane Society is this: what does the Truth in Fur Labeling Act of 2009 have that the previous three federal laws the Humane Society is suing under do not have? Perhaps it would be best to spend your time and money enforcing the laws we already have.

The Humane Society writes in its fact sheet (PDF), “The labeling law has not kept up with changes in the marketplace.” That’s the problem with laws, isn’t it? They’re not set by the marketplace, so they have a tendency to not keep up with it. Perhaps that’s why we should avoid them if there’s an alternative in the first place. Consumers have been trying to avoid fur for a long time, let’s let them by suing the bejeezus out of those who would sell fur to those who don’t want it.

People today think they’re avoiding fur if it’s not labeled, precisely because there’s a law mandating that it be labeled. But there’s a loophole, as there always is, and Clinton widened the loophole, so now we have people buying fur who wouldn’t if they knew it was fur. They think they don’t have to look because the label and the government will tell them all they need to know.

This is partly caused by the existence of the law in the first place. If consumers were personally responsible for figuring out if what they were buying was fur, maybe they’d take more than a cursory look at it and figure out that it is in fact coming from a domestic dog (as the HSUS found some fur trim in major department stores was). *Of course, this is a better argument in case studies like the FDA. Fur should be labeled, no exceptions. I just think that companies would be more accurate with labeling if they were in danger of being put out of business for an incident of mislabeling, rather than in danger of a small fine or slap on the wrist from violating a federal law or FTC regulation.

Finally, the labeling as actually mandated by the Federal Trade Commission can have the result of making things more confusing for the consumer. Raccoon dog, which is a species of canine more related to a dog than a raccoon, is often skinned alive for its fur and listed on fur labeling, per the FTC official mandate, as “Asiatic raccoon.” People might not care about wearing raccoon fur, but the FTC’s regulations won’t even let the company list the fur as coming from a dog even if they wanted to. When I see “Asiatic raccoon,” I think raccoon, not dog. Don’t you?

Please tell me how this kind of labeling doesn’t make things even worse for the consumer.

One of the bills the Humane Society is really pushing now is the Truth in Fur Labeling Act of 2009. This closes a loophole in federal law which was widened under Clinton in 1998, when the amount of money a garment had to be worth to be labeled with its fur content was increased from $20 to $150. The bill is especially relevant following the Humane Society’s 2007 investigation which found that dog fur was regularly being imported from China into the U.S. and mislabeled as faux fur, raccoon or coyote fur, or not labeled at all, at major retailers like Neiman Marcus and Macy’s.

The way to handle this in a libertarian society would be lawsuits. Lots of them, filed by individual consumers for deception and false advertising. That’s one thing that’s different in today’s society vs. a libertarian society. Today, using an egregious environmental example brought up by one of my fellow Humane Society lobbyists, the citizens of Smithfield, NC suffer from the stench of manure lagoons, their children get sick, and their only hope falls to the EPA.

The EPA in turn slaps Smithfield Foods (America’s largest pork producer) on the wrist with a one-time fine of .035% of Smithfield’s yearly sales for polluting so badly and making so many people ill– and, oh yeah, an award for environmentalism while they’re at it. Smithfield, of course, considers these puny fines the cost of conducting business and continues on like normal. Meanwhile, the company’s neighbors have no recourse or redress since the EPA has already done what it says it can.

Fast-forward to a libertarian society (no utopia, but better in many ways than what we have now). All of those individuals would personally sue Smithfield Foods in a slam-dunk case, collecting millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, in damages for this company polluting the entire town and rendering it virtually unlivable. Smithfield has also in the process of pork producing polluted the water sources of much of eastern North Carolina, so virtually everyone in that half of the state could jump in with lawsuits, too. What happens in this system? You guessed it, Smithfield would be out of business tomorrow.

So in our prospective libertarian society, there are many consumers who would be upset about their mislabeled fur and would sue and have an effect on these companies’ bottom lines that would make them sit up and label their products correctly. People wouldn’t be able to afford it, you say? The type of people who can buy $500 faux fur coats at Neiman Marcus can spare a few for a lawsuit and may even have lawyers on retainer. In our current system, instead of any semblance of justice on the part of those wronged by these companies, we have the Humane Society suing the deceptive companies under an obscure federal law (the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act) with no results and trying to get federal legislation passed at the same time.

So, I’ve told you what tactics I would use to immediately solve the problem of the deceptive fur sellers. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss why a federal law won’t really do anything on behalf of the cause of ending the fur mislabeling and could in fact make things worse.

Last weekend I attended the Taking Action for Animals (TAFA) conference conducted by the Humane Society of the United States in Washington, DC. The conference was eye-opening for me in a few ways– the terrible ways that animals are treated and abused, in ways that I as a vegetarian and animal lover never even comprehended, and the fact that the vast, vast majority of conference-goers thought the Democratic Party of the United States holds all the answers to these problems.

I attended the Lobby Day in Congress on Monday, and my state’s Republican senator was dismissed by my state director as something along the lines of “awful, absolutely terrible” on Humane Society issues, yet he was the sponsor of The Great Ape Protection Act in the last Congress and apparently has signed on to many of the Humane Society’s bills. His legislative assistant practically cried when she was told about the horrors of puppy mills.

The new Democratic Senator, by contrast, sent a representative who didn’t flinch an eye when told that horses are being exported for food, that puppies are being abused horribly by breeders, and that companies selling dog fur from China mislabel their products as faux fur. She seemed slightly concerned when told that many chimps have been held in cages for 50 years, without even being experimented on, just to get federal research dollars (the last is my own editorializing, however true it is– the Humane Society of course doesn’t say this). Yet her senator was praised just for being, well, a Democrat.

That’s the kind of attitude that turns a lot of groups– the NRA, the AKC, etc.– away from the Humane Society’s bills. When a Republican does everything but jump up and down and yell, “I love the Humane Society and all legislation it puts forth!”, yet a Democrat gets praised just for deigning to meet with the proles making the rounds on Lobby Day, it kind of shows you why some might oppose the Humane Society’s “agenda” (in quotes because some people seriously think this whole Humane Society thing is one huge conspiracy.) There is absolutely no reason from what I observed for the Humane Society to have such a pro-Democrat, anti-Republican view. Two of the four current Great Ape Protection Act sponsors are Republicans. John Ensign is a huge supporter, as are many Republicans in Congress.

Of course, opposing these bills doesn’t mean you aren’t supporting animal rights, either– more on that in a later post. Stay tuned.

So, that’s my open letter to Humane Society speakers, state directors, and citizen lobbyists. At least try to act non-partisan. Your bills are, and it would benefit your group.

Speaking of which, over the next week, I’ll be blogging about how libertarianism, not Democratic Party-ism, is the solution for helping animals, and how much more would actually get done if we just took a more libertarian approach to helping the animals.

I met a New York attorney at a conference over the weekend. When discussing the rabbis and mayors arrested in New Jersey, she mentioned that she didn’t want to live in a society where poor people felt like they had to sell their organs, and that these people shouldn’t be taken advantage of or made to feel like they had to do so.

I’m not sure exactly why this rubs so many people the wrong way. What does it make you feel to live in a society where someone feels they must have a job, or they must go to law school, or live in New York City, or commute to work, or attend conferences? Why is selling an organ that you’ll probably never miss that much different at all?

Megan McArdle explains how this isn’t even a moral quandary at all, when people are suffering and dying due to kidney shortages. Not everyone can be Steve Jobs and fly to the state with the shortest waiting line– what about them? Why should they feel pressured to die so that others can make a political point that people should only offer up their organs on a purely altruistic basis?

Daniel Akst writes:

“It’s illegal in this country to buy or sell organs for transplant. This is an unjust law made and enforced by people who desperately need neither organs nor money. It condemns kidney-disease sufferers to death and potential organ donors to poverty. It’s a law that I will unhesitatingly break if one of my children needs a kidney, and I hope you will have the decency to do the same if a member of your family is in a similar situation.

The sanctimony of those who condemn these transactions strikes me as outrageous. If someone has the right to abort her own fetus, why does she not have the right to sell her own kidney? By what authority does the state tell me I cannot save myself or my family members by paying money I earned to a willing seller of a surplus item? In fact, why wouldn’t a system of national health insurance include a provision for organ purchases? These transactions should not just be legal for the rich but subsidized for the poor, all in a carefully designed and closely regulated marketplace serving buyers, sellers and even medical ethicists. It’s a shame that even one more person has to die before this law is changed.

Of course, kidney buying wouldn’t have to be subsidized for the poor. There are many poor people who amass hundreds of thousands of dollars through generous private donors for a potential organ transplant surgery, only to die while in the waiting line.

Thirteen people will die today waiting for a kidney.

I have no doubt that there is racial profiling, even rampant racial profiling, taking place every day in America. At first I thought this may have happened with Henry Louis Gates’ arrest last week.

But this photo tells a different story.

If anyone racially profiled, it was the Harvard professor’s neighbor, who apparently called police and reported two black men breaking into Gates’ house. This is another lesson in why it’s important to get to know your neighbors!

The neighbor may have not called in the cops if Gates and his driver were white, but she/he may very well have still done so. Let’s imagine a different scenario: a robbery had taken place at Gates’ house, and the neighbor comes forward to say she saw it occurring but had figured the person breaking in was the owner locked out; I can imagine how she would have been ridiculed for thinking such a thing.

So it’s no surprise that if the neighbor didn’t know Gates lived there, she might have thought the men breaking down the front door were breaking into the house. This is true whether they were white or black.

So just the neighbor calling the police wasn’t inherently racist. I have relatives who always forget their keys, yet they’ve never had to break the door down to get in; they call someone who has a key or they find a hidden one. I’ve never seen a person breaking their own door down, have you?

Now we have the police. Depending on whose story you believe, the police officer was rude to Gates in his own house OR Gates refused to show identification to prove that he owned the house while accusing the officer (loudly) of being a racist. According to a third party, Barack Obama, the police officer “acted stupidly.” And yes, that was more of a detailed answer than he’s ever given on health reform.

But an aspect of this that hasn’t been reported in the media is that one of the officers that arrested Gates was black. You can see in this picture that as Henry Louis Gates is being led from his home in handcuffs, one of the officers standing in front of him is black (Gates is biracial himself, just as Obama is).

Gates hasn’t mentioned this at all, the media hasn’t mentioned it beyond publishing this picture. Isn’t that an important fact to get the whole picture of this story?

Sonia Nazario won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her series of articles chronicling the attempts of a teenager from Honduras, Enrique, to reach his mother in the United States. She later turned the articles into a book which was made into an HBO movie.

Enrique experienced far more problems getting through Mexico than he did once in the United States. What do the Mexicans think of Central American immigrants?

Chiapas is fed up with Central American immigrants, says Hugo Angeles Cruz, a professor and migration expert at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Tapachula. They are poorer than Mexicans, and they are seen as backward and ignorant. People think they bring disease, prostitution and crime and take away jobs. Some cannot be trusted. People in Chiapas talk of being robbed by migrants with guns and knives. They tell of an older woman who welcomed an immigrant into her home and was beaten to death with an iron pipe.

Boys like Enrique are called “stinking undocumented.” They are cursed, taunted. Dogs are set upon them. Barefoot children throw rocks at them. Some use slingshots. “Go to work.” “Get out! Get out!”

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Some migrants say Mexicans exploit illegals for a fraction of the going wage, which is 50 pesos, or about $5, a day.

Except for children throwing rocks and slingshots, does this all sound familiar?

Residents of the state of Veracruz are kind to illegal immigrants from Central America, but those by the border aren’t very accommodating.

He cannot beg 100 pesos. People in Nuevo Laredo won’t give. Mexicans along the border, he notices, are quick to proclaim their right to immigrate to the United States. “Jesus was an immigrant,” he hears them say. But most won’t give Central Americans food, money or jobs.