I care for kids, families, the sick and the elderly, working class, middle class, and every American. To end poverty and advance the American Dream, I am Libertarian Girl.
Rob Tornoe is collecting the reaction of cartoonists worldwide to Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.
So far, it seems international cartoonists (with the exception of Thailand and Bulgaria) congratulate Obama without making a political comment, while American political cartoonists for the most part have riffed on Obama not expecting it and not deserving it, not to mention having to live up to it.
Last Sunday, at Festifall in Chapel Hill, NC, I met a peace/anti-torture activist, from the NC Peace Coalition. I asked her what Obama had done for peace (of course knowing the answer, but wondering if she would be honest about it). “Nothing… but I love him anyway!” she at least honestly replied.
So Obama “won” the Nobel Peace Prize.
In truth, he got it because he is a Democrat who espouses (follow-through doesn’t matter for these people) policies that this Norwegian group likes. No, it is not just because he is not George W. Bush (although you wouldn’t necessarily know that by viewing his policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, or for renewing the Patriot Act), because I can’t imagine John McCain receiving the Nobel if the election had swayed a few percentage points the other way. So, women’s rights activists, dissidents against the Chinese government, and political prisoners be damned, Obama got moved to the front of the line for what used to be considered a top honor.
The deadline for nominations was 10 days after Obama took office, which means most likely that the prize is awarded on his campaign rhetoric and paying for abortions in Africa (which he decided to do his first day in office).
Of course if Obama has any respect for actual peace activists, or for justice in this world, he’d give it back and say he hopes he can earn it later.
The National Review brings up an interesting hidden motive the Nobelites might have had: whether to bomb Iran (or even use nuclear weapons) to prevent Iran from getting them. Perhaps that could be a silver lining in a very dark cloud: actual deserving past and future Nobelists like Muhammad Yunus will find their prize means less now.
For the record, here is a list of Obama’s accomplishments on behalf of war and strife:
“One thing is certain — President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.” – Michael Steele, RNC
First, how to win a debate with a Chomskyite:
Chomsky supporter criticizes Michelle Malkin.
Chomsky supporter then makes something up about Ron Paul out of the blue.
Point out to Chomsky supporter that Michelle Malkin attempted to fabricate these exact allegations about Ron Paul two years ago.
Chomsky supporter says nothing more about Ron Paul and moves on to how great Chomsky is, saying that his views are both consistent and logical.
So this is my great Noam Chomsky post, wherein I show just some of the inconsistencies and flaws in Noam Chomsky’s political arguments.
The interview my pseudo debater pointed to is one from a few years ago in which Chomsky discusses the “views” of Ron Paul (“views” in quotes because Chomsky often distorts Ron Paul’s actual political views into a caricature/straw man which Chomsky then has a less difficult time debating). Interestingly, Chomsky is an anarchist himself but the views he often knocks down in this interview are more related to anarchism than libertarianism. After describing something which is a cross between our current society and anarchism, Chomsky concludes it “would be a nightmare, in my opinion, on the dubious assumption that it could even survive for more than a brief period without imploding.”
First up is personal contracts. Ron Paul is for voluntary associations among people, otherwise known as “contracts.” To the idea of voluntary contracts between people, Chomsky replies:
Under all circumstances? Suppose someone facing starvation accepts a contract with General Electric that requires him to work 12 hours a day locked into a factory with no health-safety regulations, no security, no benefits, etc. And the person accepts it because the alternative is that his children will starve. Fortunately, that form of savagery was overcome by democratic politics long ago. Should all of those victories for poor and working people be dismantled, as we enter into a period of private tyranny (with contracts defended by law enforcement)? Not my cup of tea.
First of all, it’s a bit disingenuous to argue against a purported worst case scenario, yet treat this as the natural endgame of anything as inauspicious as voluntary contracts. First of all, I would say that “democratic politics” did not get rid of this scenario at all, it just plays out in other countries of the world every day. Secondly, in countries with non-tyrannical governments, there will always be a choice in companies to work for or you can start your own as many poor people have done. Third, contracts enforced by law enforcement is what we have now, so does Chomsky think that we have already “entered a period of private tyranny”? If so, since Ron Paul is against pretty much all the current corporatist and financial system, he’s barking up the wrong tree.
The only reason someone would choose this General Electric job is because there is absolutely no other alternative. That situation certainly wouldn’t exist in a free market, because the enterprising person could start their own business easily. That’s very difficult to do today.
Of course, in the end, Chomsky sums up his views by saying that things in Chomsky World would be “worked out by free communities.” How is that much different than voluntary personal contracts or the libertarianism he tries so hard to set up as a strawman and criticize?
Let’s continue.
Does it mean that all health, safety, workers rights, etc., go out the window because they were instituted by public pressures implemented through government, the only component of the governing system that is at least to some extent accountable to the public (corporations are unaccountable, apart from generally weak regulatory apparatus)?
Yes, corporations certainly aren’t accountable when they bankrupt themselves and we wag our finger and bail them out easier than a poor person gets food stamps, but that wouldn’t exist in a libertarian government. Currently, regulations serve to do the opposite of what Chomsky says they accomplish, accountability: the corporations actually write those regulations (literally write the bills that Congress passes) and of course write them in a way that keeps themselves in business at the expense of any competitor or gives them a monopoly. Notice how Chomsky does not mention this tidbit at all, even though it is directly what keeps those hated cable, electricity, and telecom companies in business.
Does it mean that the economy should collapse, because basic R&D is typically publicly funded? like what we’re now using, computers and the internet?
Did the economy collapse when R&D wasn’t publicly funded, or did many of those things he mentions (computers, the Internet) come from the transistor, which came from Bell Labs, the best R&D of all time (and privately funded!) What Chomsky doesn’t mention is that the Internet came from a military project which his anarchist society would not fund, and the project sat there for decades until it was released to private hands, which used it to create the Internet. Same for GPS, only when given over to private entrepreneurs was the public able to use or even glimpse these projects.
Should we eliminate roads, schools, public transportation, environmental regulation?
If roads, schools, public transportation, and environmental regulation (of everyone but itself and large corporations, of course) are so important to Chomsky, why does he advocate for the government to do anything else? If in fact these things are the most basic and essential components of government, why not skim off all that fat and allow the government to concentrate on these and get them right?
Now, we have potholes, 50% graduation rates, virtually no public transportation outside of large cities, and of course, the government is our country’s own largest polluter. Sounds like the government isn’t doing too great on any of these accounts.
Since unlike Chomsky tries to imply, these things would all still exist and probably be better in a libertarian society with actual accountability, his argument is, as usual, groundless.
(Question) He defends workers right to organize (so long as owners have the right to argue against it).
Noam Chomsky: Rights that are enforced by state police power, as you’ve already mentioned.
How are these rights not enforced by “state police power” currently? How is Chomsky going to defend these rights, if it’s not some sort of central committee/groups/maybe even one person (Chomsky himself?) as “The Decider”?
There are huge differences between workers and owners. Owners can fire and intimidate workers, not conversely. just for starters. Putting them on a par is effectively supporting the rule of owners over workers, with the support of state power itself largely under owner control, given concentration of resources.
This is such a supreme generalization that I’m not sure where to begin.
Workers have absolutely no power over owners? Most people in America are employed by a small business. Try running a small business or working at one, and you’ll see quickly that an owner has every reason to keep his/her workers happy, employed, and doing their jobs. If a worker suddenly quits, an owner can be in a bad situation.
Saying that workers cannot “intimidate” owners may be true if one thinks that anyone doing any intimidating would get a worker fired, but I have seen the opposite. Some highly trained and specialized employees are extremely valuable to a business and can lord over (or completely run over or take advantage of) the owner if they choose to do so.
But perhaps Chomsky is only referring to large corporations, which deal more with unions. Chomsky apparently wants to correct what he sees as a power imbalance by allowing workers to join unions. However, many unions require workers to be members and forbid a company from hiring any non-union labor. Chomsky thinks the owner has all the power, but doesn’t his solution (AKA the status quo) just transfer all that power to the unions, still at the expense of the individual worker?
Let me give one pertinent example. My brother has a small carpenter’s business. To get big jobs (government, etc.) he would have to be a part of the local carpenter’s union. Well, just join the union, right? No, the union doesn’t accept new members. You have to “know” someone to become part of the union. Sounds to me like the union doesn’t care about workers in general, but merely protecting its own workers at other people’s expense. (In fact, that’s the very definition of a union!) Yet, it has achieved the power through government means (partly through rhetoric like that of Chomsky’s here) of saying that it is protecting its workers’ and the public’s safety by getting all the large jobs for its members’ choosing, without having to compete with more skilled, non-unionized workers.
And yet, giving workers and owners equal consideration and “putting them on a par” is forbidden by Chomsky, too. You just can’t win with this guy.
So what about foreign policy?
Chomsky, supposedly so against America’s foreign policy, really only wants to impose his preferred form of foreign policy on other nations. Ron Paul’s idea that we should let other countries govern themselves is “morally unacceptable.”
OK, then. Anyone who disagrees with Chomsky is immoral, with no specifics given.
Take Social Security. If he means what he says literally,
If Ron Paul means what literally? Notice how Chomsky gives no quote whatsoever. In fact, he’s literally making all this stuff up.
then widows, orphans, the disabled who didn’t themselves pay into Social Security should not benefit (or of course those awful illegal aliens).
When has Ron Paul ever said any of these groups shouldn’t receive Social Security? In fact, he is the only member of Congress who doesn’t raid the Social Security “lockbox” to pay for general accounting, and he is the only politician I’ve heard who has said Social Security and Medicare could be fully funded by simply bringing our troops home and closing our 900 military bases around the world. Notice how Chomsky isn’t even aware of Ron Paul’s position on this issue and is just turning this into a generalized rant.
His claims about SS being “broken” are just false.
Oh, really? Aren’t more people receiving benefits now than are paying in to the system? Where’s the money for this program?
He also wants to dismantle it, by undermining the social bonds on which it is based, the real meaning of offering younger workers other options, instead of having them pay for those who are retired, on the basis of a communal decision based on the principle that we should have concern for others in need.
Here we come right down to it. Chomsky wants a “communal” decision, decided by, of course, Chomsky. Allowing a younger worker to not pay into the communal pot is verboten. But, you say, that younger worker is one of those starving workers with three young children who can’t afford to find a place to work other than General Electric and doesn’t even have a union but only an intimidating boss! Too bad, Chomsky says, everyone has to give up thousands of dollars a year to ensure Chomsky’s own Social Security benefits.
Never mind that the money won’t be there when the starving worker reaches SS age; Chomsky doesn’t worry about that, and forget about those charts and graphs. Social Security is not “broken.” It’s immoral to say so.
Also never mind that the situation Chomsky tries to speak of in which our starving worker is taken advantage of by an intimidating boss is actually often the case with an intimidating government, which not only takes money for Social Security and Medicare out of a young worker’s paycheck but income taxes, too. Forcibly. Notice how Chomsky’s sympathy for the workers does not extend to the big hand of government forcing them to hand over 40% of their paycheck.
He wants people to be able to run around freely with assault rifles, on the basis of a distorted reading of the Second Amendment (and while we’re at it, why not abolish the whole raft of constitutional provisions and amendments, since they were all enacted in ways he opposes?).
Funny, when Chomsky reads the First Amendment, he takes it to say what it means. When he reads the Second Amendment, he tries to say it doesn’t really mean what it really means.
And what is this about the Constitution not being enacted in a way that Ron Paul would agree with? Ron Paul bases every political position he takes on the Constitution. Chomsky is against just making stuff up here.
At the end, Chomsky says that he would support Hillary Clinton over Ron Paul (yes, the Iraq War-supporting, Drug War-supporting, current Israel policy-supporting, Patriot Act-voting, bailout-supporting, not-ruling-out-nukes-against-Iran Hillary Clinton.) Now that’s a principled vote!
So who’s the fundamentalist?
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.