The Fungus and Bacteria of Deregulation and Bio-Tech Worker David Bell: By Steve Zeltzer
By fauxpas | March 30, 2008
The Fungus and Bacteria of Deregulation and Bio-Tech Worker David Bell
By Steve Zeltzer
lvpsf@igc.org
IT WAS A LONG road before Sandi Trend, the mother of injured Agraquest worker David Bell, ended up at the little known California Fraud Assessment Commission FAC on September 11, 2007. The commission which is under California Insurance Commissioner, Steve Poizner, is required to provide oversight on the prosecution of workers compensation insurance fraud in California and distributes over $25 million a year to California District Attorneys for this work.
Trendís son, David Bell, had begun work at the Davis based biotechnology company, Agraquest, in August 1998 and was one semester away from receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from California State University, Sacramento, with a major in biology and a minor in chemistry. He was thrilled to have the opportunity to put his education to work in developing biotech for use in society.
Pamela G. Marrone founded Agraquest in 1995. She had previously worked for Monsanto in the Insect Control Group. Her focus was developing new products in genetically-engineered microbial pesticides and transgenic crops for insect control. This new venture capital and agribusiness-backed firm that she launched was able to raise over $50 million.
The companyís first product was an application directed at mosquito control through the use of mosquito larvae. She also became co-founder of the Davis Area Technology Association, was on the board of trustees of the Sutter Hospital Health Central Division and was co-chair of the University of California President’s Advisory Commission On Agriculture and Natural Resources. She was the Sacramento Chamber’s 2001 Business Woman of the Year and even received a Presidential Green Chemistry Award. Agraquest’s commercially successful products include Serenade (QST 713) (Bacillus subtilis bacteria) and Ballad, both widely used in organic agriculture. Some are even sold in Wal-Mart around the country. In fact, she and other Agraquest scientists have bragged in numerous newspaper articles and interviews that the company scoured the world for the discovery of “novel” microorganisms as possible candidates for bio-pesticides, insecticides, fungicides and micocides.
They’ll check out new samples of soils, plant and lichens arriving from around the globe, hoping that one eventually will lead to the next breakthrough natural, ìenvironmentally safe pesticide or fungicide.î “It’s a pretty long process,” said Pamela Marrone, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Davis biopesticide company. “We’re doing a lot of interesting things here that are cutting edge. They haven’t been done before.” “We move very fast. We focus on getting things to the market quickly,” Marrone said. ìThere’s this whole microbic world that hasn’t been scratched yet,” Marrone said. “I wrote the business plan at night and on weekends and then got a management team together,” she said. With two other executives, Duane Ewing and Bruce Holm, and three former Entotech scientists, Marrone launched Agraquest in a small East Davis lab, furnished with $35,000 in used furniture and equipment.
Los Angeles Times of May 4, 1998
Pam Marrone keeps her enemies close. They are in refrigerators and jars all over the company’s offices. Natural pesticides exist all over the world. The microbe for root-knot nematodes studied at Agraquest was discovered in an Eastern European creek by scientists once associated with a bio-weapons lab in Siberia. The company’s first product, Serenade, was derived from a microorganism found in a peach orchard near Fresno, California, where a farmer had noted that a particular strand of trees was never hit with the dreaded brown rot. The active ingredient in a fungicide called Sonata is a patented strain of Bacillus pumilus, originally found in a garden in Micronesia. Bacillus pumilus is a causative agent of food poisoning.
CNET News.com April 11, 2006
The US government, the University of California at Davis and massive chemical biotech pesticide industry were all part of a web in this very profitable world of agricultural biotechnology. In all likelihood, this is the very reason that the cover-up at Agraquest has been hidden for so many years. This industry is also one of the most important industries in California, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money for research at the University of California at Davis and other campuses. Over 2/3 of the biotech companies are also within the state of California. The development and research on these products is also funded by the US military for warfare. Interestingly, Bacillus subtilis var. niger was also used by the US military in Project SHAD as a biowarfare simulant.
The potential dangers of these products also raise the issue of why the Federal government has failed to properly supervise, investigate and manage the introduction of genetically-engineered products into the workplace and environment.
Dr. Sheldon Krimsky, a professor at Tufts University and co-editor of Why We Need A Genetic Bill of Rights: Right and Liberties in the Biotech Age, has argued that a lack of regulation and allowing the companies to monitor and regulate themselves is a growing danger and threat to the environment and a threat to all human rights and protections.
This unfortunately was borne out in Bell’s case. Despite repeated efforts to get the local, state and Federal government to intervene and seriously investigate this healthcare nightmare, they were either unable or unwilling to investigate what was really happening at this laboratory. It took over a year for Ca/OSHA to investigate the laboratory after Bell filed health and safety complaints and he later learned that the company was in a voluntary scheme with CA OSHA that they had a collaborative relationship in which they agreed to ìvoluntary compliance program.
Krimsky himself was under pressure by the chemical industry because of his investigation of the possible dangers of genetic technology to workers and the environment. They made efforts to remove him from his position but these were thwarted.
In the case of the University of California and the Davis campus there is an intimate relationship between the biotech industry and Pam Marrone. The UC Davis campus like the rest of the UC system has been a willing player and collaborator in “protecting” the biotech industry from any serious oversight or scientific investigation. In fact, the industry has made sure that many of the staff of the university involved in research are getting large shares of stocks and financial benefits for their “work” in the industry while they are at the University. The well known danger of pesticide poisoning of farm workers in California and around the world is obviously not a central area of focus by the UC system since it might threaten Monsanto and other corporate investments and interests. The lack of studies and research on the effect of genetically engineered pesticides and how they affect laboratory workers as well as farm communities and farmworkers also gets very little focus. This story is particularly important since one of the most recent farm crisis stories is the deaths in the bee industry for “unknown” reasons. These pollinating bees are crucial for crops such as almonds and many other vital farm products. Could it be that these genetically engineered organic pesticides don’t know the difference between bees used to pollinate our crops and other pests in our environment? Will we ever know?
The corporate take-over of education and particularly the role of Monsanto where Marrone is from are covered in a recent article in Alternet.
www.alternet.org/environment/76804
A Short Work Career
David Bell was 32 when he began his work on August 10, 1998 at the Davis based company as a temporary research assistant in their Davis facilityís formulation laboratory. It was located at 1105 Kennedy Place, Suite 4, an Office Park in a residential neighborhood. During Davidís employment with Agraquest, they moved to their second location in an industrial area of Davis. On July 30, 1998 CEO Marrone sent Bell a letter of job offer for the next six months, possibly for one year.”
Although he assisted in other areas of the company and helped company scientists with their projects, Davidís project was the Laginex project, Agraquestís trade name for a strain of fungus known as Lagenidium giganteum. Laginex was used as a vector control as it ate mosquitoes from the inside out. Davidís job was to find an agent that would extend the shelf life and viability of Laginex.
The United States Patent office had already issued a patent to Agraquet on November 25, 1997 for the “medium for the cultivation of Lagenidium giganteum”,(UNITED STATES PATENT # 5,691,191) that was filed by Agraquest on March 15, 1996. Lagenidium giganteum sp. was later found to cause disease in dogs and humans although Bell was told it was safe.
After a workday, only five months and 9 days after beginning employment at Agraquest, David ended up at an emergency medical care clinic in extreme pain with bloody pus draining from his nose and numbness in half of his face and teeth. The next day he was seen by a for profit Sutter Hospital independent physician who told Bell he needed to see another physician at the clinic who was also a Sutter independent physician (Pam Marrone, CEO of Agraquest was also on the board of the regional Sutter Hospital) Sixteen days later, he had the first of what would end up being four sinus surgeries and his body was infected with unknown microorganisms. He was told by the ENT physician that it would take many months for him to fully recover from his sinus surgery. It was much later that David was told by this physician/surgeon, ìI guess I forgot to culture it.î Although he had asked repeatedly for this in pre-op in front of 3 witnesses, ìI want this cultured, I think I got something from the labî. David was told by this physician that in order to file a worker’s compensation claim he had to be ìabsolutely positiveî that it was work-related.
Agraquest also violated [Insurance Code Section 11760], Labor Code 5401 which states: Reg 101119 Claim Form provided to employee within one day of knowledge of injury. Alos the California Labor Code 3602 states: Liability exists for any injury sustained by an employee ìarising out of and in the course of employmentî and during a registration or a re-registration of any pesticide product [biologicals included]. It has to be established that the product will not cause any adverse health or adverse environmental effects. The California Department of Pesticide Regulations (DPR) and the EPA mandates that a product to be used within the state has to clearly show that there are no adverse effects on the environment or human health. If there is, the products registrations or re-registrations will be canceled and full investigations as to the safety of the product will be conducted. (Department of Pesticide Regulations [DPR] Chapter IX) 11 ‚EPA Regulating Biopesticides FIFRA 6(a)(2)
Nine months after his first surgery, David was told by the receptionist that, 11 other employees had called in sick the same week David got sick and she had been instructed to shut and lock the lab door. It is mandated by Federal and State law that any adverse health effects that are suspected or discovered, especially when it comes to pesticides, (biological included) be reported to these agencies by the employer and treating physician for the safety of the environment as well as the public.
It is unknown how many identified and unidentified microorganisms are actually in the lab at any given time as Agraquest searches for ìnovelî microorganisms and as the above mentioned article states: ìThey’ll check out new samples of soils or plant roots or lichen arriving from across the globe, hoping that one eventually will lead to the next breakthrough natural, environmentally safe pesticide or fungicideî.
Not all microorganisms are safe and Anthrax is just one frightening example. The bacterium, Bacillus anthracis (Anthrax) exists in soil as a spore. Under certain condition, the anthrax spore can remain viable in soil for several decades.
In Agraquestís filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Agraquest clearly states they use hazardous materials and biologicals, yet their refusal to have proper protection for the employees and community showed that they were worried more about how investors might react than the environment and worker safety that might be at risk.
Again, in 2002, David was facing another sinus surgery (2nd of 4) for repeated infections. David wrote a letter of complaint to Cal/OSHA citing 13 violations by Agraquest, including ìdaily teatime inside the laboratory with cookiesî and ìminors from Davis High School present in laboratoriesî. In an article in the Davis Enterprise published April 28, 2000, reported that a little girl, 8 years old, had been allowed in the lab with her father. The article stated ìIt was first chance to see her dad working in the lab on a regular business day, though she has dropped in with him on weekends in the past.î ìI kind of know how to make more of the bacteria plates,î she said. We put them in a hot thing … and we made these little glass things, put bacteria on them, and put them in a microscope.î ìI saw blue and black things … they were bacteria, and they were alive.î
ìEventually, the materials will be screened. Some of them eventually might play a role in one of the bio-pesticides that Agraquest markets.î According to the Center for Disease Control Guidance and Information on Microorganisms, no minors should be allowed in a biological research facility and it is a common biosafety rule. Additionally, food should never be consumed inside a biological lab but the employee breakroom was used to conduct presentations to investors during which time the employees could not use it.
Agraquest received a few citations for “several illegal fumehoods” and a small fine. David later learned of another citation that was issued to Agraquest on July 9, 2003 by Cal/OSHA for an exhaust system that did not provide an average face velocity of at least 100 linear feet per minute with a minimum of 70/Ft/min at any one point. The laboratory-type hoods located in the Formulations Lab, Dirty Plant Path Lab, and one of the laboratory-type hoods in the Chemistry Lab had average face velocities of less than 100 Ft/min and several points that were less than 70 Ft/min. while in operation.
During the week before becoming ill at Agraquest, David was told to retrieve from Agraquestís offsite farm a barrel containing one gallon of liquid from a prior fermentation run. Labeled on this barrel was Germany and AQ 153. He was told to clean it out with household bleach so it could be used again. He asked if it was safe and was told yes, to dump it in the back storm drain. The drain was a concrete slab that had been hallowed out and was located outside the lab door. “The drain” dumped into the ground across the street next to several apartment buildings.
David also became extremely concerned that Agraquest was bringing in unknown microorganisms in soil from overseas without going through proper regulatory regulations. He had witnessed a green suitcase that was sitting on the lab counter with one huge bag of soil. He overheard employees laughing about how it was brought in on a commercial airliner to avoid customs and quarantine. It is believed it was brought in from South America. David has since called APHIS (United States Department of Agriculture) inquiring whether Agraquest had a soil import permit at that time and was told no, they didnít.
Under the US Department of Agriculture - Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) rules, soil is strictly controlled under APHIS quarantine regulations 7 CFR 330 because it can readily provide a pathway for the introduction of a variety of dangerous organisms into the United States. Importation of soil into the United States from foreign sources is prohibited and movement within the continental U.S. is restricted unless authorized by APHIS under specific conditions, safeguards and controlled circumstances described in a permit and/or compliance agreement.”
This was also reported to Sacramento Republican Congressmen Dan Lundgren by Bellís mother as a ìHomeland Security Issueî but apparently Lundgren is not interested in this security issue.
After going to the Mayo Clinic in 2003, David learned he had a histo-yeast in his blood. This fungus causes Histoplasmosis and can cause serious consequences to human health. Although Agraquest has denied any connection to this microorganism, it had been discovered that again, Agraquest scientists were listed as ìinventorsî on a United States Patent listing this microorganism that has since been reassigned to another company outside of California. It was also discovered that four days after David had first sought emergency medical care, all four of the Agraquest scientists listed on this patent started signing over their interests.
It was during the initial visit to the Mayo Clinic that David researched their medical library and discovered that the bacteria Bacillus subtilis, which he had been told was safe, causes serious health problems. At this point is when David realized the company he had believed in was the cause of his ongoing health problems. He then filed a workers compensation claim. His mother also learned later that he was being exposed to Bacillus subtilis which causes numerous adverse health affects. He in fact had worked with this bacterium at Agraquest in powder form. Brian Campbell, another worker, who later supported management had also worn a respirator around this material but David had been told it was safe and not to worry about it. As his mother Sandi Trend has said, “It is like a bad Sci-Fi movie and my son is the victim here.”
It was also in 2003 that David was told his immune system was jeopardized as well. He had stopped the normal production of B-cells and was given 17 Immunotherapy Injections from an Immunologist before he was told he would have to have IV Immunoglobulin (IVIG) Infusions every 28 days. In 2003, 2004, and 2005 he was hooked up to an IV pump and received IVIG infusions for approximately 8 hours each time. These treatments ranged in cost from $7,000 to $15,000 for each infusion.
Through many years of struggle to try and regain his health as he once knew it, Bell has shown positive to 19 microorganisms, both bacteria and fungi. These show up in his sputum cultures, blood and IgG levels (showing positive to highly positive), exposure levels that could be traced back to his employment at Agraquest. These bacteria and fungi all show up in United States Patents issued to Agraquest, United States Patents that were issued to other companies with Agraquest scientistís listed as the inventors on these patents and Agraquest Products that are used on crops and ornamentals. He was and is in serious danger.
Bell was now not only faced with a long battle to not only stay alive but fight an effort by Marrone and other company officials to prevent him from getting healthcare and benefits to help him and his family survive.
As of late 2005, his healthcare costs were over $333,000. Agraquestís mandated responsibility to provide an employee with his or her civil rights (who became sick while working at the company from a workplace exposure in 1999) was not only ignored but concealed. In a Rico type conspiracy, Agraquest had sought to cover up their financial liability for their own patented microorganisms in Bell’s body. So far they have successfully shifted these costs to a federal agency. Bell also has no doubt that he would not be alive today if he had not been able to get the Federal government to cover these treatments, yet his life is still threatened and he is unable to pay for continued treatment and medical tests.
David’s Workers Comp Nightmare
Under California Workersí Compensation law, an injured worker is entitled to healthcare, however, Bell discovered that not only was the company denying that his illness was work-related but they were seeking to destroy his reputation by accusing him of releasing private company information and threatening company employees.
On January 1, 2000, a temporary restraining order was filed by Brian J. Campbell, an Agraquest employee charging that Bell had threatened him in 1999. At this time, David was no longer employed by Agraquest. He represented himself at the trial. The judge asked Campbell if he felt so threatened, why did it take him so long to file a complaint? Davidís employment with Agraquest had ended on 6/1/1999. The attempt to keep David away from any connection to Agraquest or its employees failed and the judge denied Campbellís request. During this proceeding is when Bell first heard he had been ìfiredî from Agraquest. He was told when he was let go on 6/1/1999 that ìhis position was being terminatedî and he was given $1441.00 in severance pay. He had no reason to question this as he had been hired for six months to one year and had been at Agraquest for more than nine months. Like many other unorganized biotech workers, he was also forced to sign a privacy agreement that made him liable for releasing proprietary information about the company. These agreements in fact have been used to silence the workers in the industry who might be fearful of speaking out about health and safety problems and discrimination for fear of lawsuits and retaliation. This blanket of silence dominates the industry and Bell is one of the few bio-tech workers ever to go public.
Bell then made a request in writing to an AgraQuest attorney for a copy of his employee file, citing Federal and State law. The request was ignored. It was not until 2004 that he received a copy of his employee file. It was then he saw a memo to ìAll Agraquestersî saying that David could be a threat to the company and its employees and to be safe, the Davis Police Department would be notified and any contact should be reported directly to Pam Marrone. This tactic of accusing injured workers of making threats to company employees is not new and is a growing technique by employers seeking to eliminate and isolate injured workers so they do not have to take care of their medical needs.
David was eventually forced to move out of his native state with his wife and two children where the battle continues. His daughter often asks, “What was daddy like before he got sick?î
Nurse practitioner, Barbara Clark, was another worker who had injured herself at the 7th Day Adventist hospital chain while delivering a baby in the Adventist’s San Bernadino hospital. She was actually served with eight restraining orders by the 7th Day Adventists hospital chain on the day she was about to testify at the Fraud Assessment Commission in Sacramento about the fraud.
www.barbclark.org
Of course David’s illness was never reported as required by law and the State and Federal agencies which oversee industry and corporations all rejected his growing effort to get justice on the job and healthcare. David had also reported the health and safety problems to California OSHA but found out that they were not prepared or able to do a serious investigation of a biological research laboratory.
He and his mother have filed complaints with the Yolo County Health Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Attorney General of California, NIOSH, APHIS and CDC. His mother also contacted US Congressman Henry Waxman, Chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee in the United States House of Representatives because of her fear of mutated microorganisms being used on food crops and ornamentals. The EPA also failed to act when in fact the EPA themselves had found problems in a submission for re-registration on one of Agraquest’s products in 1999 and would only give Agraquest a “conditional time-limited” registration, giving Agraquest one to two years to prove the product was safe (the same product her son had been exposed to). This product was still allowed to be used during this time. Many other politicians have been alerted to these issues but they have yet to respond.
In 2002, David filed a complaint with the California Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Safety and Health, about the serious health and safety hazards at Agraquest. His complaint included the fact that no MSDS files were maintained on biological agents, lab clothing was allowed to be cleaned at the homes of employees and that minors, including an eight year old, were allowed to be present in the plant. A Davis High School student was even being used to wash lab glassware. He also reported that cultures were allowed to grow in drawers and cabinets in the laboratory and that the fire doors were blocked.
At some point Bell also began to suggest to the company that it increase its health and safety protections, including government mandated warning signs. He was told he could not order biohazard signs because it ìwould not look good for the tours.î What he discovered is that despite his efforts to protect the health and safety of himself, the employees and the community, the company did not want to hear what he had to say about these problems.
Under deregulation and cutbacks both with previous governor Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cal/OSHA has been virtually been decapitated. Larry Rose, the only doctor at Cal/OSHA, was not replaced when he retired and there are more Fish and Game inspectors than Cal-OSHA inspectors in California.
With no union protection of nearly all biotechnology industry workers and fear of job losses and lawsuits levied by the companies against workers, many are concerned and fearful that they will become targets like David Bell.
Davidís growing health problems were now also connected to the deregulation of Workers Compensation in 2004 by a corporate controlled governor and a compliant legislature that voted nearly unanimously for the California Senate Bill 899. This bill allowed insurance companies to flagrantly deny claims using new subterfuges. One of the reasons that nearly all of the Democratic politicians voted for this bill was the refusal of California AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer, Art Pulaski, and the labor federation to organize opposition. They took a “neutral position” on the bill saying it had some “good” things and some “bad” things. This deregulation bill however, has made it even more difficult for injured workers to get lawyers and also made it increasingly difficult to get medical care, even when going through the many hoops put in the way by the insurance industry and their hand picked “regulators”. In fact at a hearing of the California Commission on Health and Safety and Workers Compensation, California surgeons testified that they might be forced to pull out of treating injured workers due to the inability to get paid properly and in a timely fashion.
David Bell filed a workers compensation claim on October 3, 2003 that stated he had “occupational exposure to human pathogens and allergens leading to sinus surgery and immunodeficiency,” but Preferred Employers Insurance Company denied the claim. He also learned that this was not even the correct insurance carrier that was actually responsible for his injuries. Although Agraquest themselves listed this company as their insurance carrier and Agraquest received the denial letter, the company made no attempt to correct the error. During the time he was working at Agraquest, the insurance company had changed and after extended effort and time he finally learned that Golden Eagle Insurance Company had actually been the real insurance carrier. On July 14, 2004, 285 days after he had submitted the claim for his injuries, he finally learned who the insurance company was. Also during this time, Golden Eagle had been bought by Liberty Mutual and the company was successful in getting a denial of his claim by the California Workers Compensation Board. Under California law, a denial of a Workers Compensation claim must be made within 90 days after filing or it is compensable and cannot be disputed by an employer. However, in David’s Bell’s case, it took 285 days to be denied by California Workers Compensation and continued on to the Workers Compensation Appeals Board anyway.
The basis for the denial on the Appeals level was based on the judgeís determination that the only credibility came from an Agraquest scientist who not only lied on the stand but also was a founding scientist that started the company in 1995, is listed on several patents and no doubt has stock in the company. The other so-called credible witness was Davidís ex co-worker Campbell who is now working with CEO and founder of Agraquest, Pam Marrone, at another company called Marrone Organic Innovations. In fact, Campbell had also worked with Pam Marrone at another company prior to when she started Agraquest. Davidís mother who was listed as a witness was denied to take the stand and the Qualified Medical Examinerís QME conclusions were inadmissible, even after receiving medical charts from Davidís physician which clearly stated he believed Davidís medical conditions were related to his employment at Agraquest.
Surprisingly, after the denial by Workerís Compensation of any and all benefits to David, it was discovered that the Judge who presided and denied these benefits had once worked as an attorney for the same insurance carrier Liberty Mutual who fought Davidís workers compensation claim. Under SB 899 California, unlicensed medical personnel from throughout the US are also making medical determinations for injured workers without even seeing the patients and routinely denying benefits to injured workers. Schwarzenegger also appointed Carrie Nevans to be in charge of the California Division of Workers Compensation, the agency charged with oversight and managing the industry. A former insurance company claims adjuster, Nevans and her ìside kickî DWC Medical Director, Ann Searcy, have both pushed such Medical Review Boards. They do this as a way of filibustering claims by injured workers and allowing insurance companies and self-insured employers to put off paying for their injured workers while shifting the costs onto the public. It has led to such a crisis that Nevans is now saying that there needs to be a financial penalty for insurance companies and employers who misuse these review boards.
Massive Cost Shifting Scam
In not only Davidís case but for tens of thousands of other injured workers, their claims for medical benefits have been denied and they have been forced to go to SSI, state disability or public city and county hospitals to have their injuries taken care of. Almost all of David’s medical bills were paid for by the federal government. A study is now being done by the California Commission on Health and Safety and Workers Compensation to determine the extent of some of these cost-shifting schemes by the insurance industry under deregulation of Workers Compensation under SB 899.
Billions of dollars are now being paid out by taxpayers to injured
workers throughout the country who have received their injuries on the job.
In California as a result of this “deregulation”, there has been a 30% to 50% drop in Workers Compensation claims, while the number of claims in the State Disability Insurance Program has increased. Profits of Schwarzeneggerís financial backers, including billionaire insurance mogul, Warren Buffet, who helped set up his kitchen cabinet, have also handsomely benefited. Their profits have increased by billions. Eighteen billion dollars are collected in California for workers compensation but only 50% actually goes to pay for healthcare services and benefits for injured workers. The rest goes to the profits of the insurance industry and the vast apparatus that they have set up as obstacles for workers to get their healthcare.
The reason that Bellís mother ended up at the Fraud Assessment Commission, the day after her sonís trial at Workers Compensation, was because she was in disbelief as she had seen her sonís confidential medical report which had been prepared by her sonís Qualified Medical Examiner (QME) being read by the ex-coworker Campbell in the seat next to her. She had gone over these records many times and knew exactly what they were. At no time during Campbellís employment with Agraquest when her son was there, did Campbell have any management position. She had also questioned, after reviewing her sonís subpoenaed employee file, why there were so many documents within this file that came from Campbell himself after her son had already left the company. Had Agraquest and their attorney honored David Bellís request in 2000 to receive or even view his employee file, it is believed numerous documents would not have been found there.
It was also during the attendance of Bell’s mother at the Fraud Assessment Commission meeting that she met an investigator with the Yolo County District Attorneyís office who was interested in the case and requested information. She thought the only solution to what had happened to her son at Agraquest was through the Workerís Compensation system as did her son. She believes ìthe misdeeds of bad employers hide under the umbrella of protection within the Workers Compensation system and the past, present and future employees as well as the public are never made aware of the truth.î
Steve Poizner, the Insurance Commission of California, has met personally with injured workers at his Sacramento office and told them he would investigate fraud by insurance companies. His office has not only taken no action against insurance company fraud but in the case of injured Loweís Hardware store worker, Joseph Dow, actually covered up fraud that was pointed out by his Federal Judge and a California State Agency, the Fair Employment and Housing Commission. Investigators under previous Commissioner, John Garamendi, had actually told injured workers that they only investigated fraud by workers and employers but not insurance companies and self-insured employers such as Kaiser and Safeway.
The commission has in fact, a fundamental conflict of interest. It is loaded with insurance industry executives including its chair, William Zachry, a vice president for Risk Management and Workers Compensation from Safeway Inc. These executives make the decisions about who and how much California District Attorneys get out of the $25 million funds.
At past hearings, injured workers such as Safeway worker, Beverly Schenk, have been prevented from speaking out about fraud in their cases. The Commissionís role has been to do damage control for the industry in order to limit their liability and increase cost shifting.
They have also funded the retaliatory prosecutions of injured workers such as City of Atherton IBT police dispatcher, Anita Blick, who was sent to jail in San Mateo county for 60 days, some spent in solitary confinement, because she did not tell her doctor she was driving to her appointments. This felony fraud conviction was later overturned but the insurance company, Citigroup, and Atherton are still refusing to pay her medical bills and compensation for injuries.
The District Attorney of San Mateo, while prosecuting injured worker Anita Blick, had refused to prosecute Lowe’s Hardware for falsifying the paperwork of injured worker Joseph Dow. In San Louis Obispo County, the District Attorney is also seeking to jail injured worker, Reginald Fagan, and in this case the DA actually falsified documents showing that Fagan had received Workers Compensation payments when in fact he had received no payments. The net result of these malicious prosecutions is to intimidate workers into not filing Workers Compensation claims, thereby boosting industry profits. Of course the taxpayer ends up paying these costs but that is after all cost shifting.
While David Bell’s mother, Sandi Trend, did not get an opportunity to speak at the Fraud Assessment commission, she did get some interest from one of the District Attorneyís investigators that her son’s case might have some traction. Time will tell, but the systemic conflicts and corruption of Workers Compensation and the deregulatory actions in biotech as well as many other industries indicate these are dire times not only for injured workers and those in these industries but the public as well. The products have now been distributed not only in the United States but throughout the world. We can only wonder what the results of this contamination will ultimately bring?
Bell’s mother, Sandi Trend, has also written letters to US Congressman and governmental operations chair, Henry Waxman, Chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee in the United States House of Representatives because of her fear of mutated microorganisms being used on food crops and ornamentals. She also remains concerned about the EPAís oversights as they relate to the registration of biopesticide products and the fact they are still allowing companies like Agraquest to sell these products while still under review. She has contacted many other politicians about these issues but has received no responses as yet. She also is in contact with Lynn Woolsey’s office. Woolsey is subcommittee house chair of the Workplace Protection Committee woolsey.house.gov/committeestaskforces.asp. While Waxman and his committee have spent dozens of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating athletes taking steroids, apparently Waxman does not have time to look at the crisis for injured workers and the multi-billion dollar cost shifting by the insurance industry to the public.
Trend even attended a town hall meeting of Congressman along with former California Attorney General, Dan Lundgren. Lundgren, who received all of the documents and promised to move on these charges of cost shifting, has refused to get back in touch with Trend about the case and getting healthcare for her son. She and other injured workers advocates are fighting for Congressional hearings in Davis, California where the injured workers and company officials could be put under oath to get the real story of why California’s injured workers are not getting the healthcare they deserve.
One of the things that Sandi Trend and other injured workers have discovered is that these issues are not being covered by the mainstream media. The Sacramento Bee, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, as well as the major television channels locally and nationally, have all turned their backs on the struggles and tribulations of injured workers in California. It might have to be connected with the fact that these very same companies are seeking to implement the same attacks on their own workers. Many workers in the media industry face the same attacks that workers in other industries face and real coverage of these issues would certainly implicate their employers. The story continues to go uncovered and is “not a story” from the corporate media in the US today. One video that covered this very issue was Monsanto and Fox’s firing of two reporters who were about to expose the role of genetically engineered bovine in milk.
YouTube - Fox News Kills Monsanto Milk Story
Despite the corporate media blockade, the fight to expose the truth and seek justice for workers continues.
Injured workers will be rallying on April 27, 2008 in Central Part at Davis, California to commemorate Workers Memorial Day www.workersmemorialday.com . Trend, along with other injured workers and their families, will be speaking about their efforts to obtain healthcare and the growing crises for them and their families.
Injured workers will also be attending the next meeting of the California Fraud Accessment Commission FAC when it meets in Sacramento on June 17, 2008.
This story will not go away.
www.courtinfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/opinions.cgi
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Labor: By Frank D. Russo
By fauxpas | March 30, 2008
Bill to Ban Discrimination in Workers¹ Compensation Passes California Committee After Powerful Testimony of Milton Jones‹But Not Without Opposition
By Frank D. Russo
The California Senate Labor and Industrial Relations Committee voted yesterday today to approve Sen. Carole Migden¹s SB 1115 to ban race, gender and age discrimination in awarding Milton-Jones.gifdisability compensation to workers injured on the job after hearing compelling testimony from Milton Jones, pictured at right.
Jones told the committee: ³The medical examiner said half of my disability was due to the fact that I am African-American. He reasoned that since African-Americans as a group have higher incidence of hypertension, that must have caused one-half of my disability. I was stunned. I didn¹t think that you could penalize an injured worker for his race. I didn¹t put my life on the line in the Middle East so African-Americans could be awarded half of what an Anglo man with the same injury would receive.² Jones broke down into tears at the end of his testimony.
The bill passed the committee on a 3-2 party line vote with Republican Senators Mark Wyland and Dick Ackerman voting against banning discrimination. It was opposed, unless amended, by a host of lobbyists from the insurance industry, the California Chamber of Commerce, and employers including restaurants, who expressed vague concerns about the language of the bill. These opposition witnesses spoke of working in a ³coalition,² and did not have any language or suggested amendment to offer. Their first witness, Jason Schmelzer representing the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, when pressed as to what he proposed, said ³It¹s tough to put into language.²
All of the opposition witnesses said they were appalled at what had happened to Mr. Jones. Other witnesses spoke in favor of the bill including individuals and those from California Labor Federation, the California Society of Industrial Medicine and Surgery, and the California State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
You can read the text of the bill and see that the language added is the following:
³Race, religious creed, color, national origin, age, gender, marital status, sex, or genetic predisposition shall not be considered a cause or other factor of disability with regard to any determination made under this section.²
I find it simply amazing that there are those in 21st Century California would have a problem with that plain and simple language.
At the end of the hearing, Senator Sheila Kuehl, who had repeatedly asked opposition witnesses for language they were proposing, had this to say:
³As I read the proposed language, I don¹t see the issue that¹s raised by the opposition. Frankly, I also think as an attorney this ability to read something into very plain language, especially language about discrimination is a little magical thinking on the part of the opposition because it says [quoting from the bill] Œshall not be considered a cause or other facts of disability¹‹that is, your race shall not be considered a factor of your disability‹your age shall not be considered in and of itself as a factor of disability unless manifested.²
Migden¹s legislation incorporates current civil rights protections into the state¹s workers¹ compensation laws. It comes in the wake of a flood of medical reports written by physicians who say they are compelled by SB 899 to apportion permanent disability to factors such as age, race, and ethnicity. SB 899, Governor Schwarzenegger¹s workers¹ compensation bill passed four years ago, is permitting discrimination against California workers based on their age, race and gender. It allows insurers and doctors to reduce permanent disability compensation awards based on gender, race and age.
You can watch Jones¹ testimony beginning at about 31 minutes into the Senate Committee¹s hearing on the California Channel¹s archives.
Here are Jones¹ notes for his testimony before the committee:
My name is Milton Jones.
I currently live in El Cajon, although I¹m being evicted and don¹t know where my teenage son and I will live next month.
I am a U.S. Navy veteran. I am proud to have served my country as a jet and helicopter mechanic. I participated in many search and rescue missions in Iraq and Kuwait.
After getting out of the Navy, I began working as a cook in the San Diego area. Eventually, I went to work for Costco as a Relief Cook. Part of my job was to clean the large ovens used for cooking whole chickens. I was instructed to do this with a chemical cleaner while the ovens were warm.
This resulted in the toxic cleaning chemicals injuring my lungs. I developed chronic asthma, bronchitis, hypertension and high blood pressure. I had never had any of these health problems before my work injury.
In fact, I had enjoyed great health and fitness. I could beat my son in a footrace and that¹s saying something, as he is a good athlete.
But the medical examiner said half of my disability was due to the fact that I am African-American. He reasoned that since African-Americans as a group have higher incidence of hypertension, that must have caused one-half of my disability.
I was stunned. I didn¹t think that you could penalize an injured worker for his race.
I didn¹t put my life on the line in the Middle East so African-Americans could be awarded half of what an Anglo man with the same injury would receive.
They went all the way back to my military records and found that I had no problems with blood pressure even under combat conditions.
Still they said that my permanent disability percentage should be halved due to the apportionment to my ³genetics.² The doctor said he believed that African-Americans are more prone to having high blood pressure because of our physical makeup and lifestyle and what we typically eat.
This is racial profiling and discrimination at its worst.
I was in great health and eat lots of salads and vegetables. I don¹t live on a diet of fried gizzards.
Here I was being penalized for being ³injured while black.²
In addition to the racial discrimination that reduced my permanent disability compensation, the company fought for five years against covering my work injury. During that time, my bills piled up and I had to file for bankruptcy.
I lost my job, my marriage and my home, in addition to losing my health.
I now have scar tissue on my lungs and get sick easily and often. I can¹t do much without getting ill and exhausted.
I was robbed of half of my compensation - $17,000 - because I am African-American.
Is this my reward for serving my country and working hard on my job?
It is shameful that injured workers like myself are being discriminated against because of our race, gender, country of national origin, age genetic pre-disposition and nationality.
I will never get the compensation back that was taken away from me by the doctors and the courts.
I know I¹ll never get my health or the five years of my life back.
And it was very difficult for me to appear here today in the middle of being evicted.
But I had to tell you what has happened to me and appeal to you to end discrimination against injured workers. Thank you.
Posted on February 28, 2008
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Subscribers
By fauxpas | March 29, 2008
I had to make a few changes to the code of the site. So if I lost any readers who were RSS, please come back.
Sorry for any problems I may have caused!!!
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Zapatista Update: By Jorge Alonso
By fauxpas | March 26, 2008
Warning the World that Zapatismo Is in Danger
Signs that the Mexican government is gearing up for war have led the Zapatistas to launch a red alert to the world. Increased activity is reported in the 56 permanent military bases in Chiapas, which are receiving modern weaponry, equipment and special forces. Activity by rightwing paramilitary groups operating in Chiapas is also on the rise. Those aligned with the PRI, the army and state officials from the Agrarian Reform Office have mounted a series of attacks recently on Zapatista villages on lands liberated during the 1994 uprising. The attacks are of such intensity that the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) recently postponed its ambitious plans for participation in the Other Campaign.
Several years ago, after the government reneged on the San Andrés Accords, which among other things had recognized the indigenous peoples’ right to large areas of land that had been taken and collectivized by the Zapatistas, the Zapatistas devised a peaceful de facto solution: they simply exercised their right to the land in question by creating autonomous municipalities. The government’s violent response through paramilitary activity against many Zapatista towns, particularly since last September, has been documented and made public, but the Zapatistas’ call for support has largely been met with disinterested silence, especially in Mexico, where the Zapatistas refused to back Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) presidential candidate López Obrador against Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN).
The PAN federal government, the PRD state government in Chiapas and local Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and PRD municipal governments and political bosses are calculating that the time is ripe for smashing the Zapatistas. The key is in wresting away the lands on which their Caracoles and autonomous municipalities have been built. Plans sponsored by international institutions, in which the US government’s hand is hard to hide, are designed to dislodge Zapatista communities by turning resources over to transnationals in the guise of defending the environment.
The alert was issued in a symbolic setting The Zapatistas reiterated the alert in December 2007 at an international colloquium organized by the University of the Earth, the EZLN and the magazineContrahistorias to discuss the planet’s future and the situation of what are becoming known as the anti-system movements. The event was held at the university itself, which could not be a more symbolic locale. This non-formal learning center for indigenous communities fully living their autonomy receives nothing from the Mexican government; it even produces its own energy and controls its own water supply. Students from the communities gain hands-on experience cultivating organic products and there are also electricity, blacksmithing, mechanics and handcrafts workshops. They decide what they want to learn and how long they can stay.
Among the numerous speakers at the colloquium, the EZLN’s Subcomandante Marcos made a seven-part presentation on behalf of the Zapatistas, the final one of which was titled “The Calendar and Geography of War.” He began by referring to capitalism’s warlike nature, its use of war as a profit-making venture. But rather than spend time on that point, he recommended The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, a recent book by journalist and “other world” activist Naomi Klein, who also spoke at the colloquium.
He then warned that the Zapatista communities were being attacked to a degree that had not occurred for some time, adding that this is the first time the aggressions are openly coming from a “supposedly” leftist government—a dig at the PRD government in the state of Chiapas. In fact, newspapers reported that same day that Chiapas’ Governor Juan Sabines had just appointed Constantino Kanter, the representative of Chiapas’ big farmers and an ally of López Obrador, a post in his government. Marcos noted that this would give Kanter the opportunity to provide even more resources to paramilitary groups, offering as evidence for such collusion Sabines’ accusation that the Zapatistas had caused López Obrador’s electoral loss and that his “institutional Left” party would never forgive them. He charged Kanter with having coined the phrase, “In Chiapas a chicken’s worth more than an Indian.”
Marcos listed many incidents squelched or ignored by the media that had occurred in his last trip to Vicam, Sonora, for the gathering of Indian Peoples of America. He acknowledged that the EZLN was itself an army, albeit a very different one, but said that the Zapatistas were continuing their peaceful Other Campaign while preparing to resist the army, police and/or paramilitaries. He also announced that this was the last time, at least for a good while, that he would be appearing at colloquiums, roundtables, conferences, interviews and other activities of this sort. He added that this was hardly the first time the government had determined to wipe out the Zapatistas, but was, worryingly, the first time the national and international social response was insignificant and in some cases non-existent. Marcos concluded by warning that the stench of fear and war could be smelled in the Zapatista lands.
In the nineties, any danger to the Zapatistas triggered huge civil society demonstrations, which in Mexico City always included a sizable PRD contingent. Today, however, the prevailing feeling in that party is one of revenge because the Zapatistas didn’t line up behind López Obrador.
Blaming them for the PRD’s electoral defeat is way off base, however, because it ignores the fraud employed by the winning National Action Party (PAN) with help from the powers behind the throne: Mexico’s big money and influential media. Even if the Zapatistas hadn’t chosen to boycott the elections and criticize López Amador as just another cog in the system, it would not have altered such immense fraud. At the end of 2007, a prestigious polling firm found that if the presidential elections had been held at that moment, 69% of the population would have viewed them as either not very clean, not clean at all or frankly fraudulent.
Andrés Aubry: Zapatista Doctorate At the colloquium, Andrés Aubry was named Primus doctor liberationis conatus causa, which freely translated could be interpreted as a doctorate for his commitment to the effort and substance of liberation. This new doctorate was outlined in a paper signed by the EZLN’s Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee and by indigenous authorities of the Oventic Caracol and autonomous municipalities.
Historians Jerome Baschet and Jorge Santiago, both of whom spoke at the colloquium, briefly summarized Aubry’s life, above all in Chiapas. He had come to Mexico after the massive uprisings of May 1968 and following an anthropologists’ meeting in Barbados that had condemned missionary ethnocentrism, come out in favor of indigenous liberation, and argued for a liberationist anthropology. Aubry, who had an authentic spirit of liberation and was committed to the people, became a respectful apprentice in their struggles and wisdom. He accompanied the Zapatistas deeply and fraternally and because of that loyalty could look beyond appearances and live the secret of never being disillusioned. In September 2007, at the age of 80, he planned to drive to the meeting of indigenous peoples in Vicam. His doctor gave him permission to make the long trip, but he died in a highway traffic accident on his return to San Cristóbal de las Casas, just days before his planned journey.
The EZLN’s Comandante David, his voice breaking at one moment, declared that Aubry had been a constant, untiring friend and comrade. The Zapatistas would always remember him and his wife, who died some years earlier, with respect, honor and admiration. Diverse Zapatista groups, speaking in their native Totzil, Tzeltal, Chol, Tojolobal and Zoque tongues, explained that they had awarded this original doctoral honor to Aubry because he had genuinely accepted the lessons of the struggles and wisdom of the different peoples and cultures of Chiapas, Mexico and the world. He had learned from them, conceiving intellectual effort not as a privilege, a form of personal self-affirmation or a source of power over others, but as a collective experience that is necessary to resist, to nourish the good life and to change the world.
A time of tough questions
and weak answers An ongoing seminar in the University of the Earth bears the name of social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein, a theoretician of the “Another world is possible” school, who also delivered the colloquium’s opening speech—mainly an overview of today’s anti-system strategies. He argued that before the 1968 world movement such strategies had centered on taking state power to transform the world, while today alliances are being sought among anti-system movements, in the style of the Zapatistas’ “Other Campaign.” He urged that the World Social Forum be kept alive as the only multi-varied international response to capital’s global power.
Contrahistorias director Carlos Aguirre Rojas lauded the Zapatista movement as one of the most advanced anti-system movements in the world, adding that these leftist movements no longer lean toward a central actor and do not have hierarchical structures. Rather, they are creating organizations from the ground up, generating a greatly varied resistance to capitalism.
Both during the sessions and in the corridors the discussion was lively among presenters and the many and varied groups of concerned young people from all over the world. There was general agreement that the existing frameworks don’t adequately explain what’s happening in the world or how to halt it. There was also basic agreement on the need to break with Euro-centric and metropolitan visions and to learn from the anti-capitalist movements, and most of the speakers acknowledged different aspects of the Zapatistas’ experiments with alternative political structures and social relations as inspiring and thought-provoking. Nonetheless, the prevailing atmosphere among these movements is still one of searching how to create an inclusive “other possible world” that is forged from below, and this search for new, useful theories and concepts for transforming from the grass roots was also a constant in the presentations, with questions generally in greater supply than answers. In!
other words, everyone agreed that something is dreadfully wrong with today’s world and shared a broad brushstroke vision of what a better world should look like, but ideas on how to get from here to there seldom exceeded principles of behavior, although several speakers are working with young anti-system movements of a whole new kind. Conspicuously absent, however, were any viable economic alternatives that reach beyond isolated pockets of resistance.
We can’t let ourselves be immobilized by perplexity Although he couldn’t attend, one can intuit from his latest writings what Portuguese researcher Boaventura de Sousa Santos would have said from his South perspective. Like the other presenters, he sees neoliberalism as the most anti-social form of capitalist globalization, and has denounced the exclusion, oppression and destruction of the means of subsistence and sustainability of huge populations
in the world. In this sense he has also criticized the conversion of Chinese communism into an extremely savage
form of capitalism that he calls market Stalinism. But he is optimistic because the new information and communication technologies have enabled these situations to spark resistance actions that have led to the creation of alliances and struggles through local and global ties in distant parts of the planet. As a result, an alternative globalization is being built from the ground up.
Boaventura argues that understanding these new movements requires a new social theory and new analytic concepts because the Western modernity paradigm sheds little light on today’s world. He holds that we are witnessing the final crisis of the hegemony of that paradigm, and that in this era of transition tough questions and weak answers are inevitable. The questions are probing the future of the possibilities before us, each with its own roots and underpinnings, while the inevitably weak answers cannot assuage the perplexity generated by this uncharted territory and the frustration of wanting to change what is so seriously wrong without any models or precedents for how to do so.
He warns against pretending that this discrepancy between the force of the questions and the weakness of the answers is absurd or can somehow be eliminated. Instead we must recognize it as a symptom of the underlying complexity, of a new open field of contradictions in which the different possibilities compete, but in which there is also room for innovation. We must accept the invitation to mobilize, assume the risk of testing out new answers rather than allowing ourselves to be immobilized by the perplexity.
In this setting, practice resorts to a kind of theoretical bricolage according to the needs of the moment. Radical democracy is conceived as the transformation of unequal power relations into relations of shared authority in all fields of social life,
a struggle for equality and recognition of difference that privileges rebellion over conformity, and an effort to stop activists turning into functionaries. Rather than an obstacle to unity, diversity becomes a condition for it, although fragmentation and atomization are the hidden face of diversity and multiplicity. Theoretical disputes must take place in a context of concrete collective actions, because resistance doesn’t occur in the abstract. Transformative collective actions begin in response to conflicts established by the oppressors, and their success depends on their ability to change the terrain and the terms of the conflict in the course of the struggle.
A new post-capitalist utopia The Belgian priest François Houtart, founder and member of the World Social Forum’s international council and distinguished representative of the “other world” movement, presented his vision of 21st-century socialism, at the same time acknowledging that discussing socialism at all is controversial. Most of those who have been defined as “anti-system” believe the idea of both capitalism and socialism must be abandoned because they are two sides of the same coin. Others repudiate the term socialism because of its baggage—Stalinism, for example.
Houtart argued that actions without prior reflection lead to revolts with no future and that social processes are not decreed, but result from concrete actors. He said that capitalism’s destructive approach to nature and human labor has never been as intense or rapid as in the neoliberal period. The experience of social movements and convergences are delineating the focal points of a post-capitalism or new socialism. These include sustainable natural resource use, privileging use value over exchange value and establishing a representative and participatory democracy generalized in all social and economic relations rather than just political ones. This involves another philosophy of power and the construction of true multiculturality.
Hope is the conviction that struggling makes sense Gustavo Esteva, a promoter of Iván Illich’s work and an activist and ideologue of grassroots movements such as that of the Oaxacan peoples, posited that the era of the world capitalist economy is over and US imperialism is reaching its end, given that, while it can still capture hearts and minds, it no longer has cultural hegemony. With neoliberalism now an empty shell, its end is generating chaos and producing new reactionary waves and religious fundamentalisms. He explained that some want to return to the now impossible welfare state modalities while others want to bring back socialism, which is equally non-viable because of the economistic perspective of both its philosophy and practice. Noting that the new social movements are having difficulties becoming anti-systemic because they were born in the old era, he exhorted his listeners to renounce socialism.
Esteva analyzed the Grassroots Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca and Zapatismo as a source of inspiration for such anti-system movements. He proposed channeling the general discontent from this perspective, transforming protests and denunciations into viable initiatives, and resistance into liberation by linking up pockets of resistance, building autonomous ways of organizing social life beyond the logic of capital. While it seems impossible to propose the convergence of all organizations attempting to situate themselves on the left, he counseled against accepting division and turning friends into the main enemy. Quoting British writer John Berger, he said that naming the intolerable in an increasingly desperate world is in itself hope, which he defined as the conviction that struggling makes sense, no matter what happens, rather than that things will happen as one thinks they will .
Redefining the concept of power for my part, I analyzed the social movements that are constructing a profound critique of neoliberalism and capitalism, and posited that there is a diversity of powers, the best known being that which is used by groups or individuals to get others to do what they want. This type of power can be backed by force or by subtle forms of acceptance based on the asymmetric construction of consensus, but it is always oppressive, a zero-sum game in which what is gained by one is lost by the others.
Another kind of power is one that does not hoard but shares, multiplies. An example of this is the power of common decision-making. The Zapatistas’ “lead by obeying” concept is a very different kind of power from that to which capitalism is accustomed.
A basic rule that has come out of the study of social movements is the need to learn from what people do. We mustn’t fall into a Manichean way of thinking, because the dominant ideology can easily be interjected and assumed in our social expressions given that we have all lived and absorbed capitalist alienation, but we do need to distinguish the remnants of oppressive power in incipient forms of alternative power.
I looked at how the movements are demonstrating that one important instrument against concentrated and ubiquitous powers of domination is the convergences among the emerging movements. I wasn’t talking about convergences between movements and parties, both because the political class has fallen into an irreversible deterioration and because the party form corresponds to now outmoded structures of the industrial model. It is thus imperative to seek new ways to engage in politics, as the Zapatistas are doing. Convergences are part of a process in which it is no longer possible to postulate a privileged actor of change; it now has to be a kaleidoscopic panoply of agents, in our case a pluralist set of subjects that are working toward identifying, proposing and finding agreement on a common goal of transformation.
This essentially new mass is surmounting dispersion, fragmentation and merely spontaneous expressions by experimenting with new and innovative organic forms, thus forging a diverse and pluralistic conglomerate. Many social movements have been demonstrating how such convergences are needed to access other possible worlds in which justice, freedom, equality and respect for life reign.
The Landless Movement
and the Peasant WayBrazilian lawyer Ricardo Gebrim, a member of that country’s Landless Movement (MST), described a grassroots consultation process in Brazil similar to the Other Campaign promoted by the Zapatistas, stressing that Zapatismo has been a pedagogical example for many movements. He explained that many processes, such as the one in Bolivia, are not so much electoral events as insurrectional acts resulting from resistance struggles of many years. He explained that, while the MST had supported Lula, it was now building alternatives of broad-based unity and emerging strategic thinking, given that the current democracy is still nothing other than a set of mechanisms of capitalist domination.
Food expert Peter Rosset, a member of the world organization Vía Campesina,stressed that capital’s re-territorializing processes are in effect a genocidal war against indigenous peoples, peasants and fishing people. He described the destructuring and privatizing of the countryside and its control by transnational corporations that espouse a false environmentalism to justify dispossessing indigenous peoples of their lands, water and other resources. He reported on the alliances being built among traditional peasant movements and the newer anti-system ones and said that sharing experiences and debates has the potential of turning pro-system movements into anti-system ones. He also reported how the Zapatista example had spread to faraway lands, with Zapatista-style Caracoles being created in Thailand, for example.
Subversive words and eyes that speak Architect and energy specialist Jean Robert spoke on anti-systemic action in times of crisis, like the one affecting the capitalist system right now, but added his voice to those who do not believe it is on its last legs. It is surviving through inertia and as it becomes illegitimate is basing its power on violence. He then posed a fundamental question: how can we prevent the system’s feedback mechanisms from devouring the pockets of resistance? He challenged the audience to examine whether the system of domination doesn’t learn from resistance movements and whether this learning doesn’t actually reinforce it.
Another aspect he dealt with was language. Western languages, he explained, make us speak of “capitalism” in a way that makes it seem like the only possibility. Daily language feeds a vision and a way of thinking that reinforces the system, while those who do not speak Western languages can have subversive words. He urged us to “de-capitalize” our minds.
John Berger himself counseled looking beyond words altogether, since what we perceive is more important than the name we give it. He related his visit to the Oventic Government Junta and listed four things that caught his attention: 1) they have an authority stripped of authoritarian features; 2) rather than making them less human, the balaclavas the Zapatistas wear actually make them more visible, since the expression revealed in the eyes is hardest to control, and in those eyes he saw sincerity; 3) resistance can produce fatigue and that fatigue needs to be consoled; and 4) by telling their local history and their place in the world, the Zapatistas represent the antithesis of all politicians of both Right and Left, and that opposition is in their bodies, minds and souls.
Systematic lies and blinding fears Pablo González Casanova confessed that something happens to him with the Zapatistas that never happened to him in the world’s great universities: he worries about whether or not it’ll pass the test. He spoke about coherent, scientific lies—such as those used and justified by the World Bank under the principle of authority—which he wasn’t sure whether to call deceit or self-deceit. He called salaries a systematic lie, as paying for “free” labor, paying what that merchandise is worth in the free market, hides the exploitation. He valued “prohibited” knowledge, much of which is very important if those from below are to advance, explaining that prohibitions exist precisely to stop people thinking differently.
González Casanova also referred to psychological violence and violence by intimidation, which lead to ambiguities, and explained how fear is an epistemological problem because it stops people from gaining knowledge. He alluded to the differences between what people say and what they do, such as self-proclaimed socialists who support neoliberal policies. He also provided current data to prove that those proclaiming imperialism’s death have gotten way ahead of themselves; the only thing that has died is socialism, asphyxiated by the bureaucrats.
Disaster capitalism Journalist Naomi Klein, whose book on the current rise of what she calls “disaster capitalism” was lauded by Subcomandante Marcos, repaid the compliment by recognizing that the world anti-system movement had been born in Chiapas. She also spoke of the movements in the North that oppose the dominion of the huge corporations, but acknowledged that after September 11 some resistance movements in the North had been weakened and even splintered. In that regard, she explained that the mechanism of disaster capitalism is to use the state of shock or exception to impose its neoliberal measures. With public policies abandoned, disasters are exploited to privatize, weakening the state and strengthening the corporations.
Shock resistance is a powerful force that is confronting this, with some peoples using their historical memory to resist. What happened in Argentina in 2001 and in Madrid in 2004 were examples of resistance to shock. Because today life itself is under threat, she made a call to combat the capitalist narratives with anti-capitalist ones.
Women’s equality as part of the Zapatistas’ definitionFeminist Sylvia Marcos called for an assessment of women’s contributions to the anti-system movements by their refusal to subordinate themselves to the kind of subjugation women suffer under capitalism and by generating new conceptions and new practices. She critiqued patriarchal contradictions, such as thinking that anything relating to women has only to do with them and not with everyone. After defending the need for alliances with other movements and for embracing other problems as part of a viable common agenda, she expressed appreciation that a guerrilla movement such as the Zapatista one had taken on women’s equality as part of its own definition.
In fact, on January 1, 2008, the 14th anniversary of its uprising, the EZLN took pride in the fact that the celebrations took place under the sign of transforming the role of women in the communities in struggle. urthermore, the Third Gathering of Zapatista Peoples with the Peoples of the World, held in the Caracol La Garrucha in late December 2007, was
an international meeting exclusively for women. Over 2,000 people from 30 countries participated in the three-day event. Women delegates from Vía Campesina in Asia, Europe and the Americas joined others from Brazil’s Landless Movement and from many other collectives around the world. Comandante Dalia, who spoke for the Zapatistas, said that women will never forgive what capitalism has done to them and affirmed that the Zapatistas were organized to defend their lands.
Zapatista Women led workshops on the history of their movement, women’s role in the rebellion and the future of women’s participation, while men were assigned housekeeping tasks. The Revolutionary Women’s Law, promulgated in Zapatista communities in 1992, underpinned the gathering, which celebrated women’s rapidly changing roles in Zapatista communities.
By the evening of January 31, the official 14th anniversary celebration of the Zapatista uprising, more than 5,000 people crowded La Garrucha, enjoying speeches, songs and dancing. The meeting ended with the warning that Zapatismo is being attacked in a hidden war with paramilitary forces made up of peasants co-opted and trained by the federal army who are trying to dispossess the Caracoles and autonomous municipalities of their land base. In fact there were precarious security conditions in Zapatista communities, especially in the North and Selva regions, at the time of the international gathering.
Neither Center Nor PeripherySubcomandante Marcos’ seven talks under the general title of “Neither Center Nor Periphery,” offered a sharp and lucid counterpoint to the other presentations.
“Geography and the Calendar of Theory.” In this first topic, Marcos announced that he was presenting the basis of a theory so different that it is actually practice. He went on to explain that when the conceptual stone touches the surface of theory, it produces a series of concentric waves that affect different scientific and technical activities. This continues until a new conceptual stone drops and a new series of waves changes theoretical production again. The density of the theoretical production determines whether these ripples reach the shore of reality.
He criticized the aseptic zeal imposed on the social sciences, which leads to the idea that if reality doesn’t conform to the theory, tough for reality. Such theory is used to hide reality and ensure impunity. He said that Calderón, the man who currently passes himself off as President in Mexico thanks to an electoral fraud, hid his responsibility and that of those who preceded him for the catastrophes that battered Tabasco and Chiapas in late 2007 by blaming them on the moon. He also bitingly criticized supposedly progressive intellectuals who argue that social relations can be transformed without struggle and without touching the privileges enjoyed by the powerful.
Marcos then presented seven theses on the anti-system struggle. First: the capitalist system cannot be understood and explained without the concept of war. Second: the forms capitalists use to increase their earnings are to increase productivity, produce new merchandise and open new markets. Third: they achieve the latter by conquering or re-conquering territories and social spaces in which they previously had no interest, such as ancestral knowledge and natural resources. Fourth: he refuted the thesis that capitalism will collapse by itself. Fifth: he defended the idea that the capitalist system will only be destroyed if one or many movements confront and defeat capital’s central nucleus: private ownership of the means of production. Sixth: a society’s real transformations are those directed against the system as a whole. And seventh: the great transformations
do not start at the top but with small movements and with the organized consciousness of groups and collectives that mutually know and recognize each other below and on the left and construct another kind of politics.
“The Calendar and Geography of Difference.” In his second intervention, Marcos described how theories that emerge in the metropolis are exported to the periphery, where they suffer the blockages of those geographies. He
cited the example of trying to impose a metropolitan feminism on the communities without consulting them or understanding what’s already being done. He contrasted this with what women from the Zapatista movement and The Other Campaign are doing in one of the weightiest, most complex and ongoing anti-system struggles for equality and difference. These struggles would rock not only the whole patriarchal system, but also those who are barely beginning to grasp the strength and power of that difference.
“The Calendar and Geography of Destruction.”
Here Marcos criticized people who suggest we stop worrying about those who exploit, dispossess, repress and deprecate in order to debate and agree on what comes after this nightmare. He said that arrogance is usually a bad counselor on practical and theoretical issues, and spoke of the destruction of nature—deforestation, contamination, ecological imbalance—
and the misnamed “natural” catastrophes, which hide the bloody hand of capital accompanying these adversities.
He analyzed the catastrophe in Tabasco and Chiapas that affected a million people, recalling that the “self-declared” President Calderón had painted a picture of a nearly divine tragedy that had nothing to do with the development model that led to the closing off of old water routes. The inundations were a crime given the opening of the Peñitas dam, monopolized by individual interests for electricity production. In contrast with the politicians’ actions, Marcos highlighted the population’s solidarity, above all by the poor for the poor. On this point he told how the Zapatistas got help to stranded communities, which of course was not reported in the major media.
He also talked about Cuba and its history, which is one long braid of pain and dignity, and about the extraordinary challenge of building its own destiny as a nation, its own socialism. He stressed that its rebellion had come at the cost of an economic blockade and a massive demonizing campaign by the United States.
“The calendar and geography of the land.” Marcos described the uses and abuses by the big farmers in Chiapas before the Zapatista uprising. He recalled that in 1994 the Zapatistas fought against the federal army and central government of the time, which included various figures who now back López Obrador. The Zapatistas will keep talking about their persecutors, executioners and killers, adding that if they had supported the PRD’s supposed alternative to the Right, it would have been a betrayal of those who had died.
He referred to the revolutionary women’s law and the revolutionary agrarian law. Because of the latter, ranchers had been expelled from their huge holdings, which were then divvied up among the indigenous. The passing of the land into the hands of the Zapatistas was accompanied by processes that can now be seen in their territories: advances in government, health, education, housing, food, trade, culture, communication, women’s participation, etc. The Zapatistas have recovered the capacity to decide their own destiny, which among other things implies the right to make their own mistakes.
“The calendar and geography of fear.” In this segment, Marcos said that freedom must be built collectively, and not on the fear of others who, although different, are our equals. A movement’s ethics are more important than the number of people it has, its media impact, the forcefulness of its actions or the clarity and radicalness of its program. He pointed to the lack of ethics at the top, which is the ethics of fear. The capitalist system can be defined as the empire of fear. There are many fears: fear of gender, which not only implies women’s fear of men and vice versa, but women’s fear of women and men’s fear of men. There’s also fear of different generations, fear of others, fear of race…
He stated that the Zapatistas have no hierarchy of spheres and don’t claim that the struggle for the land has priority over the gender struggle, or that the latter is more important than recognizing and respecting differences. The Zapatistas want a broad movement with clear objectives: a radical transformation that involves the destruction of the capitalist system. They ask that their rights be recognized, to be allowed to be what they are and how they are. They aren’t interested in positions or posts or awards or honors. They simply want to be able to get up each morning without fear of being on the day’s agenda: fear of being indigenous, a woman, a worker, homosexual, young, old, a child… and that’s not possible in the capitalist system. “The calendar and geography of memory.” In this intervention, Marcos underscored that the Zapatista uprising had been against being ignored and forgotten. He distinguished the way Zapatistas look from the way they are looked at, detailing the respectful look that anthropologist Andrés Aubry always had for them. He warned that those who look at them are incapable of taking in all that the Zapatista movement has been, is, means and represents. The way they are seen by social scientists, analysts and artists is a window through which others look at them. We need to be aware that this window only shows a small part of the Zapatistas’ great house, leaving aspects such as the communities’ heroic daily resistance unseen.
Cuba: A revolution that knows how to danc. Another position shared by the immense majority, Zapatistas at the head, was recognition of Cuba’s heroic role in the liberating process.
Cuban speaker Gilberto Valdés, who collaborates with Havana’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, talked about his country’s culture of resistance, which has forged a very participatory people. He analyzed the current debate on the island, in which the people are seeking solutions to problems of all shapes and sizes. At the end of 2007, over two million specific proposals for responding to the daily problems and bureaucratization had been gathered. He proudly claimed that the Cuban revolution has continued to exist because it “ knows how to dance and sing,” referring to an anecdote by Marcos of a young woman who had told him she didn’t want to be invited to his revolution if it didn’t know how to dance. Valdés noted that one huge challenge in the new Latin American panorama, with its anti-imperialist, emancipationist and libertarian logic and its search for a response to the perverse mercantilist logic, is to figure out a model of alternative well-being.
Awareness of danger. At one point, a presenter respectfully inquired why a hard-line, sell-out and illegitimate rightist presidency such as Calderón’s hadn’t been prevented from taking office, referring to the Zapatistas’ decision not to back the PRD candidate. It was explained that former PRI members who were the Zapatistas’ main persecutors and the instigators and organizers of paramilitary groups in Chiapas were now with the PRD in Chiapas’ state government, where they were continuing to attack the Zapatista peoples. This was presented as proof of Marcos’ argument that the Zapatistas cannot make alliances with their executioners.
The participants were deeply disturbed when they realized the grave danger the Zapatista communities are facing today. Colloquium organizers and participants signed a declaration stressing that the Zapatistas had honored their word to put aside their weapons despite the formation of paramilitary groups, the massacre in Acteal and all the other terrible things the army had done in Chiapas. They had created the Caracoles and their peaceful activity was exemplary, yet in recent months paramilitary groups had been harassing them to get them off the land. The declaration demanded that the state and federal governments cease the aggression, since peoples should not be forced into using violence to defend against the violence they are suffering.
The Acteal massacre is a symbol. The gathering culminated on the tenth anniversary of the Acteal massacre, when the government and its intellectuals attempted to twist history to elude what had happened: a state crime. Jesuit Ricardo Robles wrote at the time: “Although governments, and behind them the de facto powers, are attempting to cover their crimes with silence, obscurity and oblivion, the dead continue their work; they care for their struggles so they don’t die with them. And their protests, proposals, utopias and slogans remain alive in truth. However much they are denied, the flames of Acteal remain alive. Acteal’s horror goes beyond today’s dirty war; it has become a symbol of all the horrors.”
Zapatismo is the whole world’s patrimony. After the colloquium, several participants used different media to call on people to mobilize to defend Zapatismo. Wallerstein stressed that the Zapatistas had set up de facto autonomous indigenous municipalities that are functioning well despite being under siege and constantly threatened by the Mexican army. He admitted that world support for the Zapatistas is suffering from some degree of fatigue and that the colloquium sought to resuscitate alliances.
Naomi Klein also echoed the Zapatistas’ red alert, given the evident signs of war on the horizon. She warned the world and Mexico in particular that new massacres such as the one in Acteal must be avoided. John Berger also demanded immediate support for the Zapatistas from Mexican civil society, arguing that everyone will suffer the consequences if this threatened project disappears.
There’s still time to stop the aggression.The political parties, now hugely discredited for having acted against people’s needs, have lost the support of a large proportion of the population. The Zapatistas are legitimately seeking other paths and other ways of engaging in politics and that search has to be defended. Leaving the Zapatistas to their fate would be enormously shortsighted and an act of terrible complicity. There’s still time to raise voices from the media that claim to be democratic to halt a massacre of the Zapatista option.
If the political polarization in Mexico is tolerating this crime, there is still the international option. It is urgent that individuals and groups around the world be made aware of what is happening and act in time to halt the aggression against the Zapatistas. Zapatismo is the patrimony of those at the bottom everywhere in the world. It belongs to us all.
Jorge Alonso is a researcher for CIESAS West and envío correspondent in Mexico.
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Excerpt: Slavery By Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon
By fauxpas | March 26, 2008
Note: Author’s footnotes have been omitted.
Introduction
The Bricks We Stand On
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.” Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.
After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily “task” was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.
Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened dozens. Within his first four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.
Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after, were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.
Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S.
Steel’s production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.
Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.
Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside five miles from the bustling downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest floor, these were sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S. Steel. Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No signs marked the place. No paths led to it.
I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, exploring the possibility of a story asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes? My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area.
Bergstresser was mystified by its presence at the center of what at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest confluences of industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron around it sat near what had been the intersection of two rail lines and a complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and iron—all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height of its supremacy in American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham.
A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of that burial ground. No specific record of the internments survived, but mountains of archival evidence and the oral histories of old and dying African Americans nearby confirmed that most of the cemetery’s inhabitants had been inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above the graveyard. Later I would discover atop a nearby rise another burial field, where Green Cottenham almost certainly was buried.
The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then “leased” by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired. Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.
The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a journalist. A deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls arrived. White readers on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum slaves. Only a few expressed shock. For most, it seemed to be an account of one more important but sadly predictable bullet point in the standard indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public Radio on the day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at one point said to me: “I guess it’s really no surprise.” The reactions of African Americans were altogether different. Repeatedly, they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in some way—partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the nation’s most conservative daily newspaper—supplied an answer or part of one to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S. society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogeymen, even the horrifying still visuals of lynching, had never been a sufficient answer to these African Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants. How had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation. I began to realize that beneath that query lay a haunting worry within those readers that there might be no answer, that African Americans perhaps were simply damned by fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers, the account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time.
As I began the research for this book, I discovered that while historians concurred that the South’s practice of leasing convicts was an abhorrent abuse of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an aside in the larger sweep of events in the racial evolution of the South. The brutality of the punishments received by African Americans was unjust, but not shocking in light of the waves of petty crime ostensibly committed by freed slaves and their descendants. According to many conventional histories, slaves were unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. This thinking held that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks in the era but was not central to it. Sympathy for the victims, however brutally they had been abused, was tempered because, after all, they were criminals. Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened couldn’t be determined. Official accounts couldn’t be rigorously challenged, because so few of the original records of the arrests and contracts under which black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.
Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the next in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally flawed. That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of official summaries and gubernatorial archives created and archived by the most dubious sources—southern whites who engineered and most directly profited from the system. It overlooked many of the most significant dimensions of the new forced labor, including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal—and tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black men away from political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or forced labor camps. The judges and sheriffs who sold convicts to giant corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to each southern state, they minimized the collective effect of the decisions by hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this period to sell blacks to commercial interests.
I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward blacks was accepted as a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large—seemingly unavoidable—social and anthropological shifts, rather than the specific decisions and choices of individuals. What’s more, African Americans were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S. society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people still not free fifty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the effects of cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and resources.
Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original documents and personal narratives revealing a very different version of events.
In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.
Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations. Where mob violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return of forced labor as a fixture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives of far more African Americans. And the record is replete with episodes in which public leaders faced a true choice between a path toward complete racial repression or some degree of modest civil equality, and emphatically chose the former. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible forces of tradition and history.
By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.
It also became apparent how inextricably this quasi-slavery of the twentieth century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to flourish in the last years before the Civil War. The same men who built railroads with thousands of slaves and proselytized for the use of slaves in southern factories and mines in the 1850s were also the first to employ forced African American labor in the 1870s. The South’s highly evolved system and customs of leasing slaves from one farm or factory to the next, bartering for the cost of slaves, and wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict leasing in the 1870s and 1880s. The brutal forms of physical punishment employed against “prisoners” in 1910 were the same as those used against “slaves” in 1840. The anger and desperation of southern whites that allowed such outrages in 1920 were rooted in the chaos and bitterness of 1866. These were the tendrils of the unilateral new racial compact that suffocated the aspirations for freedom among millions of American blacks as they approached the beginning of the twentieth century. I began to understand that an explicable account of the neo-slavery endured by Green Cottenham must begin much earlier than even the Civil War, and would extend far beyond the end of his life.
Most ominous was how plainly the record showed that in the face of the rising southern white assault on black independence—even as black leaders increasingly expressed profound despair and hundreds of aching requests for help poured into federal agencies in Washington, D.C.—the vast majority of white Americans, exhausted from the long debates over the role of blacks in U.S. society, conceded that the descendants of slaves in the South would have to accept the end of freedom.
On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House from Carrie Kinsey, a barely literate African American woman in Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would take no interest. “Mr. Prassident,” wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the illiteracy of her world. “They wont let me have him. . . . He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help.” Like the vast majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular folder at the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number, in this case 12007. No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the National Archives.
A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man—even a black child—was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged.
Millions of blacks lived in that shadow—as forced laborers or their family members, or African Americans in terror of the system’s caprice. The practice would not fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the first time since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior to the Civil War.
That the arc of Green Cottenham’s life led from a birth in the heady afterglow of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era. Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.
That silence was an agonizing frustration in the writing of this book— especially in light of how richly documented were the lives of the whites most interconnected to those events. But as I sifted more deeply into the fragmented details of an almost randomly chosen man named Green Cottenham and the place and people of his upbringing, the contours of an archetypal story gradually appeared. I found the facts of a narrative of a group of common slave owners named Cottingham and common slaves who called themselves versions of the same name; of the industrial slavery that presaged the forced labor of a quarter century later; of an African ancestor named Scipio who had been thrust into the frontier of the antebellum South; of the family he produced during slavery and beyond; of the roots of the white animosities that steeped the place and era of Green Cottenham’s birth; of the obliterating forces that levered upon him and generations of his family. Still, how could the account of this vast social wound be woven around the account of a single, anonymous man who by every modern measure was inconsequential and unvoiced? Eventually I recognized that this imposed anonymity was Green’s most authentic and compelling dimension.
Retracing the steps from the location of the prison at Slope No. 12 to the boundaries of the burial field, considering even without benefit of his words the stifled horror he and thousands of others must have felt as they descended through the now-lost passageway to the mine, I came to understand that Cottenham belonged as the central figure of this narrative. The slavery that survived long past emancipation was an offense permitted by the nation, perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving thousands of extraordinary characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but every incident in this book is true. Each character was a real person. Every direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the time. I try to tell the story of many places and states and the realities of what happened to millions of people. But as much as practicable, I have chosen to orient this narrative toward one family and its descendants, to one section of the state most illustrative of its breadth and injury, and to one forgotten black man, Green Cottenham. The absence of his voice rests at the center of this book.
Excerpted from Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon Copyright © 2008 by Douglas A. Blackmon. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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TIBET
By fauxpas | March 20, 2008
As the world waits for the the 2008 Olympics in China, the world also awaits the fate of Tibet. A territory long broiled in turmoil a defining moment has arisen. With the Dalai Lama threatening to resign, who will lead the Tibetan people to peace and freedom.
China decries the Dalai Lama as the architect of the recent unrest in Tibet but with such international coverage of the events in Tibet, all made possible by new technologies, no deed goes unseen. “Is this what democracy looks like?” Some of us have chanted at protests but we will all wait to see what type of Olympics this will be. I’m sure it will be an Olympics as controversial as the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
The world will witness a spectacle that will show the emerging China, a developed China, a world power but the world will also be aware of a developing country, with massive state controls, and a capitalist economy.
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RACE
By fauxpas | March 20, 2008
I enjoyed Barrack Obama’s speech. I don’t think that Mr. Obama has all the answers on race but I believe he made a good attempt to deal with issues, which I feel no American president has spoken so candidly to the American people about racism in the U.S.
Many people avoid or deny racial issues because they feel these issues don’t affect them or they’re not important. Those who are ignorant of U.S. history will note that the entire nation was complicit in the slave trade. Various aspects of U.S. society during the 19th century benefited from slavery.
It took the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement to make many of the constitutional laws guaranteed by 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. A reality for many African-Americans in the United States.
Beyond these entire things race in a U.S. is a complex issue because of how each culture in the U.S. views race. How African-Americans look at race and ethnicity is vastly different than how Latinos, Asians and European Americans look at race. There are some similarities but there are definite ideological differences in opinions on race.
For many different cultures racial understandings begin with entertainment, whether it is food, music, television or something other. An educated person would dig deeper beyond ones tastes but this is rare.
I still have hope. I live in an ethnically and racially diverse community. I have bi-racial children. My wife is from another country. This is not a new feeling for me because my own existence in the U.S. has been like that of a foreigner. The way I’ve had to relate to people in the world who haven’t the slightest clue on race but live in ignorance until there own comfort zones are threatened and they have to seriously think about there own sub consciousness.
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California African American History Museum
By fauxpas | March 19, 2008
This was an excellent exhibition. I saw a film on the particular day that I went. The film was not knew but the information could not come at a better time, given the state of race relations in Los Angeles. Which I feel ha