The Pine Ridge Reservation, located in rural South Dakota is plagued with deteriorating infrastructure, poverty, lack of local employment, and high utility bills. Many of the residents—the Oglala Lakota Nation—live in mobile homes or substandard housing and spend nearly 25% of their income on utilities. Few people on the reservation have the resources or construction knowledge necessary to improve their current residences or build energy-efficient, culturally appropriate houses.”

by Frank Joseph Smecker

11/17/09

Genocide is always and everywhere a political occurrence.
– Irving Louis Horowitz, Genocide

As you’re reading this I’m sure your eyes are beginning to roll, indicating how peeved you’re probably getting over yet another tirade on the subject of health-care-overhaul. Fear not. To prevent this article from joining the all-embracing tautology of other recent health care polemics, a juxtaposition of statistics will suffice: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 20 percent of the general population under the age of sixty-five is without health care coverage; one out of three, if not more, American Indians and Alaskan Natives, under the age of sixty-five, is either uninsured or dependent on the deficient services provided through the IHS (Indian Health Service).

As claimed by the Office of Minority Health, an adjunct of the Department of Health and Human Services, as of 2008 there were an estimated 4.9 million people who classified as American Indian and Alaskan Native alone or American Indian and Alaskan Native integrated with one or more other races [sic]: comprising only 1.6 percent of the U.S. population. The IHS, according to the Office of Minority Health, provides services to only 39 percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives — that is approximately 1.9 million individuals out of 4.9 million who qualify for IHS services. This laggard expanse of services comes at a time when American Indians and Alaskan Natives are plighted by appalling conditions and afflictions such as:

• infant death rates 40 percent higher than the rates that exist for whites;

• death rates from alcoholism and tuberculosis approximately 650 percent higher than overall U.S. rates;

• a male population twice as likely as white men to have liver and IBD cancers;

• a male population 1.8 times more likely as white men to contract stomach cancer and, twice as likely to die from stomach cancer;

• a female population 2.4 times more likely as white females to contract, and die from, liver and IBD cancers;

• a female population 40 percent more prone than white females to get kidney/renal/pelvis cancers;

• 31 percent of the population will die before the age of 45; “…the overall adjusted death rate for American Indians is 35 percent greater than the U.S. rate…” (The age-adjusted death rate for those living in the Aberdeen area — a region that harbors most of the Lakota-Sioux reservations in South Dakota, has risen beyond 1,000 percent); [1]

• higher rates of diabetes and obesity than the general population;

• an unemployment rate of 49 percent — approximately five times the national rate.

What no one is talking about right now is how the most blighted class of people in this country, the most marginalized group of people in the history of the U.S., will be affected by the proposed health-care-reform-bill. But perhaps that is because this bill may not actually provide any measures to ameliorate these abysmal conditions at all. And that may be the case because no one has ever really talked about the historical and ongoing destruction of this country’s native population honestly and publicly enough.

There are many bones to pick with the judicatory infrastructure of the United States of America concerning the failed restitution of history’s most victimized and terrorized peoples. For now, let us focus on bringing an ailing population back to good health through a program hatched for the absolute benefit of a class it is designed to provide services for, alongside being unequivocally structured according to how the said class determines it to be.

What I am asking, and what we should all be asking is: Why is it so difficult to provide fair and equal health care to an entire group of people that comprise less than two percent of the general American population? And: Will the administration’s health-care-reform-bill ensure fair and equal care be provided for American Indians and Alaskan Natives? And more importantly: If so, will the provisions enumerated for American Indians and Alaskan Natives, included in the health care proposal, be drafted along the former and latter parties’ terms, unescorted by any equivocal provisos and/or tendentious legislative furnishings?

Health care as a euphemism for the euphemism that is assimilation.

Health care for American Indians and Alaskan Natives is essentially the extenuation of assimilation programs, sanctioned and directed by the IHS under the auspices of the Department of Health and Humans Services (DHHS).

In 1921 a piece of legislation known as the Snyder Act warranted legislative authority for a federal health program designed to provide services to American Indians and Alaskan Natives. According to literature on the IHS website, the act authorized funds “for the relief of distress and conservation of health…[and]…for the employment of…physicians…for Indian Tribes throughout the United States.”

However, even prior to the ratification of the Snyder Act of 1921, the United States government was well involved with juridical “health care” measures (i.e. expedients) designated for the remaining native population. Holly T. Kuschell-Haworth wrote for DePaul Journal of Health Care Law in the summer of 1999:

The Origins of Federal Native American Health Care Attention to Native American health care began in the nineteenth century when contagious diseases, such as smallpox, threatened the once substantial populations of Native American people. The Federal government’s earliest goals were to prevent disease and to speed Native American assimilation into the general population by promoting Native American dependence on Western medicine and by decreasing the influence of traditional Indian healers. In 1849, responsibility for Native American health was transferred from the War Department to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA oversaw the use of congressional appropriations for the establishment of health programs for Native Americans. Responsibility for Native American health has since endured many organizational transfers, and now resides with the Indian Health Service (IHS), an operating division of the Department of Health and Humans Services (DHHS). [2]

In 1976, the United States passed the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. This piece of legislation detailed the U.S.’ responsibilities, citing: “Congress hereby declares that it is the policy of this Nation, in fulfillment of its special responsibilities and legal obligations to the American Indian people, to meet the national goal of providing the highest possible health status to Indians and to provide existing Indian health services with all resources necessary to effect that policy.” (I’ve added the italics to emphasize the obscene irony of these words with respect to the real, physical effects of the referenced promulgation).

1976 also happened to be the year the U.S. government admitted to running a covert program of involuntary sterilization, affecting about 40 percent of all American Indian women of childbearing age. [3] Article II of the United Nations 1948 Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide explicitly proscribes involuntary sterilization as a means of “preventing births among” a targeted population. Nonetheless, the IHS — an adjunct of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at the time, authorized and administered the illicit sterilizations. The putative termination of the program resulted in the transfer of the IHS to the Public Health Service. There were no indictments or punishments for those reprehensibly involved.

Furthermore, it was revealed in 1990 that the IHS was inoculating Alaska Inuit children with Hepatitis-B vaccine — after the WHO placed an interdiction on this particular vaccine for having a strong correlation with HIV-Syndrome, which is, in essence, directly linked with AIDS. In 1992, a “field test” of Hepatitis-A vaccine, also HIV-correlated, was controlled on reservations in the northern Plains region. [4]

The IHS fails as it continues to expand assimilationist health care.

Founded in 1955, the IHS is a federally administered health care program, accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. It was designed to provide services for North America’s members of the 546 federally recognized indigenous tribes. Those who receive IHS services reside mainly on reservations and rural communities within thirty-six states, mostly contained in the Western U.S. and Alaska.

IHS dependents are not eligible for access to the bulk of hospitals and medical practitioners ubiquitous throughout the U.S. They are restricted to services provided by the clinics and hospitals that contract with the IHS only. Moreover, the majority of IHS facilities are located within “contract health service delivery areas” comprising reservations, the counties circumscribing the reservations, and the adjacent counties. The IHS itself approximates that 43 percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives live outside the parameters of “contract health service delivery areas.” And according to Bonnie Duran, writing for the American Journal of Public Health in 2005: “…more than 60 percent of members of US tribes reside outside their home reservations at least part of the year, but only 1 percent of the IHS budget is earmarked for urban Indian health care [urban clinics service, in toto, nearly 600,000 individuals].” [5]

In the 1950s the U.S. passed a sequence of “termination” statutes by which, in the words of American Indian scholar, author and activist Ward Churchill, “the federal government unilaterally dissolved more than a hundred indigenous nations and their reservation areas.” Furthermore, concomitant ruling was enforced to “encourage” the relocation of sizable “numbers of Indians from the remaining reservations to selected urban centers;” a colonial tactic designed to obviate any recrudescence of social solidarity within native communities. [6] These legislative instruments were prorogued (suspended but not dissolved) in the 70s, but by the 90s the federal relocation program had succeeded in pushing more than half of all U.S. indigenous peoples out of reservations and into city ghettos, under the ostensible objective of “assimilation.” Would you care to be prodded out of your home and marshaled into an economically depressed area of one of America’s major cities? I didn’t think so.

Owing to the fact that the preponderance of IHS facilities are located not in city ghettos but on and around reservations, concurrent with the actuality that virtually half the native population resides nowhere near service areas on account of former federally mandated relocation programs, not only substantiates the concern that adequate health care is not being provided to America’s indigenous, but that these conditions are federally ignored, and met with silence and depraved indifference.

As regards financial deficiencies, IHS is bracketed for budgetary purposes as a discretionary program. In other words, there is no federal guarantee that there will ever be adequate pecuniary allocations (funding) for the IHS. On the other hand, for the general public, being predominantly Eurocentric, white-American, Medicare and Medicaid are federal prerogatives. And those who are eligible are guaranteed plenary (full) access to their programs. To adduce another excerpt from Bonnie Duran’s piece in the American Journal of Public Health in 2005: “For reservation-based populations, the level of per capita funding is less than half of what is provided to those on Medicaid and in prison.” [7]

In 2005 the General Accountability Office (GAO) controlled a study that revealed a number of IHS facilities with zero funding to contract for “non-urgent care.” The same GAO study discovered that eleven out of thirteen facilities surveyed had zero to limited ability to treat chronic pain. Seven out of thirteen facilities had zero to limited ability to perform cancer screenings. [8] Let me remind the reader that these findings pertain to a specific group of people who are, at the very least, twice as likely as white folks to contract, and die from, preventable cancers.

As if that isn’t bad enough, despite the claim that Congress still allocates funds for the IHS (in lieu of the expiration of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act in 2000), the IHS only receives 50-75 percent of the requisite funding needed to operate. [9] Regardless of the increase of federal appropriations over the years, the amount of real money doled out has decreased. To put it another way, the IHS is virtually bankrupt. The amount of federal allocations may have increased, but the amount of actual capital put into the system has considerably decreased.

Meanwhile, the Pima of Arizona suffer the highest diabetes rates in the world. And in 2007 their tuberculosis rate was 5.9 compared to 1.1 for whites. [10]

The 1.8 million-acre San Carlos Apache Reservation, home to a community of 13,000, is one of the poorest reservations in the States. Writing for Congressional Quarterly, Peter Katel quotes Tribal Chairwoman, Kathleen W. Kitcheyan, lamenting: “We suffer from a poverty level of 69 percent, which must be unimaginable to many people in this country, who would equate a situation such as this to one found only in Third World countries.” [11]

Less than a tenth of the recent bonuses awarded to certain peoples by certain businesses, generated by the taxpayer bailout could have sufficiently extended IHS services and advanced aid to improve these inimical conditions greatly. It is the very least this country could have done on behalf of long overdue reparations.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which end of the political spectrum one is ensconced in — negligent and damaging policy written by U.S. lawmakers is negligent and damaging policy. If one leans further to the right, obdurate ethnocentrism (the whole “…I’ve seen one Indian, I’ve seen ‘em all…” mentality) often accompanies those at the helm. If one leans further to the left, liberal and “humanitarian” agendas often obfuscate the implications attached to policy destined for nothing short of the same old hegemonic ends. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” It does not matter whether one is right, center, or left.

The syndicated creation of disease and destitution.

Would it surprise you if I told you that most of these despairing conditions could have been prevented? Well, it’s true — they could have been prevented. More than one half of the nation’s uranium deposits, one-fourth of its low-sulfur bituminous coal reserves, one-fifth of its oil and natural gas, alongside substantial deposits of copper and other ores are confined within the margins of reservations. [12] These resources are lucrative, to say the least. They are also lethal once taken from out of the ground and/or processed on site. Nonetheless, it is peculiar to find the most impoverished demographic in the U.S. residing directly above a copious amount of the world’s most profitable resources. As claimed by Ward Churchill, in his essay The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism, the natural resource base of the Navajo alone is far greater than that of Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, and Monaco, combined. [13]

Through a series of ratified acts (e.g., Indian Reorganization Act, 1934), the U.S. defined itself as the primary governing body of Indian reservations, establishing a system of tribal council governments for each reservation, whose main responsibilities (under the rubric of “economic planning”) include: minerals-lease negotiations, contracting with external corporations, long-term agricultural leasing, water-rights negotiations, land transfers, and more. History has shown that such “economic planning” is nothing but a damaging strategy for an exploitative U.S. bylaw apparatus.

After decades of uranium mining on American Indian territory, many lives have been ruined. Uranium tailings, fifty to sixty feet high litter the defunct mining sites situated on reservation lands releasing radon, actinides (responsible for long-term radioactivity), and other debris into the topsoil and groundwater of the surrounding regions. There is no such thing as “safe doses” of radiation. The debris that sullies the climes of Indian country is replete with alpha-emitting substances often resulting in cancers and other degenerative diseases. Remember that most IHS facilities cannot afford to offer cancer screenings.

Dr. Gordon Edwards, writing for Perception magazine in 1992, explained that leftover uranium tailings contain about 85 percent of the original radioactivity found in the ore. They emit at least 10,000 times the amount of radon gas (able to travel a thousand miles in just a few days) as the undisturbed ore. In the Southwestern U.S., schools were once built using uranium tailings as construction material. [14]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) estimates radon emissions from uranium tailings in the Southwestern U.S. will result in over 3,000 cancer deaths per century over the entire North American continent. Other researchers posit that this assertion is underestimated by at least a factor of ten. [15]

By the 1950s cases of lung cancer, pulmonary fibrosis, pneumoconiosis, silicosis, tuberculosis, birth defects, kidney damage, and more, began to show up in populations near uranium mining sites. By 1978, the GAO had recorded 140 million tons of “on site tailings piles at twenty-two abandoned and sixteen operational mills.” There are more than 1,100 abandoned uranium mines in the Navajo Nation alone. Continued production results in the creation of six to ten tons of tailings annually, alongside small cell carcinoma for the Navajo miners. [16]

Yucca Mountain, situated on Shoshone Nation land, is a proposed nuclear waste repository site. Left with thousands of tons of nuclear waste per annum, U.S. nuclear power facilities are desperately seeking a place to store their ever-increasing stockpiles of deadly wastes. America’s best idea thus far is to stuff it all inside a mountain, on land that does not belong to the U.S.

Backed by the Ruby Valley Treaty and the Nevada Enabling Act, Yucca Mountain and its surrounding region are not U.S. territory, therefore not for federal use. Not surprisingly, this injunction is flouted by military nuclear weapons testing on Shoshone land, during which 700-ton explosives are detonated. Moreover, nearly 70 percent of the nation’s gold mining occurs upon Shoshone Nation land, despite the fact that gold ore is commonly found throughout the U.S. What’s wrong with industrial gold mining, you may ask. Well, for one, it’s stupid.

Gold mining is a highly nocuous vocation. Not only does it threaten the health and livelihood of miners and occupants of the surrounding communities, but it is deleterious to its own and surrounding landbases, ultimately threatening the natural ecology of the region.

Tons of rock must be extracted from the earth to extricate an ounce of gold. The processing of the metal involves (depending on its metallurgical makeup) the application of a diluted cyanide solution (sodium cyanide), sulfuric acid, mercury, and other noxious and fatal substances, alongside being water intensive (drawing intensively from a diminished water-table).

There are literally thousands of other examples I could provide to illustrate how the U.S. and its corporate collaborators create poor health conditions and abject poverty among an already marginalized population for their own profitable gains and neocolonial, hegemonic aspirations. And matters are made desperately worse by the incompetence of the IHS.

Seeking solutions.

Rectifying a longtime problem, one as grisly as the diminution of America’s indigenous, followed by destructive protocol delegated by U.S. decree, is indeed a difficult task at hand. As regards restoring a broken and virtually bankrupt IHS, some lawmakers are pushing for the reauthorization of the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act.

On October 14th, Rep. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller urging “the inclusion of reauthorization of the IHCI Act as part of comprehensive health insurance reform,” nmpolitics.net reports. In the words of Heinrich, “Our country desperately needs health insurance reform — but our pursuit of reform cannot leave Native Americans behind,” he said. “I represent tens of thousands of Native Americans in central New Mexico, and my constituents have made it clear that they cannot wait any longer for health care reform in Indian country.”

According to New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone: “Less is spent on providing health care to American Indians per capita than any other sub-population. In fact, we spend more to provide health care to federal inmates than we do for American Indians.” As reported at racewire.org, Pallone is appealing for an amendment to the current health care bill that would add changes to services for American Indians to “any health care reform that happens in Congress.”

Many wonder, though, would reauthorizing the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act, with a few additional furnishings, really ameliorate the problem at hand? Obviously, U.S. legislation has not worked thus far and, moreso, it has been the driving impetus behind the historical disintegration of this country’s indigenous.

If anything is to suffice, health care services for Native Americans must be developed in accord with Native Americans’ requirements and wishes. Services must incorporate the indigenous traditions and practices of each tribe, alongside the option to access conventional methods of treatment.

More capital should be injected into the system. There are absolutely no excuses to do otherwise. The money is there — it’s just being misspent, primarily on an already-bloated defense budget. Allocations for environmental clean-up costs must be put in place, too. And clean-up projects must be enforced with full speed ahead. This would — with the adequate sanitation gear — provide a massive amount of new employment as well.

A concerted effort, from all angles, on behalf of U.S. policy-makers, must culminate in an unprecedented level of reparations that not only rectify centuries of genocidal maltreatment, but also recognize, with respect, indigenous sovereignties. This includes the withdrawal of all unwanted military and corporate activity/occupation from Indian country. In the end, the health of one’s landbase is commensurate with the health of one’s community.

1.) Goldsmith, M.F. (1996). First Americans face their latest challenge: Indian health care meets state Medicaid reform. JAMA, 275, 1786; also see Voss, Richard W., Victor Douville, Alex Little Soldier, and Gayla Twiss, Tribal and shamanic-based social work practice: a Lakota perspective, Social Work, Vol. 44, 1999.
2.) Kuschell-Haworth, Holly T., “Jumping Through Hoops: Traditional Healers and the Indian Health Care Improvement Act,” DePaul Journal of Health Care Law, 1999.
3.) Dillingham, Brint, “Indian Women and HIS Sterilization Practices,” American Indian Journal, vol. 3, no. 1 (1977), pp. 27-28. For more info on this, see Churchill, Ward, “In the Matter of Julius Streicher: Applying Nuremberg Precedents in the United States,” From A Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985-1995 (Boston: South End Press, 1996).
4.) Andrea Smith, “The HIV-Correlation to Hepatitis-A and B Vaccines,” WARN Newsletter (Chicago: Women of All Red Nations, summer 1992).
5.) Duran, Bonnie M., American Journal of Public Health, May2005, Vol. 95 Issue 5, pp. 758-758.
6.) Churchill, Ward, “Since Predator Came: A Survey of Native North America Since 1492, From A Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985-1995 (Boston: South End Press, 1996), p. 26. Also, see House Concurrent Resolution 108 of August 1953, which promulgated a policy of “unilaterally dissolving specific native nations.” This resulted in the “suspension of federal services to and recognition of the existence of”: the Menominee on June 17, 1954 (ch. 303, 68 Stat. 250); the Klamath on Aug. 13, 1954 (ch. 732, 68 Stat. 718, codified at 25 U.S.C. § 564 et seq.); the “Tribes of Western Oregon” on Aug. 13, 1954 (ch. 733, 68 Stat. 724, codified at 25 U.S.C. § 691 et seq.); and more. In total, 109 nations were statutorily “terminated” in the 1950s. Some were restored and federally recognized in the 1970s. Also, see the Relocation Act (PL 959) of 1956; for more info on the latter “Act,” see Fixico, Donald L., Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986).
7.) Duran, Bonnie M., op. cit.
8.) James, Cara, Karyn Schwartz, and Julia Berndt, “A Profile of American Indians and Alaska Natives and Their Health Coverage, Race, Ethnicity and Health Care, Kaiser Family Foundation, September 2009, p. 6.
9.) Goldsmith, M.F. (1996). First Americans face their latest challenge: Indian health care meets state Medicaid reform. JAMA, 275, 1786; also see Voss, Richard W., Victor Douville, Alex Little Soldier, and Gayla Twiss, Tribal and shamanic-based social work practice: a Lakota perspective, Social Work, Vol. 44, 1999.
10.) Katel, Peter, (2006, April 28), “American Indians,” CQ Researcher, 16, 361-384.
11.) Ibid.
12.) Churchill, Ward, “Native North America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” From A Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985-1995 (Boston: South End Press, 1996), p. 147; also see Garrity, Michael, “The U.S. Colonial Empireis as Close as the Nearest Reservation,” Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, ed. Holly Sklar (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 238-68.
13.) Churchill, Ward, “Native North America…,” From A Native Son…, p. 150; also see U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, The Navajo Nation: An American Colony (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976).
14.) Edwards, Dr. Gordon, President of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, “Uranium: The Deadliest Metal,” Perception Magazine, v. 10 n. 2, 1992.
15.) Ibid.
16.) Quartaroli, MaryLynn, “Leetso,” the Yellow Monster: Uranium Mining on the Colorado, http://www.cpluhna.nau.edu/Change/uranium.htm

Frank Joseph Smecker, TPC’s Editor of Radical Earth Defense, is a social-worker and writer from Vermont who has an ardent and committed passion to work in defense of everything wild. Mostly an autodidact, he is also currently in school matriculating toward a degree in psychology. He is an accomplished writer; his essays, interviews and articles, decrying the atrocities of industrial civilization and capitalism, have appeared in many publications. He is also a blog writer for the Vermont Commons Journal (for Independence from Empire).

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By Dr. Steven Best

11/13/09

I.

The nonhuman animal advocacy movement is at a crucial crossroads where truly it is now do or die. In the early 1980s, a new animal rights movement glowed bright with potential; in just a few years, however, the light faded to black as corruption, opportunism, and bureaucracy snuffed out the promise of genuine change. As they evolved, it became increasingly obvious that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other groups emulated the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to become corporate behemoths and mainstream machines. Increasingly co-opted and compromised, animal rights groups frequently worked with, rather than against, the exploitation industries in order to regulate, not eliminate, the ongoing nonhuman animal holocaust.

In the last decade, for instance, PETA pressured McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC to increase cage size and adopt “less cruel and more profitable” slaughter methods,[1] while HSUS aggressively campaigned for “humane meat” and “cage-free eggs.” These groups ultimately serve corporate exploiters’ interests and champion capitalist principles generally. But whereas PETA began as a grassroots organization in 1980, and continues to defend the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and to promote veganism, HSUS has been a bureaucratic welfare group since its inception in 1954, it consistently denounces the ALF, and has always capitulated to carnivorous culture as it barely gives support even for vegetarianism.

Lest anyone in either the industry or advocacy camps had any doubts, HSUS President and CEO Wayne Pacelle put them to rest in a sycophantic July 2009 interview on Agritalk radio. Pacelle virtually apologized for being vegan in his private life and assured the flesh, vivisection, hunting, zoo, and circus industries that they had nothing to fear from HSUS, as his goal is to promote “decency and mercy toward animals” and not to close their operations.[2]

II.

In direct response to the wretched reformism and opportunism of bureaucratic “welfarism,” a new movement emerged to reconstruct nonhuman animal advocacy unequivocally as a struggle for animal rights, not “welfare”; for the total abolition of nonhuman animal slavery rather than its regulation; and for veganism, not “humane” animal-derived products of any kind. To a significant degree, the new vegan abolitionist movement has been shaped and defined by the work of Gary Francione, professor of law at Rutgers University. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Francione exposed the duplicity of “new welfarists” who use the term “animal rights” but pursue “welfarist” policies. These policies, Francione argues, are incoherent and dilute the meaning of rights; “welfarism” in any form, he insists, works to the benefit of industries and thus increases, rather than decreases, the demand for animal-derived products; it only aggravates, rather than alleviates, speciesism and the plight of nonhuman animals in horrific systems of exploitation.

Francione tapped and mobilized growing dissatisfaction with corporate reformism and sparked a growing vegan abolitionist movement. More accurately, he revived a vegan movement first created by Donald Watson in 1944, and was sustained by vegan societies such as in the UK and US. These societies maintained Watson’s broad and political vision of veganism not merely as a diet but rather as an ethical and political commitment to the abolition of nonhuman animal exploitation and, indeed, to all systems of oppression.[3] Francione wedded the pacifist ideals of ancient Jainism, Watson’s vegan viewpoint, and the philosophy of animal rights first systematically developed in 1983 by Tom Regan, merging these influences in a new matrix of pacifist vegan abolitionism.

Francione typically speaks as if he invented veganism, and sycophantic followers such as Roger Yates claim that a bona fide “animal rights movement” only began in 2006 with the ascendant influence of Francione’s work.[4] But Francione mostly returned to Watson’s original teachings, albeit often in diluted form that retains the ethical vision linking food choices to moral commitments to oppressed nonhuman animals, but without a consistent political commitment to working against all forms of oppression and exploitation. Abolitionist approaches toward speciesism began within the nineteenth century feminist-antivivisectionists, were deepened in Watson and emerging vegan societies, informed the hunt saboteur movements in the UK from the 1960s to the present, and were advanced in historically momentous ways in 1976 when Ronnie Lee founded the Animal Liberation Front.

While Francione advanced a forceful critique of “welfarism” and took animal rights philosophy to a new level, he has nonetheless proved to be bereft of political vision and incapable of forging a genuine resistance movement that can evolve beyond the marginalized position currently embraced by less than one percent of the human population. In Francione’s religious, tepid, and apolitical rendering, vegan abolitionism remains an elitist, white, Eurocentric consumerist lifestyle easily co-opted by capitalism and dominant ideologies. Moreover, Francione has spawned a cult-like following – “Franciombes” – who parrot his fundamentalist, rigid, bellicose, and Manichean positions; with slavish devotion to their Master and his hostile manner, Franciombes defame his critics in a style more suited to Machiavelli than Jains.

III.

The Guru and his disciples come together in a dance of doctrine and dogma. Like Christian fundamentalists, Francione and his followers believe they possess the Truth while all others struggle in error. As Francione argues there is literally “no alternative,” only chaos and ruin, except for their approach based on obedience to law, peaceful education, and focus on individuals and consumption habits over institutions and productive imperatives stemming from global capitalism. For them, the world is black and white, answers are cut and dry, and complexity is reduced to the Procrustean bed of either/or, rather than enlivened through the dialectical logic of both/and.

According to the pacifist party line, militant direct action (MDA) tactics such as economic sabotage are ALWAYS wrong and NEVER effective. Excusing themselves from the work of analyzing the complexities and unique specific situations, Franciombes fashion a handy a priori “truth” and apply it mechanically to every action that has happened or will happen. Their ignorance of history is matched only by their mental rigidity. For over three decades, in dozens of countries throughout the world, in countless thousands of actions, liberators and saboteurs have freed hundreds of thousands of captive nonhuman animals; permanently shut down numerous breeders, “fur farmers,” and vivisectors; and convinced countless numbers of individuals to find gainful employment in careers other than nonhuman animal exploitation, while inspiring people worldwide to join the animal liberation movement.

In all this, Franciombes see no value or gain and, despite operations closed forever, they can only repeat the baseless claim that all damaged property is rebuilt and all liberated nonhuman animals are “replaced.” This may happen in some cases, but in light of the many operations shut down for good, this clearly is a false claim; even when animals are replaced and property rebuilt and restored, rising insurance costs are enough to weaken and jeopardize the viability of small and moderate operations at least. Whereas dogmatic pacifists hide under the cover of ignorance and denial, corporate exploiters themselves have testified to the effectiveness of ALF actions.[5]

By vilifying sabotage tactics as “violent,” and by conflating attacks on property with assaults on people, Franciombes adopt the reactionary discourse and position of the FBI and the corporate-state-media complex. They needlessly and divisively pit education in opposition to illegal tactics (even open rescues), as if the two tactics were irreconcilably opposed rather than complimentary aspects of a revolutionary process.

Despite some talk of capitalism, commonalities of oppression, and alliance politics, Francione ultimately pushes a simplistic, single-issue “go vegan” approach pitched to a white, affluent, privileged, Western audience, with no intent to engage people of color, working class families, the poor, or China and India – the world’s most populous nations now in rapid transition from maintaining traditional plant-based diets to embracing Western diets rooted in consuming “animal products” including flesh, milk, and eggs.

Francione thereby reinforces the dismal elitist, classist, and racist stigmas attached to activists for nonhuman animals since the beginning of “animal protectionism” in the early nineteenth century, and he further isolates veganism and animal rights from progressive movements and the social mainstream. Unable to articulate a structural theory of oppression, exploitation, and ideological hegemony, and mired in Western dualisms and the construction of false oppositions such as between production/consumption, individual/social, and psychological/institutional, Francione exculpates the logic and global machinery of capitalism to lay the entire burden of blame and responsibility on individual consumers.

Certainly, humans do have agency and need to take responsibility for transforming their personal lives, such as by engaging the ecological and ethical imperative to go vegan. But politically and pedagogically it is also crucial for citizens to recognize the formidable power of the structural forces in their lives and the ways in which sedimented economic and political institutions pose profound obstacles to teaching, learning, and progressive ethical and social change. Psychological and ethical change is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of the large-scale social transformations needed for creating viable democratic and ecological cultures.

Internalizing the capitalist ideology of liberal individualism, this pseudo-abolitionist offers nothing but the most banal and tepid reformism which is no more effective in changing the overall social relations of domination than “welfarism” is in breaking the chains of speciesist oppression. Rather than advancing on Watson’s formulation, Francione offers a regressive and hollow version of a rich ethical political ideal opposed to all forms of exploitation and hierarchy.

IV.

Franciombes eliminate complexity and ambiguity from the social-political picture, and reek of arrogance, dogma, and condescension. They cling to the religious conviction that any approach to veganism, animal rights, or abolitionism other than what Francione has set in stone is false, reactionary, and “welfarist.” They promiscuously deploy the phrase “new welfarist” to discredit others in the movement, much as McCarthyites hurled the epithet of “communist” and post-9/11 patriots terrorize with the discourse of “terrorism” to discredit their opponents as irrational extremists.

Indeed, in McCarthyist fashion, upon receiving alleged death threats from supporters of confrontational or illegal direct action, Francione made reckless accusations and named names of anyone (including avowed pacifists) remotely connected to such a devious terrorist plot. Moreover, Francione routinely brands his opponents as “mad” or “insane,” as if disagreement with his divine teachings were evidence of psychological impairment and oblivious to the normalizing and ableist implications of crude dichotomies of sane/insane and rational/irrational.

Unable to grasp the root causes of hierarchical domination and ecological crisis, blaming individuals over institutions, Francione is hardly positioned to grasp the nature of the problems afflicting other animals and the planet let alone to offer potential solutions and viable tactics. And thus we get nothing beyond the hopelessly vague, liberal pseudo-panacea of “vegan education.” Apparently limited to blogging and podcasting to the choir, Francione & followers are bereft of politics, and, in fact, they lack even the most rudimentary elements of a theory and practice of education – more than a small problem for an approach seeking change through vegan education. Their outlook is utterly delusional in the conviction that veganism is the main vehicle and catalyst for individual enlightenment and, thereby, for social change. These pugilistic pacifists cling to a Christian-like faith that somehow, someday their insular polemics and feeble “education” efforts will transform the heart and soul of humanity and, thereby, change society as a whole. Oblivious to the threshold we are about to cross, they promote slow, incremental change amidst rapid, systemic ecological breakdown.

Incredibly, as global ecological and social crises rapidly mount, Francione ignores the most crucial events of the day – human overpopulation, species extinction crisis, deforestation, global climate change, and the destructive growth imperatives inherent in the capitalist economy. The chaos theory model Franciombes use to buttress their collective hallucination of a “vegan revolution” is far more applicable to the exponential growth of flesh consumption in China and India. For every person who becomes vegan, a thousand flesh-eaters arise in these rapidly industrializing societies and elsewhere such as Brazil and South Africa. The Franciombe concern over “replacement” of liberated nonhuman animals seems to elude them as it applies to their own single-issue approach, which fails to realize that for every vegan convert they celebrate, armies of necrovores are continuously born and raised.

Francione’s approach is complacent, detached from reality, and irrelevant to the massive and complex struggle necessary to forestall biological meltdown and ecological catastrophe. Pacifist lifestyle veganism is another dead-end and groundless hope, totally inadequate to the unprecedented challenge of a planet in crisis. If once progressive, Francione’s approach is now clearly reactionary. It is a pseudo-abolitionist movement, bourgeois lifestyle veganism; it is a one-dimensional, single-issue, Eurocentric, white, elitist, consumerist, capitalist construct that vegans and abolitionists need to shed quickly.

Where Franciombes seek to trademark abolition and revile as mere “welfarism” any vision not their own, this group aims to blow the doors off their cultish theology in order to reinvigorate thinking, restore common sense, situate veganism in its broadest political context, and revitalize possibilities for revolutionary change. Our options are not confined to either the “welfarism” of HSUS or the pseudo-abolitionism and lifestyle veganism of Francione. There are other ways, such as history reveals and the future requires.

V.

We need a far richer and more radical concept of abolitionism that draws from and revitalizes the strength and power of the nineteenth century anti-human slavery movement that erupted in the US (and of course earlier in the UK). Unlike the pale imitation and caricature espoused by Franciombes, the version of abolitionism we champion is far more in tune with the radicalism, pluralism, and alliance politics (imperfect and impermanent as it was) of nineteenth-century abolitionism. But eschewing nostalgia and outmoded political models, this approach also draws from numerous other contemporary theories and political movements. We recognize the need for radical social change and we understand that the fight against speciesism, capitalism, the state, and hierarchy in all forms will be waged on many different fronts simultaneously. We seek to reinvigorate a movement sold-out by corporate opportunists and paralyzed by pacifists who sympathize with the latent “humanity” of oppressors and demonize the militant wing of animal liberation, a perverse inversion of loyalties and misguided sentiments manifested in the Stockholm Syndrome mindset evident in the mindset of fundamentalist pacifists who enjoin activists to respect the humanity of murderous oppressors as they demonize and vilify militant liberationists[6]

We cannot stop the speciesist and corporate war on nonhuman animals and the planet with blogging, leafleting, tabling, and recipe books alone. Capitalism is inherently destructive, and change will never come solely through education and persuasion, nor without a movement more powerful than the agents and institutions of omnicidal destruction. As radical pedagogy theorist Paulo Freire himself insisted – education can only be part of a much broader and multi-pronged movement of resistance, struggle, and change. Thus, like all priorl revolutions, human and nonhuman animals will not win liberation because oppressors suddenly see the light, but rather because enough people become enlightened and learn how to rock the structures of power, to shake them until new social arrangements emerge.

It is not only the content of Francione’s positions we challenge, but also the very form and method of his approach. We cannot progress in the struggle for liberation or hope to be politically relevant unless we abandon Francione’s dualistic, either/or logic for a dialectical both/and logic, one that abandons all bogus dichotomies and false separations. Thus, we need education and agitation, mainstream and militant tactics, peaceful resistance and confrontation and sabotage, and aboveground/legal and underground/illegal means of weakening speciesist capitalism.

We need more, not less, vegan education, of a kind that shatters the enclaves of white privilege in which Franciombes entomb abolitionism and reaches out to the poor, working classes, inner cities, less-industrialized nations, and, crucially, the emerging crisis flashpoints in the burgeoning population giants of China and India. And, despite one of his most persistent and vapid imposed false options, those who work underground to liberate nonhuman animals through raids can and do rescue other animals from “shelters.”

While we support the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, and defend the importance of economic sabotage, we also recognize that property destruction is only a rear-guard and minor means of resistance that has to yield to a broad social movement. Still, it remains an important – sometimes seemingly the only – means of resistance against the capitalist property system, and merits support as we simultaneously work toward building political alliances on a global scale and in an unprecedentedly broad and inclusive way.

The pluralist and contextualist approach central to our position absorbs the partial value and validity of vegan abolitionism, but without the debilitating dogmatism and disabling rejection of effective tactics simply because they do not conform to an ancient code or utopian ideal that only serves to strengthen oppression and to reassure oppressors they have nothing to fear from an “opposition” movement.[7] It abandons single-issue fetishism and the complacency of class and racial privilege in favor of diversity, solidarity, and bridge-building with those most economically disadvantaged and politically marginalized. Only in this way, can the profound importance of veganism and animal rights be recognized and respected by a social majority; only in alliance with other struggles can its revolutionary potential be realized.

In the consumerist and privatized lifestyle form promoted by Franciombes, however, veganism is the opiate of the people, and Murray Bookchin’s polemic against apolitical “lifestyle anarchism” can be fruitfully applied to the vaporous lifestyle veganism championed by Franciombes and others.[8]

We endorse a form of abolition that (1) defends the use of high-pressure direct action tactics, along with illegal raids, rescues, and sabotage attacks; (2) views capitalism as an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive system, and sees the state as a corrupt tool whose function is to advance the economic and military interests of the corporate domination system and to repress opposition to its agenda; (3) has a broad, critical understanding of how different forms of oppression are interrelated, seeing human animal, nonhuman animal, and earth liberation as inseparable projects; and, thus, (4) promotes an anti-capitalist alliance politics with other rights, justice, and liberation movements who share the common goal of dismantling all systems of hierarchical domination and rebuilding societies through decentralization and democratization processes.[9]

VI.

We form this new group out of the need for a radical social approach to veganism and animal rights that transcends bourgeois liberalism; the need for a global Left that renounces speciesism and all other ancient and lingering prejudices and forms of oppression; the need for post-hierarchical worldviews and democratic and ecological societies; and the need for total liberation and revolutionary transformation.

Forget Francione …

We must link the liberation of other animals to human and Earth liberation, and build a revolutionary movement strong enough to vanquish capitalist hegemony and to remake society without the crushing loadstones of anthropocentrism, speciesism, patriarchy, racism, classism, statism, heterosexism, ableism, and every other pernicious form of hierarchical domination. Humanity may not succeed in this endeavor, but it is one that we must undertake. It is no longer the classical choice between “revolution or barbarism,” but now that of revolution or ecological collapse and mass extinction.

We have two goals. First, we aim to expose the fatal flaws in Francione’s approach, and provide a positive alternative to his apolitical, one-dimensional, and single issue form of abolitionism. This approach provides a greater openness, diversity, and flexibility of tactics in contrast to the dogmatic and artificially constrained options Francione leaves open for his extreme pacifist approach. Since this alternative model is richer, multidimensional, and far more political, it opens to an alliance politics with other progressive and radical causes and groups.

And as we promote alliance politics, it is crucial to find ways of building bridges and forming commonalities. And thus our second and quite modest goal is simply to open a space for new forms of thought and struggle that revolve around the ideal of total liberation and a new ethics and politics that transcend humanism – however broadly defined – and encompasses all sentient beings and the natural world. We must first and foremost forge channels of communication to link vegan and nonhuman animal liberation communities with human animal liberation and environmental communities, representing a politics for the 21st century. In this endeavor, we hope to make this site and possible others a rich storehouse of information and a valuable medium for discussion and debate.

We reach out to any and all people from any of these communities to contribute to this crucial endeavor. Clearly, this broad spectrum of thought and politics will not agree on all points, but it is more important to focus on similarities and shared concerns, such as arise from the devastating impact of capitalism on social, sentient, and natural worlds with mutual concerns of peace, justice, equality, democracy, rights, autonomy, and ecology.

To Join Our Extended Facebook Network:

-Do a group search on Facebook for “Radical Abolitionism: Total Liberation by Any Means Necessary” and submit a request to join, or

-Email camille@negotiationisover.com with the subject “Faceboook Radical Abolition Group”

Notes:

——————————————————————————–
[1] For PETA’s approach, see “The Case for Controlled-Atmosphere Killing” ( www.peta.org/cak/).

[2] For a transcript of the interview, see: http://www.cattlenetwork.com/Content.asp?contentid=327066 .

[3] For Watson’s seminal 1944 essay arguing for a broad ethical and political concept of veganism, see: http://www.ukveggie.com/vegan_news/vegan_news_1.pdf .

[4] Roger Yates, “Three Years Young” (http://human-nonhuman.blogspot.com/2008/12/three-years-young.html).

[5] Susan Paris, president of vivisection-industry front group Americans for Medical Progress, for example, admits the ALF has had a large impact on vivisectionists, writing, “Because of terrorist acts by animal activists like Coronado, crucial research projects have been delayed or scrapped. More and more of the scarce dollars available to research are spent on heightened security and higher insurance rates. Promising young scientists are rejecting careers in research. Top-notch researchers are getting out of the field.” Moreover, the August 1993 Report to Congress on Animal Enterprise Terrorism describes the effectiveness of ALF tactics:, “Where the direct, collateral, and indirect effects of incidents such as this are factored together, ALFs professed tactic of economic sabotage can be considered successful, and its objectives, at least towards the victimized facility, fulfilled.” Both quotations cited at: http://www.animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/ALFPrime.htm.

[6] For a vivid and grotesque example of the Stockholm Syndrome and the internalization of the capitalist superego, see Lee Hall’s scurrilous attack on MDA in her self-published screed, Capers in the Churchyard: Animal Rights Advocacy in the Age of Terror (2006). For critical dissection of the multitude of fallacies, errors, and abysmal scholarship informing this pacifist propaganda tract (which one could easily mistake for a political attack from a vivisection industry front group or the FBI), see the essays by Best and Miller listed in note 7. Also see the devastating critiques from UK activists deeply involved in the campaigns Hall distorted and denounced: Steven Best, Jason Miller, Joan Court, Janet Tomlinson, and Lynn Sawyer, “Presence of Malice: UK Activists Vs. Lee Hall” (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/presence-of-malice-uk-activists-v-lee-hall/),Alison Banville, “Lee Hall: Unplugged and Unmasked” (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/lee-hall-unplugged-and-unmasked/); and Lynn Sawyer, “On the Practice of Pluralism: A Response to Lee Hall and the London Vegan Festival Controversy.”

[7] On the importance of a pluralist and contextualist method, see Steven Best and Jason Miller, “Pacifism or Animals: Which Do You Love More? A Critique of Lee Hall, Friends of Animals, and the Franciombe Effect in the New Abolitionist Movement” (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/pacifism-or-animals-which-do-you-love-more/), and “Averting the China Syndrome: Response to Our Critics and the Devotees of Fundamentalist Pacifism” (http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/averting-the-china-syndrome-response-to-our-critics-and-the-devotees-of-fundamentalist-pacifism/).

[8] See Murray Bookchin, “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm” (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/ANARCHIST_ARCHIVES/bookchin/soclife.html).

[9] On alliance politics in a total revolution framework, see the Introduction to Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II (eds.), Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (2006, AK Press).

Dr. Steve Best is TPC’s Senior Editor of Total Liberation. Associate professor of philosophy at UTEP, award-winning writer, noted speaker, public intellectual, and seasoned activist, Steven Best engages the issues of the day such as animal rights, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media, globalization, and capitalist domination. Best has published 10 books, over 100 articles and reviews, spoken in over a dozen countries, interviewed with media throughout the world, appeared in numerous documentaries, and was voted by VegNews as one of the nations “25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians.” He has come under fire for his uncompromising advocacy of “total liberation” (humans, animals, and the earth) and has been banned from the UK for the power of his thoughts. From the US to Norway, from Sweden to France, from Germany to South Africa, Best shows what philosophy means in a world in crisis.

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Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Watch this video to “take the time to educate yourself on who we [White Buffalo] are and what we do…”

Anthony DeNicola, the deer mass murderer who orchestrated and led the slaughter of 313 deer (the “official” count) in Death Park (fka Shawnee Mission Park) over the course of three nights last week, sent me this missive via email:

From: WBUFFALOINC
Sent: Monday, November 09, 2009 1:41 PM
To: Jason Miller
Subject: Re: DEATH PARK DEER: The latest disturbing developments

Jason,

If I understand correctly you are a self-proclaimed autodidact. If so, please take the time to educate yourself on who we are and what we do, and not follow the misinformation and ignorance that you are regurgitating. We euthanized 312 deer in 3 nights while training law enforcement personnel to be able to continue management in the future in the most humane way possible. There were no crippled deer and all were shot in the brain. The meat processor and State biologist can verify this because they saw every carcass, and they have no reason to lie about their observations. In fact, the State would prefer hunting, so if we had conducted ourselves improperly they would have called us to task to have hunting be the only permitted management option.

Also, please realize that my organization was instrumental in the research that allowed for the registration of GonaCon, the vaccine that was part of your proposed solution. I am conducting 100 surgical sterilization next month in Missouri as part of a suburban deer management program. This is an initiative to come up with an alternative non-lethal solution that can be practical and cost effective in developed environments.

And remember millions of “semi-tame” cats and dogs are euthanized every year.

Tony DeNicola, Ph.D.
www.whitebuffaloinc.org

Probable victim of the Death Park Deer Massacre….

My reply:

From: Jason Miller
Date: Nov 12, 2009 3:29 PM
Subject: Re: DEATH PARK DEER: The latest disturbing developments
To: WBUFFALOINC

Tony,

I will admit that I’m no expert on you, your company, or your “services,” but I’ve done enough homework to know that while you are not the cause, you are an abhorrent symptom of the dominant culture and its obsessions with death, killing, dominating, profiting, “wise use” (my favorite euphemism for abusing nature and nonhuman animals), and satiating human desires at the expense of other sentient beings and the Earth.

In an anarcho-vegan world (which we probably won’t see in our lifetime, but if Homo sapiens are to remain extant, humanity will probably be forced to reorganize and evolve into such a sociocultural and economic construct—since we’re destroying the planet), you would be tried and severely punished (perhaps executed) for premeditated mass murder of sentient beings.

I have watched the video that Steve Hindi captured of that horribly botched “sharp-shooting” you orchestrated that devolved into chaos, mayhem, and the shooters resorting to suffocating deer with plastic bags over their heads. God only knows what Hindi had captured on the confiscated cameras which you or the rangers wiped clean. And God only knows what happened out there in Death Park. It took the FBI, the JOCO Sheriff Department, city police, the park police, and a ridiculous restraining order, but they managed to keep me out of the areas where you were baiting and preparing for the democide. Otherwise, you can bet I would’ve had you on “candid camera.” One day someone will capture you on film and shut you down.

I saw the photos, have spoken to activists and have read accounts of the helicopter massacre of Axis deer you perpetrated at Pt. Reyes.

And gunning down 313 deer in 3 nights at Death Park? That’s a bloodbath. What’d you use? Uzi’s?

I’ve read of your butchery you call sterilization (saw a photo of you with a scalpel in one hand and a deer ovary in the other), which by the way is NOT a nonlethal means of deer overpopulation control I support. Your sterilization and IC projects are merely vehicles for you to maintain your tax-exempt status. You aren’t pulling the wool over my eyes.

GonaCon is NOT the IC that we proposed in our nonlethal plan. We suggested the use of PZP, which Jay Kirkpatrick has been studying for years—and as he states, “It works. It works WELL.” We ultimately began demanding (we learned early on there was no point in “asking”) that JCPRD/KDWP use GonaCon since it had recently been approved for use by the EPA, though even without that approval they could have gotten a permit to use either drug for research purposes—an ideal scenario for our suburban family park had they used Anthony Marr’s DAA to “remove” the “excess” deer instead of paying you to shoot them in the face and splatter their brains on the ground.

GonaCon would have been developed and approved with or without your organization. Besides, I see the world in shades of gray. Polemics and hyperbole aside, I recognize that you are not “all bad” and that you have made some contributions to wildlife. But make no mistake about the fact that I also realize that your ruthless barbarism cloaked by your intellect and professionalism far outweigh any good you’ve done for nonhuman animals.

And to call shooting another living, sentient being in the head “euthanasia” is a criminal abuse of language. At the end of your missive to me, you reference the millions of domestic companion animals whom are euthanized each year (a practice which I utterly abhor—I have several rescue animals in my family and make regular donations to no-kill shelters). As malevolent a practice as that is (Nathan Winograd has crafted a brilliant plan to implement nationwide no-kill shelters), even animal shelters generally euthanize with drugs. But then again, I suppose bullets are cheaper.

I recognize that state conservation agencies like the KDWP are all about killing too, though for slightly different reasons than you. I’m all too familiar with the complex social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics that enable the 15 million or so US hunters and “conservationists” like Lloyd Fox to maintain their self-appointed place as “guardians of over-populated species” and of “biodiversity.”

As with most forms of nonhuman animal exploitation and slaughter, it comes down to human monetary gain, “tradition,” comfort, pleasure or convenience—with an utter disregard for sentience and for the growing body of cognitive ethology studies showing that the individuals that people like you and hunters wantonly massacre lead relatively rich intellectual, emotional, and social lives. It takes a souless person, Tony, to reify or objectify thinking, feeling individuals to the extent that you can eradicate them like a flea infestation, murdering them, tearing apart families, and leaving fawns motherless before they’re self-sufficient.

And for you to present yourself as the only alternative to their blood-sport is both mendacious and representative of a false dichotomy. Like you, Tony, I’m a smart, educated man. So don’t insult my intelligence by suggesting that it isn’t possible to utilize a variety of nonlethal means to manage human-caused over-populations of wildlife. In this specific instance, we had Anthony Marr, In Defense of Animals, and thousands of grass roots activists around the world poised to pour their time, money, brainpower, and labor into creatively implementing a comprehensive nonlethal deer management plan in Death Park. JCPRD and KDWP let the deer overpopulation problem spiral out of control for several years and then simply marched in lock-step with the prevailing culture of death, anthropocentrism, and speciesism by paying you handsomely to slaughter our precious deer and by authorizing a bow hunt, which won’t happen if my group has anything to say about it. You and your butchers have already plowed enough deer six feet under.

You, sir, are an abomination from a moral standpoint. And practically speaking, your’re a dinosaur—-a vestigial remnant of a culture of death that’s gasping its last, choking on the noxious fumes of its own excrement. We’ve fouled our own nest to the extent that we, as a collective species, are drowning in our own effluent.

Meanwhile, empathy deficient bullies like you surf the wave of humanity’s peak as “lords and masters” of the Earth. Be careful, Tony.

When Mother Nature reaches out and bitch slaps us (Homo rapiens), that wave will hurl you face-first into the craggy rocks hugging the shore-line and you and your pitiless cohorts are going to find yourselves mangled beyond recognition.

Regards,

Jason Miller
Senior Editor and Founder of Thomas Paine’s Corner
Press Officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office
Founder of Bite Club of KC

More on Anthony DeNicola aka Dr. Death:

http://www.sharkonline.org/?P=0000000431

http://www.all-creatures.org/cash/cc2007-w-what.html

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

by Camille Marino

November 12, 2009

Simulposted with Negotiation Is Over

In lieu of the scientific debate that the vivisection community has consistently and adamantly refused to engage in, CNN.com aired a discussion focusing on animal liberation v. animal experimentation on November 11, 2009. Interestingly, neither J. David Jentsch nor Dario Ringach chose to appear, confirming that they have no desire to discuss their atrocities with a mainstream audience. It is obvious from this “Blogger Bunch” forum, however, why one-sided propaganda campaigns are embraced by UCLA Pro-Torture.

Click HERE to watch…

The panel included:

• Dr. Ray Greek MD, President, Americans For Medical Advancement. His books include Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals and What Will We Do If We Don’t Experiment on Animals? Medical Research for the 21st Century
• Peter Young, Founder and Publisher of Voice of the Voiceless. He is an animal liberationist, seasoned activist, and speaker.
• Michael Conn, Vivisector at the Oregon Health & Science University and author of The Animal Research War.
• Tom Holder, Founder of Speaking of Research and spokesperson for Pro-Torture for Science.

While there were no actual opening statements, arguments, or rebuttals, Michael Conn’s comments were the most problematic and deceitful. If one were to award points for evading subject matter and long-winded factually-deficient diatribes, then, without question, Conn would be the uncontested winner. Tom Holder adhered to his standard industry lines which have already been addressed here. And, while Dr. Ray Greek and Peter Young attempted to cultivate a factual debate about issues, unfortunately, their adversaries were unwilling or unable to do so.

Some Major Issues

1) The first questions posed: (1) why do “researchers” experiment on nonhuman animals who react differently than humans? and (2) why are the same cruel experiments continuously repeatedly? I suspect that they are playing the law of averages, waiting for an isolated result that will provide fraudulent data. But I guess I’ll never know the answer for sure because…

Michael Conn — reminiscent of Sarah Palin — decided he didn’t like those questions. He decided to speak about something else entirely: If you do not have polio or if you have ever taken a drug, then you have benefited from vivisection. He proceeded on an insufferable and irrelevant tangent about how “you owe a debt to animal research” if you have ever used a pediatrician, veterinarian, pregnancy test, vaccine, or had a stroke. Constructing his strawman argument, Vivisector Conn essentially confirmed what we already knew — that nonhuman animals were tortured with ruthless efficiency and packaged for profit in every perverse way imaginable. But he wholly evaded the real issue of whether or not those sadistic experiments were valid. Fortunately, there was a scientist on the panel…

Dr. Greek, a physician, spoke of the fact that drugs react differently in nonhuman animals than they do in people. “Animals simply cannot predict human response and, yet, that is exactly how people who earn their livlihood from using animals sell that animal use to society and that’s just fraud, plain and simple… Of course you can grow things using animal eggs, etc. But that’s not the issue. The issue is whether they predict human response and they just don’t.”

This 5-year-old male Rhesus macaque, known as Frak, is part of a U. study to test a neurally activated prosthetic arm. After the study, Frak is to live out his days in a primate sanctuary. Frak is among several research animals an animal-rights group alleges are being mistreated in violation of federal law at the U. following an eight-month undercover investigation. (Photo courtesy of the University of Utah)

2) Tom Holder – he wants people to believe that “conditions in labs are spectacularly improved” from the fifties and sixties. And, as always, Holder advances an image of well-cared for and nurtured animals in a comfortable laboratory environment, he refuses to acknowledge that these victims are imprisoned and terrorized regularly. They are tortured, drugged, mutilated, and murdered at the hands of sociopaths in white lab coats. Yet Holder concludes that if you are against “animal research” then you are against “animal health and human health”.

Peter Young cites an investigation into animal abuse at the University of Utah which was in the news as the debate aired, November 11, 2009. “Dr. Conn and Mr. Holder are lying to you. These pictures you see are not outdated. Every single time anyone cracks that veil of secrecy and goes into a lab they come out with horrific images every single time… EVERY SINGLE TIME.” The Salt Lake City Tribune reports the following:

“PETA leaders contend their evidence reveals “flagrant disregard” for the animals’ well-being and violations have become “business as usual” at the U.

“The ongoing lack of veterinary care means that animals who were already doomed to live and die in laboratories are suffering much more than they have to,” said Kathy Guillermo, PETA’s vice president over laboratory investigations.

The group plans to release video images it says show mice dead from neglect, dying mice bloated with ulcerated tumors, rabbits and cats with surgically implanted devices on their heads and spines, and U. lab staff, their faces blurred, casually describing deplorable conditions for the research animals.

“Betcha if you squeezed that, that would pop,” a lab worker says, holding up a mouse with a bulging abdomen to the camera.

“How would you like to be sitting in a little square box with half your skin missing and your eyeball hanging out for a week, just shivering in trauma?” another mouse-lab worker says.”

3) Michael Conn then says “the U.S. government does not tolerate bad actors.” He also has the audacity to make the statement that the USDA overseas animal experimentation, therefore, ethical, well-trained professionals provide the utmost care ensuring humane treatment. But USDA Inspector Dr. Isis Johnson adamantly disagrees with the vivisector and discusses the futility of the Federal Animal Welfare Act. The following is an excerpt from Matt Rossell’s Letter to the Editor of “The Scientist”:

“Conn maintains that diligent inspections were conducted by USDA and other internal oversight committees. Compare Conn’s claim with the fact that the USDA inspector at the time, Dr. Isis Johnson Brown, was by my side at a press conference, having quit in frustration after her supervisors at the USDA failed to support her efforts to enforce the minimal requirements of the Animal Welfare Act. Every news agency in Portland was on hand, and the following is part of what she had to say:

Simply revealing the truth was what caused the “public relations nightmare” Conn describes as being so difficult for the primate center to deal with.”

4) Dr. Ray Greek challenges Michael Conn to a debate: “I’ve offered to debate Drs. Ringach and Jentsch many times; they’ve always turned me down. The animal experimentation community does not want an open dialogue on this, they want to propagandize to the general public. Michael, if you’re so convinced that you’re right on this issue, let’s have a public debate.” But, whereas Jentsch and Ringach have refused the challenge, Michael Conn ended the discussion as he began it — by evading Dr. Greek’s offer and, instead, giving a literary critique of one of his books.

FOR THE RECORD, DR. GREEK CHALLENGED THE VIVISECTION COMMUNITY TO A SCIENTIFIC DEBATE TWO MORE TIMES IN THE LAST 24 HOURS, AND NOT ONE “RESEARCHER” IS WILLING TO DEFEND THE MERIT OF ANIMAL MUTILATION IN A PUBLIC FORUM.

Camille Marino, TPC’s Editor of Vegan Agitation, is an animal liberationist, an extraordinary agitator and activist, and is the founder and editor of Negotiation is Over. In her words, “It’s time to stop waving signs at cars or trying to enlighten the apathetic. The fight for the rights of non-human people is urgent and requires us to act outside the box.”

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

If you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to look up Thomas Paine’s Corner’s Facebook page via the “search” feature and become a fan.

And if you have a MySpace account, don’t forget to friend Thomas Paine’s Corner at www.myspace.com/anarchovegan

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

“Man’s treatment of his fellow-men, and especially his conduct toward the forms of life differing anatomically from him, are such as to stamp him as being anything but an ideal animal—anywhere outside the psychologies of brigands, at any rate.”

The New Ethics

By J. Howard Moore

London, 1907

The inhabitants of the earth are bound to each other by the ties and obligations of a common kinship. Man is simply one of a series of sentients, differing in degree, but not in kind, from the beings below, above, and around him. The Great Law—ACT TOWARD OTHERS AS YOU WOULD ACT TOWARD A PART OF YOUR OWN SELF—is a law not applicable to Aryans only, but to all men; and not to men only, but to all beings. There is the same obligation to act toward a German, a Japanese, or a Filipino, as one acts toward a part of his own organism, as there is to act in this way toward Americans or Englishmen; and, furthermore, there is the same reason for acting in this manner toward horses, cats, dogs, birds, fishes, as there is in acting so toward men. Restricting the application of this all-inclusive injunction to the human species is a practice dictated solely by human selfishness and provincialism. The restriction is made, not because we are logical, but because we are diminutive.

How would it be for some other distinct group of the inhabitants of a world, to cut themselves off ethically from the rest, observing in their conduct toward each other THE GREAT LAW of social propriety, but ignoring this law in their conduct toward others, and acting toward all others, although these others were like them in every essential respect, as if they were without any of the ordinary rights and sensibilities of a common consciousness? Is it probable that men would have any difficulty in seeing clearly the untenableness of such an attitude? And yet it would be just as logical for any other group of animals to do this as it is for men to do it. The philosophies of this world have all been framed by, and from the standpoint of, a single species, and they are still managed and maintained in the interests of this species. What insects! The breadth of human sympathy and understanding is the catholicity of katydids who never see beyond the hedgerows that bound the little meadow in which they sing their lives away.

Moral practice and understanding are everywhere tribal and antagonistic. They have been inherited, not reasoned out. They have been handed along to us, not generated by us. They have come about as a result of the militant condition of things in the midst of which and in conformity with which life has been developed on the earth.

The ideal conception of social obligation is bigger than family and friends, bigger than the city and state in which one happens to be born and raised, bigger than species, bigger even than the particular world of which one is a tenant. There are no aliens anywhere, not even in hell, to the being who is as big morally as he ought to be—only brothers. The universal heart goes out in tenderness beyond all boundaries of form and color and architecture and accident of birth—into every place where quivers a living soul. The Great Law is for the healing and consolation of all. Moral obligation is as extensive as the power to feel. […]

Man has defined himself as the “paragon of creation.”

This is an overestimate. Man is no more a model animal than the universe is a model universe. They are both of them very immodel, as every one must know who has powers of understanding exceeding those of the infant.

Man is a bigot, and in his conception of himself and in his estimate of the relative importance of himself and others, he is true to the weaknesses of his kind. But, omitting altogether the question of whether man is the masterpiece of the universe or not, we may affirm with perfect confidence, and without fear of contradiction, that if man is the paragon of the universe, the universe has no cause for dry eyes.

Man’s treatment of his fellow-men, and especially his conduct toward the forms of life differing anatomically from him, are such as to stamp him as being anything but an ideal animal—anywhere outside the psychologies of brigands, at any rate.

Human beings have been sufficiently enterprising and sufficiently devoted to each other to evolve into the master of the earth; but instead of recognizing their responsibilities and converting themselves into preceptors for the vanquished races, as an ideal race would have done, they have become the butchers of the universe. Instead of becoming the models and schoolmasters of the world in which they have outstripped, and striving to improve the faulty natures, and guide the wayward feet of those by means of whom they have been hoisted into distinction, they have become colossal pedants, proclaiming themselves the pets and specials of creation, and teaching each other that other races are mere things to furnish pasture and pastime for them. They preach that it is the ideal relation of associated beings for each to act toward the others in the way in which he himself would like to have others act toward him. This ideal of social rectitude was discovered two or three thousand years ago, and has been taught by the sages of the species ever since. But in the application of this rule human beings restrict it hypocritically to the members of their own species. No nonhuman is innocent enough, or is sufficiently sensitive, intelligent, or beautiful, to be exempt from the most frightful wrongs, if by these wrongs human comfort, curiosity, or pastime are in any way whatever catered to. Our own happiness, and that of our species, are assumed to be so pre-eminent that we sacrifice without hesitancy the most sacred interests of others, in order that our own may be carefully provided for. Even for a tooth or a feather to wear on human vanity, forests are silenced and communities littered with the dead and dying. Beautiful beings that fill the groves with song and juvenility are compelled to sprawl lifeless and disheveled on the heads of unconscionable sillies. […]

Look at the scenes to be met with in our great cities! They are sufficient to horrify any being susceptible enough to the sufferings of others to be rated as one-fifth civilized. An army of butchers standing in blood ankle-deep and plunging great knives into writhing, shrieking living beings; helpless swine swinging by their hinders with their blood gushing from their slashed jugulars; unsuspecting oxen with trustful eyes looking up at the deadly pole-ax, and a moment later lying aquiver under its relentless thud; an atmosphere in perpetual churn with the groans and screams of the dying; streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals; dead bodies dangling from sale hooks or sprawling on chopping blocks; men and women going about praying and preaching, and sitting down two or three times a day and pouncing on the uncoffined remains of some poor creature cut down for them by the callous hands of hired cutthroats—such are the sights in all our streets and stockyards, and such are the crimes inflicted day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenseless dumb ones of this world.

Oh this killing, killing, killing—this awful, never-stopping, never-ending, worldwide butchery! What a world! “Ideal”?—and “perfect”?—and “all-wise”? Certainly—to tigers, and highwaymen, and people who are sound asleep; but to everybody else it is simply monstrous.

We are nothing but a lot of ferocious humbugs—that is the long and the short of it—leading lives all the way from a tenth to two-thirds decent in our conduct towards our fellow men, but almost absolutely savage in our treatment of not-men. A being who can look without weeping on the heart-rending facts that fill the cities of our so-called civilization has a psychology granitic enough to gaze unmoved on a hellful of roasting souls.

The Chicago stockyards alone grind up annually 4,500,000 sheep, 5,500,000 cattle, 450,000 calves, and 10,000,000 hogs-20,500,000 living beings a year, or an average of over 100 a minute during every ten-hour working day!

What a mill! Just think of it! You who find it hard to realize vividly, and who stand blank and unconcerned in the presence of horrors that ought to make your very viscera crawl, and the very stones at your feet rise up, just remember, as you go about your daily duties, wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, that every time the clock strikes, 6,500 innocent, intelligent, and highly sensitive beings have had their heads smashed with an axe, and their throats lunged through, and have struggled, and shuddered, and seen the world vanish from their eyes, here in these godless charnels. And remember, too, that this appalling carnage goes on, and on, and on, day after day, month after month, year after year.

“What for”? Why, bless your life! In order that men and women may pray for mercy, and preach the Golden Rule, and deplore injustice, with their bellies full of blood!

I would like to retain respect for the religion of my boyhood, but when I see that religion look with indifference, and even levity, upon a hemorrhage wide as the continents, and horrible even to “heathens”—not only wink at it, but apologize for it, and even belittle those few emancipated souls who are trying to stop it—I can but feel that such a faith has no just claims on the allegiance of thinking men. “Does it not shame you,” cried “pagan” Plutarch away in the dawning, “to mingle blood and murder with Nature’s beneficent fruits? Other carnivora you call savage and ferocious—lions, tigers, and serpents—yet you yourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity.” Men and women who hold shares in the responsibility for the common crimes of our civilization would do better to stop giving money for missionaries and begin on themselves; for they commit every day of their lives greater crimes and more of them than the so-called heathens they are trying to “convert” ever dream of. The gods pity this world if we have got to go on for ever as we have in the past—a globeful of lip-virtuous felons!

It has been claimed that man cannot be a consistent humanitarian, because it is necessary for him to exploit others in various ways in order to provide for his own needs and desires.

This is the most common objection. … It is the most common because it is the most selfish. So prominent is egoism in human psychology, and in the philosophies that have sprung from that psychology, that the most natural and convincing objections to any proposition are those prompted by and appealing to the selfish instincts. The question that arises in the mind of the ordinary man when a change in the arrangements of the world is suggested to him is not what will be the effect of the change on the universe, but what will be its effect on him—on that remarkable atom of the universe so zealously partitioned off from the rest of his own skin. Man has been so long accustomed to the undisputed privilege of spoliation, and has so long and so brilliantly imagined himself to be all there is in the world, that a proposition denying this privilege, however fair the proposition may be from an impartial point of view, is promptly classified as the allegation of a zany, and is supposed to be conclusively disposed of when it is shown to be capable of interfering with human convenience or pleasure.

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

By Ray Greek MD

November 10, 2009

Simulposted with Negotiation is Over

Dr. Dario Ringach has posted an essay titled “Opponents of animal research should get their facts right” on the Speaking of Research website. In his essay Dr. Ringach creates the illusion that 30,000 scientists support using animals in research and that the only people opposing such use are misanthropic nonscientists. There are several falsehoods in his essay.

1. A vast majority of the scientific community does not see animal models as predictive for humans. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole is working to find predictive tests as animals have not been and even the National Cancer Institute has said society has lost cures for cancer because of misleading effects in mice. The people who support animal use regardless of efficacy are those who pay their mortgages with the proceeds from the enterprise. Upton Sinclair in his book I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935) said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

2. Dr. Ringach uses the usual bait and switch technique of confusing basic research with predictive research. Society is uncomfortable with using animals in research but tolerates it because they have been told, by those who use animals, that cures will be forthcoming. When society asks, “Where are the cures?” the researchers respond that the research they are doing is basic research which is not goal oriented and hence was never supposed to lead to cures. They are pursuing knowledge for knowledge sake and maybe that knowledge will someday lead to cures but maybe it will not. This rhetoric is necessary, as numerous scientific studies have proven beyond doubt that animals cannot be used to predict human response to drugs or disease. However, society will only allow animals such as monkeys and chimpanzees to be used in research if they believe that such animals are surrogate humans and can be used to predict human response. The basic researcher’s dishonesty tells us mush about their priorities.

3. Dr. Ringach uses the fallacy known as argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority) and lists supposed historical examples he claims society has only because of using animals in science. Neither of these things is science. One is a fallacy hence should alert the reader to the strength of Dr. Ringach’s argument and the other is unverifiable without extreme effort on the reader’s part. No reader is going to exert that kind of extreme effort so Ringach is safe in making his case.

I could continue to point out the flaws in Dr. Ringach’s essay specifically but have done this in general in a book authored by Niall Shanks and myself, Animal Models in Light of Evolution. However, there is another way to allow society to judge for themselves who is right on this issue. Hubert H. Humphrey said, “The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously.” Facts matter more than rhetoric. Society needs to know the facts and understand this issue because lives depend upon the outcome. With that in mind, I have on numerous occasions asked Dr. Ringach and his colleague at UCLA, Dr. Jentsch, to debate this issue in a public forum on the UCLA campus. They have declined. (Although I hear they are trying to arrange a panel discussion with nonscientists, who know nothing about the issue, or scientists who more or less agree with them. Perhaps they hope that by having such a fiasco they can claim they have honestly debated the issue.)

Sometimes researchers present a sweat-drenched fear of public debate because of threats to their life. The fact is, I have probably had as many if not more threats to my life as any of them have. (A little publicized fact.) What they really fear is public exposure to the facts. Furthermore, this excuse does not play when the forum for the debate is a college campus complete with security and metal detectors. If the researcher is as scared as many suggest he is then he should not be walking around campus or driving to the store but rather staying at home 24/7. Clearly this excuse has more to do with not wanting the facts exposed to the light of public debate than actual rational fear.

Hubert H. Humphrey also said, “Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate.” I agree. If researchers like Ringach want society to believe their rhetoric then let them engage in a time honored American tradition and debate the science behind their claim that animals are predictive for humans. I am still available.

Ray Greek MD
President, Americans For Medical Advancement

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

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Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

November 9, 2009 — Negotiation Is Over

NIO Editorial Note: It is not animal rights activists that vivisectors fear, it is exposure. To illustrate this indisputable fact, the Star Tribune published the following report in response to a post on NIO last week, Pro-Vivisection Activism: Promoting Violence Against Animals

Simulposted with The Star Tribune: Group targets U animal scientist (by Jim Spencer)

The school raised security around one of its researchers after an animal activist group singled him out on its website.

University of Minnesota police have increased patrols near the home of a Medical School animal researcher after a posting on an animal activist website displayed his name and photograph and noted that “… we should not be surprised when the unconscionable violence inflicted upon animals is justifiably visited upon their tormentors.”

The Internet posting went up late last week on the website NegotiationIsOver.com in reaction to a Star Tribune story about a multimillion-dollar national campaign by biomedical researchers, including U Prof. Dick Bianco, to increase lagging support for medical and scientific tests using animals.

“The university police are patrolling around my house now,” said Bianco, an associate professor of surgery and director of experimental surgery. “The FBI is involved to assess the threat.”

FBI spokesman E.K. Wilson said: “I can’t confirm or deny an investigation. But we have talked to Professor Bianco and received his information. We are reviewing and assessing it and coordinating with the University of Minnesota Police Department.”

Greg Hestness, the U’s chief of police, said the school has invested in security measures for staff and facilities “since prior attacks” at the university seven years ago.

Animal activist Camille Marino wrote the article and published Bianco’s photo and contact information on NegotiationIsOver.com. “These abusers need to understand that their unethical behaviors entail tangible consequences,” she wrote.

Marino said Monday that the FBI has not contacted her.

Marino said she had “no expectation” of what people reading the website should do to Bianco or Frankie Trull, who directs the Research Saves campaign for the Foundation for Biomedical Research. On the website, Marino wrote that “my activism is wholly above-ground and, therefore, I would never encourage any activity that is illegal or otherwise questionable.”

In an interview, she said: “I believe there is a moral obligation to prevent violence against innocent beings, whether they are animals or humans. If violence will prevent that, it would be justified.”

Concern over such statements arises from recent violent attacks on researchers by extreme animal activists. Scientists in California have had cars bombed, property set afire and family members harassed.

Bianco called the language of Marino’s essay “right on the edge.” “It borders on inciting people to violence,” he said.

Bianco, who plays an active part in the animal research campaign and invites high school students to his lab to see how he conducts research, has received anonymous death threats in the past. His office and lab include panic switches that set off an alarm in the U’s police headquarters.

Bianco said he will be careful in the coming weeks. “This is as bad as I’ve heard it,” he said of the website posting. “It doesn’t hurt to be safe.”

Camille Marino, TPC’s Editor of Vegan Agitation, is an animal liberationist, an extraordinary agitator and activist, and is the founder and editor of Negotiation is Over. In her words, “It’s time to stop waving signs at cars or trying to enlighten the apathetic. The fight for the rights of non-human people is urgent and requires us to act outside the box.”

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

If you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to look up Thomas Paine’s Corner’s Facebook page via the “search” feature and become a fan.

And if you have a MySpace account, don’t forget to friend Thomas Paine’s Corner at www.myspace.com/anarchovegan

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

.

By Vi Ransel

10/28/09

Corporations are “inhuman entities” (Jon Faulkner) whose single, and legally mandated purpose, is to turn the Earth, and all its resources, including human resources, into profit for its shareholders – as long as they stay within the law (that they have written). Ask Milton Friedman.

And when human beings surround themselves with the mantle of these entities, 3-pound cheeseburger in hand as they talk into a Blue Tooth while driving an SUV; when human beings are owned by them by reason of debt for resin gnomes made in China, for McMansions made of pressed sawdust patties, for education that mis-educates, for healthcare/insurance that “lives” off the diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cancers created by the producers of food-like products polluted with the same poisonous organophosphates developed to gas soldiers in World War I and refined for use on Jews in World War II and mainline its media like junkies; when human beings prostrate themselves before these entities, willing to call the choice from among thousands of shiny, branded commodities freedom, they trade their identity, their soul, their “selves” for these poisonous, quality-less “products,” which are nothing more than a means to relieve them of the money they received for the work of creating all the wealth that made the production of those tawdry trinkets possible in the first place.

Because industrial/manufacturing corporations wanted cheaper labor costs, they shipped US manufacturing out of the country in order to raise their profits. Now American workers, whose jobs they’ve downsized, outsourced, and contracted-out, no longer have the money to buy what those corporations have manufactured offshore. The finance corporations rode to their fellow corporations’ rescue by stepping in with debt in the form of a plastic I.O.U. card/slave chain to be waved whenever the purchase of those resin gnomes, sawdust homes, mis-education, poisonous food-like products, gas for SUVs, electronic distractions or healthcare is desired. The Treadmill of Endless Purchase, itself a church, goes on. The offshored manufacturing corporations are paid by the finance corporations who hold our I.O.U.s and we continue to ride the destinationless merry-go-round of debt slavery with an occasional stop by an ever-increasing number of us in Poverty Land.

The less individual thought, the less knowledge available, the more profit created. The more we THINK about a purchase, the less likely we are to make it, and the more time we might use to think about who’s in charge here, the majority of the American people or just the few behind the corporate cloaking device. And besides, if you don’t use your time to think, you can use it to by more stuff. And buying stuff is more fun than participatory democracy. Ignorance is easier than thinking. And, no, “we” can’t have thinking.

Knowledge is dangerous. Knowledge creates doubt. Knowledge is power. That’s why we’re not allowed to have it. That’s why it’s missing in our mis-education and corporate “entertainews.” That’s why it was illegal to teach slaves to read. That’s what pissed off the Church about the printing press. And that’s why knowledge (of good and evil) was given the rap of original sin.

The less you know, the more of everything the Rich or the Church – or insert your choice of tyrant here – gets to keep without your even questioning it. You have no information on which to base a question. All you have is what’s fed to you by the corporations who own 80% of the media. And they have answered all the questions that need to be asked, in their opinion, that is. That’s the way things are, the way they were and the way they always will be. I learned that in catechism. Or was that “God always was, always will be and always remains the same?” Or perhaps, TINA – There is no alternative. Ask Margaret Thatcher. Or corporate capitalism is the logical and benevolent end of history. Ask Francis Fukiyama. Or, the common people don’t need to know nuthin’. We’ll tell them what they think. Leo Strauss.

When we willingly surrender our identity, our free will, our ability to make meaningful choices, we become truly one of the herd, a follower allowed only the facade of choice. The choices that matter will be made FOR us. What a relief. Thinking is hard work. Morality is too much responsibility. Drink the Kool-Aid. Swallow the pill. Shut your eyes. Relax into the waterboard of consumerism’s faux-individuality, based entirely on repetitive and addictive choices from among thousands of meaningless choices proffered by the masters behind the corporate curtain, whose only actual product is slavery, both mental and financial.

Vi Ransel, TPC’s Senior Editor of Anti-Capitalism, is a researcher and poet of exceptional caliber. Very little is known about her.

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

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Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

“In still a further sign of desperation, vivisectionists have also erected billboards claiming the Los Angeles populace is free of, get this, leprosy, because of animal experimentation. There were 91 cases of leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, in the entire United States in 2000; treatment has been effective since at least the 1940’s, with new drug regimens in place to counter resistance to the causative bacterium since the 1980’s. Implying that the continued killing of animals in the 21st century is a “necessary evil” to prevent leprosy is just another attempt to keep UCLA rolling in research grant money, most of it taxpayer funds wasted on addicting non-human primates to methamphetamines and other utterly ridiculous, useless and cruel experiments.”

November 5, 2009 — Negotiation Is Over

by Camille Marino

According to an article published on Wednesday, November 4, in the Star Tribune, a decline in public support for sadistic animal experimentation has prompted an aggressive $1 million propaganda campaign by the Foundation for Biomedical Research.

Sinking equally as low as UCLA Pro-Test did with their full-page advertisement in the L.A. Times, 15 billboards in the Twin Cities employ empty rhetoric bereft of any scientific merit in an attempt to mislead the public:

“Ever had leprosy? Thanks to animal research, you won’t.“

The North American Animal Liberation Press Office (NAALPO) recently addressed this nonsensical claim:

“In still a further sign of desperation, vivisectionists have also erected billboards claiming the Los Angeles populace is free of, get this, leprosy, because of animal experimentation. There were 91 cases of leprosy, or Hansen’s Disease, in the entire United States in 2000; treatment has been effective since at least the 1940’s, with new drug regimens in place to counter resistance to the causative bacterium since the 1980’s. Implying that the continued killing of animals in the 21st century is a “necessary evil” to prevent leprosy is just another attempt to keep UCLA rolling in research grant money, most of it taxpayer funds wasted on addicting non-human primates to methamphetamines and other utterly ridiculous, useless and cruel experiments.”

Frankie Trull is founder and president of the Foundation for Biomedical Research. She is also president of the National Association for Biomedical Research (NABR), the nation’s leading lobby advocating exploitation of helpless animals. Trull is a vocal cheerleader for regimented torture which she euphemistically refers to as “biomedical research and testing.“ I can only imagine that Tom Holder hopes to one day fill her skirt.

[Frankie Trull, Founder & President of FBR: 818 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 900, Washington DC 20006 Tel: (202) 457-0654 Fax: (202) 457- 0659 email: info@fbresearch.org]

Fearing that Americans’ support for animal mutilation will drop below 50 percent next year, she is concerned that legislative and regulatory “research” restrictions would have a huge impact on profit margins.

Dick Bianco, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School, is part of the campaign. Unconcerned with science or facts, he is focused on manipulating public perception by any means necessary: “If we could get a celebrity, that would change everything.”

[Richard W. Bianco, Department of Surgery Experimental Surgical Services 420 Delaware Street SE Mayo Mail Code 220 Minneapolis, MN 55455 Phone: 612-625-5914 Fax: 612-626-6949 Email: bianc001@umn.edu]

We cannot be complacent. Abusers across the country are standing up and actively advocating violence against animals. The capitalists are using their money and power, targeted propaganda campaigns, and, with a little help from Dick, they will soon be enlisting celebrities. Paris Hilton, perhaps? What about Bart Simpson? It remains to be seen how low these parasites will stoop.

THIS IS URGENT: Animal Rights Activists Need to Use Every Tool Available

Nonhuman animals are being targeted by Pharma, their lobbyists, and the professional sadists in white lab coats. We don’t have the money to counter this unprecedented wave of “ANIMAL ABUSE ACTIVISM”, but we have many options. My activism in wholly above-ground and, therefore, I would never encourage any activity that is illegal or otherwise questionable. But, clearly, the time for civil dialogue is over. And we should not be surprised when the unconscionable violence inflicted upon animals is justifiably visited upon their tormentors. Sadists will never be persuaded to be decent human beings. These abusers need to understand that their unethical behaviors entail tangible consequences. Perhaps one day soon vivisectors may look back on the good old days when direct action meant ALF property damage.

Animal liberationists have many resources available and they need to be used to our greatest advantage.

1) INFORMATION IS OUR BEST FRIEND: As long as the animal terrorists continue to step into the mainstream forum, their readily-available public-domain information will continue to be published on Negotiation Is Over. While all communication should be respectful and non-threatening, animal rights activists have a responsibility to engage this element — by written word or in person — and be uncompromising in our position. Until the animals can live in peace, no one deserves to live in peace — certainly not their tormentors.

2) INFORMATION IS OUR BEST FRIEND: An effective method of countering a capitalist-funded propaganda campaign in to coordinate a media campaign of our own. I suggest that one day a week, Mondays, be set aside to blog about nothing other than “ANIMAL ABUSE ACTIVISTS” and their misinformation campaigns. Every single person reading this article can register at blogspot.com and proceed to publish the names and contact information of those advocating violence. (Or, forward it to me and I will publish the information.) In addition, we need to advance real science: the lies being generated by terrorist organizations such as Pro-Test for Science (formerly UCLA Pro-Test) and the BRF needs to be assessed and deconstructed. I personally know of several active scientists and anti-vivisectionists in the NIO community who’s expertise I hope to draw on.

This is simple. We can set aside one day a week to address the “ANIMAL ABUSE ACTIVISTS” and link our blogs in a network of comprehensive coverage — the sadists, the lies, the misinformation. I am appealing to everyone: contact me at camille@negotiationisover.com and take a stand with NIO.

3) INFORMATION IS OUR BEST FRIEND: Irrespective of the tactics each of us employs — and make no mistake, the spectrum of available tools needs to be employed — solid information is essential. I invite everyone to weigh in with comments, suggestions and creative strategies to counter the “ANIMAL ABUSE ACTIVISTS”. They have the money and power. We have the passion and drive.

WE CANNOT BE COMPLACENT!

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

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To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.

Simulposted with Animal Rights Africa

Hunters are killers, plain and simple. Let us not mince words. Hunters try to justify their violent pastime, but whatever they say to the contrary, hunting is the premeditated, cold-blooded killing of innocent animals.
The object of the hunt is to kill animals. Hunters argue that it is not just about killing. They claim that the camaraderie, nature appreciation, exercise, nature education, and so-called conservation benefits are just as important a part of the hunt as the actual killing or attempted killing of the target animal.

But most people can appreciate and learn about nature and also contribute to nature conservation efforts without having to kill animals, and by doing their shooting with a camera instead of a gun or bow.

Do hunters really care?

It is ludicrous to believe that someone who actively sets out to kill a healthy animal for fun, trophy or profit really cares about wild animals specifically or nature in general. Photographs of smiling hunters posing with their dead victims hardly reflect the kind of “caring” that most normal people relate to. If hunters are the “true” conservationists they claim to be, and really do care about animals, they would pursue every humane, non-lethal possibility or means of caring for wild animals and the environment. Instead, their solution to any perceived problem with animals is to reach for the gun. Why is it that hunters, as so-called conservationists, are interested only in those animals that are most attractive as trophies, most enjoyable to eat or most “challenging” to hunt?

Do hunters pay for conservation?

Killing wild animals is big business, and there are lots of people who make a lot of money out of it. Those who encourage and participate in hunting form part of a multi-million Rand industry that will fight to its last breath to stay in business. Manufacturers and marketers of hunting gear and clothing, guns and ammunition, bows and arrows, camping equipment and much more have a vested interest in promoting hunting as a good, healthy outdoor sport for the whole family. The more hunters out there killing, the more they sell.

Game ranchers and provincial and national conservation authorities generate millions of Rands annually by selling wild animals to private game farmers where hunters pay exorbitant fees to kill them for fun, trophy or meat.

As with every other type of institutionalised animal abuse, hunting will not easily be abolished in spite of relentless pressure from animal rightists. What makes hunting relatively easy to defend is that the hunters have spread a false message that it is they who fund conservation, and that were it not for them, most conservation areas currently in private ownership would convert to agricultural land with the total loss of the wildlife at present on that land. This implies, firstly, that the only justification for maintaining wild animals on the land is to generate funds from hunting, and, secondly, that all land which is not profitable game ranching land must automatically be taken over by environmentally destructive agriculture. This is absolute nonsense.

Conservation and the protection of wild animals must be funded from ethically acceptable sources, including a conservation levy on all profits from the sale of goods or services which have their origin in any natural resource. Wildlife and environment conservation must not be abandoned to an animal-unfriendly system that uses profit to justify the killing of healthy, defenseless animals. By allowing hunters to make the claim that they “pay for conservation”, human society is failing in its responsibility to wildlife. The fate of wild animals has literally been abandoned into the hands of killers.

Do hunters fulfil the role of predator?

Definitely not. Hunters will not miss out on any opportunity to cover themselves in glory, even to the point of claiming the role of natural predator in those areas where natural predators have been eradicated or do not occur.
But as so-called predator, the hunter selects only the finest specimens to kill. This is in direct contradiction of the role of true predators, who hunt the old, disabled and unwary and in so doing maintain the health of the populations. Predators too old, disabled or incompetent are also preyed on, but not by human hunters who only want healthy specimens in the prime of life.

The sustained killing of prime specimens of any population or species leads to debilitation of the gene pool and can hasten the rate at which that population or species becomes endangered or even extinct. No natural predator would act in this manner unless in very unnatural and exceptional circumstances. Natural and balanced predator/prey relationships lead to healthy populations of both the prey and the predator species.

Why hunting is wrong!

Hunting is wrong because for no good reason it violates the most basic right of any living creature – the right to life. According to hunters, they only shoot animals who are surplus or excessive to the carrying capacity of the land or who are old or injured . They claim that their killing is done for humane and practical reasons, and that an untimely death by bullet or arrow is preferable to death from natural causes.

All of this presumes that animals who are killed or wounded by human hunters, endure less fear, stress and pain than those animals dying from natural causes, including predation.

It is a fact that hunters kill for the pleasure, the satisfaction and the boost it gives their fragile egos. This makes killing seem like an honorable pastime that others should strive to emulate. It relegates animals to the status of utility items that exist to pleasure humans, and if that pleasure lies in the killing of an animal, then so be it.

Hunting simply perpetuates the ethically indefensible conception that animals exist for humans. And nothing more emphatically emphasises this misconception than when humans deliberately track down a wild animal and kill it for fun, trophy or profit. This shows an absolute disregard by hunters for the right of wild animals to live out their lives as nature intended, in circumstances which allow them to enjoy the diverse experiences of living in their natural environment. And for as long as hunters are allowed to conduct their bloody war on innocent wild animals with the sanction of civil society, then every human in that society shares in the guilt of the wrongdoing.

Also, when a hunter removes the body of the animal he/she has killed, this in fact robs that ecosystem of the nutrients locked up in that animal’s body. Every animal is composed entirely of elements accumulated within the ecosystem in which that animal has lived. When an animal dies of natural causes, the body is decomposed or consumed within that ecosystem, and the elements which made up the body are released back into that ecosystem and recycled through other plants and animals. When a hunter removes the dead animal from that ecosystem, the elements contained in that body are lost to the ecosystem.

Considering the weapons used by hunters today, it is an understatement to say that a targeted animal has little or no chance of avoiding being killed or wounded. The distance from which a hunter can deliver a fatal shot far exceeds the distance from which a natural predator could successfully attack it’s intended prey. Wild animals have not yet evolved the instinct required to keep modern hunters at a “safe” distance.

Man has always hunted

There is a very clear attempt by hunters to defend their bloody sport by claiming that it is in the human genes to hunt. This is absolutely not true. Hunters are conditioned into hunting by their peers and by an industry, which in various ways encourages people to become hunters by associating it with manhood, adventure and even Divine decree.
What this implies is that humans are incapable of evolving into more civilised, caring and tolerant beings. Fortunately nothing could be further from the truth. There is hope for a future in which animals are respected for their inherent value, and that those laws which now give humans the “right” to own and abuse animals will be replaced by popular laws which protect the rights of all animals, just as they now protect the rights of all humans.

Hunters and criticism

Hunters are notoriously intolerant of anyone who questions their so-called “ethics” or who dares to criticise their violent pastime. Anyone who opposes the killing of innocent animals by hunters is labeled a “bunny-hugger”, “unrealistic”, “impractical”, “emotional”, “ignorant”, “humaniac”, even a “terrorist” if you happen to be an animal rightist.

Any critics of hunting are so ridiculed that both they and civil society at large are cowed into a state of silent acceptance of hunting as an indispensable, even honorable, component of orthodox conservation policy and practice.

That hunters have to go to ever-greater lengths to defend their actions to an increasingly critical, well-informed public, is encouraging. However, the use of terms such as “sustainable use” and “wise use” have become the everyday language of hunters and are intended to give legitimacy to their killing.

It is also an unfortunate reality that most wildlife-related NGO’s are dominated by people who are themselves hunters or who see no wrong in others killing wild animals for fun, profit or trophy. Most ordinary members of these organisations are quickly indoctrinated into accepting that hunting is a necessary evil that goes hand in hand with so-called “sustainable use”. Those who criticise the hunting aspect of “sustainable use” are ostracised and sidelined within the organisations of which they are members.

What you can do to oppose hunting

1. Join JA and become an anti-hunting activist
2. Write to provincial and national conservation authorities and object to the opening of conservation areas to hunters
3. Let hunters know that you are opposed to their violent pastime
4. Don’t visit conservation areas which allow hunting
5. Don’t purchase the by-products of hunting i.e venison, biltong, animal skins, curios from hunted animals
6. Boycott stores that sell hunting equipment and promote hunting
7. Write anti-hunting letters to newspapers and magazines
8. Support campaigns to end hunting
9. Do not join or support conservation organisations that promote or tolerate hunting as an acceptable component of “sustainable use”.

Thomas Paine’s Corner wants to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to receive them, type “TPC subscription” in the subject line and send your email to willpowerful@hotmail.com

For the latest updates on the animal liberation movement, visit NAALPO at http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/

If you have a Facebook account, don’t forget to look up Thomas Paine’s Corner’s Facebook page via the “search” feature and become a fan.

And if you have a MySpace account, don’t forget to friend Thomas Paine’s Corner at www.myspace.com/anarchovegan

Watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4 and go vegan. Do it for your health, for nonhuman animals and for the Earth!

To support or undertake animal rights and liberation activism in the Kansas City area, visit Bite Club of KC at http://biteclubkc.wordpress.com/.