Occupy "The Scream"

The huge turnouts for Occupy May Day seem to have stunned the corporate media, which had assumed the movement was dead because they had stopped paying attention to it. Now, they are trying to marginalize OWS even further by calling the day's events a one-off piece of national street theater. Nothing to see here, move along, let's get back to the Rombama Death Match and the Osama Assassination retrospective.

Well, not so fast! Occupy is alive and well and living in the rarefied world of obscenely overpriced art and the obscenely wealthy oligarchs who have nothing else to do with their money than invest it in priceless masterworks, only to hide them away from public view. Today is "Shut Down Sotheby's" Day in New York City to protest against the auction of one of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" paintings. (he painted more than one version.) From the OWS website:




Tonight, at an exclusive 7pm auction, Sotheby's is expected to sell Edvard Munch's iconic painting "The Scream" for $80 million dollars*. Outside, Occupy and labor allies will protest the Upper East Side art auction house in solidarity with 43 locked-out art handlers who have been replaced by Sotheby's with low wage temporary workers with no benefits.
Catering exclusively to the mega-rich (by providing a service that makes them richer and more exclusive,) Sotheby's is perhaps the most quintessentially 1% institution there is. Founded before the industrial era, it was the first company ever listed on the NY Stock Exchange, and today (despite the current "recession") is more profitable than at any other time in its 260-year history. Meanwhile, the Sotheby's workers who make those profits possible are given the shaft. Enough is enough. The 99% will not stand silent as union-busting companies like Sotheby's wage class war against us.
Making it even more interesting is the fact that Shrillionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg's girlfriend, former NY Banking Commissioner Diana Taylor, is on the board of Sotheby's. She has actually threatened to quit should Sotheby's CEO accede to the demands of the shut-out Teamsters. "MiDi" has got to be a match made in heaven, given Bloomberg's own disdain for the working class and poor. With a net worth of almost $20 billion, he is adamantly against raising the minimum wage, and insists that food stamp applicants in his fair city get fingerprinted lest they steal crumbs from the maws of the plutocrats. And when it comes to the unemployed and underemployed Occupiers, he is Marie Antoinette in smirky billionaire drag: instead of eating cake, says Hizzoner, they should just go out and become entrepreneurs.

You can see video here of locked-out Sotheby's workers asking Diana Taylor to stand up for them and their families. Her response has all the passion of a bored, pre-guillotine Louis XVI in drag.

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Odd Couples, Then and Now 

And it's not just the Teamsters giving Diana Taylor some righteous indignation. Investors are planning to demand that she and others resign from the Board at the annual shareholder meeting on May 8, for "gross mismanagement" in wasting money to punish middle class workers, and also for the mishandling of James Murdoch's embarrassing position on the Sotheby's board. The auction company has had its share of scandals over the years, and if there's one thing fabulously wealthy oligarchs don't want now, it's even more bad press and class resentment. This is one thin-skinned crowd. They have not had an equal opportunity to develop life's little calluses.

Even the Ivy League has had it with Taylor and her cadre of plutocrats. Dartmouth students have teamed up with the Teamsters, and are demanding their own college board of trustees cut all ties with the auction house, given its blatant class warfare against working families:




Despite grossing over $700 million in 2010, Sotheby's hired the notorious union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis to attack its workers. More than seven months ago, Sotheby's locked the art handlers out of their jobs, depriving them of their paychecks. On Jan. 1, the art handlers and their families were stripped of their health care coverage. Sotheby's continues to demand that all union positions be phased out and replaced with low wage non-union temporary positions with no benefits.
"Taylor's open hostility to the bargaining process, and refusal to end this awful lockout is an affront to my College's values," said Janet Kim, a Dartmouth junior who participated in Saturday's action. "Dartmouth has always been committed to being a socially responsible institution, but Taylor's actions totally fly in the face of that."
Sotheby's reckless behavior has harmed its shareholders. In a recent filing with financial regulators, the auction house disclosed that it had spent $2.4 million in "extra expenses" associated with the first three months of the lockout. (The entire cost of the art handler's contract is $3.2 million.) The lockout has also caused several organizations, including a group affiliated with Oberlin College, to cancel events originally scheduled to be held at Sotheby's.

"Diana Taylor's refusal to publicly use her influence to try to end this lockout not only speaks volumes about how she feels about America's working families, but it should raise serious questions about her stewardship as a board member," said Jason Ide, President of Teamsters Local 814, the union that represents the workers.
I guess it is also no coincidence that Diana Taylor lounges on the board of Brookfield Properties, the quasi-owners of Zuccotti Park, original camp of the Occupy movement. This is another one of those neo-liberal public private partnerships in which taxpayers foot the bills of the ruling class.

Of course, the ultimate irony is that Sotheby's will profit mightily from the sale of "The Scream", an iconic painting that captured the angst and despair and outrage of people buffeted by a cruel authoritarian system over which they have no control.

Munch and other painters in the Expressionist movement wanted to express a new internal, psychological form of reality. Art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson says the image touches on something primitive within all of us, because we were all once young and helpless like the hairless creature in the picture, wordless and afraid. She says Munch managed to convey something all human beings have felt at some time: "I am overwhelmed. I am helpless. There is nothing I can do and when I try to convey it, in some way, whether I am screaming or expressing some of what nature is screaming at me, other people ignore it."

Why would some master of the universe even want to own this painting, given that it symbolizes the pain of the downtrodden?  Hmm.... Sadism. Control. Evokes fond memories of crashing an entire economy and the hopes and dreams of  an entire generation. Or, alternately: wealthy new owner identifies with the painting because it symbolizes the fact that he is only a multimillionaire and not yet a member of the Forbes 400. It is so unfair that the 400 richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom 160 million combined. It's enough to make one Scream.

Update: The Scream has sold for a record-breaking $120 million, the highest ever price paid for a work of art at auction. The bid was done privately, by telephone. No word on the identity of the new owner, who may be in the Forbes 400, after all.  

We Are So Fracked

A couple of weeks ago, in my "Hey, Barack! You Don't Know Frack" post, I wrote about how the Business Roundtable mega-lobby weaseled its way into the corporation-friendly Oval Office and suggested the fracking industry could frackin' regulate itself. And how the White House started a fracking task force to oversee fracking. And how it was probably just another smokescreen to make us rubes believe the government is operating in the public interest.  

Well, it turns out to be even worse than I thought. According to a report today in Bloomberg, the Obama Administration is considering allowing Big Frack to wait to disclose the cancer-causing chemicals it uses to propel gazillions of gallons of water to blast open the ground until AFTER it has already drilled the wells. And to disclose them on its own self-serving website, called FracFocus. If this is true, we are talking about political malpractice rising to the level of criminal negligence or worse.

You may recall what I wrote about FracFocus last time. When you visit the site to get information about gas drilling in your area, you will see a tiny disclaimer that the information on the individual wells may not be up to date. By as much as a year. Which means it's probably way more than a year. And that you should trust Big Frack telling you their chemicals are safe about as much as you trust BP telling you the oil magically disappeared and their chemical dispersants made deformed Gulf marine life taste better.

In related news,  EPA inspector Al Armandirez was fired by the Obama Administration this week after Koch Brothers shill Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) dug up an old video showing him making a speech about "crucifying" fracking polluters to set an example for other polluters. Armandirez, who once said that fracking one Texas gas well caused more pollution than all the regional cars and trucks combined, had used somewhat intemperate language which the sensitive frackers decided was anti-religion. And the White House naturally agreed, and canned him.  It's Shirley Sherrod all over again. Andrew Breitbart may be dead, but he apparently cloned himself well in advance of the blessed event. 

Yeah. We are so, so fracked.

May Day

Workers, students, jobless people, retirees of the world, unite!

The Haymarket Memorial, Chicago

It's May, it's May, the lusty month of May! And you know and I know there is no congenial spot like dear old Camelot any more in the United Amerikan States of the Homeland. (And I am not talking about the Kennedy mythos, either. Maybe the pre-Columbian era). Raining where I am, but we definitely need it after that dry, hot, climate change-controlled April we had. Whoever heard of brush fires in April?


If you can't make it to a protest, or if it's just not your cup of tea, be part of the striking hoi polloi and just don't buy anything today. That particular act is no big problem for me, since I rarely buy anything anyway. No banking, no commerce, no commenting on presidential politics in the threads of the corporate New York Times. No watching commercial TV, including cable. I chose today to cancel Netflix. For video addicts, here's a link to a whole bunch of Occupy livestreams, worldwide. The whole idea is for the 99% to either march in the streets, or disappear from money-grubbing One Percent World altogether. Peacefully resist.


Update: Firedoglake's Kevin Gosztola has an excellent liveblog on the May Day Occupy activities. He writes that corporate media outlets are focusing heavily on the expected "violence" at the various protests. Damage to property is feared by the Powers that Be. Meanwhile, I just got another annoying email from Obama which includes a video of his speech last year announcing the Osama assassination. When the government kills somebody, it's justice. When ordinary people peacefully protest, it's time for a major crackdown.


Another Update: To celebrate May Day and mark the anniversary of the Haymarket Massacre and its ensuing entrapment scandal, the FBI arrested five self-proclaimed "anarchists" for attempting to blow up a low-traffic Cleveland bridge spanning national parkland, using government-issued dud bombs. (The quintet had apparently initially just conspired to destroy corporate signage,) To prove that the feds are equal-opportunity entrappers, U.S. Attorney Steve Dettelbach of the Southern District of Ohio proclaimed: "The threat we face is a diverse one and terrorists can come from many hues and many homelands."


Yeah... nice to know those brown Muslim terr'ists caught a break today and the guvmint concentrated on homelandian white anarchist hippies for a change.

His Icy Hotness

If you have been paying any attention to corporate media political coverage the past couple of days, you might think you were trapped in a seventh grade time warp. This is the narrative: Obama is the cool kid, and Romney is the nerd. Obama is the slow-jamming killah  and Romney the bumbling rich snob who has probably never even killed a fly. (Remember -- Obama did once kill a fly on national TV!). It's Ferris Bueller vs. Napoleon Dynamite. It's the junior high school election as covered by the junior high school newspaper. It's surface, it's shallow, and it's stultifying.

The president is being criticized for his unseemly bin Laden chest-thumping by the GOP, who used to have the market cornered on warrior presidents who never went to war themselves, but made a big show of landing on aircraft carriers and crowing "Mission Accomplished." Barack's bellicosity is so much more refined than Bush's, after all. He does not mumble and he doesn't strut (much) and he doesn't smirk. He slow-jams the Osama Bump, he kills at the White House Correspondents Dinner, he oozes charm and drives dorky Karl Rove nuts. You can practically hear the Turd Blossom whine in the latest SuperPac ad criticizing Barry for being cool: "It's not fair that you're the popular kid, and Mitt's the loser! Waaaaah."  

It's hard to tell which came first: the media complicity chicken or the government propaganda egg. Seemingly on cue, cable outlets and TV networks and major newspapers have all come out with the same story.  Even though tomorrow is International Workers' Day, what we are really supposed to celebrate is the first anniversary of the Death of bin Laden. Obama will give NBC an exclusive and "unprecedented" interview in the Situation Room on how it all went down. He'll coyly defend keeping the death pics secret even as he dishes on the gory details. He may even boast once again on those targeted drone killings that officially don't exist. The New York Times ran a glowing op-ed on "The Warrior President" which had Glenn Greenwald in fits. (Me too. It portrayed Obama as a tough guy who can both dance and operate a drone joy stick by proxy. Take that, Norman Mailer!). 

The Nation goes so far as to point out that the President is even deliberately starting to act black just to drive Mitt nuts:

 .... he's rubbing their faces in it, just like he did when he sympathized with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for getting arrested in his own home. And that gleams like troll gold to Republican strategists.

Obama has dared to be a cool black man more often lately. First, in January, he sang, “I—I’m so in love with you” at a fundraiser at the Apollo Theater, with Al Green in the audience, a totally engaging moment the Rove ad doesn’t fail to sneer at. (As Maureen Dowd wrote, “For eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected.”) Then, for a Black History Month celebration in the White House, Obama sang a few bars of “Sweet Home Chicago” with B.B. King, once again looking terrifically comfortable in his own (black) skin.

It's the youth vote, stupid! Maybe if the president portrays himself as a celebrity and knocks a few bucks off their crushing college debt, they'll get all fired up and head to polls this fall instead of Occupying. Personally, I give young people more credit. For one thing, you have to come equpped with a certain propensity for being sucked into a personality cult. For another thing, it's pretty insulting to be pandered to when you're unemployed and in hock to big banks up to your ears, only to be cajoled by a jive politician "Stupid youth, vote!"

Obama actually won the "Marketer of the Year" award from Ad Week after the 2008 campaign. His political machine and the access-hungry corporate media establishment are partnering up and rebranding his brand. New Obama has a spine of sub-zero titanium. He kills terrorists with frigid resolve. He slow-jams, but in a dignified adult way.  Even though he pretends not to be as sexy, that graying hair and dulcet voice make everybody hot. He is cool enough that he can still send shivers up Chris Matthews' leg. He is so cool that he makes the Republicans sweat. He is the personification of the Icy Hot Pain Relieving Patch! You've all seen that commercial:

Barack Obama Icy Hot is a typical politician topical pain reliever that gets ICY to dull the brain pain, then gets HOT to relax it away. He It temporarily relieves major angst minor pain associated with unemployment, lack of insurance, being spied on, foreclosure arthritis, tendonitis, and muscle strains and sprains.

Obama Icy Hot speeches formulations include Wall Street-vetted FDA permitted crumbs active ingredients to relieve minor pain. Obama Icy Hot products contain platitudes menthol or a combination of slow jams menthol and after-dinner jokes methyl salicylate.

These ingredients create cooling and warming sensations that divert attention from the actual pain and help block the pain signals being sent to the brain.

Today in Chutzpah: Bank of America Issues Human Rights Credit Card

Just when you thought they couldn't get any more brazen....


If you sign up for a usurious credit card from foreclosure fraudster, too-big-to-exist, bailed out corporate welfare leech Bank of America, they will donate 25 whole cents out of every hundred bucks you borrow to the LGBT lobby, a/k/a "The Human Rights Campaign."


In other words, they will make a profit of about a thousand percent off the APR backs of liberal do-gooders who still have enough credit to qualify for this scam. Has the Human Rights Campaign no shame for partnering with a global financial crime cabal responsible for creating human misery on a scale not seen since the Spanish Inquisition? This is the same bank, remember, that tried and failed to charge customers $5 for using their own debit cards, so we definitely know the financiers in this partnership have no shame. It is a moral characteristic absent in sociopaths. If corporations are people, then BofA is a person with an incurable personality disorder.


And what about this Human Rights Campaign? (not to be confused with Human Rights Watch, which I wrote about yesterday) According to Wikipedia, it is the largest LGBT advocacy and political lobbying group in the United States. It supports the re-election of, among others, Barack Obama (who is still "evolving" on gay marriage and recently passed on signing an executive order forbidding workplace discrimination against gays by government contractors.)


HRC came under hefty criticism for making a deal with President George W. Bush during his campaign to privatize Social Security: the lobby agreed to go along with his scheme in exchange for same-sex partners becoming eligible for benefits.  HRC was also slammed for giving high corporate marks to tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds a few years ago. As you may recall from yesterday's post, the R.J. Reynolds family has also been very, very generous over the years to the Democratic Party and Obama.


And, as you probably already guessed, Bank of America itself has been a big contributor to the campaign coffers of Barack Obama. As much as the corporate media try to claim that newly-populist Barry has been rejected this cycle by Wall Street, he is still raking in the banking cash. Ninety-one individual employees of BoA have already given him almost $60,000 this year alone, according to Open Secrets. And when the president speaks at the Democratic National Convention in an anti-union state this September, the venue will be Bank of America Stadium. So, folks, be sure to get your BofA Human Rights credit card today and use it to get cash back in hotels and restaurants and bars, and for balloons and bumper stickers and escort services campaign bling in Charlotte! Those two bits going to Gay Rights for every hundred bucks you spend will surely find their way into the pocket of our amazing evolving president. It's the endless cycle of neoliberal public-private partnerships. The only ones left out of the money loop are the taxpayers who foot the bill.


If the thought of this North Carolina orgy of crony capitalism is bumming you out, there will be alternate events, including a "March on Wall Street South" to coincide with the Democratic Con. Here's the website where you can get information on attending. You can even make a non-BofA credit card donation to help secure parade permits and other bureaucratic nonsense already being put in place to stifle dissent.


And don't forget May Day this Tuesday. If you are unable to attend a protest, don't have a job to call in sick to, don't have money not to spend, don't have a TV to turn off to avoid the propaganda, more ideas can be found here.


The solidarity promises to be severe. No credit cards are required.

Don't Leave Home Without It

Obama of Sunnybrook Farm

I don't know which is worse: the fact that the Obama Administration has scrapped protections for child farm workers, or the fact that this craven act has engendered so little outrage.

Human Rights Watch, though, has just issued a scathing report on the Labor Department's abandonment of a policy that would have protected minors from dangerous working conditions on farms, bluntly stating that our leaders are condemning vulnerable children to maiming and death. Conventional corporate media spin has it that the White House was the victim of a right wing disinformation campaign by Sen. John Thune and others, accusing it of waging a war against family farms, the American work ethic, moms and apple pie. They had no choice but to crumble! However, the proposed regulations would only have applied to farm employees under the age of 16 -- not to the children of farmers. Family farms, to the extent that they have survived predation by Agribusiness, would have been exempt. Obama never even fought back.

Yet again, this Administration has "caved" to Republican and corporate pressure because it does not want to be maligned as anti-family farm, anti-Heartland. However, what nobody is talking about (yet) is that the proposed rules would have adversely affected big tobacco farms in those all-important swing states of North Carolina and Virginia. Tobacco farmers employ migrant workers, and migrant workers bring along the kids to help out and make more money. They get paid by the bushel, and do not earn a regular salary. Among the new rules the Labor Dept. had been due to enforce was a provision prohibiting minors from exposure to toxic tobacco plants and the equally toxic pesticides used to protect them. Barring children from the harvest would have cut into the bottom line of R.J. Reynolds. Barring children from de facto slavery might have evoked the wrath of the powerful tobacco lobby. Protecting children from nicotine poisoning in the fields might have spawned a whole slew of anti-Obama SuperPac ads in Virginia and North Carolina -- two states crucial to his re-election. 

Although the president has been a public critic of Big Tobacco (his Justice Dept. fought back against cigarette makers' fight to keep warning labels and graphics off the packages) he also has had no qualms accepting money from donors enriched by the cancer-causing industry. The late Smith Bagley, heir to the R.J. Reynolds fortune, was a major Democratic fund-raiser and Obama bundler. Obama appointed his equally generous widow, Elizabeth, to a "global ambassadorship" at the State Department. She had been ambassador to Portugal during the Clinton Administration.

Of course, this big money/political rationale for throwing migrant farmworkers' children under the bus is pure conjecture on my part. I gave up trying to delve into the presidential psyche a long time ago. Who really cares what his reasons are, when the results of his reasoning are what really count. And who can be surprised by this latest deregulatory action from an administration that has already condemned thousands of asthmatic children to suffering and death by punting on smog regulations last year?

That may sound harsh, but it is no harsher than this embrace of Dickension child labor abuses by a Democratic administration. As Zama Coursen-Neff, HRW's deputy director of children's rights puts it in her report:  

The US Labor Department has caved in to Big Agriculture and their allies in Congress to abandon the most vulnerable working children in America. Instead of protecting child farmworkers, the Labor Department will look the other way when children get crushed, suffocated, and poisoned on the job.

(snip)

Agriculture is the most dangerous work open to children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Children risk pesticide poisoning, serious injury, and heat illness. In 2010, the latest figures available, 16 children under age 16 were fatally injured at work in the US; 12 of them worked on farms. Thousands more are injured each year.

In interviews with Human Rights Watch, child farmworkers have described working with heavy machinery, including tractors; falling from ladders; exposure to pesticides and experiencing symptoms consistent with pesticide poisoning; working in extreme heat to the point of dehydration; and “topping” and harvesting tobacco, risking nicotine poisoning, known as green tobacco sickness.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the US Department of Labor bears responsibility for determining what jobs are particularly hazardous, and thus off limits, for children under age 16 working on farms that are not owned or operated by their parents. Current rules, known as “hazardous orders,” which were drafted decades ago, prohibit operating certain equipment, working in areas with certain animals, working from a ladder at a height of over 20 feet, and applying the most toxic agricultural chemicals.

According to OSHA, most farm accidents happen to people over 65 and under 16. Three hundred children are killed on American farms every year. (Most child deaths are not related to work, per se; the OSHA numbers reflect all accidental deaths on farms. These might include household accidents, animal mishaps, motor vehicle accidents.) Adolescents already have a false sense of invincibility and usually don't have the maturity to operate heavy machinery safely. Tractor overturns are the most common farm accident, accounting for 44% of all fatalities. Most farms are located far from emergency medical facilities and ambulances usually take a long time to arrive. They are often too late.  

In case you were wondering what the Obama Administration has to say for itself -- well, not very much. The president can't even take his usual easy way out and blame Congress. Here is the official spin:

"The Obama administration is firmly committed to promoting family farmers and respecting the rural way of life, especially the role that parents and other family members play in passing those traditions down through the generations," the Labor Department said in a statement announcing the withdrawal of the rule.

"The Obama administration is also deeply committed to listening and responding to what Americans across the country have to say about proposed rules and regulations."

(Hint: the day before the decision, Sarah Palin complained on Facebook that President Obama was not pro- working family values and family entrepreneurial togetherness. Enter damage control, exit rules against damaging children.)

The Happy-Talk Bullshit

The Grim Reality (from the film La Cosecha (The Harvest)

Down on the Factory Farm

By Neil Gillespie
Cross-posted from The Justice Network

Many people are uninformed about farm animals, slaughterhouses, factory farms, industrial animal agriculture, and the normalization of violence accepted to put dinner on the table. Videos go a long way in understanding the killing of animals for human use, like those from Paul McCartney, Dr. Temple Grandin, bloggers, animal welfare organizations and filmmakers.

The book Eternal Treblinka, and others, describe the horrible suffering animals endure everyday in industrial factory farms. As Mark Bittman wrote in "The Human Cost of Animal Suffering" in the New York Times, "…once we accept that farm animals are capable of suffering (80 percent of Americans believe this to be true), we might well wonder what they’ve done to deserve such punishment."

Bittman interviewed Timothy Pachirat, author of "Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight". Pachirat worked five months in an Omaha slaughterhouse. Pachirat "took the job not as an animal rights activist but as a doctoral candidate in political science seeking to understand the normalization of violence."

Bittman wrote "The most publicized stories about industrial agriculture represent the exceptions that prove the rule: the uncommon torture of animals by perverse individuals in rogue operations. But torture is inherent in the routine treatment of animals as widgets, and the system itself is perverse. What makes "Every Twelve Seconds" different from (for example) a Mercy for Animals exposé is, says Pachirat, "that the day-in and day-out experience produces invisibility. Industrialized agriculture perpetuates concealment at every level of the process, and rather than focusing on the shocking examples we should be focusing on the system itself."

A video by Dr. Grandin discusses humane methods of animal dispatch. A video by Dax Jorgenson shows the humane butchering of a live hog from killing the animal to completion. Another video by Terrence Malachy shows the utterly inhumane killing of a hog. This is hard to watch, and the authorities should investigate this outrageous torture of an innocent animal.

There are alternatives to the normalization of violence accepted to put dinner on the table. The first step is this admission: The normalization of violence toward farm animals is unacceptable in a civilized society. Next, humane methods of animal farming and animal killing must be employed. For others, vegetarianism or veganism is the way to stop the normalization of violence toward farm animals.

David Aman of Krewe De Food made this point on the KDF Chicken Killing Demonstration blog post:

"Everyone who eats meat should participate periodically in its killing. If you're not a vegetarian then do yourself a favor and eat something that you kill. There would be a lot less meat consumption if us omnivores were a little more attached to the killing portion of our meat consumption. The industrialization of our food is doing something to our subconscious; can't say exactly how it has and will effect us but it can't be good.."

As John Cassidy said on the KDF "How to kill a chicken" video, "It's not fun... but it's how life goes on without Walmarts."

Mark Bittman described a similar reaction: "Pachirat says he has changed as a result of his experience, becoming increasingly interested in what he calls "distancing and concealment." He now intends to work on those issues as they relate to imprisonment, war, torture, deployment of drones and other sophisticated weaponry that allow impersonal killing. And it’s because these connections make so much sense that we should look more carefully at how we raise and kill animals."

Could the normalization of violence toward farm animals explain other undesirable aspects of our society, like torture, perpetual war, and the highest incarceration rate in the world? Is it any coincidence that corporations are also involved with perpetual war, incarceration, and industrial factory farms?

My conversion to vegetarianism began during a hunger strike in January 2012, followed by watching videos like Earthlings and Mercy for Animals that show the horrible violence farm animals suffer. Subsequently my desire to eat animals diminished.

Killing sentient beings like farm animals should not be taken lightly. Alexia Allen of Hawthorn Farm shows the respectful harvest of a chicken in her video. Farm Sanctuary has a petition to President Obama, End factory farming!, urging reforms to our food system recommended by the National Conference to End Factory Farming.

In this 2012 presidential election year we should be discussing this important issue, the normalization of violence toward farm animals. This issue may have wider implications for all of us.