LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

Cultivated-Meat Nationalism

October 15, 2024

Photograph Source: World Economic Forum – CC BY 3.0

Eleven Republican members of Congress recently sent a letter to the director of national intelligence and the USDA’s director of homeland security, expressing their concern China was pulling away from the United States in the field of biotechnology, specifically as it relates to cultivated meat. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from animal cells, without slaughter.

“We request that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the USDA Office of Homeland Security coordinate to conduct a focused analysis on the potential implications of China’s advancements in innovative protein technologies,” the letter said. “We seek your recommendations on strategic measures the United States should consider to ensure continued leadership and resilience in this critical sector.”

This represents a marked shift from prior Republican engagement with the field of cellular agriculture. Over the past year, a handful of Republican-controlled states have preemptively banned the new protein, while a number of others are considering similar measures. Meanwhile, even some conservative Democrats, like Senator John Fetterman, have expressed support for such bans.

I’m an advocate for a massive increase in public funding for cultivated-meat research. My prime motivation is I see the technology as the most promising means of reducing animal suffering and premature death. That said, I frequently employ a variety of other arguments to advance this policy goal. These include highlighting the potential environmental and public health benefits of cultivated meat.

At times, I’ve tried to use nationalist anxiety to garner support for the technology. For instance, I’ve written letters to newspapers in which I discussed China including cultivated meat in its five-year plan, and worried aloud about the United States being left behind. As an internationalist, I always feel guilty about this. Increasing the saliency of nationalism is bad in a host of ways.

Perhaps most obviously, it increases the risk of war. Military conflict is terrible for humans, and, as an animal advocate, I believe it’s terrible for our fellow creatures. I suppose you could make a contrarian, misanthropic case that in destroying human life and infrastructure, the world might improve for animals, but I don’t think that’s actually true and wouldn’t support it if it was.

That said, I think activists have to approach the world as it is, not as they want it to be. Nationalism remains a source of motivation for many. Further, I’m aware much technological advancement has been inspired by nationalist anxiety. The Space Race is an excellent example of this. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union competed to achieve space-flight superiority.

Similarly, when it comes to social progress, some academics believe the struggle for African-American civil rights during roughly the same period was as successful as it was in part because the Soviet Union was using the existence of America’s Jim-Crow system in propaganda against the United States. Our government acquiesced to a greater degree than it might have, if not for Cold War.

All of which is to say, I’m not sure how I feel about using nationalist anxiety to advance cellular agriculture. I imagine there’s a way to do it that’s relatively benign and I’d like to think that’s what I’ve done. I know all political strategies involve some degree of moral compromise. Still, it makes me uncomfortable, especially as global politics seem increasingly unstable, to deliberately stoke national tensions.

Jon Hochschartner is the author of a number of books about animal-rights history, including The Animals’ Freedom Fighter, Ingrid Newkirk, and Puppy Killer, Leave Town. He blogs at SlaughterFreeAmerica.Substack.com.

Montana is Not “a Product” and Government is Not “a Business”

WALZ AND TESTER NEED TO CAMPAIGN

ON TRANS AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

George Ochenski

October 15, 2024
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Photo by Brynn Pedrick

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte has boasted that “Montana is an easy product to sell” and recently referred to himself as our state’s CEO.

He’s dead wrong on both counts. Montana is a state, not a product — and government is not a business. We have elected officials whose duty it is to serve the people with the greatest good for the greatest number — not CEOs whose job is to maximize profits for corporate shareholders.

Of course Gianforte is not the first nor the last person to come to Montana and evince the attitude that Montanans don’t recognize the value of what we have — and then go on to “market” what we hold dear to wring financial profit from the state’s incredible natural assets and hardworking citizens.

In truth, the other side of marketing, which so many governors, both Republican and Democrat, have mistakenly believed was their job, is maintenance of those natural assets and our people — not auctioning them off to the highest bidder.

Like any asset, natural or otherwise, you simply cannot put more and more pressure on a finite resource before the resource itself is degraded. And right now under Gianforte’s administration, make no mistake, our resources and people are being degraded.

Gianforte’s view of Montana is not unlike that of the railroad, timber, and cattle barons or the Copper Kings. That view sees what can be cut, mined, drilled, grazed and taken from the land to produce profit for the takers — not what can and should be “maintained and improved” as mandated by Montana’s constitution.

But how has that worked out? Well, the railroad barons got vast holdings of federal lands to supposedly build lines and maintain rail service to “settle the West.” Yet today Montana has no passenger service on its southern rail line and there are no rail lines going up all the valleys in which the government so generously granted the railroad barons every other section of public land.

Even worse, those vast tracts of once-public lands have been mercilessly clearcut, leaving stumpfields and thousands of acres of knapweed infestations among the spiderwebs of eroding logging roads thanks to a decision by Plum Creek’s board of directors to “liquidate” their timber holdings.

And liquidate they did, with a vengeance and nodding approval from its CEO, just as Gianforte is now doing with state forests. That’s what CEOs do — liquidate assets to produce revenue. But Montana’s budget surplus means we don’t need to and shouldn’t be razing our forests for money.

Meanwhile, if you look at the “maintenance” part of the equation, the toll is tragic. Our deer are now laced with Chronic Wasting Disease, our once world-famous rivers are dry and hot irrigation ditches with crashing trout populations. And our parks and campgrounds are so overrun with tourists Montanans have to get reservations to go to places they’ve gone for years.

Nor are our fellow Montanans in any way, shape, or form “shareholders” since the “dividends” from marketing the state do not accrue to the populace, which now finds itself incapable of even affording a home in their own state. No, the profits from marketing Montana go to the developers, the subdividers, and the luxury resort and private hunting lodge owners.

And so the governor, like carpetbaggers of the past, sees Montana as a commodity to be sold and profits reaped. As for future generations, Christian evangelicals like Gianforte don’t worry too much about the future since they’re very sure the rapture is imminent. But “get as much as you can as fast as you can” is no way to run a state – especially with Gianforte as its “CEO.”

George Ochenski is a columnist for the Daily Montanan, where this essay originally appeared.

US Gun Violence Lowers Academic Achievement Especially for Black Children

Algernon Austin

October 15, 2024

Photo by iStrfry , Marcus

In early September, the United States experienced its 24^th school shooting of the year. Since that incident at Apalachee High School in Georgia, there have been several additional school shootings. Gun violence in schools has increased in recent years (Figure 1), but sadly that is only a small slice of the gun violence that children experience. Because of gun-extremist politicians and a gun-extremist Supreme Court, more people — including criminals — have easy access to guns, and they are allowed to have guns in more places than ever before. As a result, school safety and the well-being of our children suffer.

While death and injury are the most immediate and severe consequences of gun violence, there are many other negative collateral consequences. One that scholars are coming to more fully appreciate is gun violence’s effect on academic achievement. In the Annual Review of Criminology, Patrick Sharkey summarizes the findings of a seminal study of children who were targets of a sniper attack on their school playground:

From one month to 14 months after the shootings, children who were on the playground when the attack took place exhibited more extensive symptoms of PTSD than children who were inside the school. For children inside the school when the attack occurred, symptoms of PTSD faded in the 14 months following the incident. For those on the playground, symptoms persisted over time. A majority of those on the playground continued to report fear of a recurrence, sleep disturbance, and jumpiness more than a year after the attack.

It is not difficult to imagine that the trauma of a school shooting can disrupt children’s ability to focus on schoolwork. A growing body of scholarship shows students’ academic achievement declines after school shootings. Marika Cabral and her colleagues use individual- and school-level data to study the effect of school shootings. They state:

Our results indicate that exposure to a shooting at school disrupts human capital accumulation in the near-term through increased absences, chronic absenteeism, and grade retention; harms educational outcomes in the medium-term through reductions in high school graduation, college attendance, and college graduation; and adversely impacts long-term labor market outcomes through reductions in employment and earnings at ages 24–26.

In short, school shootings are quite economically harmful to the children exposed to them.

But schools are not the only place where children are exposed to gun violence. It can occur anywhere in their neighborhood. Figures 2 and 3 illustrate the simple correlation between exposure to violence — including gun violence — and academic achievement. Children exposed to more violent crime in a school district tend to have lower standardized test scores in English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics. Gerard Torrats-Espinosa’s more detailed analysis of these data found a statistically significant causal relationship between homicides (most homicides are committed with firearms) and boys’ academic achievement. Boys exposed to more homicides had lower scores on ELA and mathematics achievement tests.

Torrats-Espinosa also found a negative relationship with ELA test scores for Black and Hispanic students. His study is likely limited by the fact that it uses data at the school-district level. The crudeness of the data probably hides additional negative effects of gun violence in mathematics and for different sub-populations.

Figure 2

Violent Crime is Associated with Lower English Language Arts (ELA) Test Scores

Source: Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, “Crime and Inequality in Academic Achievement Across School Districts in the United States,” Demography 57(1, February 2020): 123–145. Used with permission of Torrats-Espinosa.

Figure 3

Violent Crime is Associated with Lower Math Test Scores

Earlier this year, the Washington Post profiled Rashad Bates, a Black 14-year-old boy who has already lost five friends to gun violence. For a Black male, his situation is not so unusual. Gun violence occurs more in sociallyand economically disadvantaged communities. Black children are exposed to gun violence at a much greater rate than children of other races (Figure 4), which means that the negative academic impact of gun violence is felt most strongly in poor, Black communities.

There are several gun safety policies that would keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous individuals and away from sensitive places, but gun-extremist politicians and a gun-extremist Supreme Court block the implementation of these policies. There are also effective community-based violence interruption programsas well as other initiatives that move at-risk individuals away from violence and toward productive employment – but these programs are not adequately funded. Ultimately, the problem of gun violence is a problem of political will. Broadly speaking, the public is overwhelmingly supportive of gun safety measures. Thus far, that has not been enough to convince political leaders and Supreme Court justices to enact policies that would lead to a substantial reduction in gun violence.

This first appeared on CEPR.

Algernon Austin, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has conducted research and writing on issues of race and racial inequality for over 20 years. His primary focus has been on the intersection of race and the economy.