GOP Wants To Criminalize Exposing The Crimes Of Private Companies

Republican legislatures apparently never bother to read the Constitution, or, if they do, they certainly seem to ignore it. Restrictions on voting, abortion, and even free speech have been a staple of Republican state legislatures for years now. One of the newer restrictions these GOP legislatures have come up with are laws designed to protect the abusive practices in the agricultural and livestock industries from being exposed by disgruntled employees or determined animal rights activists. These laws are know by the term "ag-gag".

Some of these laws make it illegal to even hold documentation of these abuses and requires that those documents be turned over to the authorities. Wyoming recently passed such a law. According to the NRDC, the bill "silenced free speech by making it a punishable offense to collect data—including photos—on public land for the purposes of reporting illegal pollution or other violations." Thankfully, a court has struck down this law as an unconstitutional abridgement of free speech. The fact that the law prohibited collecting data on public land made it even more egregious.

As Erik Loomis points out, " Moreover, if filming what is happening inside agricultural facilities becomes illegal, what makes filming anything inside of any place of employment legal? There’s no good reason why this principle could not be applied universally to places of employment. That is extremely scary and takes away one of the only tools workers have to fight their own abuse." Unfortunately, like Loomis, I have no faith that the Roberts Court will sustain the lower courts when these cases reach it.

It is bad enough for workers employed in these polluting industries already. Charlie Pierce highlights the devastation of Crossett, Arkansas by a paper mill owned by the Koch brothers. Even when the abuses are right out in the open and reported to company officials, they are merely covered up and the whistleblowers are either explicitly or implicitly threatened with their jobs.

In Crossett, "Larco Inc., a local heavy-equipment and construction firm, where he worked, was contracted by Georgia-Pacific to handle disposal of the paper plant’s waste. According to Guice, the contract called for his company to spread two hundred thousand cubic yards of 'ash' dredged from the Georgia-Pacific paper mill’s sediment ponds across four hundred acres of property that it owned in the town. He says that Georgia-Pacific supervisors told him to spread the waste in layers in pits that were sometimes forty feet deep, and then to cover it with six inches of dirt, 'so that it looked like a regular piece of land'...When he told the Georgia-Pacific supervisors that he was getting readings so high that they indicated a potential for immediate illness and death, he says the company blamed his equipment. After he protested this, they offered to build a roof over the fields where the waste was being spread, but he told them that this would be like building a toxic gas chamber. 'They told me it was my problem. They knew it was dangerous, but their attitude was: keep your mouth shut, do the job, and don’t get in anyone’s business,' according to Guice. Eventually, a company official took her own readings, which he says confirmed his own. At this point, the company decided to build a huge stainless-steel chain-link fence around the perimeter of its property, 'so you can’t see where the work is'."

Imagine how bad things will get when companies like this can make even documenting criminal activity like this illegal. But that is what Republicans want to do. It's just another prong in the attack in the GOP war on knowledge and science.