Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
The Frog Farm Issue 12
From schirado@lab.cc.wmich.edu Thu Oct 7 18:31:26 1993
Return-Path: <schirado@lab.cc.wmich.edu>
Received: from grog.lab.cc.wmich.edu by mail.netcom.com (5.65/SMI-4.1/Netcom)
id AA05937; Thu, 7 Oct 93 18:31:14 -0700
Received: by lab.cc.wmich.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1)
id AA09194; Thu, 7 Oct 93 21:30:42 EDT
From: schirado@lab.cc.wmich.edu (Schirado)
Message-Id: <9310080130.AA09194@lab.cc.wmich.edu>
Subject: Frog Farm #12
To: pazuzu@netcom.com
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1993 21:30:42 -0400 (EDT)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 96010
Status: O
Welcome to the twelfth installment of the Frog Farm. It's been a busy week
here, and a rainy and cold one as well, but as I send this out, I'm seeing the
last glorious sun we'll see in these parts for a good long time. I hope you're
all looking forward to the onset of the new year, and experiencing success in
all your endeavors.
This installment contains:
1) Administrivia: FAQ changes, judgment proofing
2) Forwarded material from other Internet sources: the 9th and 10th
Amendments, Commercial Liens and New York's Robert Schultz again
3) Excerpts from Thomas Szasz' _Our Right to Drugs: The Case For a
Free Market_
4) PC Kidnappers (originally published in _Heterodoxy_)
5) SPAWN: A Free Market Operating System! (from Michael Rothschild's
_Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism_)
**
Administrivia
The proposed addition for the FAQ I published in the last installment has been
added, with some minor changes. In addition, the subjects I discussed there,
in combination with a lot of the mail I've been receiving lately, have led me
to the conclusion that a new section must be added to the FAQ, namely, one
entitled, "Judgment Proofing". Remember, your comments are welcome. I've added
the section and have begun work on it, but without some serious help, it's not
going to be the best it could be. Nevertheless, I hope to have the new version
of the FAQ done in rough draft form by the time I finish up editing this
installment. (I'm surprised I didn't get any comments on the proposed FAQ
addition; are you folks POSITIVE it was perfect just the way it was? I doubt
it! I'm just a novice at all this! Come on! How can I make it better?)
On the subject of judgment proofing, we should all remember that I'm far from
the best reference source on the topic; in fact, I'm going on the record now
as stating that I have absolutely no personal experience whatsoever regarding
it. Since it is such a crucial element of defending Rights, the information I
decide to include in the FAQ should be of the highest possible timeliness and
accuracy, and it is for this reason that I do not want to have to write this
section myself, as it would fail miserably in these two regards. We'll see how
it turns out. I'm also adding new case citations, and making sure that from
now on, every one added has a YEAR on it...
Well, it had to happen; I'm running low on archived material to share with the
list. You will notice this installment is largely "sidereal" issues and views,
and I hope that you find it entertaining and informative regardless. AS
ALWAYS, please share any comments you may have!
**
Forwarded material from other Internet sources
>From Computer Underground Digest 5.76:
[Begin forwarded message]
>Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 23:53:38 PDT
From: jkreznar@ININX.COM(John E. Kreznar)
Subject: File 5--Question EFF yielding of crypto authority to NIST
> Below is the text of the comments that EFF filed with NIST today.
>
> ...
>
> When the Clinton Administration announced the Clipper Chip, it
> assured the public that this would be a purely voluntary system. We must
> have legal guarantees that Clipper is not the first step toward prohibition
> against un-escrowed encryption. Yet the Administration has not offered any
> such guarantees, either in the form of proposed legislation or even agency
> rules.
Actually, they have issued such legal guarantees. They're in the form
of the administration's vow to uphold the US Constitution. That
document's 9th and 10th amendments preclude US Government denial or
disparagement of the people's right to use cryptography (and a whole
lot of others). The fact that these legal guarantees are being
ignored simply illustrates that their tyranny is unbridled.
By engaging NIST on this subject, the EFF is implicitly yielding to
them authority which is not theirs to begin with.
[end forwarded message]
Forwarded from the ACT (Against Constitutional Terrorism) mailing list
(original identifying headers deleted):
>Subject: Use the system
Despite my subject line -- the below article is being posted with
a strong warning: DO NOT ATTEMPT THE TACTICS DESCRIBED IN THIS
POST UNLESS YOU HAVE A VERY THOROUGH UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT YOU ARE
DOING. People who have tried this thing casually have had their
asses handed to them.
Notwithstanding the cavaet, the article does show that
the very same people who have spent their careers twisting and
perverting the "law" such that you and I end up behind the
eight-ball, are VERY vulnerable to the "law" as they themselves
have interpreted (warped) it. The point of all this being: It
is possible to use the system, as badly bent as it is, to force
compliance with the constitution, and as long as even a part of
the system is still functional, I will use vigorously it to
protect my freedoms and defend the principals inherent in
the Declaration Of Independence.
When there is no longer any remedy at law, then indeed
there is no law of man's worthy of the name. At which time one
must take up God's law and re-institute it here -- at the point
of a gun if necessary.
"... God forbid we should ever be twenty years
without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all,
and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will
be discontented, in proportion to the importance of
the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet
under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner
of death to the public liberty... And what country
can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the
spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy
is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify
them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or
two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time
to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It
is its natural manure."
--Thomas Jefferson (letter to William S. Smith,
Nov. 13, 1787)
"Though written constitutions may be violated in moments
of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which
those who are watchful may AGAIN rally and recall the
people; they fix to for the people the principals of
their political creed."
--Thomas Jefferson
"Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God."
--Thomas Jefferson
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right
to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect
themselves against tyranny in government."
--Thomas Jefferson, Proposed Virginia Constitution, June
1776 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 (C. J. Boyd, Ed.,
1950)
To wit:
Commercial Lien Strategy:
A "Presidential" Opinion
by Alfred Adask
In the last issue of the AntiShyster, we began to explore a new
Commercial Lien Strategy (CLS) whereby common citizens, without the aid of
lawyers or the courts, can induce government officials to actually obey the
laws they have sworn to uphold.
In brief, the Commercial Lien works like this:
1. Most people know that liens can be filed on another person's property
based on a financial debt (if I owe you $10,000 and refuse to pay, you can
file a lien on my property for the amount of that debt). However, few people
realize that Commercial Liens can also be filed based on a contractual duty or
obligation. (For example, suppose I contract to put a roof on your house, but
fail to do so. Although I don't owe you any money, I do owe you a contractual
duty to build the roof. Based on that duty, you could theo- retically file a
Commercial Lien on my property as a device to compel me to complete my
contractual duty/obligation to build your roof.)
2. When government officials take an Oath of Office to "uphold and
defend the Constitution of the United States" (and/or Texas, New York, Utah,
etc.), they enter into a specific performance contract with We the People. By
virtue of their Oath of office, government officials assume a contractual duty
of obligation to obey the law!
3. If a government official who has sworn (i.e., contracted)) to obey
the law, breaks or ignores any law he's sworn to "uphold", common citizens can
file a Commercial Lien on his property that will paralyze his ability to buy,
sell or lease any property and ruin his credit rating until he corrects his
breach of contract and once again obeys the law. For example, suppose a judge
arbitrarily denies you some Right guaranteed in the Constitution he's sworn to
uphold -- if he does, you can file a Commercial Lien on his property to compel
his compliance with his contractual oath.
Because the Commercial Lien is a non-judicial instrument, there is no
judge or court involved in the filing procedure who could dismiss the lien and
thereby protect government officials who have broken the law. Though we are
still unable to sue city hall (and the crooks that reside there), it looks
like we can nevertheless "lien on 'em".
The Commercial Lien appears to be simple, inexpensive and nearly perfect
for common people and pro se's. All they have to do is properly prepare a
Commercial Lien against the offending government official, have it notarized,
pay a modest filing fee, and file it with one or more County Clerks. With
just a little time, a little research, and a little money, the average person
is capable of compelling government officials to actually obey the law! It's
almost unheard of. The last time the People successfully compelled corrupt
government officials to actually obey the law was during the American
Revolution -- and that was done at the point of a sword. The CLS may be
similarly powerful, but it's done at the point of a pen.
THE $64 QUESTION
Clearly, if the Commercial Lien Strategy is lawful, it's ability to drive
corruption and lawlessness from our government may be limitless. But that's
the critical question: Is the Commercial Lien strategy truly lawful? The
question's important because if the CLS is unlawful, any pro se who tries the
strategy could wind up sanctioned, fined, or even jailed.
The CLS certainly sounds lawful, and I know of several examples where the
CLS has been used on government officials with apparent success. Still it's
a new strategy, and despite the optimistic opinions of some very knowledgeable
pro se's, it's too early to tell for sure if the CLS is really lawful. Part
of the problem is that no matter how brilliant some pro se's may be, their
legal theories are often flawed, incomplete, or absolutely wrong.
If only we could get a competent licensed lawyer to give us a positive
op- inion on the lawfulness of the CLS - then we might feel more confident
about applying the strategy. But how could we get a truly competent lawyer to
analyze the CLS on our behalf? Even if we could afford the cost, how could we
trust a lawyer to give us an honest opinion concerning a strategy that might
ultimately shake the whole government?
The answer, of course, is that we (pro se's, etc) can't trust a lawyer's
opinion on the CLS. But just because the lawyers might not be honest with us,
doesn't meant that skilled lawyers might not offer honest opinions on the CLS
to someone else like, oh, maybe some judges and government officials who've
been slapped with the CLS. And guess what? That's just what's happened.
SWORN & SUBSCRIBED
How would you like to see a sworn opinion on the CLS from the president
of the Florida bar? Sound unlikely? Sound impossible? Well, we got it.
I haven't seen all the background documents, but it appears that Mr.
Nelson E. Starr (a pro se litigant in Case No. 92-8051-CIV-RYSKAMP, US Dist.
Ct. of the South. Dist. Florida) filed Commercial Liens on several top
government officials and federal judges. Apparently, the defendants
(government officials and judges) then asked Mr. Alan T. Dimond, president of
the Florida Bar, to examine Mr. Starr's Commercial Lien and express his
opinion of the lien's legality in a sworn affidavit. Someone sent me a
photo-copy.
In the first five paragraphs of his affidavit, Mr. Dimond outlines his
con- siderable background as a lawyer. Then, in the last two paragraphs, he
swears under oath that:
"6. I have reviewed a document entitled "A Security (15 U.S.C.) Claim of
Commercial Lien and Affidavit," recorded at Official Record Book 7358 [the
last digit in this number wasn't quite clear in the photo-copy; it might be
"7355"] at pages 703-705, in the Official Records of Palm Beach County,m
Florida, on August 13, 1992. I note that the document names a number of
public figures including the Attorney General of the United States, the United
States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the Commissioner of the
Internal Revenue Service,... the Chief United States District Court Judge for
the Southern District of Florida,... [another] United States District Court
Judge for the Southern District of Florida, and others, at least one of whom
is participating as counsel for the United States in this case."
"7. I have been told by counsel of the United States that the Security
Claim of Commercial Lien and Affidavit has no basis in fact or law and is a
creation of one of the litigants herein. In my 24 years of experience, I have
never seen or heard of any 'lien' such as those that were filed relative to
this matter. Assuming the truth of the representation, and based on my
experience in civic and bar activities and as a practicing lawyer and as
president of The Florida Bar, it is my opinion that the document causes ir-
reparable harm to the system of the administration of justice. While some of
the harm may be compensable at law, no degree of compensation will adequately
remedy the damage to the appearance of integrity of those named and of the
system of the administration of justice. In my opinion, the filing of this
type of lien is a direct attack in the justice system and on the general
reputations of those named in the "lien". It may negatively impact on the
financial credit rating of those individuals. It will probably have a nega-
tive impact on their willingness to continue to serve as representatives of
the United States. And, it constitutes an abuse of civil process that cannot
be adequately remedied by an action at law."
(signed) Alan T. Dimond; Sworn to and subscribed before me on the 7th day
of October, 1992. He is personally known to me and did take an oath. Notary:
H. Valdes.
LINE BY LINE
Damn.
Dimond's affidavit was apparently intended to help defend the government
officials, but if you stop to reread it, line by line, you'll see that one of
the nation's premier lawyers (president of the Florida bar) pretty much says
the Commercial Lien's got the defendants by the short hairs.
But before you reread Dimond's sworn statement, consider some of the
background information. First Mr. Dimond is a lawyer. His stock-in-trade are
words. Linguistic precision is everything in law. Second, he was asked to
provide an opinion in defense of several very powerful government officials
and federal judges. Third, he was asked to present his opinion under oath.
Conclusions:
1) Mr. Dimond's purpose was to prove the CLS was unlawful;
2) he should have done some considerable research into the CLS to prove
it's unlawful; and
3) he must have chosen the words used in his affidavit very carefully:
Point: If Mr. Dimond writes very carefully, we must read very carefully.
For example, Dimond opens paragraph 7 with "I have been told by counsel
for the United States that the Security Claim of Commercial Lien and Affidavit
has no basis in fact or law..."
ANALYSIS: Very strange. The defendant judges and government officials
presumably sought attorney Dimond's personal affidavit because either
1) he's recognized as a legal genius whose opinions carry great technical
weight, or
2) he's recognized as a legal whore who'll say anything for anyone (if the
price is right) but whose opinion still carries great political weight by
virtue of his status as Florida bar president.
Curiously, lawyer Dimond does not say the Commercial Lien is unlawful --
he merely says he's "been told it has no basis in fact or law" by someone
else. Hell, any first year law student can tell you his second-hand opinion
is essentially hearsay and as such, is almost meaningless in court.
Dimond continues, saying "Assuming the truth of this representation [that
the lien "has no basis in fact or law"]..." Assuming? Are we to "assume"
lawyer Dimond didn't bother to research the issue himself and prefers to base
his sworn testimony, on behalf of some of the most powerful government of-
ficials in the country, on nothing but hearsay?
By attributing the opinion on the Commercial Lien's lawfulness to an
unnamed "counsel" of the United States" and "assuming" that opinion is valid,
attorney Dimond is ducking personal responsibility for a statement that
implies (but never declares) that the CLS is unlawful. Under oath, Dimond
sounds strangely unconvinced that the CLS is truly "without basis in fact or
law".
Dimond's evasiveness is telling. The powerful defendants must have
sought Dimond's opinion because they expected him to rescue them with a
brilliant denial of the lien's lawfulness. If Dimond didn't take time to
analyze the lien's lawfulness and merely dashed out an affidavit on a moment's
notice as sort of a "political favor" to the powerful defendants, why didn't
he "go the distance" and swear that based on all his years of experience, he
knew the CLS was absolutely worthless? The only reason I can imagine is that
something in the CLS scares him more than the government officials who sought
his help. (Could it be that he was scared that if he lied under oath, that
someone would file a Commercial Lien on him?)
On the other hand, if Dimond thoroughly analyzed the lien (as we can
expect from a bar president handling a very hot issue for several very
powerful government officials), why didn't he "go the distance" and swear
under oath that he knew the lien was worthless? I can imagine only one
explanation -- Dimond suspects the Commercial Lien strategy is lawful.
Why else would Dimond base his affidavit on inadmissible hearsay and un-
professional "personal experience", rather than hard professional research in
a law library? Are we to believe that the president of the Florida bar, a
member of a substantial law firm, a recognized professional in his field,
didn't bother to crack open a single law book to find evidence that the CLS is
unlawful? Six important federal officials (people who can play a serious role
in Dimond's financial and political future) asked for his help, and the best
he can do is vaguely recollect that "I ain' nevah seen nuthin' lahk it, nevah
befo"?
Pretty hard to believe.
A more plausible scenario would be that Dimond did his level best to
please the powerful defendants by digging through the law library for statutes
and case law that proved the CLS invalid, but failed to find anything. If
Dimond researched the CLS but couldn't prove it unlawful, he'd have to concede
it was lawful. Perhaps he couldn't reference his own opinion under oath
since, based on his legal research, he knew the CLS was valid. Therefore,
Dimond could only support the defendants by skating around the issue with an
af- fidavit based on hearsay and "assumptions" rather than facts and law.
Next, Dimond notes that the CLS "is a creation of one of the litigants
herein. In my 24 years of experience, I have never seen or heard of any
[such] 'lien'..."
ANALYSIS: Roughly correct, but irrelevant. The CLS is a recent
innovation previously unknown to the lawyers and legal system. But labeling
the CLS as a "creation" hints that its been spawned out of some twisted pro se
litigant's delusions rather than the law, that the CLS is without legal and
lawful foundation, and is therefore unlawful.
But that's just Dimond's words. If I were spinning those words, I
wouldn't say the lien's a new "creation"; I'd say it's a new "application" and
thereby imply the Commercial Lien has a lawful foundations, and as such, is
probably lawful itself.
Further, just because Mr. Dimond has never seen such a lien in his "24
years of experience' doesn't prove a thing. How many lawyers had seen a law
that blacks could ride in the front of an Alabama bus prior to the 1964 Civil
Rights Act? How many lawyers had seen a Constitutional "right to privacy"
before the U.S. Supreme Court found it in Roe v. Wade? The law, as lawyers
like to remind us, is constantly changing, growing, evolving. Well, on behalf
of "We, the Mammals", I'd like to welcome "You the Dinosaur Lawyers" to a
brand new wrinkle in the "theory of evolution": the CLS is about to render
government corruption almost extinct.
It's irrelevant whether Dimond's ever seen the CLS before. He hasn't
seen the dark side of the moon, either, but it's there. The real point to
Dimond's statement is that in all his experience, he's never seen one bit of
evidence, precedent, statute, case law, or Constitutional prohibition to say
the Commercial Lien is illegal. If he'd seen or found any evidence that the
lien was illegal -- anything at all -- it would certainly have been cited in
his affidavit. Instead, the sworn affidavit of the president of the Florida
bar offers not one single citation to support his apparent hope that the CLS
is illegal.
OPEN SEASON
According to the U.S. Constitution, all powers not specifically granted
to government are reserved to the People. Which means that if the laws don't
specifically say you can't do something, you can do it until the Congress
legislates otherwise of the Supreme Court rules to the contrary. Which means,
the "new creation" of the Commercial Lien is legal and lawful until law can be
found or made to the contrary. Since Mr. Dimond didn't produce any previous
law to prohibit the CLS, it appears there's no previous prohibition and the
CLS should be lawful until some future date when Congress or the U.S. Supreme
Court says otherwise. And that means, at least for now, it's open season on
corrupt government officials.
Lawyer Dimond seems to agree. He points out that the CLS, "... causes
irreparable harm to the system of the administration of justice."
Oh dear me, NO! Not "irreparable harm" to the "system of administration
of justice" (not justice, itself). Oh, Pulleese! ANYTHING but that!! Why...
why, the very thought of it is enough to jus' make me swoooon.
Well, better stock up on smelling slats, Scarlet, cuz if lawyer Dimond's
right about the paucity of defenses and remedies against the CLS, the entire
government's about to pass out cold.
Faced with the CLS's "direct attack on... the general reputations of
those named in the 'lien'", and even though the CLS "many negatively impact on
[their] financial credit rating," Dimond will only concede that "some of the
damage may be compensable at law..."
"Some?" "May?" Hardly the optimistic prognosis the defendants had hoped
for. He's equivocating. Mr. Dimond's limp assessment of their chances to sue
to recover damages caused by the CLS should scare every corrupt government
official in the USA into packing his bags for Brazil. And it get words (or
better, depending on your point of view).
Even though Dimond claims the CLS is "an abuse of civil process" he
nevertheless concluded that the Lien "cannot be adequately remedied by an
action at law." Although Dimond does not absolutely say there's nothing
government officials can do to protect themselves against the Commercial Lien
Strategy, he comes pretty close. At minimum, he's warning the government
defendants that they're in a losing proposition, and even if some kind of
later litigation "may" generate compensation for "some" of their damages, that
compensation will be, at best, inadequate. In short, they're going to lose
more than they can ever hope to recover, which means they're gonna lose. Which
means the Commercial Lien Strategy is solid.
In fact, it appears so solid that Dimond predicts the CLS "will probably
have a negative impact on the [corrupt government officials'] willingness to
continue to serve [steal] as representatives of the United States"!
Reader, do you understand what you just read? The president of the
Florida bar has stopped just a few words short of saying the Commercial Lien
Strategy is so powerful it will probably chase corrupt officials right out of
government!
It's one thing to read the theories an notions of paralegals, pro se's,
and would-be writers like myself that fill the AntiShyster. We've shared some
good ideas on the CLS but, still, it's hard to trust our judgement. But when
the president of the Florida state bar implicitly agrees that the CLS is so
strong that his best advice to government officials is "RUN, YOU MUTHA'S!
RUN!!!", well, you gotta agree the Commercial Lien Strategy looks a whole lot
more reliable.
A word of caution: Although I interpret Mr. Dimond's remarks as a general
commentary on the overall Commercial Lien Strategy, he was only talking about
a specific Commercial Lien which I have not seen or published in the
AntiShyster. Just because he was impressed by one Commercial Lien does not
mean all liens (including those published here) are similarly formidable. No
matter what I say, no matter what Mr. Dimond says, you must do your won
research, and personally confirm the CLS before you start "liening on"
government officials.
A word of celebration: It's impossible to read Mr. Dimond's sworn opinion
on the CLS without wanting to pass out the party hats and horns. One of
America's premier lawyers is unable to declare that the Commercial Lien
Strategy is illegal or unlawful, can't offer much hope that those who are
"liened on' will be able to sue to recover for damages, and implicitly
concedes that those who properly file Commercial Liens aren't likely to be
sued for damages.
It is too early to break out the champaign, but it looks like we've got a
chance to take back our government.
Cheers.
Reprinted with permission from the "AntiShyster", POB 540786, Dallas,
Texas, 75354-0786 - (214) 559-7957 - annual subscription $25.
[...]
>Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1993 11:27:00 -0400
From: kone@COURIER1.SHA.CORNELL.EDU
Subject: News from the Empire: cracks in court
To: <Libernet@Dartmouth.EDU>
Agian, Robert Schultz of the All county taxpayers alliance, has struck his
blow agianst the state. From the UPI wire, 02 Oct, 8am:
Albany-Robert Schultz, the man who has been challenging New York's
borrowing practices in court, is now questioning the impartiality of the
Judges who will untimately decide his case. Schultz has called on Court of
Appeals Chief Judge Judity Kaye, to review the financial holdings of herself
and her six colleagues, saying he does not think judges who own state or
municipal bonds can impartially rule on his lawsuits over the state's
borrowing practices.
New York is also the only state in the Nation who is taxing information.
It seems that in the middel of the night, just before the State legislature
adjourned for the summer, passed a minium 5% surcharge on phone services that
charge on time usage. This means that the local BBS, that charges .02 an hour
has to collect a tax of 5%, while Prodigy has to collect a tax of 13.5%
Although this tax only applys to usage of phone lines for "entertainment
purposes" even a company like Prodigy can not addjust their softwear when they
are informed about the tax the day before it went into effect. His Imperal
Magesty, Mario Cuomo, had said "telecommunications is a key to New York's
economic future" just before he signed the bill.
According to the Imperal Tax Collector, James Wetzler, "I don't think this
was something tha was thought through before it was enacted. That's what
happens when you do it the last night of the legislative session."
William Kone Kone@courier1.sha.cornell.edu
**
Excerpts from _Our Right To Drugs: The Case For a Free Market_
by Thomas Szasz
(c) 1992
ISBN 0-275-94216-3
Casting a ballot is an important act, emblematic of our role as citizens. But
eating and drinking are much more important acts. If given a choice between
the freedom to choose what to ingest and what politician to vote for, few if
any would pick the latter.
...
The trick to enacting and enforcing crassly hypocritical prohibitions, with
the conniving of the victimized population, lies in not saying what you mean
and avoiding direct legal rule making. Thus, the Founders did not declare, in
so many words, "To justify slavery, in the slave states blacks shall be
counted as property; and to apportion more congressional seats to the slave
states than they would have on the basis of their white population only, black
slaves shall be counted as three-fifths persons."
...
...There are three distinct drug markets in the United States today: 1) the
legal (free) market; 2) the medical (prescription) market; and 3) the illegal
("black") market. Because the cost of virtually all of the services we call
"drug treatment" is borne by parties other than the so-called patient, and
because most people submit to such treatment under legal duress, there is
virtually no free market at all in drug treatment. Try as we might, we cannot
escape the fact that the conception of a demand for goods and services in the
free market is totally different from the conception we now employ in
reference to drug use and drug treatment. In the free market, a demand is what
the customer wants; or as merchandising magnate Marshall Field put it, "The
customer is always right." In the prescription drug market, we seem to say,
"The doctor is always right": The physician decides what drug the patient
should "demand", and that is all he can legally get. Finally, in the
psychiatric drug market, we as a society are saying, "The patient is always
wrong": The psychiatrist decides what drug the mental patient "needs" and
compels him to consume it, by force if necessary.
...
Naturally, drug companies defend the practice [of advertising]. "The ads,"
they say, "help educate patients and give consumers a chance to become more
involved in choosing the medication they want." But that laudable goal could
be better served by a free market in drugs. In my opinion, the practice of
advertising prescription drugs to the public fulfills a more odious function,
namely, to further infantalize the layman and, at the same time, undermine the
physician's medical authority. The policy puts physicians in an obvious bind.
Prescription laws give doctors monopolistic privilege to provide certain drugs
to certain persons, or withhold such drugs from them. However, the advertising
of prescription drugs encourages people to pressure their physicians to
prescribe the drugs they WANT, rather than the drugs the physicians believe
they need...Missing is any recognition of the way this practice reinforces the
role of the patient as helpless child, and of the doctor as providing or
withholding parent. After all, we know why certain breakfast food
advertisements are aimed at young children: Because while they cannot buy
these foods for themselves, they can pressure their parents to buy the
advertised cereals for them. Similarly, the American people cannot buy
prescription drugs, but they can pressure their doctors to prescribe the
advertised drugs for them.
...
If ever there were services that are fictitious or even worse, they are our
current publicly financed drug treatment services. The wisdom of our language
reveals the truth and supports the cogency of these reflections. We do not
call convicts "comsumers of prison services", or conscripts "consumers of
military services"; but we call committed mental patients "consumers of mental
health services" and paroled addicts "consumers of drug treatment services".
We might as well call drug traffickers -- conscripted by the former drug czar
William Bennett for beheading -- "consumers of guillotine services". After
all, Dr. Guillotin was a doctor, and Mr. Bennett used to teach ethics.
...
Although it is obvious that the American drug market is now completely state
controlled, most people seem at once unaware of this fact and pleased with it,
except when they want a drug they cannot get. Then they complain about the
unavailability of that particular drug. For example, cancer patients complain
that they cannot get Laetrile; AIDS patients that they cannot get unapproved
anti-AIDS drugs; women, that they cannot get unapproved chemical
abortifacients; terminally ill patients in pain, that they cannot get heroin;
and so on...Sadly, the very concept of a closure of the free market in drugs
is likely to ring vague and abstract to most people today. But the personal
and social consequences of a policy based on such a concept are anything but
abstract or vague...the voluntary coming together of honest and responsible
citizens, trading with one another in mutual trust and respect, has been
replaced by the deceitful and coercive manipulation of infantalized people by
corrupt and paternalistic authorities...helping politicians to impose their
will on the people by defining self-medication as a disease...
...
Ever since Colonial times, the American people have displayed two powerful
but contradictory existential dispositions. THey looked inward, seeking to
perfect the self through a struggle for self-discipline; and outward, seeking
to perfect the world through the conquest of nature and the moral reform of
others. [Any guess which of the two is morally reprehensible? You got it. If
you want to change the world, change yourself first.] The result has been an
unusually intense ambivalence about a host of pleasure-producing acts (drug
use being but one) and an equally intense reluctance to confront this
ambivalence, embracing simultaneously both a magical-religious and rational-
scientific outlook on life.
...
In 1914, Congress enacted another landmark piece of anti-drug legislation;
the Harrison Narcotic Act. Originally passed as a record-keeping law, it
quickly became a prohibition statute. In the course of the next seven years,
by a curious coincidence of history -- if, indeed, it is coincidence -- in
Rissua, the Soviet Union replaced the czarist empire, while in the United
States, the free market in drugs was replaced by federal drug prohibition
possessing unchallengeable authority. Excerpts from two key Supreme Court
decisions quickly tell the story.
In 1915, in a test of the Harrison Act, the Court upheld it, but expressed
doubts about its constitutionality. "While the Opium Registration Act of
December 17, 1914, may have a moral end, as well as revenue, in view, this
court, in view of the grave doubt as to its constitutionality except as a
revenue measure, construes it as such." Yet only six years later, the Court
considered objection to federal drug prohibition taboo...In 1914, trading in
and using drugs was a right. In 1915, limited federal drug controls were a
constitutionally questionable tax revenue measure. By 1921, the federal
government had gained not only complete control over so-called dangerous
drugs, but also a quasi-papal immunity to legal challenge of its authority.
...
Although we now shamefully neglect and obscure the differences between vice
and crime -- and hence the differences between peaceful persuasion and
government coercion -- these differences form the pillars on which a free
society rests. Conversely, denying these distinctions (by metaphorical
bombast, sloppy thinking or political propaganda making use of both) is the
decisive step in transforming self-restraint into the restraint of others,
temperance into prohibition, persuasion into persecution, the moral ideals of
individuals into the immoral madness of crowds. All this [Lysander] Spooner
saw clearly:
No one ever practices a vice with any...criminal intent. He
practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from
any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction
between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws,
there can be on earth no such thing as individual right,
liberty or property; no such things as the right of one man
to the control of his own person and property, and the
corresponding and co-equal rights of another man to the
control of his own person and property.
...
During the first two decades of this century, several protectionist programs
-- prohibiting alcohol, providing "pure" food and drugs, limiting access to
certain pharmaceuticals -- converged and reinforced one another. Each of these
programs was, of course, defined as a "reform". ruling out opposition. And
each was based on the belief, rapidly gaining ground in the country, that the
world was becoming too complicated for ordinary people to manage without the
active support of the protectionist state, whose duty should be to safeguard
people from the hazards of putting the wrong things in their mouths or bodies.
With this view firmly planted in the American mind, an avalanche was loosened
that no one could stop. It still has not hit bottom.
As respect for the right to drugs diminished, enthusiasm for drug controls
increased. Both Right and Left embraced Prohibition. The Left, intoxicated
with anti-capitalism, discovered that alcoholism is a disease caused by the
free market...the Right, intoxicated with religion, stuck to its theme that
alcohlism is a sin.
...
...The more hopeless our drug problem becomes, the more stubbornly we clinhg
to the myth that drugs pose a threat to every man, woman and child in the
world, and the more certain we are of our duty to combat drug abuse by coerced
traetment and criminal penalties at home, and by armed intervention and
economic sanctions abroad. Truly, we are the redeemer nation, our centuries-
old ambivalence toward alcohol seemingly entitling us to assume the role of
moral savior not merely of our own people, but of people everywhere.
...
Although there is no evidence that the American consumer ever complained
about the free market in drugs, there is plenty of evidence that his
self-appointed protectors complained bitterly and loudly.
...
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is usually credited with two major achievements: 1)
saving the country from its domestic enemy, big business, during the
Depression; and 2) saving it from its foreign enemies, the Germans and the
Japanese, during World War II. To fight big business, Roosevelt gave America
big government; to fight the war, he gave it the atomic bomb. Overshadowed by
these dramatic events, Roosevelt's role in the War on Drugs is all but
forgotten. Yet the first business he set out to bust was the "monkey business"
of merchandising medically "worthless" drugs. Of course, he failed to get rid
of such drugs, but he succeeded in socializing the pharmaceutical market and
undermining the legitimacy of self-medication.
...while free marketeers generally believe that "it was President Franklin D.
Roosevelt who was directly responsible for the abandonment of most of the
principles of economic liberty on which this nation was founded," there is no
agreement on why this happened, only on when it happened. Among the
explanations usually advanced are the Depression and Roosevelt's personality
-- both no doubt relevant. I would add another reason that is closely related
to our present concerns, namely, the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition failed
to prevent Americans from drinking, but succeeded in accustoming a whole
generation to the criminalization of what, prior to 1920, had been an
important and legitimate free-market enterprise. Although Prohibition, the
law, was repealed, the *idea* of drug prohibition remained imprinted on the
national consciousness and henceforth found expression in the progressive
criminalization of self-medication. Generation after generation of Americans
thus became inured to state supervision of their drug use, much as generation
after generation of Soviet citizens became inured, after 1917, to state
supervision of their economic affairs.
...Remarkably, some prophetic pessimists foresaw that Roosevelt's drug
control laws -- ostensibly aimed at protecting the public [can you say,
"Crunchy Frog?" ;)] -- were, in fact, "aimed at abridging the 'sacred right'
of self-medication...People would have to visit a physician to get medicine
they could otherwise purchase without a professional fee, at the local
drugstore." Alarmed, a poor woman in North Carolina wrote to her senator, "If
any one has a sick headache would it be a violation of the law to make a cup
of thyme tea for relief? The poor can't have a Doctor for every minor
scratch." But even the worst pessimists could not have anticipated that
possessing and ingesting marijuana, which grew wild like mushrooms, would
become both a disease and a crime. Clearly, the common people did not want
drug controls and were never consulted. Who were the people who pushed for
chemical statism and who *were* consulted? In addition to the muckraking
journalists, support for federal drug controls came mainly from women's
groups, the American Medical Association, and influential physicians such as
famed Harvard neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, who was a personal friend of the
Roosevelts.
...
In 1939, emboldened by...successful efforts to increase the government's
powers to restrict access to drugs, the FDA proposed banning saccharin. This
gave rise to an amusing episode in the otherwise bleak and baneful progression
of the politicization of drug controls. What the FDA did not count on was that
Roosevelt was a regular user of saccharin, which was then the only noncaloric
sweetener. "Anybody who says saccharin is injurious to health is an idiot,"
declared the commander in chief of the therapeutic state, and saccharin was
safe. Today, the FDA is no longer so hamstrung by presidential preferences.
...
The War on Drugs is a moral crusade wearing a medical mask. Our previous
moral crusades targeted people who were giving themselves sexual relief and
pleasure (the drives against pornography and masturbation). Our current moral
crusade targets people who are giving themselves pharmaceutical relief and
pleasure (the drive against illicit drugs and self-medication). Although the
term "drug abuse" is vague and its definition variable, by and large, it is
the name we give to self-medication with virtually any interesting and
socially disapproved substance...because...we view it as both immoral and
unhealthy.
...what Tuveson termed our collective striving for a "holy utopia" is the
superglue that reconciles and unites in an intoxicating embrace of intolerance
the diverse personalities and politics of Nancy Reagan and Jesse Jackson,
George Bush and Charles Rangel, WIlliam Bennett and Ralph Nader.
...
THE "DANGEROUS DRUG" AS SCAPEGOAT
Suppose a social historian in the days when it was popular to accuse Jews of
poisoning wells decided to study that phenomenon. Surely, it would have been a
mistake for him to assume that the wells were, in fact, poisoned; that the
culprits were invariably Jews; and that, in order to advise the authorities
about how best to reform Jew-control policies, he would have to examine the
"physiological and psychological efffects" of the poisoned waters. In fact,
until modern times, water was a notoriously unsafe beverage, the source of
water-borne infections, still unsafe in many parts of the world...
...The point is that -- just as, in medieval Europe, drinking water from
*any* source was dangerous, and the matter had nothing to do with Jews -- so,
now, the use of *any* drug is dangerous, and the matter has nothing to do with
drug traffickers. Obviously, no drug is dangerous so long as it remains
outside the body; and every drug -- even the seemingly most innocuous, such as
aspirin and vitamin A -- is potentially dangerous, for certain persons, in
certain doses. This simple fact is ignored by virtually all contemporary
scholars and commentators addressing the subject of drug controls.
...
Like all public health measures, drug controls tend to be regarded as
unselfish, public-spirited legislation, their sole aim being the improvement
of the health of the population. However, because self-interest is intrinsic
to the human condition, this is, prima facie, an absurd assumption. It is also
totally inconsistent with the historical evidence. For example, the 1906 Food
and Drugs Act was actively supported by large food and drug producers -- not
because they were interested in promoting public health, but because they
wanted to restrict competition by cartelizing their industries. The story of
margarine regulation is illustrative.
Margarine, an artificial product made from processed vegetable fats, was
invented in 1869 as a substitute for butter. It was (or could have been)
cheaper than butter, tasted good, and gained immediate consumer acceptance. To
protect their dairy industries, states with dairy interests undertook to
counteract free and informed consumer choice: They imposed special taxes on
margarine and banned coloring it yellow. By 1902, thirty-two states had
banned coloring margarine, "the phrasing of the statutes conveying the clear
impression that margarine was an unhealthy, low-quality imitation of butter".
Discriminatory taxes on margarine remained in effect until the 1950's.
...
The laws that deny healthy people "recreational" drugs also deny sick people
"therapeutic" drugs. This is partly because some of the same drugs --
including our favorite scapegoat drugs, cocaine, heroin and marijuana -- have
both therapeutic and recreational uses, and partly because certain drugs
believed to be therapeutic for certain diseases (and sometimes available
abroad) have not (yet) been approved by the FDA as both effective and safe.
However, with enough political clout, special interest groups often prevail
and determine both diagnostic and therapeutic policy.
...
DRUG EDUCATION: THE CULT OF DRUG DISINFORMATION
In 1979, when Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency, he did so as a
Conservative with a capital C. The liberals were hippies who smoked marijuana,
got abortions for their girlfriends and neglected their children. Such, at
least, was the image into which conservative Republicans cast liberal
Democrats. In contrast, Conservatives -- exemplified by Ronald and Nancy
Reagan -- stood for morality, tradition and family values. These claims will,
in my opinion, go down in history as the most transparent hypocrisies of the
Reagan presidency. For whatever ugliness was committed in the name of drugs by
President Reagan's predecessors, it was the Reagans who, through the
repetition of a moronic anti-drug slogan, taught American children to spy on
their parents and denounce them to the police.
Reagan claimed that he stood not only for family values, but also for less
government. As an abstract proposition, he surely would have agreed that a
person's loyalty to his family is more important and should be more enduring
than his loyalty to a temporarily expedient government policy. But talk is
cheap. When the Reagans' vaunted family values were put to the test of
practical politics, when old-fashioned allegiances came in conflict with the
pursuit of personal self-aggrandizement, their noble professions were brutally
belied by their ignoble policies. They embraced one of the most characteristic
and most despicable practices of the great socialist states of the twentieth
century: turning children against their parents in a holy war against enemies
of the state.
...
The merchandising of a new drug-detection device is illustrative. The kit,
called DrugAlert, consists of three aerosol cans with which a parent can
detect whether their child is "on drugs". To use this tool, the parent need
only "wipe a piece of paper on a surface that drugs might have touched, then
spray the paper with the chemicals," and -- presto -- cocaine turns the paper
turquoise; marijuana, reddish brown. Does this kind of parental behavior
invade the child's privacy? "Sure, it's an invasion of privacy," the
manufacturer acknowledges, "but so is a thermometer...[P]arents need any tool
they can get to protect their kids from drugs." [How about telling them the
truth about them?] Unfortunately, this test is far from foolproof. It picks up
over-the-counter antihistamines as cocaine. Too bad. But better safe than
sorry.
...
Most Americans are ignorant of the fact that the maniacal pursuit of "good
drugs" -- expected to make us healthy and live forever -- and the maniacal
persecution of "bad drugs" -- the cause of crime, disease and every other evil
known to man -- are peculiarly American social phenomena...[but] it is
important to note that the image of America as a nation of drug abusers is
false. Actually, we are less given to self-medication (which we call "drug
abuse") than people in many other countries. It is France that has apparently
earned the dubious sobriquet of "the most tranquilized country on earth,"
making the French media ponder "the question...how the French can get hold of
3.5 billion mood-changing pills a year, or about 80 pills for every adult."
Actually, the answer is simple: The French get their drugs by prescription,
from doctors who are not persecuted by their government for prescribing all
the Valium and Librium their patients want.
These cultural differences bring to mind the adage, "Germans eat to live; the
French live to eat." Mutatis mutandis, Americans feel it is morally
justifiable to take pills to make oneself healthy, but not to make oneself
happy; the French do not feel the urge for a sharp distinction between these
justifications.
...
I am neither black nor Hispanic and do not pretend to speak for either group
or any of its members. There is, however, no shortage of people, black and
white, who are eager to speak for them. Which raises an important question,
namely: Who speaks for black or Hispanic Americans? Those persons, black or
white, who identify drugs -- especially crack -- as the enemy of blacks? Or
those who cast the American state -- especially its War on Drugs -- in that
role? Or neither, because the claims of both are absurd oversimplifications
and because black Americans -- like white Americans -- are not a homogenous
group, but a collection of individuals, each of whom is individually
responsible for their own behavior and can speak for themselves?
...
Mainstream American blacks are Christian,s, who look for leadership to
Protestant priest-politicians and blame black drug use on rich whites,
capitalism and South American drug lords. Sidestream American blacks are
Muslims, who look for leadership to Islamic priest-politicians and maintain
that drug use is a matter of personal choice and self-discipline.
...
Malcolm X wore his hair crew-cut, dressed with the severe simplicity and
elegance of a successful Wall Street lawyer, and was polite and punctual. Alex
Haley describes the Muslims as having "manners and miens [that] reflected the
Spartan personal discipline the organization demanded." While Malcolm hated
the white man...he despised the black man who refused the effort to better
himself: "The black man in the ghettoes...has to start self-correcting his own
material, moral and spiritual defects and evils. The black man needs to start
his own program to get rid of drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution."
This is dangerous talk. Liberals and psychiatrists need the weak-willed and
mentally sick to have someone to disdain, care for and control. If Malcolm had
his way, such existential cannibals masquerading as do-gooders would be
unemployed, or worse...
...Malcolm understood and asserted -- as few black or white men could
understand or dared to assert -- that white men want blacks to be on drugs,
and that most black men who are on drugs want to be on them rather than off
them. Freedom and self-determination are not only precious, but arduous. If
people are not taught and nurtured to appreciate these values, they are likely
to want to have nothing to do with them. Malcolm X and Edmund Burke shared a
profound discernment of the painful truth that the state wants men to be weak
and timid, not strong and proud.
...
The vile beauty of contemporary American anti-drug politics is that the
authorities need no guidelines to recognize a drug malefactor. They know one
when they see one. William W. Tucker, an internist and past president of the
Sacramento-El Dorado Medical Society, said it well in this comment to MEDICAL
ECONOMICS: "As the situation now stands, there are no clear lines. It's like
being stopped for speeding. When the driver asks the patrolman just what the
speed limit is, he answers, 'I don't know, but you were over it.'"
...
The penultimate transformation of medical practice from a privately
entrepreneurial activity to a publicly beauracratic one was brought about by
the convergence of three critical economic and technological changes: 1)
third-party payments for hospital and physicians' services and drugs; 2) new
synthetic psychoactive drugs, such as Valium, replacing traditional "natural"
drugs, such as opiates; and 3) computerized monitoring of doctors'
prescription-writing habits and patients' prescription drug use. (I call this
the "penultimate transformation" because we have not yet taken the ultimate
step in this process: the formal nationalization of the country's health
services.) [Eh? What was that about a Health Care Plan?]
...
...Dr. James Todd, executive vice-president of the American Medical
Association, complains that "Americans are already the most over-self-
medicated population." Todd's assertion exemplifies the confused equation of
self-medication with drug abuse, and the mindless assumption that
semf-medication is, a priori, undesirable. The same idea is voiced by Herbert
D. Kleber, professor of psychiatry at Yale and one of the country's leading
"substance abuse experts", who states approvingly, "Medically, abuse is often
defined as nonmedical use."
...
...there is nothing particularly novel about our present drug problem. Nor is
there anything particularly novel about envisioning a return to a free market
in drugs. We need not reinvent the wheel to solve our drug problem. All we
need to do is stop acting like timid children, grow up and stand on our own
two feet. "It is ordered in the eternal constitution of things," wrote Edmund
Burke, "that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge
their fetters." Nor can men of infantile minds and childish habits be free.
Their dependency -- on the state, not on drugs -- forges their fetters.
**
PC Kidnappers
by K. L. Billingsley
originally published in _Heterodoxy: Articles and Animadversions on Political
Correctness and Other Follies_, Volume 1, No. 8, January 1993
On the morning of May 9, 1989, eight-year-old Alicia Wade awoke complaining
of pain deep in her midsection. Her father, 37-year-old Navy enlisted man
James Wade, and her mother Denise, took the girl to the NAVCARE facility in
San Diego, where initially she either couldn't or wouldn't explain what
happened. The doctor found that the child's anal and vaginal regions had been
torn in a sexual attack and would need to be surginally repaired. When
informed of this, both parents showed great distress and began to weep
uncontrollably. The NAVCARE doctor immediately called the local Child
Protection Services.
CPS immediately suspected family involvement for two reasons: the rapist,
they believed, had not removed the child from her room, and Alicia did not
immediately complain of pain. The CPS worker interpreted the hours the Wades
had spent at NAVCARE as a delay in reporting the crime, and thus an
additional sign of guilt.
Though shaken by what had happened to their daughter and also by the hints
of accusation they felt coming from authorities, the Wades cooperated fully
in an interview with CPS. They could not hide the fact that they were
overweight, which child welfare authorities often take as evidence of general
neglect. They did not hide the fact that Denise Wade had been molested as a
child and that James was a recovering alcoholic who twice blacked out while
drinking in foreign ports. They did not know that they were waving "red
flags" that further substantiated suspicions toward family involvement in the
crime. They had no idea that authorities were already beginning to build a
case against them and were taking particular aim at James Wade, who was a
walking bull's-eye beacuse he was a white middle-aged male and a serviceman
in addition to his other defects.
The Wades were more interested in the facts. During an evidentiary exam at
the Center for Child Protection, their daughter Alicia calmly told the
physician that a man came through the window, claimed to be her "uncle",
took her out in a green car and "hurt" her. They would have had a better
notion of the ordeal ahead of them if they had known that on the space on the
medical form for "chief complaint in the child's own words", the examining
doctor ignored Alicia's testimony and wrote only that the child showed "total
denial".
Alicia provided a detailed description of the attacker's clothing, color of
hair and eyes, even a pimple on his face. James Wade, a genial Missourian,
cooperated fully with the police, who collected evidence including smeared
fingerprints and a partial footprint outside Alicia's window. Wade submitted
to a polygraph and a "rape test kit" which included a semen sample. He did
not know enough about the murky legal realm he had entered to request that
the sample be compared to Alicia's semen-stained panties, which police
seized, but did not examine.
After a long interrogation and numerous accusations by the police, James
Wade said, "You're so sure I did it, but if I did it, I sure don't remember
it." Child-welfare workers, who soon began to direct the examination of the
Wades, repeatedly lifted this line from its context and construed it as an
admission of guilt, not an expression of frustration, shock or anger. They
were not interested in the fact that four of Alicia's friends who lived
within a four-block area of the Wade home had also recently been sexually
attacked and that, in each case, the attacker had entered through a bedroom
window. Five days after the rape of Alicia, in another Navy housing project,
five-year-old Nicole S. was abducted through a window and attacked. Some two
weeks after the attack on Alicia, police confirmed that someone attempted to
break through the bedroom window of the Wades' six-year-old son, Joshua. All
these episodes notwithstanding, James Wade was the prime suspect in the rape
of his daughter.
While Alicia was being prepared for surgery, guards forcibly removed Denise
Wade from the hospital. The surgeon was outraged that the mother was not
present. Alicia was crying for her parents, but investigators from the
Department of Social Services forbade the parents to speak to her. In spite
of a request by the Wades, no one explained what was happening to the girl,
whom social workers packed off to a therapist and placed in a foster home. In
the argot of the child-abuse industry, what had happened to the Wades is
called a "parentectomy".
At this point, the Wades were unaware that their ordeal was part of a
national syndrome which began in the 1970's with Walter Mondale's Child Abuse
Prevention and Treatment Act and has gained momentum in the last few years
with the proliferation of feminist ideologies about the evils of patriarchy
and politically correct thinking about the nuclear family as a locus
classicus of sexual oppression and violence. Fueled by state monies, the
child protection system has grown to immense proportions, like the monster
Woody Allen describes in _Sleeper_ with "the body of a crab and the head of a
social worker".
In _Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse_,
Richard Wexler examines the national child protection system and documents a
number of horror stories. Parents have been charged with child abuse for
being late to pick up their children at school, letting them eat breakfast at
McDonald's too often, or for not letting them watch television after 7:30. In
this Wonderland world, the operant principles have less to do with the
Constitution than with the maxim of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's chief of the
NKVD: "You bring me the man, I'll find the crime."
Wexler shows how the statistics which assert the existence of a national
epidemic of child abuse are based on reported cases in which some 60 percent
are bogus, amounting to one million false accusations every year nationwide.
In the police state atmosphere of child protection, informers remain
anonymous, and the accused remains branded with a scarlet A even after they
have been cleared of wrongdoing. It is a system rife with abuses and filled
with the arrogance of power, yet the child police continue to assure us that
child abuse is an "American tradition" for which the only remedy is massive,
aggressive intervention by the state.
The case of the Wade family fully magnified all the intrinsic defects of the
system. The following account is based on original interviews
with the
victims, public officials, and some press accounts from an excellent
investigative series in the _San Diego Union_. Its primary source, however,
is a number of highly detailed reports by the San Diego County Grand Jury,
which has been investigating the child protection system since 1988. All
told, the jury received testimony from hundreds of witnesses from all areas
of the system: the judiciary (Superior Court and Court of Appeal), defense
bar, appellate bar, public defenders, Family Court, Center for Child
Protection, District Attorney and a number of victims. The jurors also spent
many days observing court proceedings, visiting "receiving homes" for
children, and attending Juvenile Justice Commission meetings. The jury also
received testimony from some social workers who wanted to blow the whistle on
corruption. Such workers had to testify without notifying their superiors,
lest they suffer retaliation.
One institution in which the Wades found themselves enmeshed was San Diego's
Center for Child Protection. The Director is Dr. David Chadwick, who has been
described in the local press as a "definitive zealot" for a system ruled by
politically correct thinking. Chadwick once told a state legislative
committee that his organization performed evidentiary examinations, not in a
disinterested search for the facts, but in order to "prove abuse". Reporters
at the _Union_ found a number of instances where Chadwick's Center "diagnosed
molestation when other medical authorities insisted there wasn't any".
Through Chadwick's agency, the Wades learned the concept of "denial". In
denying that James Wade had raped his daughter, the couple was seen, not as
asserting innocence that could be adjudicated by a review of the facts, but
rather, as being "in denial". And "denial", as the Grand Jury noted, is taken
by the system as evidence of guilt, a tactic the child police share with the
KGB and other professional witch-hunters.
"Denial" is the child protection system's version of perpetual motion, an
incantation that makes the presumption of innocence disappear. Richard Wexler
records the following classic exchange between a caseworker and a woman named
Susan Gabriel, whose husband Clark had been accused of molestation:
CASEWORKER: We know your husband is guilty, you've got to force
him into admitting it.
GABRIEL: How do you know he is guilty?
CASEWORKER: We know he's guilty because he says he's innocent.
Guilty people always say they're innocent.
GABRIEL: What do innocent people say?
CASEWORKER: We're not in the business of guilt or innocence, we're
in the business of putting families back together.
GABRIEL: So why not do that with us?
CASEWORKER: Because Clark won't admit his guilt.
If, as was the case with Denise Wade, the wife should be so stubborn as to
support her accused husband, she is adjudged to be co-dependent and
"accomodating the denial". And if the child denies the charge, this is
considered merely part of the "child-abuse protection syndrome". As the Grand
Jury later reported, Alicia Wade's only "denial" was that her father was the
attacker. The possibility that Alicia was telling the truth and that James
was innocent never entered the minds of the child police.
Once enrolled in the Kafkaesque Center for Child Protection, the Wades soon
found themselves in the hands of social workers. Most members of the
profession (about 70 percent in San Diego) are female and, according to both
victims and longtime observers of the system, many come to the job seeing
themselves as liberators, rescuing the innocent from an oppressive, male-
dominated dungeon called the family.
Social workers are not required to record their interviews, and their
statements, often used in court, frequently include hearsay evidence and are
not made under penalty of perjury. After sifting mountains of evidence,, the
Grand Jury found that social workers "lie routinely, even when under oath".
And there were "numerous instances" in which social workers disobeyed court
orders. Everything is on the worker's side. They simultaneously acquire
evidence for the prosecution and "provide services" to the family of the
accused (which the accused end up partially or fully footing the bill for).
Families enter the process eager to cooperate, but are soon horrified to find
their statements distorted, taken out of context and used against them.
In the Wades' case, for example, a social worker told the couple early on
that if they showed any emotion (under the circumstances, a perfectly natural
response) they would not be allowed contact with the child. When they
complied, the same social worker then accused them of being "unconcerned"
about their daughter, using this allegation in court.
Jim Wade found himself "horrified by the absolute power over the lives and
freedoms of an individual American that these individuals are allowed to
exercise". All of the DSS reports about the Wade family failed to include
anything positive. They did not mention that Wade's drinking was not a source
of problems, and that he had not been drinking the day of the attack. There
was no reference to his Navy record, which, except for his weight problem,
was described as "superb". Reports also ignored Denise Wade's day-care
business, which ran with no problems, and noone bothered to interview parents
of the children she cared for. Reports further failed to mention that Alicia
was an A student, who had just been named Student of the Month at her grammar
school. There was no mention of family participation in community and church
activities.
In a videotaped interview, Alicia was asked with whom she would feel most
safe. "My mom, dad, and brother," she answered. The transcript of the tape,
however, chopped the reference to the father. A child-protection official
later acknowledged that he never bothered to review the video.
Feminist cliches and anti-family zealotry are not the only forces that drive
the system. Here, as in political abuses, the Watergate rule applies: follow
the money. Therapists who fail to back up the social worker's allegations can
quickly find themselves out of lucrative court referrals. And referrals
applying to military families are particularly lucrative, beacuse they are
backed by the fathomless funds of the Civilian Health and Medical Program of
the Uniformed Services (CHAMPUS). San Diego County pays court-appointed
therapists $40 an hour, but CHAMPUS springs for nearly double: $78.60 for 45
minutes of psychotherapy. The Wades went to therapy twice a week.
Alicia's therapist was Kathleen Goodfriend of the La Mesa Village Counseling
Group, who worked on the case entirely without supervision. Like the social
workers now pawing through the Wades' lives, Goodfriend ignored the evidence
and assumed more or less automatically that Jim Wade had been the attacker,
although his daughter continued to staunchly deny this in their sessions.
Receiving more than $11,000 in state monies for this case alone, Goodfriend
began relentlessly to brainwash Alicia Wade, now totally isolated from her
family, pressuring her into naming an "acceptable perpetrator". That is, her
father.
The Grand Jury eventually subpoenaed Goodfriend's notes, which contained
many comments about how Alicia "liked" her therapist. But Alicia's own
testimony makes it clear that the child wanted only to go home. The Grand
Jury was also alarmed that Goodfriend taught the child about masturbation
"without any parental input or apparent interest by the child".
While Goodfriend worked on Alicia's mind, the Wades' social workers were
working on her future. They rejected Alicia's grandparents, aunts and uncles,
the pastor of the family church and the father's attorney as possible
custodians for Alicia because of their "allegiance with the parents". One
social worker told Alicia's grandmother not even to waste her time coming to
San Diego because her son James was guilty of raping Alicia, who would not be
coming home to anyone in the family. Instead, they were sticking the girl in
a foster home and the social worker and Goodfriend would be controlling all
access to it.
Children are put into foster homes as quickly as possible because that act
opens the floodgates of federal funds. Foster parents receive $484 a month
for a child from ages 5 to 18, almost twice the amount a welfare mother
receives for her own offspring. Special care cases can bring up to $1,000 a
month. And all funds are tax free. Some foster parents are concerned and
caring, but others are entrepreneurs in what the Grand Jury called "the
baby-brokering business". They depend on the goodwill of social workers to
get and keep the little human beings who keep the government checks coming.
Alicia Wade's second foster mother -- for unexplained reasons, the girl was
traumatically removed from the first foster family where she was placed --
believed her story about a man coming through her window. She sought to
testify that the child not only had no fear of her father, but desparately
wanted to return home. This outraged social workers, who promptly yanked
Alicia from that home and reported an "infraction" to the foster care
licensing department. The social workers then placed Alicia in a third home.
This one had a difference: the foster parents were trying to adopt a child
through the "fast track" program. Alicia was offered as an obvious candidate.
By now, the Wades knew they were in a hostage situation. To get their child
back, they had to fully cooperate with accusatory bureaucrats who assumed
their guilt from the start.
James Wade willingly submitted to polygraph tests. One of these was
inconclusive; he passed two others and the examiner found no intent to
deceive. Then there were some 700 questions to get through, part of a battery
of tests that includes the Thorne Sex Inventory, the Multiphasic Sex
Inventory, the Sexual Attitude Scale, the Sexual Opinion Survey and the
Contact Comfort Scale. Here are some of the 300 "true and false" questions:
"I have occasionally had sex with an animal."
"I get more excitement and thrill out of hurting a person than I
do from the sex itself."
"I have become sexually stimulated while feeling or smelling a
woman's underwear."
"I have masturbated while making an obscene phone call."
"Younger women have tighter vaginas than older women."
"Sometimes I have not been able to stop myself from fondling
one or more of the children in my family."
And then, near the end, a light touch: "I have fantasized about killing
someone during sex."
Virtually all men accused of child abuse in San Diego must then endure a
stretch on the "penile plethysmograph". In this procedure, a therapist places
the accused in a booth and shows him how to wire his penis to a mercury
strain gauge. Then the therapist lowers the lights and starts a procession of
erotica that can include child pornography, all the while watching dials that
measure erection. During the video portion of the test, the operator stops
the pictures, asks the subject how he feels, and waits until his organ "hits
baseline" before continuing. (A San Diego social worker who administers the
test has composed kiddy-porn audio tracks, with vignettes of fathers
performing oral sex on their daughters.) At the conclusion of the test, the
machine spits out a "phallometric score".
Operating a penile plethysmograph is also a lucrative business, with some
therapists charging $1,000 per session. Those backed by military insurance
find themselves booked for more sessions than others. One tester claims to be
able to use the device to provide "orgasmic reconditioning" to help the
subject "learn to become sexually responsible". He is currently trying to
talk the Navy into letting him treat the Tailhook offenders. Specialists are
developing a version for women that measures the engorgement of the labia
along with a gauge that takes the temperature of the vaginal area.
Penile measurements are part of an inquisition that differs from the Salem
witch hunts and the Moscow show trials in that the accused must pay cash
upfront for the dubious privilege of being so degraded. The Wades found
themselves required to accept all kinds of "services", such as counseling,
therapy, parenting classes and "abusers groups". Though taxpayers shoulder
much of the cost, the system bills many of the charges back to the family
through a scheme called "Revenue and Recovery". The out-of-pocket costs to
the Wades, before being billed for foster care, were $260,000, not the kind
of spare change a Navy man keeps around. Some accused have insurance; some
don't.
Once stuck in the court system, moreover, the Wades found themselves at a
constant disadvantage in trying to establish their innocence. Unlike the
prosecution, they had no money to pay for "expert" witnesses. (Jim Wade later
pegged his legal fees at $125,000, and his insurance did not cover these
costs.) When the Wades realized the deep anti-family animus of the system,
they struck a plea bargain by pleading no-contest to a charge of "neglect",
part of a deal that would eventually return their daughter home. But after
the bargain was struck, the county said that, based on the recommendations of
Kathleen Goodfriend, Alicia would not be returning home.
The Wades' attorneys argued that the parents should have moved to have the
plea overturned and requested a jurisdictional trial. The DSS countered that
if they tried that tactic, the DSS would also seize their son Joshua and put
their family "further behind the eight ball". This threat constituted an
offer the Wades couldn't refuse.
Later on, as part of its review of the Wade case, the Grand Jury found that
the entire juvenile system was characterized by "confidential files, closed
courts, gag orders and statutory immunity" and had "isolated itself to a
degree unprecedented in our system of jurisprudence and ordered liberties".
Said former court referee William Burns: "Any time you have secrecy you have
the seeds of corruption...the people who are behind closed doors can do any
damn thing they want. And in Juvenile Court, they do." Evidence contrary to
the system's position, the Grand Jury found, is "either excluded or ignored"
and more than 98% of the system's petitions are granted. (During proceedings
in the case at hand, for instance, the prosecution objected to Alicia's own
detailed description of her attacker as "hearsay" and the court sustained the
objection.)
From October 1989 until June 1990, Alicia had no contact with her parents.
While the court proceedings dragged on, devastating the Wades financially and
emotionally, social workers determined that Alicia was "adoptable" and that a
parental rights termination hearing was appropriate.
All this time, the eager Kathleen Goodfriend was still interrogating Alicia.
One of her therapeutic tactics was to say that that _she_ knew the father was
the attacker, and that it was therefore "okay to tell". But the child
persisted in her detailed story about the intruder. Alicia continued to speak
positively about her father, saying, "I love my parents and I want to see
them". As the date for a twelve-month hearing approached, Goodfriend stepped
up her efforts, setting up a kind of tag-team system by ordering the foster
mother also to pressure the child to "disclose".
Thirteen months of isolation and brainwashing eventually took their toll. In
late June of 1990, the nine-year-old girl succumbed. At a hearing later on,
she said she couldn't hold out any longer. The record makes it clear that she
did this to get the therapist off her back.
After the "disclosure", all questioning of Alicia stopped. Goodfriend's
"therapy" had achieved its goal. The foster parents immediately whisked
Alicia away on a month-long trip to Disney World, an obvious reward for
delivering the goods on her parents, as well as a diversion to keep her from
recanting. At this point, Denise Wade, whose social worker had been
pressuring _her_ to leave her husband, had to be hospitalized to prevent
suicide.
In December, James Wade was finally formally arrested on the charge of
raping his daughter and found himself staring down the barrel of a 16-year
prison term. The Torquemada in his inquisition would be Deputy County Counsel
E. Jane Via, whose legal philosophy was summarized in the comment, made in
another court case: "Just because we can't find evidence that this man
molested that child doesn't mean that he is not guilty."
Via had perfected one of the child abuse system's key strategies: winning by
attrition. Her collaborators in social services farm out the children she is
trying to extricate from their familes to pet foster parents, and delay
"reunification" until the child "bonds" with the new parents. Then they use
this testimony, backed by testimony from friendly therapists, to block family
reunification and justify adoption. According to one investigator, the child
police tell foster parents to take the children on long and frequent
vacations. Then they turn around and accuse the natural parents of not seeing
their children enough. It was Via who tried to justify removing Alicia's
brother Joshua from the Wade home.
Via's zealous pursuit of James Wade involved an irony which soon acquired
crushing weight. Before handling the Wade case, Via was the Deputy District
Attorney who prosecuted the man authorities now believe was the one who
assaulted Alicia. Via was thus fully aware that Albert Raymond Carder had
been molesting girls in the Wades' neighborhood, and that his modus operandi
involved entering through a window, committing the crime and leaving without
a trace. In the case of Nicole S., attacked five days after Alicia, the
attacker drove a white truck, which was not consistent with Alicia's
testimony about a green car. But it emerged that at the time of the attack,
Carder did indeed drive a green car, which he reported stolen not long
afterward. The stolen car report was never given to the detectives, who
apparently never ran a vehicle check on Carder.
Via ordered blood samples to be taken from Carder, whom she eventually tried
and convicted. But later, when Via transferred to the office of the County
Counsel and began to prosecute James Wade, she denied that she had ordered
these blood samples and that there could be any connection between the cases
of Nicole and Alicia Wade. (The jury found Via's actions incomprehensible,
and recommended that the state investigate her for possible conflict of
interest and ethics violations.)
In the pretrial maneuvering, police finally examined Alicia's semen-stained
panties two years after the attack and determined that they could be tested.
It took months for DNA tests to be completed, but they finally confirmed that
James Wade could not have been the man who attacked Alicia. It was a clear
exoneration, but the D.A.'s office, where Via had previously worked, ordered
that the tests be repeated, and the DSS continued to prohibit contact between
father and daughter.
Convicted sex offender Albert Raymond Carder, on the other hand, was in the
five percent of the population whose genetic profile matched that of the
stains. His shoe size matched the print taken outside Alicia's window. But
even this powerful evidence was not enough. Once the child police could no
longer deny third-party responsibility for the attack, the system marshaled
its considerable resources to ensure that, however strong the evidence of Jim
Wade's innocence, Alicia still did not return to her family.
The Grand Jury later identified a "race against time to arrange for Alicia's
adoption prior to the availability of the DNA results." When the result of
the evidence was known, Jane Via strenuously resisted a defense motion to
delay a hearing that would terminate the Wades' parental rights. Cooperating
with Via, Court referee Yuri Hoffman showed himself willing to have Alicia
adopted even when James Wade's innocence had been established.
In November 1991, two and a half years after the ordeal began, the D.A.'s
office dropped rape charges against James Wade. Then judge Frederic Link
issued a rare "true filing of innocence" for the embattled Navy man, which
prosecutor Cathy Stevenson unsuccessfully opposed in court. Wade petitioned
the court to have the original neglect charge, which had been part of his
desparate plea bargain, set aside to clear his name and free the way for
Alicia's return. Wade said that the declaration of innocence was like getting
out of jail. But his troubles were not over.
As a result of his ordeal, Wade had become an outcast in the community and
so had Alicia's brother Jason, one neighbor having forbidden his children to
play with "the son of a pervert". There were what Wade later described as
"sleepless night, accusatory stares, the unending tears, the strain on our
family, the doubts planted in the minds of our friends". The legal fees, says
Wade, "robbed me and my parents of our life savings". And, of course, there
was the absence of their daughter during a crucial formative period in her
life.
But politically correct Jane Via did not believe that the Wades had suffered
enough. Via argued that the finding of innocence for the parents "didn't
matter" because the original petition was not sexual molestation but neglect,
which still provided sufficiant grounds for Alicia's adoption. The Wades
appealed to the Grand Jury for help, and it was only through their eleventh
hour intervention that Alicia escaped being adopted away forever.
On November 23, Alicia Wade was reunited with her family. The system that
purportedly operated in her best interest returned the girl home using a
medicine to which she was allergic, without the glasses she wore when she was
taken from her parents and with no record of an opthamologist's checkup. Two
days later, on Thanksgiving Day, Alicia turned 11.
The Grand Jury found that the Wade case, which they said did not even need
to be in the system, was far from unusual. In the San Diego area alone, the
jurors found 300 cases with similar elements. No system could be without
errors and mistakes, but the Jury was disturbed by the fact that rather than
attempting to correct these problems, "the system appears designed to create
or foster them, to leave them untested and uncorrected, and ultimately to
deny or excuse them, all in the name of child protection." The jurors
described the system as out of control, with no checks and balances.
Faced with the overwhelming weight of the evidence, several agencies the
Grand Jury criticized, including the DSS, admitted the problems and began to
undertake reforms, including an emphasis on family reunification. The D.A.'s
office was another matter. San Diego D.A. Edwin Miller is a board member of
the Child Abuse Prevention Foundation, and the former head of his child abuse
unit, now a local judge, is Harry Elias, married to Kee McFarlane, whose
interviews with children were the basis for the McMartin preschool
molestation case, the longest and costliest trial in American history. (See
"Remembrance of Crimes Past", p.7) Miller's office justified its handling of
the case and defended the vindictive Jane Via, but at least admitted that
mistakes had been made. On the other hand, County Counsel Lloyd Harmon, Via's
other boss, admitted no misconduct, nor even the possibility of injustice.
Harmon's response to the Grand Jury, incredibly enough, maintained that the
Wade case "was handled in a thorough and professional manner and with due
concern for the rights and interests of all parties".
While the child police circled their wagons, the Wade family languished in
debt and tried to deal with the emotional fallout. Yet, except for Court
Referee Yuri Hoffman, none of those who had attempted to ruin the Wades'
lives stepped forward to apologize. No form of compensation was offered. And
as far as can be determined, noone was fired or even severely disciplined
over the Wade case. In December of 1992, more sophisticated DNA testing found
a 100% match between the blood of convicted molester Albert Raymond Carder
and genetic markers in the semen evidence in the Wade case. But as of January
1, 1993, the D.A.'s office had still not filed rape charges against Carder,
probably because to do so would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of the suit
James Wade had filed against the County.
What happened to Jane Via? It was more business as usual, the tragedy of
James Wade not having altered her attitude or procedures. In November of
1992, Via represented the DSS in the case of Gavin O'Hara, whose daughter had
been seized by a social worker and placed in the care of the social worker's
sister. O'Hara had been told that his being a Mormon and presumptive believer
in patriarchy made it more likely that he would abuse the child. The social
worker and her sister, testimony showed, had discussed taking the girl from
him before she was even born. When Yuri Hoffman awarded custody to the
natural father, Via went ballistic and petitioned for a new hearing based on
the therapist's belief that the child was suffering "separation anxiety". It
was the old attrition game that she had played with James Wade, but this time
the court was having none of it. Judge Richard Huffman said that a "dumb
system" had "brutalized" a child and sarcastically put Via down, to the
undisguised delight of people in the courtroom.
And the therapist/masturbation instructor, Kathleen Goodfriend? It would
seem that brainwashing a child for more than a year to get her to accuse her
father of a crime would at least disqualify someone from getting court
referrals. But Juvenile Court is still providing Goodfriend with a steady
supply of lucrative clients. When asked if Goodfriend's performance in the
Wade case might merit some kind of censure, the official response was that a
therapist was "innocent until proven guilty", precisely the presumption that
had been denied to the Wades.
Jim Wade retired from the Navy, and moved to his parents' farm in Missouri.
There, he hopes to heal the wounds and build a new life among the people he
grew up with. He has filed a suit against San Diego County, saying, "I just
want to be able to pay my parents back the money they gave me to fight this
thing." Slow to anger, Wade nonetheless tells anyone who asks that he
believes the child protection system is filled with "pimps and parasites
living off the miseries of others."
Wade's ordeal was dramatic, but don't check the listings for a movie of the
week. The story was optioned and shopped around Hollywood, but there were no
takers. "The reason the networks turned it down," says Wade, "was that they
didn't want to show anyone getting off [on a child abuse charge]. They got
the wrong message, because that isn't what it was about."
Jim Wade has also undertaken a mission to warn others about the system. He
has appeared on the "Larry King Show" and other programs, but he cites the
op-ed piece he wrote for the _San Diego Union_, right after his family was
reunited, as best representing what he wants to say: "Take heed, citizens of
San Diego and all Americans. There is a creature running amok in your midst
which can steal your children, your financial future and, very possibly, your
personal freedom, as it did mine."
[end]
Heterodoxy: The cultural equivalent of a drive-by shooting.
Subscriptions are 25.00 US per year from:
The Center for the Study of Popular Culture
12400 Ventura Blvd., Suite 304
Studio City, CA
91604
**
>From _Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism_, by Michael Rothschild:
...the ultimate example of market chaos is found not on the floor of a stock
exchange, but in a computer lab in Palo Alto, California. Here, the Xerox
Coporation maintains the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for the purpose of
pushing information-processing technology beyond its present limits. Among
other things, PARC's researchers have been responsible for the innovations
that led to the personal computer and graphic dsktop interface that made
Apple's Macintosh computer so popular. [An excellent history of PARC can be
found in _Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First
Personal Computer_, by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (1988,
William Morrow and Company).]
Quite recently, a team of Xerox's computer scientists, led by
Argentine-born physicist Bernardo Huberman, has been trying to make PARC's
high-power computer network run more efficiently. Computer networks first
appeared in the mid-1980's, soon after personal computers became commonplace
business appliances. At first, the idea was to wire computers together so
that a user at one machine could retrieve data stored in another one.
But some computer users don't need access to remote files. Instead, they
want lots of raw computer power. Crunching through the billions of
calculations needed to run, for example, a weather model, can keep even a
high-speed computer's central processor busy for hours. Since the scientists
in Huberman's team all specialize in modeling chaotic systems, they often
found themselves waiting for their computers to finish up.
As in most offices, only a few people at Xerox's research center keep their
machines fully occupied at any given moment. Most central processors sit
idle, while others are only partially engaged in such light duty tasks as
word processing. Huberman's team figured they could eliminate their waiting
time if they could harness the wasted number-crunching capacity of the
network's idle computers.
The obvious solution was to write software that would manage the network.
This control program would slice up computational tasks and dispatch the
pieces to idle machines. When the calculations were done, partial answers
would be reassembled into final results. In essence, the control program was
an ultrasophisticated scheduler.
This "command-and-control" approach had been tried a few years earlier at
MIT, but it had never worked. There was no fair and simple way of assigning
work priorities. Sometimes idle machines became busy again when their own
users started a project. At other times, machines sat idle, waiting for
results from calculations delegated to other computers.
Because the workload on the network kept changing, the most efficient
allocation of computing power couldn't be figured out in advance. Worst of
all, the computers were spending more of their precious time communicating
with the central controller than doing real work. In short, the solution
became hopelessly bogged down by the costs of coordination.
To solve these problems, Huberman's team did what all true innovators do:
They turned the problem upside down. Instead of building a system with an even
more sophisticated control program, they designed one without any central
control. In its place, they created an internal market for computer time.
This synthetic market was built atop a path-breaking piece of software called
SPAWN. In essence, SPAWN is a useful computer virus - or, in light of its
helpful properties, what programmers call a "worm". Copies of SPAWN code
replicate themselves across the network under prescribed conditions.
Before launching a new computational problem, the user assigns it a "dollar"
budget. Then SPAWN subdivides the problem and its budget into smaller pieces.
In effect, each problem component rides through the network piggy-backing atop
a copy of SPAWN. Problem modules offer to "buy" slices of computing time with
their "dollars" by broadcasting their bids on the network.
Under SPAWN's open-auction system, idle computers respond by "deciding"
individually whether to accept a particular bid. When a bid is accepted, the
problem module moves over to that computer for the agreed amount of time. Both
the problems and the computers constantly monitor "market prices". Problems
must purchase enough time to get themselves completed, but they cannot
overspend their budgets. The computers are programmed to maximize their
revenues - that is, to squeeze the greatest possible results out of a limited
amount of energy and resources.
SPAWN works. Less than 10 percent of each machine's time is wasted in the
bidding process. Without a central controller, a flexible and efficient use of
resources spontaneously emerges from buying and selling among independent
agents. In this self-organizing system, "dollars", rather than hormones, are
the signaling medium. Auction prices fluctuate chaotically - but not randomly.
When new machines are added to the network or more problems are run
simultaneously, market prices respond appropriately. An increased supply of
computing time lowers prices; a demand surge raises them. But the precise
future path of prices cannot be predicted, because a healthy free market is
intrinsically chaotic.
[end of excerpt]
See also:
Waldsburger, Carl A., Tad Hogg, Bernardo A. Huberman, Jeffrey O. Kephart, and
Scott Stornetta, "SPAWN: A Distributed Computational Economy" (Palo Alto:
Xerox PARC Report, SSL-89-18, 1989)
Waldrop. M. Mitchell, "PARC Brings Adam Smith to Computing" (_Science_, April
14, 1989, p 145)
**
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: 2.3
mQCNAiuhO1QAAAEEAOuUGP0QKhow6Fao1yAZklOAoU+6sXt8978TaJYQQ+NTHMx7
zlnmG6d6LWarPgwIwyCyygEMU+2zAClde08YHOSI/zH+2rvLSaddgPcGJlf7V7+K
uhu3nBJM6dhEBKY2P3UfO+CmQQemQ3Q8yR4m8HEpno1VRzUIh2QAFfmIg8VVAAUR
tDNJYW4gTSBTY2hpcmFkbyA8aW1zQHRodW5kZXItaXNsYW5kLmthbGFtYXpvby5t
aS51cz4=
=WIMt
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
