Last night, Rachel Maddow interviewed an environmental scientist from Tulane University who described the process by which the Gulf of Mexico is dying. Everyone is focused on the oil damage, but there has been a "dead zone" around the mouth of the Mississippi River for years caused by the chemicals that farmers use in the watersheds that empty into the river.
Reading this article about how the EPA is finally going to investigate the pollution caused by concentrated animal feeding operations (factory farms,) I'm reminded of those futuristic novels of the 70's that predicted the death of the planet.
We knew about all of these problems 40 years ago, and we were making headway on solving some of them. E.g., electric cars in California, educating women about birth control, cleaning up the rivers and lakes, recycling, protecting wetlands, etc. Then came the Reagan era and the masterminds of deceptive language who wrote his scripts. All of a sudden our problems were all caused by "welfare queens" and greedy unions. It was "morning in America" and to hell with the rest of you. I got mine and that's all that mattered. "Greed is good." "Shop til you drop."
So now we're obese and bankrupt. Someone said of the oil disaster, "The ocean is crying." Mother Earth is trying to tell us something. Meanwhile, the media perseverate on whether President Obama is "angry enough."
I used to think that electing Democrats would help change things for the better. But the masterminds of deceptive language are still at it, and MSM just repeats their nonsense. I'm not feeling very optimistic right now. What do you think?
HJR 86, the brainchild of Rep. Tom Loehner, R-Koeltztown, (pictured testifying at Senate hearing) had been rewritten nine times, that's a 9, as of Wednesday morning before the public Senate hearing on the proposed constitutional amendment. But what HJR 86 really needed was to be eighty-sixed. It was godawful on more than one level, but especially because the perfected language in the House--and I use the term "perfected" ironically--tells anti-CAFO activists that they can kiss any local control over factory farms good-bye. Only the (currently in the pocket of the Farm Bureau) state legislature can do any regulating:
[N]o law criminalizing or regulating crops or the welfare of domesticated animals will be valid unless based upon generally accepted scientific principles and enacted by the General Assembly.
[emphasis mine]
But that language is gone from the Senate version. Senators, especially those on the Ag Committee, thought better of it when they found themselves bombarded with phone calls and e-mails from irate rural Missourians. (This is not the first time those folks have--please forgive the pun--saved our bacon on this issue.) The Senate version, as of Wednesday morning, read:
[N]o state law criminalizing or otherwise regulating the welfare or breeding of any domesticated animals shall be valied unless it has been enacted by the general assembly or promulgated by administrative rule and unless it is consistent with scientific and economic standards generally accepted within the agricultural community.
[emphasis mine]
"Administrative rule" is a fancy-schmancy term granting some local control.
That change in wording means that there is one serious flaw in this bill that's now unlikely to survive the legislative process. Leaving only two others. Of course, if the senators eliminate the other two, the whole bill would evaporate. Which would be the best possible solution.
And what would those other problems with HJR 86 be? See if you can figure it out. Because I'm not explaining it until my next posting on this bill.
Update: I was wrong about the House bill eliminating local control. If I had paid better attention, I'd have noticed that the beginning of the sentence I quoted from the perfected bill specifies such control:
Notwithstanding that this section shall in no way prohibit or limit the right of any county or city to enact ordinances, no state law criminalizing or otherwise regulating crops or the welfare of any domesticated animals shall be valid unless based upon generally accepted scientific principles and enacted by the general assembly.
[emphasis mine]
Rep. Chris Kelly, D-Columbia, called me to point out that he had that language added to the House bill. Good for him! (And a raspberry for me.) Thanks, Chris.
(Even with local control intact in both the House and Senate versions, though, the bill is still a turkey.)
It's one thing for our little enterprise here to call Chris Koster on the carpet for appealing a case that everybody but Big Ag wanted to see left alone. In 2008, a judge ruled that a two mile buffer zone should protect Arrow Rock Historic Village from a hog CAFO. By extension, that ruling would protect other historic sites and state parks. But Koster wants to get that ruling struck down.
Now the two biggest media outlets in the state are criticizing him too. The Kansas City Star ran two editorials (Count 'em: one and two) telling him to lay off. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reprinted the second Star editorial, the one that begins: "Attorney General Chris Koster's latest bid to open up Missouri to more factory farms stinks."
Will Koster think this negative attention stinks? Enough to drop the appeal? I guess we'll see. No wonder so many Democrats still call him Koster the Imposter.
A large part of the CAFO battle in this state is about who controls where the factory farms can be located. Big Ag wants only the legislature--Republican controlled--to have that power. Environmentalists and many rural residents want local control, on the assumption that the locals shouldn't have to tolerate environmental damage and devalued property. A skirmish in that battle has arisen over the question of whether anybody besides the legislature can create CAFO free buffer zones around historic sites and state parks. The resulting controversy involves both Chris Koster and Jay Nixon.
The controversy began with a fight at the historic village of Arrow Rock near Columbia. The town, which makes most of its income from the tourist trade, went to court in 2007 to prevent a 4800 hog CAFO from being built nearby. In August of last year, Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce ruled that there would be a two mile buffer zone to protect the historic village.
The hog CAFO, as it turned out, wasn't built, so the buffer zone was a moot point, but Matt Blunt's Department of Natural Resources, carrying water for Big Pig, as usual, appealed the decision anyway. The bad actors didn't want a precedent of buffer zones set.
In Catch-22, Major Major's father was a wealthy alfalfa farmer who had gotten rich by having the government pay him not to grow alfalfa and who used his money to buy more land, with the result that he "soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county." (p.86)
The parallel may not be exact but consider: pork and poultry CAFOs are asking the USDA to buy up--to the tune of $75 million in the last six months--the extra meat they're producing that they can't sell. Meanwhile, the USDA is guaranteeing loans to pork and poultry producers who want to build new CAFOs or expand existing ones.
Major Major's father would approve. True, CAFOs aren't getting paid not to raise hogs, but they are getting paid to raise hogs nobody wants--and getting paid to raise even more hogs nobody wants. Similar principle.
And while the USDA is buying up their excess product--even as it helps them to overproduce even more--the little guy keeps getting squeezed. He's not getting these subsidies. Oh well, who cares, right?
If Vilsack were really on top of the job, he would have noticed and rectified this double dipping already, but it's our job to nudge him in the right direction.
Speaking at the FBR Capital Markets conference in New York in December, Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele, said there were no immediate plans to do much with the $154 million it received from the Treasury.
"With that capital in hand, not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession," he said, "but we also feel that we'll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out."
Last Thanksgiving, St. Louis ACORN activists made the same point as the Times article when they gave Wachovia the Turkey of the Year Award for not using bailout money to slow the mortgage crisis. Might I just point out the obvious: If none of the banks are willing to lend, then they won't have a recession to get through; they'll have a depression. And the luxury cruise ships of our economy, like Wachovia and Boston Private Wealth Management, will sink along with a lot of rowboats with peeling paint.
All over the state, opponents of Missouri CAFOs have been firing between circled Conestogas and waiting for the cavalry to arrive. In historic Arrow Rock Village, for example. Early in 2007, the Department of Natural Resources granted Dennis Gessling a permit to build a 4,800 hog concentrated animal feeding operation two miles from the little town near Columbia--a town that relies on its decades-old summer theater performances and tourism to survive.
Local citizens organized and by October of 2007 had filed suit against the DNR and Doyle Childers, its director, for failing in one of the Department's mandated duties, the requirement that it protect state historic sites and parks. The pioneers could hear far off bugles, barely audible above the gunfire that fall, when Jay Nixon, the man everyone figured for the next governor, spoke at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Missouri Parks Association:
"I believe that our state is headed in the wrong direction on many fronts, including the protection and preservation of our natural resources, our parks and our historic sites. [emphasis mine]
The settlers held off the assault from Gessling by convincing Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia S. Joyce to rule in their favor. On August 25th of last year, Joyce criticized the DNR for failing to protect the historic site and established a fifteen mile buffer zone, prohibiting CAFOs within that zone.
Although the ruling applied only to Gessling--and despite the fact that his permit expired on August 30th without the proposed facility being built--in September Big Chief Childers of the DNR, in cahoots with the Missouri Farm Bureau and a group of agriculture organizations, filed motions objecting to the ruling. Judge Joyce, still critical of DNR failure to protect historic sites, reduced the buffer zone to two miles.
Gibbons finally got back to the anti-CAFO activists with an answer about whether he would interpret 192.300 to mean that County Commissions have the authority to regulate CAFOs. The short answer is that 192.300 "clearly allows the establishment of the County Health Ordinances and is in support of local control."
Here's the entire text of his e-mail on the subject to Rhonda Perry of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center:
With regard to the office of Attorney General, the job is to enforce the law fairly, impartially and effectively to give full effect to the will of the people of Missouri. It is not a policy making role like the Legislature.
Therefore, my duty as Attorney General is to enforce effectively provisions like 192.300RSMo as affirmed in Borron v Farrenkopf, 5 SW 3d 618 (MoApp 1999) which clearly allows the establishment of the County Health Ordinances and is in support of local control.
Regarding your question on the inclusion of County Health Center Boards in 192.300, the language used is clear that when it comes to health ordinances, a properly constituted County Health Center Board has the same authority as a County Commission. Therefore, that is the position I am duty bound to uphold if I am the next Attorney General because it is the law.
Thank you for contacting me and for the opportunity to discuss these issues now and in the future.
Activists need no longer base their AG vote, then, on that single issue. And they are aware that, whichever man wins, they'd do well to set up a meeting with him early on. These are very determined people who--trust me--will continue to make headway on the issue.
Several dozen rural Missourians have been working their fannies off for at least a couple of years to rein in the abuses of CAFOs in our state. And now they're faced with a choice, in the AG race, between what they see as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle Dum. Mike Gibbons consistently voted to curtail the rights of counties to pass health ordinances regarding CAFOs (in '03, '04, and '05) and Chris Koster sponsored SB364 in the spring of '07, which would have eliminated that last small vestige of local control over CAFOs.
(The backstory on 364 is that these fanny-busting activists stopped that bill cold. They got their network of citizens to put so much pressure on rural senators that the bill was not brought up for a vote because it would obviously have failed.)
Having lost their bid to get Jeff Harris or Margaret Donnelly the AG nomination, the activists are retrenching. They asked each man to explain what position he'd take as AG on the authority of County Commissions to regulate CAFOs.
One of the men responded. The other is stonewalling them. And I've been reading the group's online discussion of how to vote in that race.
Chris Koster agreed to meet with a small group and explain his position. Here's Julie Fisher's summary of what he said:
The endeavor to rein in CAFOs is the classic political battle between grassroots organizing and big money.
Big ag took some hard punches to the midsection in the last couple of weeks with the publication of two reports critical of CAFOs: one from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the other a two year study from the Pew Research Group and Johns Hopkins University. Between them, those reports spent about 400 pages documenting what grassroots activists have been shouting about the harm to family farmers, the harm to the environment, and the harm to public health.
Big deal. Smithfield and Tyson just tightened their abs and absorbed the blows. It'll take a lot more than that to topple them.
Here's how the battle's being waged in Missouri.
Last year, then-Republican Chris Koster led a failed attempt in the Senate to pass a bill that would have hurt Missourians in two ways. First, it would have outlawed "nuisance lawsuits". Sure, such lawsuits are a "nuisance" if you're MOArk. Otherwise, they are attempts by John Q. Citizens to stand up against CAFOs that are ruining their lives. Second, the bill would have wrested the only vestige of local control of CAFOs away from citizens. Grassroots pressure was so heavy that the bill didn't even come up for a vote.
The battle on the lawsuit front continues to rage. Premium Standard Farms came out of a particularly bloody round last year when the court ordered it to pay 4.5 million dollars to three plaintiff families. Last month a leaked memo revealed how Smithfield, which just bought Premium Standard Farms, plans to handle the threat of future suits. With hundreds more families waiting in the wings to sue, the corporation has decided not to settle out of court and not to try any suit brought by several plaintiffs at one trial. Instead, Smithfield will try each case separately.
Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, even if you know you aren't going to succeed--or at least, not right away. Not this year.
Jeff Harris (Democratic representative from Columbia, running for the Attorney General nomination) takes umbrage that Tyson, Smithfield and MOArk are turning the Missouri countryside into their personal fiefdoms. He resents the damage done by CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations) in our state so much that he's filing two bills this session to restrain CAFOs and big ag.
Apparently CAFO opponents are making inroads against the Farm Bureau's stranglehold on rural opinion. Witness this headline in the Boonville Daily News:
Lawmaker continues effort to give communities local control over CAFOs - Local voters would have final say on proposed corporate livestock factories
Notice how the CAFOs are described: not as hog farms but as "corporate livestock factories".
Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, even if you know you aren't going to succeed--or at least, not right away. Not this year.
Jeff Harris (Democratic representative from Columbia, running for the Attorney General nomination) takes umbrage that Tyson, Smithfield and MOArk are turning the Missouri countryside into their personal fiefdoms. He resents the damage done by CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations) in our state so much that he's filing two bills this session to restrain CAFOs and big ag.
The first bill is a repeat performance, forbidding the construction of a CAFO within five miles of a state park or a national historic landmark (such as the village of Arrow Rock, which is about to be drenched in the stench of a hog CAFO). Better luck with it this year than last, Jeff.
The second bill, more important as far as reining in these nosesores and water table polluters, would grant local governments control over whether they could be built. Right now, the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) grants a license to any prospective CAFO owner who so much as winks in its direction.
Matt Blunt and Department of Natural Resources Director, Doyle Childers drove four hours to Joplin to try to talk the Joplin Globe out of its editorial policy opposing CAFOs.
It is not at all unusual for a Governor or an MDNR Director to call the Kansas City STAR or the St. Louis POST-DISPATCH about some real or perceived slight or mis-reporting. But, it is extremely rare for the Governor or MDNR Director to show up personally in newspaper offices. This had never occurred at the offices of relatively small newspapers, such as the Joplin Globe.
For all the good it did the guv. Which was none. You can read all about it on Ken Midkiff's site.
See that pretty little Dark-eyed Junco on the left? That's the papa bird. And the hungry hunk with the open maw on the right is what he thinks is his baby. But it's not. It's a baby cowbird, and Mama cowbird deposited her offspring's egg in the junco's nest, trusting the junco to raise a baby two to three times its own size. That baby cowbird hatched first and biggest, shoving the other nestlings out and presenting tiny parents with the full time job of feeding it. Ah, those cowbirds. They sure know how to make other species do the heavy lifting.
The term for this avian practice is brood parasitism, and a human equivalent of the practice is the way big ag is fooling rural people into helping "raise" its processing plants and CAFOs. What I mean is, it's so much easier to make a go of opening a new plant if you put it in a nest where the tiny local economy will feed your giant baby.
For example, the CAFOs that supply those chicken and hog processing plants should have to buy up land for several square miles around each one, because land values plummet. State assessors automatically lower the value of acreage within a half mile of a CAFO by 30-40 percent. That's a conservative estimate of the loss. Sometimes, people can't sell the land at all. It just sits there, even if the owner dies and the price is fire sale cheap. No prospective buyer wants that stink. So the landowners are helping feed the cowbird.
Ken Midkiff of the MO Sierra Club has an excellent piece in the Columbia Tribune about Hillary Clinton appointing a CAFO advocate as a co-chairman of her rural campaign effort:
I received a press release from the Hillary Clinton camp announcing she had appointed Joy Philippi as co-chairwoman of her rural campaign effort. Having never heard of this appointee, I entered her name into a search engine.
Lo and behold, it turns out Joy Philippi was, until March, president of the National Pork Producers Association (NPPC) and owns and operates a giant hog CAFO on her land in Nebraska. She is still one of the chief pooh-bahs of the NPPC, on its national board of directors. Big Pig. Big Meat.
Here are links to three items that might interest you:
There's a thirty second ad called "The Grinch Who Stole SCHIP" that's funny and that vividly makes the point about George W. Grinch.
The Monday Post-Dispatch pretended to ask a number of Missouri power players to answer Virginia's question about whether Santa Claus is real, then the P-D writer put more truth into their mouths about their beliefs than they would ever dare speak. My favorite:
Virginia,
Of course there is a Santa Claus. But thanks to environmental policies I've supported, the North Pole is melting, and he's got to learn to swim. Since I believe that waterboarding is really like training for a swim competition, I say we tie him up and find out what he knows.
Christopher "Kit" Bond
U.S. Senator
This last one isn't Christmassy, but Gone Mild curls its lip eloquently at CAFOs and at Chris Koster for having sold himself out to Big Ag:
I'm no PETA member, but even I don't like the idea of eating something that has spent its entire life jammed in a stinky stall like the most crowded and flatulent elevator you have ever imagined.
Setting aside any porcine pity or tenderness for tenderloins, though, CAFOs are huge canker sores on the environment. They pollute ground water with unimaginable quantities of pig feces and urine. Their smell can make your eyes water, or worse - airborne micro-particles of pig feces can pollute entire zones of beautiful Missouri countrysides.
The corporate hog farming industry just latched on to one of the most powerful lobbyists in Missouri, as if it needed any more help. Missouri Ethics Commission records indicate Smithfield Foods, Inc., Smithfield, Va., the conglomerate which has swallowed up Murphy Farms and Premium Standard, as of Oct. 15, has former state representative Jewell Patek as its lobbyist.
Considering the in-roads the corporate farms have been making under the administration of Patek's close friend, Governor Matt Blunt, this does not bode well for Missourians who have been trying to stop the spread and the resulting contamination from these businesses.
Premium Standard Farms, which operates swine CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations) in three northern Missouri counties, sustained a body blow when it lost a lawsuit to four families in September of last year. The families had sued over destruction of property values as a result of the CAFOs, and the jury awarded them $4.5 million.
Premium Standard Farms is a Goliath and can easily shell out 4.5 mill, no problem. The problem is that 53 other plaintiffs had, at that time, also filed suit. And if they were to prevail, more would surely follow. A few million here, a few million there. Before you know it, Premium Standard Farms could be facing a serious outlay of cash.
The statewide Dem candidates have said they're prepared to return over-the-limit campaign contributions, but Republicans? Their grab-all-you-can legislation created the mess, and now, clutching the boodle to their breasts, they whine about giving it back like a five year old who wants to keep the neighbor kid's toys.
Rep. Jane Cunningham, a St. Louis County Republican who is running for the Senate, said refunds would be unfair because that would help slow-starting campaigns instead of those who hustled to raise funds early. She could be forced to return $35,800. "It's not the American way to advantage people who have sat on their thumbs," she said.
If Republicans "hustled", to use her word, the definition that applies would be this one: to earn one's living by illicit or unethical means.
Last June, Matt Blunt took tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from individuals affiliated with the Dairy Farmers of America, a large milk marketing organization with offices in Kansas City.
Now comes word that the Blunt Administration is providing a five year, no-bid contract to DFA to conduct "state" safety testing on the milk it sells.
In a speech in Arrow Rock Saturday night, Jay Nixon said a whole slew of things that a Democrat in this state ought to be saying. He criticized the Department of Natural Resources for failing to protect state parks, according to their mandate. The DNR is going out of its way to license CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations) next to our state parks. Nixon also got on the DNR's case for failing to side with the state in preserving a bridge that is part of the Katy Trail. Then he criticized the Corps of Engineers for dumping tons of soil into the Missouri River without questioning what effects that might have on wildlife.
"My vision for our state and our state government demands that we return the Department of Natural Resources to its original duty of protecting our state resources," he said, adding that DNR has taken the side of business at the expense of protecting the environment on key issues.
HJR 86, the brainchild of Rep. Tom Loehner, R-Koeltztown, (pictured testifying at Senate hearing) had been rewritten nine times, that's a 9, as of Wednesday morning before the public Senate hearing on the proposed constitutional amendment. But what HJR 86 really needed was to be eighty-sixed. It was godawful on more than one level, but especially because the perfected language in the House--and I use the term "perfected" ironically--tells anti-CAFO activists that they can 
Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, even if you know you aren't going to succeed--or at least, not right away. Not this year.
See that pretty little Dark-eyed Junco on the left? That's the papa bird. And the hungry hunk with the open maw on the right is what he thinks is his baby. But it's not. It's a baby cowbird, and Mama cowbird deposited her offspring's egg in the junco's nest, trusting the junco to raise a baby two to three times its own size. That baby cowbird hatched first and biggest, shoving the other nestlings out and presenting tiny parents with the full time job of feeding it. Ah, those cowbirds. They sure know how to make other species do the heavy lifting.
Ken Midkiff of the MO Sierra Club has an excellent piece in the 
This last one isn't Christmassy, but 
Premium Standard Farms, which operates swine CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations) in three northern Missouri counties, sustained a body blow when it 
The statewide Dem candidates have said they're prepared to return over-the-limit campaign contributions, but Republicans? Their grab-all-you-can legislation created the mess, and now, clutching the boodle to their breasts, they whine about giving it back like a five year old who wants to 
