Dustin M. Wax

In Trust Us We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, the authors describe the millions of dollars spent by the pharmaceutical, tobacco, biotech, agribusiness, and other industries to obscure and manipulate scientific data and research to advance their own interests (generally in opposition to the public’s). Working through “front” organizations with benign, positive, occasionally even lefty-sounding names like the The Advancement for Sound Science Coalition, the American Council on Science and Health, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, American Chemistry Council, the Foundation for Clean Air Progress, the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, and the Society for Women’s Health Research, corporations produce legitimate-sounding scientific studies that support their own products or actions, often at the expense of people’s lives. Under the guise of “sound science”, this data is not only poured into PR campaigns–through, among other things, scare stories and other public-interest pieces produced by corporate-funded organizations for your local news broadcasts–but also provide policy-makers with the plausible denial they need to, for instance, talk about the need for “further research” into global warming without actually having to take a political stand that might cost them their corporate donations in the next election cycle or their cushy jobs on leaving “public service”.

The latest act in the “sound science” assault on both science and the public interest is Monsanto’s lawsuit against the Oakhurst Dairy Co-op based in Maine, over their inclusion of the words “Our Farmers’ Pledge: No Artificial Growth Hormones” on their products’ labels. In a stunning piece of corporate double-speak, Monsanto claims:

Monsanto fully supports the right of people in grocery stores to make informed choices about what they purchase. We believe that consumers should be able to make these informed decisions based on fair and accurate factual information about the quality and safety of the products they purchase. Currently, the labels used by Oakhurst are contrary to the position of the Food & Drug Administration for the voluntary labeling of milk and milk products with respect to the non-use of rBST, and violate state laws regarding unfair and deceptive commercial practices. The current labeling practices of Oakhurst fail to fully disclose years of scientific evidence that milk from cows supplemented with rBST is the same as all other milk. Scientific studies conclude that the use of rBST to improve milk production does not change the nutrition, taste, quality, or any other health or safety characteristics of milk.

Without this information, independent market-research shows that many consumers are misled to believe that the milk with labels such as the Oakhurst Dairy label was healthier or safer than other milk. In surveys conducted by MSR Research Group, Inc., and overseen by independent third-party scholars, research revealed that more than two-thirds of consumers were misled to believe that the milk with the Oakhurst Dairy label was healthier to drink than milk labeled without such a statement, and that more than sixty percent of consumers were also misled to believe that the milk with the Oakhurst Dairy label was safer to drink than milk labeled without such a statement.

Now, I don’t know if milk from rBST-treated cows is, in fact, less safe than milk from non-treated cows. I do know, however, that the “years of scientific evidence” Monsanto cites are very likely to have been funded by Monsanto itself, through their sponsorship of research centers at various universities and at their own corporate headquarters in Missouri. Even blatantly obvious research manipulation pays off for Monsanto and its fellow agribusiness/pharmaceutical/chemical companies, by muddying the waters and throwing even the most positive scientific certainties into doubt. If Monsanto’s research is quite clearly fake, then so, too, might their critics’ research be, essentially taking the results of even legitimate scientific research out of the debate, leaving the field open to, essentially, whoever can spend the most money. Between multi-billion-dollar Monsanto and the 88 farms that make up Oakhurst, that’s a pretty clear outcome.

Monsanto has been bringing this sort of lawsuit against small farmers who refuse to use rBST hormone treatments–and had the gall to say so–ever since the product was introduced years ago. They brought so much pressure to bear in Vermont that the state changed its regulations on hormone-treated diary. Oakhurst is based in Maine, and is covered by a Maine state law that awards a “Quality Seal” to dairies that purchase at least 80% of their milk from Maine dairy farms that do not use artificial growth hormones (according to Oakhurst’s website). So Big M is clearly gunning to take down Maine’s regulations, as much as to hit small dairies where it hurts. As far as I can tell, Oakhurst isn’t saying anything that is not true. And they are providing a piece of information that many customers obviously want–as Monsanto itself says in their statement. Monsanto “supports the right of people in grocery stores to make informed choices about what they purchase” (“People in grocery stores”? Like, the stockboy? What about people in bodegas? No rights for them? Or people in restaurants? Or what about children in school lunchrooms? Does Monsanto not support their right to make informed choices?)–but Monsanto wants to be the only ones providing that information.

“Trust Us, We’re Experts” indeed! There’s an old joke, “How do you say ‘Fuck You’ in Yiddish? ‘Trust Me.'”

One of the beauties of the Internet is that it has provided a valuable public space for expression, be it personal or scholarly or commercial or political or whatever. Like lots of other people committed to the growth of the Internet as a social tool, I have adopted a “copyleft” standard for this site, to encourage (or at least remove barriers) others to use, expand, reshape, and otherwise incorporate my thoughts and ideas into their own expressions, as I (and others) have and will with theirs.

This is, without question, an idealistic enterprise, aimed at producing a more perfect society than the one we live in. Because we do, alas, still live in our less-than-perfect society, though, sometimes we face situations that challenge those ideals, situations that are a little harder to swallow than someone writing a public retort of our deeply-held, publically-expressed opinions.

A couple years ago, I was involved with the then-fledgling Suite101.com as a contributing editor, writing a monthly column on Jewish-American history (which I was at the time researching towards my MA). After a few months, changes at the site, intensifying committments in my own life, and a fairly radical change of interests led me to abandon that role, although the pieces I wrote are still online. Among them was a long, three-part series on Franz Boas, the father of modern American anthropology.

As Derrida tells us, once an author releases his or her work, s/he cannot control the various ways it is used and interpreted, even if they run contrary to the author’s intentions. Sometimes this is a positive thing: I was pleased, a couple years ago, to start receiving e-mails from college students who had been assigned the three essays as part of introductory anthropology courses, a use for which I would have never guessed the work was good enough. On the other hand, while Googling for something else I wrote for another site, I came across a usage of my words that I am rather less pleased about: “Wolzek’s Terror Timeline: History of the Jewish Assault on the World”.

[Note: As I’d really rather not send any traffic to this particular site, and would also like to avoid them sending traffic to my site via the referrals, I am providing the URL but no link. Cut and paste “http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/timeline/default.asp?jumpTo=1000” into your address bar, and scroll roughly halfway to “1858 AD”.]

As the title suggests, the piece is an entry in a dateline of the Jewish conspiracy against the world, with Boas playing an important role in advancing the “subjective” social sciences, “which he [could] then manipulate to serve the interests of Jews.” It also includes a link to one of my original articles, which, although the original URL is spelled out, the link itself is to another page on their site, where my article has been copied in its entirety. What is especially galling, however, is that my language has been quoted (without acknowledgement) but the words subtly changed to reflect an anti-Semitic worldview that is far from my actual intentions or beliefs. Compare my words:

Boas was one of a number of highly-assimilated German-Jewish intellectuals who came of age in the increasingly conservative, post-1848, Bismarckian Germany. The son of active liberal Jewish parents, Boas was a promising student of physics and geography during the time that Bismarck was consolidating an alliance of Junker landowners, high-ranking civil bureaucrats, and military officers into a unified German state. Boas saw his future in Germany as increasingly dim, as growing anti-Semitism made it less and less likely for a Jew to receive a teaching position, even in the secondary schools.

With this in mind, Boas began looking to America as a likely place to build his career as early as 1882 (though he did not permanently immigrate until over a decade later).

with their “Background” on Boas:

Boas was one of a number of German-Jewish intellectuals who came of age in the increasingly conservative, post-1848, Bismarckian Germany. The son of active liberal Jews, Boas was a student of physics and geography during the time that Bismarck was consolidating an alliance of Junker landowners, high-ranking civil bureaucrats, and military officers into a unified German state. Boas saw his future in Germany as increasingly dim (!), as growing ‘anti-Semitism’ made it less and less likely for a Jew to receive a teaching position. With this in mind, Boas like other Eastern European Jews, looked to America as a place without existing defense mechanisms in place to counter Jewish ethnocentrism and its manifestations.

A little further down the same page (in another entry) we find:

1888 AD: Jew Franz Boas publishes “On Alternating Sounds.” With this essay, Boas plants the radical seed of what would become “cultural relativism,” undermining both the racial-scientific and cultural evolutionist models of human difference, both of which saw White, Western European Christianity as the highest state of human achievement from which all other ways of life were more primitive deviations. Boas saw these people not as examples of what “we” once were like, nor as examples of retardation or degeneration, but merely as alternative cultural forms of equal value.

which is clearly another twisted adaptation from my own words:

The importance of these findings, published in the 1888 essay “On Alternating Sounds”, cannot be overestimated. With this essay, Boas planted the seed of what would become “cultural relativism”, upsetting both the racial-scientific and cultural evolutionist models of human difference, both of which saw white, Western European Christianity as the universal norm from which all other ways of life were deviations which reflected the inferiority of non-Western and non-Christian peoples. Boas saw these people not as examples of what “we” once were like, nor as examples of retardation or degeneration making them unfit for inclusion in the modern, “civilized” world, but as alternatives to Western lifeways worthy of study and appreciation in their own right.

Ironically, posting the entire work without my permission was, in fact, copyright infringement, as it was written well before I had even heard of “copyleft” and is covered by Suite101.com’s copyright terms. But I have nothing to gain (and my idealistic integrity to lose) by pushing the case. But what this site did is not simply legally wrong, it is morally wrong and intellectually dishonest. And more than a little confusing: after all, the article is extremely favorable to Boas and his work–why link to it?

Most of all, I just hate being associated, whatever my own intentions are and were, with this sort of willful abrogation of intelligence, morality, and decency. And I don’t see that there’s anything I can do–if even words praising a man for his lifelong devotion to undermining the foundations of scientific racism can be twisted into a condemnation, what possible ethical, intellectual, or practical recourse do I have?

Chalk it up, I’m afraid, to a lesson on the pitfalls of an Open Society.

OK, I’ve registered to blog in Blogathon 2003. As noted before, I’ll be writing in support of Doctors without Borders. If you can afford it, please sponsor me.

I’ve made up a little graphic that I’ll be adding to the sidebar when I get a chance. Since this is my first attempt at this sort of thing, I’d appreciate any feedback on the design of the button, from whether you can read and understand it to whether the design is too dumb and I should just use one of the graphics from the Blogathon2003 site. Here it is:

John Nichols of The Nation writes about checks and balances between executive and legislative power, particularly regarding the President’s ability to make war. Nichols’ argument is that it was, Constitutionally speaking, the responsibility of Congress to put the brakes to Bush’s drive for war, a responsibility they shirked with their vague “Resolution Authorizing the Use of Force Against Iraq”–even as they refused to declare war! When Sen. Ron Paul reminded Congress that it was their responsibility, not the President’s, to declare war, and made a motion to add a bona-fide declaration to the Authorization of Force, his motion was flatly denied.

Essentially, by refusing to declare war, Congress refused to take responsibility for Bush’s actions in Iraq–and thus made it easy to be seen supporting a popular President without taking any risks themselves. Now that it is becoming crystal clear that Congress and the American people were misled by Bush and Co. (although it was pretty clear to a lot of us months ago, even last year), Nichols calls on Congress to redeem their lapse of duty by taking the lead in investigating, thoroughly and openly, the not-so-creative manipulation of fact and power behind the war in Iraq.

What Nichols’ post highlights is the incredibly expanded role, in increased power, of the President in modern times. One of the risks of openly asking Congress for a declaration of war is that it would not pass–after all, we haven’t declared war since WWII–and that Bush would go to war in Iraq anyway. Bush I did it in 1990, and Clinton did it in 1999, both times forcing Congress to go to the Supreme Court in an attempt to force the President to comply with the Constitution–and both times failing to win the support of the Supreme Court. Congress is partly to blame, having greatly expanded the role of the administrative branch with the PATRIOT Act and having failed, again and again, to put Bush to the test. 127 out of 127 judicial nominees? Approved. Massive detention of foreign nationals without due process? Approved. War in Afghanistan, violation of the Geneva Convention, massive tax and non-military budget cuts, federally-funded faith-based programs, anti-regulation activists appointed to regulatory agents? Approved, approved, approved, approved, approved.

While Congress contemplates its own too-much-protested irrelevance, I’ve been thinking about the judiciary. In a nutshell, I believe that, given the greatly expanded power of the administrative branch, it is no longer tenable to allow the President to appoint the courts that are intended as a check on executive power. No Founder could have imagined the massive administrative apparatus we would accumulate over the 20th century, especially the FBI and CIA, and more especially their expanded powers under the USA PATRIOT Act. Neither could they have foreseen the aforementiond abdication by Congress of the right to declare war, and the much greater power accorded the administration under the War Powers Act. What it boils down to is a President with the power to arrest alleged criminals and try them under judges he himself appointed.

In order to preserve the checks and balances that were meant to underpin the running of our government, then, it seems to me that the judiciary has to be made fully independent of the administrative branch (or at the very least, moreso). This means, first and foremost, taking away the President’s ability to appoint federal and Supreme Court judiciaries. I’ve thought pretty hard about what could replace Presidential appointment, and I’ve come up with a few ideas. The first, and my favorite, is to have the federal judiciary nominate new federal judges and Supreme Court justices, perhaps with guidelines restricting nominees to those with a certain degree of seniority in their respective lower courts. Thus, when a Supreme Court seat is vacated, the federal judges would nominate one of their own, perhaps limiting consideration to those with at least 10 years (or some other reasonable figure) as a federal judge. This nomination could, in the case of the Supreme Court, be subject to Congressional approval, perhaps a Presidential veto; federal judgeships could be selected by a vote of all the federal judges, or perhaps confirmed by the Supreme Court. Another idea is to elect currently appointed judges the same way lower court officials are elected in some places–an idea I like much less as likely to turn judges into politicians, but which apparently works well enough where it’s practiced. Or judges could be nominated by their prospective peers (the Supreme Court nominating members to fill its vacancies, the federal courts nominating members to fill theirs) and voted on by Congress. All these ideas would entail certain practical difficultes, but then so does the current system. The advantage would be in removing much of the politicization of judicial appointments–and perhaps, in the process, making it less likely for the Supreme Court to support Presidential candidates favorable to their own political ideologies.

I’m also thinking that Supreme Court justices should have a limited term. I understand that their life sentences terms are meant to make them less subject to the ebb and flow of political ideologies, but I don’t think that’s worked out very well so far. Even if Presidential appointment remains the rule, justices should be limited to a reasonable period spent on the bench–perhaps 10 years (with one rotating out every year, or something). This would make it far more difficult, however justices are appointed, to consolidate a block of justices committed to a particular ideological viewpoint, as well as limit any long-term damage a dodgy Court, if installed by some conspiracy of events, could inflict. Ex-justices could be retired back into the federal judiciary, or perhaps a new position could be invented to take advantage of their admittedly vast experience of Constitutional interpretation and application–perhaps as adjuncts to Congress?

I realize that this is a tall order, requiring a Constitutional Amendment at the very least–but we’ve addressed issues like this before, in the case of Presidential term limits for instance, suggesting that it’s not entirely beyond the pale of possible actions. Mostly, I just want to float the idea–maybe I’m overlooking some incredibly important fact about the status quo. But I’m pretty sure at least that something has to be done to balance the administrative branch’s much-expanded powers, or rather than merely changing the Constitution, we might as well scrap it.

Ann Coulter has her own blog, “CoulterGeist”, hosted on the Human Events website. It’s tagline is “Ann Coulter speaks her mind…”. As you might have suspected, there’s nothing there.