Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Seventeen

In this instalment, things are coming to a head with Ong and the Ruka, but the Elders prove that they are one step ahead of the bad guys.

&&&&

The Ruka subcontracted the kidnapping to a group of ex-CIA agents who’d honed their skills as part of the “extra-ordinary rendition” campaign during Bush’s poorly-conceived “war on terror”. They’d snatched a lot of innocent people then, but that had been a problem with the management, not the front-line staff. These guys were quite professional. Moreover, they were---from the Ruka’s point of view---totally expendable.

The snatch team had been on standby for a couple days before the Ruka called them in. They drove to the naturalized park where Bookchin was taking a long walk.

Mikhi wasn’t a very fast walker, but he did like to ramble around and be in nature once in a while. He had some cheap binoculars and he liked to look at birds and other wildlife. He didn’t have a car, which meant that he couldn’t get very far away from home. But luckily he only lived a mile or so from a river with extensive “naturalized” parks on both sides. A surprising amount of wildlife lived there. He’d seen osprey, mink, deer, beavers, muskrats, lots of different types of song birds, and, waterfowl. Once he’d even seen a bobcat! He’d found that viewing wildlife was more a case of being observant and where to look than how far someone got from civilization.

The “snatch team” split up into four groups of two each. One got ahead of Bookchin on the trail with another behind. One stayed at the removal van. They kept an eye on the traffic in the parking area and were ready to receive the target and one of the teams for removal. The last was in the same parking lot. The leader and a driver were there to monitor the communications, give direction, step in to help if necessary, and, give a ride to the other team now stalking Bookchin. Everyone was wearing two-way communications gear, but they were under strict orders to not use it unless necessary. The park wasn’t empty, but it wasn’t tremendously busy either. It was heavily wooded, so it would be possible to isolate the target for the snatch. They had decided to quickly grab their target when he was no longer visible to anyone else---even if for a moment---and drag him off trail where he could be quickly sedated and carried out to the van. They had an agreed cover story that their “friend” was diabetic, going into a coma, and, they were taking him to the hospital for treatment.

Mikhi stopped on the trail waiting to see if some birds would show up on old hulk of a tree down by the river. Last time he’d been out he saw a red-headed wood pecker on it. Then he saw a younger couple walk up from around the bend behind him with two off-leash dogs ranging in the woods on either side. The woman was very tall, slim, with fiery red hair. She was slightly past middle age and very handsome. The man next to her was shorter, about the same age, had short iron-grey hair, and something of a pot gut. The two dogs appeared to be a black German shepherd and a Rottweiler. Bookchin wasn’t too impressed. The damn “dog people” annoyed him---the dogs scare off the wildlife and the odd one had socialization problems that make them aggressive. At least these dogs looked well-trained.

The couple and their dogs passed him and went around a corner, leaving him to his thoughts. At that point a couple men appeared from behind him. They seemed to be looking directly at him as he approached---almost as if they wanted to say something. At that point the two dogs burst out of the undergrowth and threw themselves at the men. They both had a brief look of terror, then reached into their pockets for some reason but---too late. The dogs had their arms in their jaws and shook the men the same way a cat does a rat.

At that point the couple came back down the trail and called out: “Carbon come!” “Nic come!” At that point the dogs let go and ran to their owners. The two men quickly gave up any thought of reaching for weapons and warned their back-up about the situation. He advised an abort and told the other group on the trail to go to the scene and offer help in order to see what was going on. The woman and man quieted their dogs and walked slowly towards Mikhi and the two other men.

A minute later two men came around another bend further up the trail, saw the bleeding men, the couple, and, Mikhi. One of them played the part of being a “good Samaritan”. “What’s going on? Are you guys OK?”

“Do we look OK? These dogs attacked us totally without warning or reason. We’re bleeding! Would you help us get to the hospital? We’re going to need stitches and we’re in no state to drive.”

Bookchin then piped up. “I’ve got a cell phone. I can call 911.”

“Oh no, there’s no need for that. But if you could give us a ride, it’d be appreciated.”

Mikhi responded. “Sorry, I don’t own a car or even have a driver’s license. I can’t help.”

The couple with the dogs had ordered the animals to sit down and wait. They then walked up close to the two new people and said: “We’re so sorry. We don’t know what got into them. Is there anything we can do?” Mikhi noticed that both of them put their hands into the pockets of their jackets.

At that point the team leader in the second van made an executive decision. “This is going sideways fast and I’m not entirely sure that this is a coincidence. It’s time for you to kill the dogs, witnesses, snatch Bookchin, and, get out of here before the police arrive. I’m authorizing maximum force.”

At that point the radio connection between the four teams dissolved into static. But enough had been said for the four mercenaries to start to pull out their concealed weapons. The man and woman each instantly uttered a brief command: “Nic kill.” “Carbon kill.” Mikhi was horrified to see how quickly the first two men were knocked onto the ground and had their throats crushed by the two large dogs. They were like lightning!

Without even looking at the dogs, the man and woman instantly stepped forward even closer to the men that they were talking to and pulled their hands out of their pockets. They both had something like a switchblade knife in their hands! With a fluid motion that showed absolutely no wasted energy, the blades flicked out of two handles at the same time and then went directly into the two men’s necks just below the jawline. They both gushed out bright red blood onto the fronts of the man and woman. Then they fell down like wet sacks of concrete.

The man and woman grabbed the men under their armpits and dragged them off the trail to the side and scooped leaves over their bodies. After this was done with the first two, the grey-haired man turned to Mikhi while the red-haired woman started on the second pair. He told Bookchin. “I think you’d better walk down the trail that way a bit and wait at the park bench. Nic and Carbon will go with you for protection in case any more of these twerps show up. A friend of yours will come to pick you up and take you home. We have to do some tidying up here and it’s best that you remain within reach instead of wandering off in a state of shock.”

At that point the woman had finished with one of the bodies. They both they stood up tall, pointed at Bookchin and spoke to the dogs: “Nic protect!”, “Carbon protect!” The dogs got up, walked over to Mikhi and waited for him to start off down the trail. At this point the grey-haired man started moving the last corpse and the red-haired woman took off her jacket---it was reversible---and put it on inside out, hiding the blood spatter. She took some wet wipes out and cleaned off her face and hands.

&&&&

Blue type. Request for subscriptions. Short sentence with hyper-text links to Pay Pal and Patreon. Feel the warm glow of supporting local media!

&&&&

Mikhi was at the bench for about 20 minutes. The dogs waited at his feet all this time, quiet but extremely vigilant. When Ian showed up they instantly got to their feet and padded down the trail back to where Mikhi had left the couple. Ian led Bookchin to his car, at which point they drove over to a fast food restaurant for some coffee and something to eat. Mikhi found a big cheese burger and a small coffee in front of him. Ian said “Eat this. With a full stomach your blood won’t all stay in your head. That will help you calm down. I’d have gotten you a tea instead of coffee, but all they have here is that iced nonsense---yuck.”

Bookchin was surprised and appalled that he wasn’t even in shock. He was just hyper-aware of his surroundings. He mentioned this to Ian who said “Yeah. I get that. It’s the adrenaline rush. You’ll probably have a hard time getting to sleep tonight. I’d recommend getting baked on cannabis and watching a comedy on Netflix.”

He went on “I’ll tell you what happened and why. Those four guys were trying to kidnap and torture you to find out who the Elders are.”

“Were they members of the Ruka?”

“No, the Ruka rarely gets their hands dirty directly. Instead, they hire subcontractors. We apologize for getting caught flat-footed like that. We generally try to avoid violence, but sometimes it happens. Ong Kata is getting very desperate to find out who we are, and he’s paying the Ruka to do risky stuff.”

“The experts decided that we’d protect you by making a very scary display of force. By now the bodies have disappeared and the site has been totally cleaned up. We jammed the communications of the group just before things got violent, so all the surviving members of the snatch team know is that four of their people went to grab you, had a problem with some dogs, and, then disappeared without a trace.”

“Intelligence agencies generally have a very low tolerance for ambiguity. Ultimately they’re bullies who try to make sure that nothing at all is left to chance. That’s how people survive in the world of spooks. As contractors, the Ruka probably didn’t tell them anything about the Old Ones and just said that you are an individual that they wanted snatched and delivered at a specific place at a specific time. The Ruka would either interrogate you themselves or hire another contractor to do it for them. That way they limit the chances of things coming back on them.”

“We’ve just created a major embarrassment for the Ruka because it now looks like they didn’t warn their contractors about what they were really asking them to do. This will make it harder for them to get hired help---which will both increase their operating expenses and discourage the ‘best’ people from working for them. This fits into our long-term strategic counter-move against Kata.”

&&&&

Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with.

The Fair Trade Movement: Part Two of my Interview with Bill Barrett

In preparing for this interview, I did a lot of research and came across some academic papers that suggested that Fairtrade isn't actually all that good for coffee farmers. In this article I raised this idea with Bill Barrett. I think he did a good job responding to those questions.

Cloudwalking Owl · Orthodox Economist Critique Of Fairtrade

Just to put this issue into a context, it's similar to dilemmas that some people face here, such as dairy farmers and taxi drivers. Dairy farmers used to be pretty much the poorest farmers in Canada before the introduction of quotas to limit production. The problem is, however, that since the Canadian Dairy Commission introduced the supply management system farmers can't sell fluid milk without quota---and it has become very expensive to buy. (According to this Macleans article published in 2011, $25,000/cow.) And that means that anyone who doesn't already have quota will find the extra money they make from supply management is being eaten up by having to borrow money to pay for the right to sell milk.

A similar situation existed in various US cities that limited the ability of people to drive cabs based on the ownership of a certificate (the "medallion") that allowed someone to run a taxicab. The idea was---just like with dairy farmers in Canada---that if there are too many cabs competition will drive owners and drivers into desperate poverty. The problem was, however, that the medallions got more and more valuable as time went on---which meant that more and more of the money spent on cab fares ended-up being spent on buying the right to run a cab instead of going into cabbies' pockets.

Both situations were considered "political footballs" by politicians who just kicked them down the road. Supply management probably won't survive over the long haul because of the increase in free trade agreements. Similarly, ride-sharing systems like Uber and Lyft seem to be making any issue concerning taxicabs somewhat irrelevant. That's because it's hard to see how any heavily regulated industry can survive competition with another who's business model seems to be to thumb their nose at all those regulations---and who usually gets away with it because the systems are so popular with consumers.

Fairtrade coffee has one big advantage over milk and taxicab rides in that the way both of those systems were designed, they already controlled all the production within the respective country or city. That meant that they couldn't deal with quota problems by expanding their share of the market. Coffee isn't in this situation because most coffee that people buy isn't Fairtrade. That means that there is potential to grow the market. And if the sales do grow, that means that the possibility exists to have the market grow so fast that it offsets the problem of too many small producers chasing too few customers.

&&&&

This is the first article where I've started using the paid Soundcloud system. It only costs $15/month, but asked for the money upfront for a whole year. That means that I had to pay out $180 yesterday to be able to put in the interview clips I used in this article. I'm not "singing the blues" here, but I just wanted to point out that this is a significant cost that comes with putting out this blog. So if you can afford it, why not subscribe? It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

&&&&

 

Cloudwalking Owl · Annual Coffee Sales In Canada

Here's a graph that Bill gave me that shows how successful Fairtrade Canada has been in getting its coffee sold. ("MT" means "Metric Tons". One metric ton is 1,000 kilograms or a little over 2,000 lbs, or, one Imperial ton.) As you can see, sales of Canadian roasted Fairtrade coffee has increased by 77% in five years---something just about any business would be overjoyed to hear!

Cloudwalking Owl · Share Cropping In Coffee Production

The final question I asked in this article had to do with share cropping. 

Please note that I am using the term "share cropping" in an idiosyncratic way. Most writers referring to this modern system of distributed livestock production use the more neutral term "contract farming". In North America share cropping came about in the Southern US at the end of the Civil War as a system that allowed large landowners to force their former slaves to continue to do the hard work involved in cotton production. Freed slaves didn't have access to land because the huge plantations hadn't been broken up along the lines of General Sherman's famous "40 acres and a mule" land redistribution order. In making the distinction, other writers choose to focus on the issue of land ownership instead of the grotesque exploitation.

I think that this distinction is besides the point. The real issue is one of unequal power being brought to a contractual agreement. In the past, most wealth resided in the ownership of land. This meant that the wealthy people wielded power over the exploited through the exercise of "land power". Similarly, modern companies exert power to exploit through their control of the meat processing and distribution network---which resides in the contracts they have with large supermarkets, like Walmart. That's why I am quixotically trying to use the older term, because I think that it gives the casual reader a greater sense of the important issues involved.  

Here's a YouTube video that explains all the relevant issues using the example of chicken production in the USA. 

If you can believe the above, contract farming can be and often is, the kissing-cousin of slavery. That's why I think it's important to not allow bland language to cover up an ugly reality. More people know about how exploitative share cropping was, so I like to use the less pretty---but more accurate language.

That's why I was happy to hear that the groovy, Fairtrade coffee is not grown through exploitative share cropping relationships!

That's enough for this week. Remember to wear your mask, keep your distance, and, stay home. Eventually most of us will get vaccinated and then we will have a new "normal" to adapt to. 

&&&&

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Sixteen

Things are heating up. Ong Kata wants the Ruka to get more "kinetic" in their pursuit of the Elders. Does this means that Mikhail is in for some bad times?  

&&&&

Ong Kata was angry. He’d given a lot of platinum, iridium, and, rhodium to the Ruka and he hadn’t seen any results. That’s why he was on the phone with their representative.

“I’ve paid a lot to you guys and I expect something in return. Who are the “Old Ones”? And how can I shut down the Climate Trials?”

The voice on the encrypted phone line refused to acknowledge Kata’s anger. “You’ve paid us a lot because we are the best. And we haven’t found out any more than your previous investigators. That’s to be expected, as they were also the best at what they do. But we wouldn’t be the best at what we do if we hadn’t started out doing background research to double check what they did. Moreover, we always need to carefully investigate a situation before we escalate to wet methods. That protects both us and the customer from unforeseen complications.”

“What exactly are you going to do now that you’ve done this research.” Kata was still angry, but he was able to contain his rage when dealing with the Ruka---who obviously didn’t think the enormous sums he was paying them meant they should grovel as his employees did.

“We’ve decided to start out by offering you a range of options. First, if you really do want to learn who the Elders are, we think we are going to have to kidnap and interrogate Bookchin. That, of course would mean we have to eliminate him to cover our tracks. Moreover, a successful kidnapping is a very difficult job---much more complex than a simple assassination. A killing would, however, not get us any closer to learning what is going on. It might, however, damage the Climate Trials process enough to limit market share. On the other hand, it might dramatically increase audience share by creating a meme around his murder.”

“Surely you can make it look like an accident.”

“Of course. But everyone knows that killings can be made to look like an accident or some sort of unknown medical condition. And the timing will always create suspicion. Don’t forget that until we learn more about the “Old Ones” we won’t be able to deal with their manipulation of artificial intelligence to build market share. You don’t kill an octopus by chopping off a tentacle---you have to get the head.”

“It sounds like a kidnapping is the only option. Get on with it!”

“OK Ong. But increased risk increases cost. We will contact you soon with the results.” At that point the Ruka shut down the conversation and the line went deal. Kata was so angry that he smashed his cell phone onto his desk, sending pieces flying across his office.

He barked at his secretary over his intercom. “Barra, get me some coffee and a new cell phone---you know what I use!”

“Right away sir.”

&&&&

If you like to read the Back-Grounder and you can afford it, why not subscribe? It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

&&&&

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

The FairTrade Movement: an Interview with Bill Barrett, Part One

In this article I start an interview with local coffee entrepreneur Bill Barrett (he was instrumental in starting the Planet Bean coffee shops and roastery) about the Fairtrade movement. It turns out that he is on the board of directors of FairTrade International as an NFO (National Fairtrade Organization) rep. In effect, one of the key people managing the entire international Fairtrade movement lives right here in Guelph. This first part of the story serves as a bit of an introduction to the concept and how it works in practice. 

Cloudwalking Owl · Bill Barrette Intro To FairTrade

Bill mentions that the first steps toward Fairtrade involved imports of handicrafts and eventually became a network called "Ten Thousand Villages" Stores. I found a website for this group, but it only ships to people in the USA. It did direct me to an affiliated business in Port Colborne, titled "Villages Port Colborne".  

&&&&

A subtlety that Mr. Barrett goes over somewhat quickly needs emphasis. The word "Fairtrade" and phrase "Fair Trade" mean substantively different things. The former is a registered trademark that a business can only use if it is certified by the international organization that Bill is involved with. As Bill explains, you only get to show this on your label if you agree to a fairly long list of pretty important commitments---including regular inspections to ensure you are really doing what you are supposed to be doing. 

In contrast, "Fair Trade" isn't registered and can be legally used by just about anyone. But having said that, there is a group in Canada called "The Canadian Fair Trade Network" which has some sort of lessor relationship to Fairtrade Canada.

What are Fair Trade Programs?

Fairtrade Canada operates Fair Trade Programs in collaboration with the Canadian Fair Trade Network (CFTN) and the Association québécoise du commerce équitable (AQCÉ). We work with local community groups to boost awareness and understanding of trade issues, and to promote the purchase of Fairtrade products. Towns, Campuses, Schools, Workplaces, Faith Groups and Events can be designated as Fair Trade (not certified - only products and producers can be Fairtrade certified). To become designated, organizers need to submit a completed application form demonstrating compliance with specific requirements. Ambassadors are recognized as leaders in their fair trade community. (from the Fairtrade.ca FAQs)

The difference is that a group can be designated as "Fair Trade", but a product has to be certified "Fairtrade". If you see the words "Fair Trade" on a product there's no real guarantee that the premium you are paying is actually going to the producer. (More about this later on.)

&&&&

Bill mentions "Francisco van der Hoff", which is the Spanish form of his name. This makes sense as van der Hoff spent a lot of time as a priest in South America. But the original Dutch form of his name is Frans van der Hoff. The second thing Barrette mentions several times is that he is a "worker priest".

Frans van der Hoff. Image c/o Paris Match. ("Fair Dealing" provision)

This is an obscure, but highly relevant issue. During the 1940s there was an opinion that the industrial worker class of France were moving away from Roman Catholicism and towards atheist systems of thought---like Communism. Some priests believed that this was because the church parish system was increasingly irrelevant to the lives of working people. With this idea in mind, they stepped away from the idea of being paid officials in charge of a specific congregation and instead got a job like everyone else. In effect, they ceased being middle-class professionals and instead became part of the working class. 

The Church was somewhat ambivalent about this because they were afraid that the priests who went off to work in factories with the proletariat would end up becoming Marxists and leave the church. It appears that this did happen sometimes, but a more common problem was that it tended to radicalize the clergy and get them to become more sympathetic to the poor. (Which, as everyone knows, is definitely anti-Christian.) For that reason, the church suppressed the movement for about ten years in the 1950s, but then it allowed them to come back in 1963. 

As Barrett explains, van der Hoff went to South America and---from the way he describes the man's trajectory---he was influenced by "Liberation Theology".  That's an interesting tangent that readers should learn a bit about, because it fits so neatly into the Fairtrade story. 

In a nutshell, Liberation Theology is based upon the two following concepts:

• changing the church from being top-down hierarchical to bottom-up decentralized, through the creation of "base communities" consisting of ordinary Christians who try to figure out for themselves how to apply the teachings of Jesus to their lives
  
• prioritizing help for the poor and abused over that of preserving the present form of social organization

Unfortunately, helping the poor and encouraging social change was pretty much the American government's definition of "COMMUNISM!!!!!!!!" during the cold war. This meant that the CIA helped local elites fight a war against this movement all across Central and South America---and that involved a lot of torture and murder. (That's what Bill is talking about when he mentions the "carnage" in Chile. That would be the coup against Salvador Allende.) 

I mention this background because I think it's important for people of good will to understand how much of our lives are "intertwined" with those of other people. When you walk into Planet Bean or Costco to buy Fairtrade coffee, stop sometimes and think about how what you are doing fits into a multi-decade long struggle to change Roman Catholic theology. It stretches from worker priests to liberation theology to a redefinition of the way we interact economically with the global South. I also think that it's an exercise in understanding that no matter how insignificant your particular struggle to make the world a better place may seem, you are still an important part of it.  

&&&&

It's also important to understand theoretically what Frans van der Hoff was doing when he decided to "cut out the middlemen" (or "coyotes"). I can remember reading a passage written by the famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith (who studied at the Ontario Agriculture College in Guelph before it became a University) where he talked about the way family farms are exploited in North America. He said that it was simply a function of having a huge number of farmers dealing with a very small number of grain merchants. That's the situation that Bill Barrette is describing in his talk, and the formal economic term for this is an "oligoposony". And it's also exactly the same situation that led to prairie farmers in Canada forming wheat pools to market their harvests for them, as I documented in my conversation with Peter Cameron.

In a sense, the coyotes were offering a useful service to the small coffee farmers. After all, for years and years who was going to take their coffee to market if they didn't? That was then, though. Now it is now possible to organize chains of distribution that don't involve exploitative middle-men. But I will point out at this point that this probably wouldn't have been possible to organize on the scale that Bill Barrette is describing without many of features of the modern economy---sophisticated trade networks plus computer technology that make communication instant and free. Moreover, it probably wouldn't have been possible to "boot strap" this system into existence without the existing network of church communities that could be easily organized into an "at cost" marketing and retail network for the very first sales. (That's the same process that Alphonse Desjardins followed when he convinced Catholic parishes to set up credit unions in Quebec, as I pointed out in my interview with Peter Cameron.)    

This isn't to say that non-exploitative trading networks couldn't have existed before now, but it would have much, much harder for them to come into existence before this historical moment. 

&&&&

With this article I've pretty much maxxed-out the "freebie" part of my Soundcloud service. (This article's soundclip puts me at 99% full up.) From now on, I'll have to start paying for the service. It's $15/month, which I think is a fair price. But that's an on-going expense that will have to come out of what I get from subscriptions. So if any of you have been thinking about subscribing but haven't got around to it, this might be a good time to do so. It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

&&&&

I think that Bill had his names mixed-up when he was describing how the first brand name for Fairtrade coffee was created. The novel's name is Max Havelaar and it was written by Eduard Douwes Dekker, who used the pen name of "Multatuli" (it's Latin for "I have suffered much"). The book that the coffee brand is named after has the full title of Max Havelaar; or, The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company.

I haven't read the book, but I did find a movie based upon it that you can watch in full on YouTube. (I warn you, though, it's almost three hours long!) It is a pretty representative example of the sort of "progressive art house" movies that I used to watch as a university student---like The Battle of Algiers and Burn!. It was supported by the Indonesian government, but they wouldn't let it be shown in their country for ten years because it paints a pretty unflattering portrait of the local elite who collaborated with Dutch colonial authorities. Either way---judging by the movie---the book is a pretty standard description of the perversions of colonialism, much like Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Orwell's Shooting an Elephant. (If nothing else, I liked the shots of Indonesia and the people who lived there---whether it was accurate or not, I haven't a clue.)

No matter what you can say about the book as a work of fiction, it seems to have been useful insofar as it created a story about coffee and where it comes from. And that explains why it is probably a good idea to buy Fairtrade commodities. A quick search on line shows that the brand name is still used in parts of Europe. 

&&&&

When Bill talks about the relationship between "FLOCERT" and "Fairtrade International" he talks about it being "ISO certified" and this is a "Chinese Wall" system. I think that readers might be excused for not understanding what he's talking about. 

First "FLOCERT" stands for "Fairtrade Labelling Organization CERTification". Here's a Youtube video from the organization's website that explains their mandate. 

 

A "Chinese Wall" is a business term (supposedly, it refers to the Great Wall of China) for the practice of splitting apart different parts of a company to lessen conflicts of interest. In the case of the Fairtrade business, I would assume that this comes about because the organization needs to totally avoid even the appearance of bias. That's because the product that they are selling is charging a premium price for something that is totally intangible to the final consumer. In other words, they have to take it totally on trust that the extra money they are paying is actually being passed on to the person picking the beans.  

Let me illustrate with an example that I heard about on a radio program years ago. In a community in British Columbia there were a lot of people paying a premium for free-range, organic eggs. But a journalist went around and asked local chicken farmers about how well they were doing. It turned out that none of them were actually selling these types of eggs to the local stores. When he went and asked the store owners about this, he found that they were genuinely surprised to hear this. They'd been buying eggs from a middle-man who assured them that they were local, free-range, and, organic. 

The reporter went "under cover" and followed this distributor and followed him to a purported chicken farm. But when he looked around, he found that the barns were empty. What he did find, however, was that truck loads of eggs were being imported from a factory farm in Alberta and that they were being taken out of the cartons and put in new ones that described them as being "locally-grown, free-range, and, organic". 

The problem is that the extra money you pay to the producer is a tremendous incentive for larceny. If there isn't any sort of oversight mechanism, it will probably end up in some slime ball's pocket. In the case of organic food that people grow in Canada, they now use exactly the same sort of process with the same sort of "Chinese Wall" system. This involves the "Pro-Cert" company, which is also "ISO certified" (more about that later). And it is what producers use to get accredited so they can become officially "organic" (and other things too---like "gluten free"). 

A selection of logos that Pro-Cert certifies

Bill mentioned that FLOCERT is "ISO certified", as is Pro-Cert. This is an interesting point that bears explanation. 

To a large extent our modern society is based on the same sort of trust that shoppers need to have when they buy Fairtrade or organic products at a store. For example, when a car factory orders tons of nuts and bolts of a certain type, they have to know that they will actually be the size and strength specified. That's because if they aren't the autos that they build with them might wear out well before they are supposed to---or even worse, fail when going down the road, causing dangerous accidents. 

It used to be that businesses made all their parts themselves, or at least had a long-term relationship with specific suppliers. That might have been OK in a world where people rode buggies. But the machinery we depend upon nowadays involves components from all over the world, and it's made by people we will never ever meet personally. Moreover, because of international trade, we can't even rely upon a government agency to regulate things like this for us. Instead, what business depends on is an independent company that they pay to inspect their production line to make sure that it follows the standardized practices needed to gain the ISO ("International Standardization Organization") certification. Once it has that, then other companies will know that they can trust that the bolts will fit and not break.

Yup, that's why the wheels don't fall off your car!

FLOCERT plus ISO certification means that when you buy your coffee with the Fairtrade logo on it, you can be pretty safe in assuming that the extra money you are paying actually goes to the people who pick the beans.

&&&&

I've gone into some detail to explain the certification system because there have been complaints raised by some economists about this and whether or not Fairtrade actually helps coffee farmers. But I've been repeatedly warned by readers to keep my stories relatively short. So I'll stop here and continue at a later date.

&&&&

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Fifteen

In this episode we see an excerpt from an academic political science book that helps explain why the Climate Trials were so important to building an adequate response to the Climate Emergency.

&&&& 

Excerpt from Reflection on the Climate Trials: Politics Qua Social Transformation, by Dr. Lucrecia Machiavelli (Oxford University Press).

One of the biggest problems with democratic political governance in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries was the way citizens tended to conflate politics with activism. Politics, per se, has absolutely nothing to do with making the world a better place. It is true that politicians often have very strong opinions about things like the civil rights, inequality, the Climate Emergency, etc, but they are invariably strongly constrained by various systems and conflicting groups working within those systems. It’s often said that elected leaders aren’t “kings”, but the fact of the matter is even absolute monarchs were constrained by the aristocracy, the clergy, the state of the economy, tradition, etc. Our Presidents and Prime Ministers are similarly constrained by the rule of law, the bureaucracy, the party they represent, other leaders---federal, provincial, municipal, tribal, international---and so on.

The result of these limitations is that most political leaders simply cannot lead. Instead, the most they can do is choose to follow some other group in society that has managed to garner enough support to represent a significant constituency. A probably apocryphal statement attributed to a Canadian Prime Minister---Pierre Trudeau---states that “The art of leadership is to stay exactly seven inches ahead of public opinion.” Certainly everyone has heard of Bismark’s dictum that “politics is the art of the possible”.

The real “leaders” who change society are never elected to public office. Instead they stay outside of power, using their communications and organizational skills to spread a specific worldview. Insofar as they are capable of expanding the percentage of citizens who share their point of view, they become leaders of one of the constituencies that elected officials have balance off against others in order to create a functional government.

To illustrate this point, consider the civil rights movement during the 1960s. There were many different players, but let’s look at three: Martin Luther King Jr., George Wallace, and, Lyndon B. Johnson. King wanted to see the end of the Jim Crow laws---as did Johnson. The problem was, however, that the New Deal Democratic party that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had put together depended on white racist working class support to retain power. This meant that if Johnson managed to pass a Civil Rights Act, he knew that it would damage the Democrats for an entire generation---or longer.

George Wallace, oddly enough, really didn’t have a deep-rooted personal animus against people of colour---he’d actually been endorsed by the NAACP for his first (lost) election where he spoke out against the KKK. And after he left politics eventually became something of a recognized “ally” of the Southern black community. But he had learned from his first run that he had to have the support of racist whites if he was going to ever get elected to high office.

King needed to build build enough support to repeal Jim Crow among Northern liberal whites to make it worthwhile for Johnson to walk away from the New Deal coalition with racist Southern whites. In effect, he had to convince the President that the gains to be made were worth sacrificing other goals that he also strongly believed in---such as his “war on poverty”. King succeeded, but when enraged Southern voters left the Democrats the Republican Party proceeded to vacuum up their support through racist, “dog whistle” campaigning and more subtle forms of Jim Crow based on voter suppression and gerrymandering. This is what’s called their “Southern Strategy” and it became the basis of the “Reagan revolution”.

Wallace developed a “third option” when he realized that he could retain power on a state level by pivoting away from the unpopular Civil Rights Act by “branding” himself as an independent overtly racist leader. The “Segregation Today, Segregation Tomorrow” speech that he gave after being elected Governor of Alabama was written by the leader of the state KKK and ensured that he would receive racist support until the end of his long and successful career as a state politician.

In effect, a battle was waged by two activist groupings: the NAACP versus the KKK. Each sought to “gain the ear” of elected politicians. King managed to get Johnson to make a huge political sacrifice in order to end the Jim Crow laws. That was because his groups had built a significant national coalition between Northern liberal whites and blacks. In contrast, the KKK had built a strong enough local coalition to convince Wallace that the only road to state power in Alabama came from appealing to racists.

Someone concerned about “right” and “wrong” might fixate on the fact that racism is a bad thing. Indeed it is. But successful politicians are almost by definition not concerned about right or wrong, instead they are concerned with the possible. Where morality comes into play is within the wider public arena that creates support for particular points of view.

It might seem odd to talk about the KKK as an activist organization pushing a moral agenda, but truth is the overwhelming majority of racists believe they are actually standing for something right and proper: the protection of the “white race” and “Western civilization”. It’s not really the job of a politician to choose which set of moral values are or are not “correct”. Instead, it’s her job to negotiate compromises between the groups holding these different points of view in a way that prevents society from descending into violence.

****
&&&&

I heard an expert on neo-fascism talking on a CBC podcast the other day. He talked about how important it is to have local news sources in every community so people can develop a personal relationship with journalists. That way, they can't so easily dismiss ideas outside of their "filter bubble" as just being "fake news". But the reason why local news has become so tenuous is because there's no functional funding mechanism for it. That's why I'm asking for money in each post. It's to get some money so I can pay for various things I need to do to keep this blog running. But just as importantly, it's to get people used to the idea that they need to pay for local news if they want it to exist. 

Luckily, it's easy to buy a subscription and the amount of money you need to give is trivial. If you can afford it, why not sign up through either Pay Pal or Patreon?

&&&&

The Climate Trials created a unified set of reference points and catalyzed a general concern many members of the body public felt about the Climate Emergency. The feeling was “Why is nothing being done about this clear and present danger to our civilization?” If you had polled politicians anonymously you probably would have found a similar concern among many---if not most---of the very leaders who held high office. The problem was they didn’t feel that they had enough support from the voters to take bold moves. And in the absence of being able to make sweeping policy decisions, they ended up being prone to accepting the “half-measures” and “necessary compromises” invariably offered up by lobbyists and bureaucrats who had spent their lives learning that no one ever lost their job because they were too cautious.

A more charitable---but ultimately more damning---way of looking at the situation is to borrow a term used in economics: opportunity cost. Whenever we make a choice to do something in one way, we really should consider what other options we are giving up by doing so. Unfortunately, politicians usually don’t have the luxury of considering opportunity costs. That’s because their lives are time poor. They have to ration what they read, who they talk to---even how much time they spend thinking. If their doors were ever really “open”, they’d never be able have time to do anything else but listen to people’s complaints. Every information source that they rely on has to be rationed and “dumbed-down” by “gate keepers” protecting them from information overload. This means they never hear anything that isn’t part of “conventional wisdom”. And if there is no “conventional wisdom” warning of the profound opportunity cost that comes with ignoring the Climate Emergency, elected officials are going to be the very last people to understand this point.

The Climate Trials changed what passes as conventional wisdom in society. This gave politicians the freedom to think about the consequences of inaction, simply because the issue finally became something that a large enough fraction people took seriously. In political science, this is usually described as being a case of the “Overton Window” expanding. And this allowed professional politicians the freedom to seriously consider an idea without suffering a catastrophic loss of support among voters.

&&&&

Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!

Deplatforming is not Censorship!

With the final---long, long, overdue---decision by both Facebook and Twitter to cut Donald Trump's ability to use their platforms I've heard a bit of the usual complaints about "censorship". At risk of repeating, I thought that I might devote an op-ed this week to explaining one more time the difference between "deplatforming" and "censorship". 

First off, let's discuss an "opening act" before we get to the main event. A US senator by the name of Josh Hawley has had a book deal with Simon and Schuster cancelled because he was the "guy on the inside" spreading the false narrative that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump while a howling mob attacked the building because they foolishly believed what people like him were saying.

This is being spun as an issue of free speech, but I think that it's extremely important to understand the difference between government attempts to limit speech and allowing publishers the right to decide what books they will or will not publish. 

The first issue is that of the difference between the "width" of government versus editorial authority. If a government chooses to censor it's citizenry, the issue isn't whether or not a specific press publishes something, but rather the ideas contained in the book. If Simon and Schuster decides to cancel it's contract with Hawley, that has no bearing at all on whether or not some other business will decide to publish it. If no one at all is interested, Hawley can just go out and publish it himself---there are lots of different ways to do that now. (For example, I use Smashwords and Lulu. And I'm thinking about expanding to audio books using Bandcamp.)  

In contrast, if Hawley really was suffering from censorship, it would be illegal to even share computer files or photocopies of his book with others. That's because the government has authority over an entire society, whereas all a publisher has control over is his or her own personal presses, servers, and, cheque book.  

&&&&

So there are profound differences between cancelling a book deal and government censorship. But there's also the notion that people are losing book deals because folks just don't like their ideas. How can that be right?

Much as I personally might wish it to be different, the fact is that publishing is just a business like selling shoes or hiring someone to pave your driveway. If a company pays an advance, organizes a publicity campaign, and, prints off a million copies to only sell about 100 books---they've lost money instead of making a profit. 

People won't buy an author's book if they don't like his ideas. That's because that is what they are buying when they buy a book. People also design different types of shoes (a different type of idea)---some get bought by lots of people, others end up being thrown out because no one wants to wear them. There are also different types of materials that you can use to pave your driveway, again some get bought and others don't. Books, shoes, asphalt---the same sort of market forces are at play.

Moreover, publishers aren't psychics. They can do research, but ultimately they don't really know if a book is or isn't going to make money. Like all businesses, people have to make decisions based on their "gut instincts". I strongly suspect that Hawley's book looked like a good idea when there was a chance of Trump getting elected to a second term, or at least keep some credibility with the Republican party. Unfortunately for Hawley, I would suspect that Simon and Schuster decided that the assault on Congress meant that Trump will eventually become totally disgraced and if so, Hawley's book would become yet another production run that ends up going straight to recycling. As a result, they cut their losses by cancelling the contract. 

There's another side to this thing. Publishing houses like Simon and Schuster are run by human beings. And as such, they tend to have "skin in the game". This means that there are times when their personal beliefs get involved in the decisions they make. It might very well be that the relevant executives are so outraged by the recent events in Washington they decided that they don't care how much money they could make off Hawley's book, they simply refuse to be involved in promoting his odious ideas. People make decisions like this all the time, and as a result of this latest fiasco, some very surprising statements have been made by people that I'd never have believed would get so personally involved. For example, consider this statement from the National Association of Manufacturers (traditionally an industry group that supports Republicans):

“Armed violent protestors who support the baseless claim by outgoing president Trump that he somehow won an election that he overwhelmingly lost have stormed the U.S. Capitol today, attacking police officers and first responders, because Trump refused to accept defeat in a free and fair election. Throughout this whole disgusting episode, Trump has been cheered on by members of his own party, adding fuel to the distrust that has enflamed violent anger. This is not law and order. This is chaos. It is mob rule. It is dangerous. This is sedition and should be treated as such. The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power, and any elected leader defending him is violating their oath to the Constitution and rejecting democracy in favor of anarchy. Anyone indulging conspiracy theories to raise campaign dollars is complicit. Vice President Pence, who was evacuated from the Capitol, should seriously consider working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to preserve democracy."

I will draw reader's attention to one particular sentence in the above excerpt from a press release: "Anyone indulging conspiracy theories to raise campaign dollars is complicit." I haven't read Hawley's manuscript, so I don't know what's in it, but if the editors have decided that it does spread "conspiracy theories" they have every right to sever their contract in order to avoid being "enablers" who add "fuel to the distrust that has enflamed violent anger".

&&&&

Wow, this one was hard to write. I've been listening to podcasts, reading papers, and, putting a lot of time into just thinking on this issue for over a month. Also some of the details that I found were hard to dig up. I got a crumb of the academic research on deplatforming from listening to a series of extremely long podcasts (about a dozen 2 or 3 hour long episodes) on conspiracy theories. With this in hand it took several hours to dig up that article on what happened when Britain First was kicked off Youtube.  

This is difficult work. So if you can afford it, why not send me some money? It's easy to buy a subscription on Pay Pal and Patreon.

&&&&

When we move from book publishing to social media, things get a little more complex. I say that because social media has something of the look and feel of a utility---like a telephone system---instead of publishing. If Twitter and Facebook are more like the phone system than Simon and Schuster, then maybe kicking Trump off of them is sorta like cancelling phone service because you don't like what he says to the people he calls.

The difference comes down to the fact that each house only has one or two sets of communication wires going into it (phone plus cable). It would make no sense at all for any business to attempt to add another one because it would cost a fortune. This makes telephone service a monopoly, and as such kicking someone off it really does seem like something awful.

But those wires are increasingly used more for access to the Web than to call your sister or watch Fox News. This means that the legacy phone (and cable) companies have a practical monopoly over Internet Service Provision because they inherited the wired infrastructure from a previous business model.

As a result, the government (at least in Canada) has declared the Internet Service Provider business a "regulated monopoly", which means that it controls price increases and has forced the phone and cable companies to sell bandwidth at a "reasonable price" to other Internet Service Providers---like Teksavvy. If they didn't, Bell and Rogers would inevitably charge even more money for even worse service than they already do. This state of affairs was relatively easy to do, simply because phone and cable services were already regulated monopolies before the World Wide Web was anything more than a gleam in the eye of a European engineer.

The question arises, therefore, "Should the government force social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc, to follow regulations just like Bell and Rogers (in Canada)?" This could be a two-edged sword. Conservatives could put in regulations based on an absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech that would forbid companies from banning people because they lie and support violence against minorities. But by the same token, Liberals could put in rules that forbid things like hate speech, fake news, and, misleading advertising. 

But the assumption that the above is based upon is that there are no practical alternatives to the biggest social media companies---which simply isn't true. There are other, smaller social media companies. Personally, I've tried to use MeWe, Pinterest, and, at one time had an account in Myspace (which is still going after all these years!). I looked at a bunch of others too, but now only use the following:

• Facebook
• Youtube
• Instagram
• Reddit
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Quora
  

And, to be honest, I really only use them mostly to do two things: market the Back-Grounder, and, to help come up with ideas for this blog.  

The fact of the matter is that there are already a large number of already existing social media alternatives. If neo-Fascists, anti-maskers, white nationalists, etc, get pushed off one of them, it's not that hard to find another which is more friendly to nasty, conspiratorial ideas, like:

• Parler (more about it later)
• 4-Chan
• 8-Chan
• Gab
  

Beyond that, there are a fair number of others that I'd never heard of before I started researching this article. Here's a few with links:

• Mastodon
• Care2 
• Ello 
• Plurk 
• Tumblr  
  

Just yesterday it was announced that the alternative social media platform that has been embraced by neo-fascists and conspiracy theorists, Parler, had been effectively shut down by Apple and Google---who dropped the app for it from their stores, and, Amazon, which stopped hosting the system on their cloud service. 

The wide variety of social media firms that already exist mean that there is nothing like a practical monopoly existing on social media---if you get tossed from one you can always go to another. And the wide number of different systems tells me that if all of them refuse to let you on them, people always have the option of making one of their own. 

What that means to me is that the reason people like Trump and his henchmen are complaining is that they are being denied access to the large audience that is on the big systems. Conversely, it means that the people running these systems have a precious resource that they---as business people---want to preserve and protect: the customer base. If the social media giants allow their businesses to be tainted as being "hotbeds" of goofy racist, conspiracy-laden nonsense they will lose credibility and eventually their users will migrate to some other platform that uses better judgment about what they allow to be broadcast on their system. (Even worse, if they don't pull their socks up, they might end up with the government regulating their content.)

Really, it's exactly the same thing as when a venue---like a church or a concert hall---decides whether or not to allow a group like the Nazis to rent their space. The overwhelming majority won't do it because they realize that they could damage their brands. That's why most of the "deplatforming" controversies have raged around university lecture halls---because campuses are hotbeds of free speech absolutism. Often they have rules that say that any student group (no matter how small or unrepresentative) has a right to bring in any outside speaker to use a subsidized hall for a talk.

&&&& 

What is the point of all this?

Well, as the entire world could see when thousands of nutcases stormed Congress, web-based lies actually do have consequences. And this might not---by a large margin---be the worst thing that can happen. We've already seen genocide against Muslims being spread by Facebook in Burma. And anti-vaxxer propaganda seems to be on the way to sabotaging vaccination efforts aimed at shutting down the Covid-19 pandemic.

And from what I've found out while researching this article, the most effective tool we have to prevent recruitment of "new believers" and to stop organizing "hard cores" into violence is to deplatform the people spreading the lies. 

In support of this thesis, I'd draw people's attention to an interesting academic article titled Following the Whack-a-Mole: Britain First’s Visual Strategy from Facebook to Gab, by Lella Nouri, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Amy-Louise Watkin, and, published by the Royal United Services Institute (a UK think tank) and Swansea University.

Britain First is a nasty piece of work that found itself purged from both Facebook and Twitter because of the sorts of things it said on line. It then migrated to Gab, which didn't really care what it and it's members posted. The naive might be tempted to say "then what good was served by deplatforming the group on Facebook and Twitter?"

The difference came down to the fact that there are orders of magnitude more people on Facebook than there are on Gab. This dramatically reduces the ability of the group to recruit new members and spread their messages. In support of this thesis, I'd draw readers attention to the following two tables.

I've hi-lighted the most relevant figures that show the tremendous change between the amount of connection with the public that Britain First used to have through Facebook. It had over 100 times as many comments and reactions/up-votes on Facebook than Gab. And it had more than 300 times more shares/reposts. This has a tremendous impact on the ability of the group to recruit more new members and share it's poisonous ideas with the wider world. 

It is true that the content of what gets published on Gab is more poisonous than what used to be published on Facebook. As the authors of the paper point out, it is important for intelligence services to keep an eye on what goes on in these marginal social media sites because they can still be very important both for radicalizing sympathizers and planning campaigns of violence. But this happens anyway even if mainstream platforms like Facebook are still being used. Deplatforming stops the pipeline of new sympathizers and recruits into the organization---and the migration of "new blood" onto Gab for even further radicalization.  

&&&&

I did some research and it appears that the first person to opine about the different velocity of truth versus lies was Jonathan Swift, who wrote “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” Since he lived in the 18th century, it just goes to show that the issues we are facing have been around a long time. And it is not just a trivial witticism, but rather a finger pointing at a tremendously important moon. As I see it, there are two key issues involved here.

Telling a lie is a lot less work than digging up the information needed to refute it. What makes the job of refuting them far, far more difficult is the fact that different people process information in very different ways. A significant fraction of the public will get emotionally-engaged with a plausible lie and will fight against any attempt to show them evidence that goes against it. In these cases experts suggest that all you can do is continue to offer friendship, subtly plant the occasional seed of cognitive dissonance, and, hope that the person will eventually figure things out for themself.

In order to understand my next point, I think it is useful to take all of this out of the theoretical and put it back into the practical. Last night the Youtube AI decided that I might want to listen to some Catholic Fascist nonsense, so this program showed up on my feed. And, halfway through, the narrator says that a business that the show uses to manage it's social media---Buffer---had cancelled their contract and that the company that they replaced it with did the same thing the same day they signed onto it. So it can be said that John-Henry Westen and Lifesitenews are being "deplatformed"---but only in a very small way.

 

 

I'm not going to go through this cavalcade of non-sequitors to point out all the errors in reasoning that John-Henry Westen makes in the above video clip. But the questions I found myself asking after I saw it the first time were:

• Does he actually believe what he is saying?
• Does he know how bogus it is, but is so upset about abortion that he believes "the ends justify the means"?
• Is he simply a grifter who is manipulating the rubes to gain money/power off them? 

Sadly, I'll never really know. That's because the opportunities that we are given in life to really, truly, get to have an honest conversation with another human being are really, really, limited. To a large extent this is simply because of practical considerations---most people's lives are too busy to really spend a lot of time talking through a complex issue with another person. Compounding this problem is the fact that we all use language in subtly different ways, which means that it takes long period of negotiation to really understand what a person means if we are talking about a difficult subject. Moreover, a lot of us (if not everyone) brings with them strong inhibitions that make it exceptionally hard to even say certain things.

Lies have none of these problems. A lie can be changed so it is short, snappy, and, easily remembered. It can be carefully pruned in order to remove all the complexities that might need explanation. But the truth is usually a gnarled, hard-to-explain, nest of complexities. It might be the case that many people "can't handle the truth", but I suspect that just as often people just don't have the time.  

For these reasons lies are a lot like cancer or the Corona virus---an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. And if that ounce is deplatforming a liar off social media it can prevent the necessity of spending a ton of time trying to convince a "true believer" that they've been had.

&&&&

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency needs to be dealt with.