Gibbons finally got back to the anti-CAFO activists with an answer about whether he would interpret 192.300 to mean that County Commissions have the authority to regulate CAFOs. The short answer is that 192.300 “clearly allows the establishment of the County Health Ordinances and is in support of local control.”

Here’s the entire text of his e-mail on the subject to Rhonda Perry of the Missouri Rural Crisis Center:

With regard to the office of Attorney General, the job is to enforce the law fairly, impartially and effectively to give full effect to the will of the people of Missouri. It is not a policy making role like the Legislature.

Therefore, my duty as Attorney General is to enforce effectively provisions like 192.300RSMo as affirmed in Borron v Farrenkopf, 5 SW 3d 618 (MoApp 1999) which clearly allows the establishment of the County Health Ordinances and is in support of local control.

Regarding your question on the inclusion of County Health Center Boards in 192.300, the language used is clear that when it comes to health ordinances, a properly constituted County Health Center Board has the same authority as a County Commission. Therefore, that is the position I am duty bound to uphold if I am the next Attorney General because it is the law.

Thank you for contacting me and for the opportunity to discuss these issues now and in the future.

Activists need no longer base their AG vote, then, on that single issue. And they are aware that, whichever man wins, they’d do well to set up a meeting with him early on. These are very determined people who–trust me–will continue to make headway on the issue.

Several dozen rural Missourians have been working their fannies off for at least a couple of years to rein in the abuses of CAFOs in our state. And now they’re faced with a choice, in the AG race, between what they see as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle Dum. Mike Gibbons consistently voted to curtail the rights of counties to pass health ordinances regarding CAFOs (in ’03, ’04, and ’05) and Chris Koster sponsored SB364 in the spring of ’07, which would have eliminated that last small vestige of local control over CAFOs.

(The backstory on 364 is that these fanny-busting activists stopped that bill cold. They got their network of citizens to put so much pressure on rural senators that the bill was not brought up for a vote because it would obviously have failed.)

Having lost their bid to get Jeff Harris or Margaret Donnelly the AG nomination, the activists are retrenching. They asked each man to explain what position he’d take as AG on the authority of County Commissions to regulate CAFOs.

One of the men responded. The other is stonewalling them. And I’ve been reading the group’s online discussion of how to vote in that race.

Chris Koster agreed to meet with a small group and explain his position. Here’s Julie Fisher’s summary of what he said:

• He was handed SB 364, not because Farm Bureau asked him to sponsor
  
  it, but because his colleagues recommended him mostly due to his success
  
  in reaching a compromise with the eminent domain legislation.
• What he had failed to appreciate when he sponsored 364, was that despite some of the decent language in the bill, the part that took away
  
  our rights to local control spelled out doom for the bill and its sponsor.
• He interprets 192.300, like Jay Nixon, to mean that both county commissions AND county health boards have the authority to pass health
  
  ordinances to protect their communities, and as Attorney General, he will defend that right.
• He and Nixon, if elected, can and have worked well together. If they are both elected, they would work together to create stronger standards
  
  and serious enforcement of those standards.
• He considers most of the staff in the current Environmental Division of the AG office to be very good and thought that, as AG, he would invite them to stay on board.
• He would offer to put together a working group to address CAFO issues. (We all know that such work groups under the Blunt administration have been heavily biased toward the CAFO industry, and thus have been essentially ineffective. But Koster did say that this does not have to be a group comprised of the Farm Bureau.)
• The Department of Natural Resources has done an abysmal job, and he was highly critical of the department and its director. In fact, he acknowledges that, because of DNR’s inaction, communities and individuals have had to take on the job of trying to protect themselves.
• He said that he would strongly enforce violations of state CAFO laws and regulations.

Gibbons, on the other hand, simply doesn’t get back to this group of concerned citizens. Silence. That’s what they get.

But that doesn’t automatically incline these people to vote for Koster. One of them figures it’s “as muddled a political choice as I’ve ever faced.” Some will vote for Koster because “the enemy of your enemy is your friend”, and Gibbons, in the pocket of the Farm Bureau, is clearly their enemy.

But they don’t trust Koster. One asked whether it’s better to vote for someone you can’t trust to do the right thing or to vote for someone that you can trust to do the wrong thing. Another person mentioned having heard Koster lie on the floor of the Senate and said he votes for people on their past actions, not their promises about the future.

Still, Koster’s got the endorsement of Charlie Speers, the attorney who successfully represented a group of people in northern Missouri who sued Premium Standard Farms. Speers thought Koster would be easier to work with than Gibbons.

Let me interject here that I’m sure Jay Nixon would agree with Charlie Speers. Jay’s got to know that Gibbons will start sabotaging him on November 5th.

Anyway, some of these people will vote for Koster; others will abstain. But all of them feel that both Koster and Gibbons are political opportunists and that constant grass roots organizing for the purpose of pressuring the eventual victor is the only certain way to make progress.

The endeavor to rein in CAFOs is the classic political battle between grassroots organizing and big money.

Big ag took some hard punches to the midsection in the last couple of weeks with the publication of two reports critical of CAFOs: one from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the other a two year study from the Pew Research Group and Johns Hopkins University. Between them, those reports spent about 400 pages documenting what grassroots activists have been shouting about the harm to family farmers, the harm to the environment, and the harm to public health.

Big deal. Smithfield and Tyson just tightened their abs and absorbed the blows. It’ll take a lot more than that to topple them.

Here’s how the battle’s being waged in Missouri.

Last year, then-Republican Chris Koster led a failed attempt in the Senate to pass a bill that would have hurt Missourians in two ways. First, it would have outlawed “nuisance lawsuits”. Sure, such lawsuits are a “nuisance” if you’re MOArk. Otherwise, they are attempts by John Q. Citizens to stand up against CAFOs that are ruining their lives. Second, the bill would have wrested the only vestige of local control of CAFOs away from citizens. Grassroots pressure was so heavy that the bill didn’t even come up for a vote.

The battle on the lawsuit front continues to rage. Premium Standard Farms came out of a particularly bloody round last year when the court ordered it to pay 4.5 million dollars to three plaintiff families. Last month a leaked memo revealed how Smithfield, which just bought Premium Standard Farms, plans to handle the threat of future suits. With hundreds more families waiting in the wings to sue, the corporation has decided not to settle out of court and not to try any suit brought by several plaintiffs at one trial. Instead, Smithfield will try each case separately.  

Few suits are as successful as the one that garnered $4.5 million, and Smithfield figures to wear out the opposition: try the cases separately so that each family has to hire legal help and hang in through all the company’s appeals, thus forcing plaintiff attorneys, whose resources may be spread thin, to wait years for any payoff.

Of course, that tactic will also be expensive for Smithfield:

When considering the acquisition of Premium Standard, Smithfield estimated its financial exposure to the litigation at $150 million to $200 million, according to the memo.

You get some idea of how lucrative CAFOs are when you see that Smithfield still considered PSF worth buying despite a $200 million legal downside. The reason CAFOs are so lucrative is that they’re heavily subsidized by you and me. And besides, like most polluting industries, they slough the cost of their pollution onto taxpayers.

Grain growers are heavily subsidized by the government, so CAFO owners get cheap food for their hogs and chickens. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that “from 1997 to 2005 taxpayer-subsidized grain prices saved CAFOs nearly $35 billion in animal feed.” You can bet that family farmers who raise their own grain to feed their livestock could use those kinds of subsidies.

Keeping CAFO animals alive long enough to be slaughtered requires antibiotics, and that practice is creating drug resistant strains of pathogens. You don’t think Land O’ Lakes or Tyson will pay your bill at St. John’s Mercy or your funeral bill when one of those bugs picks you off, do you? No, nor will they clean up the streams in MacDonald County either.

On top of that, whatever few improvements big ag does have to make, it expects us to pay for them. Twin bills sponsored by Rep. Munzlinger (R-Williamstown) and Senator Clemens (R-Marshfield) would have granted tax credits for odor abatement programs. Aside from the fact that such technology is generally ineffective, there’s no reason why you and I should pay for the privilege of helping run farmers out of business who would raise antibiotic-free animals that don’t pollute the streams or raise a stench nobody can live near.

That bill (as well as the Monsanto-sponsored bill that would have prevented dairy farmers who don’t give their cows hormones from mentioning that fact on the packaging) have stalled in the legislature because of citizen pressure.

Watch out, though. True, it’s an election year, and legislators are as leery of controversy as a mouse who spies a cat. But some of those little rodents are sneaky. They like to give the impression that a bill is dead, only to attach the language as an amendment to an unrelated bill.  

With the legislature due to wind up in the next couple of weeks, activist groups such as the Missouri Rural Crisis Center and the Sierra Club will be watching carefully for end runs. Opponents can sometimes stop such a move by behind-the-scenes lobbying, basically getting enough support together and saying, “We don’t want to vote on this. It’s too hot.” Another tactic is to amend the amendment, taking out the objectionable language.

If the activists keep big ag from getting tax credits or keep Monsanto from preventing honest labeling of dairy products, we’ll call the ’08 legislative round a draw. Jeff Harris’s bill to grant local entities control over licensing CAFOs went nowhere, of course. He knew it wouldn’t. But we’ll settle for stopping odor abatement tax credits this year and hope for support of Harris’s idea in next year’s legislature. Or the year after.

Photo: farmsanctuary.org

Last month I wrote:

Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, even if you  know you aren’t going to succeed–or at least, not right away. Not this year.

Jeff Harris (Democratic representative from Columbia, running for the Attorney General nomination) takes umbrage that Tyson, Smithfield and MOArk are turning the Missouri countryside into their personal fiefdoms. He resents the damage done by CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations) in our state so much that he’s filing two bills this session to restrain CAFOs and big ag.

Apparently CAFO opponents are making inroads against the Farm Bureau’s stranglehold on rural opinion. Witness this headline in the Boonville Daily News:

Lawmaker continues effort to give communities local control over CAFOs – Local voters would have final say on proposed corporate livestock factories

Notice how the CAFOs are described: not as hog farms but as “corporate livestock factories“.

 

The article describes how one of Harris’ bills would give communities the right to put the licensing of CAFOs in their area to a vote and quotes Harris at length. The first page of the article (and the rest is only available in the dead tree version) doesn’t even give the bill’s opponents any response time.

Wonder if the Farm Bureau is going to start characterizing the Boonville Daily News as the liberal media.

Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, even if you  know you aren’t going to succeed–or at least, not right away. Not this year.

Jeff Harris (Democratic representative from Columbia, running for the Attorney General nomination) takes umbrage that Tyson, Smithfield and MOArk are turning the Missouri countryside into their personal fiefdoms. He resents the damage done by CAFOs (contained animal feeding operations) in our state so much that he’s filing two bills this session to restrain CAFOs and big ag.

The first bill is a repeat performance, forbidding the construction of a CAFO within five miles of a state park or a national historic landmark (such as the village of Arrow Rock, which is about to be drenched in the stench of a hog CAFO). Better luck with it this year than last, Jeff.

The second bill, more important as far as reining in these nosesores and water table polluters, would grant local governments control over whether they could be built. Right now, the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) grants a license to any prospective CAFO owner who so much as winks in its direction.  

So Harris is introducing a bill that would allow local governments to make the licensing of nearby CAFOs a ballot issue. Only if a local ballot initiative failed to stop a new CAFO would the DNR have a say in whether to license one. Harris says:

“This legislation will give the people forced to live with the smell, pollution and waste caused by a nearby CAFO a powerful voice in the licensing process.”

Rural landowners have been organizing and fighting the proliferation of CAFOs, but the powerful Farm Bureau tells the Republican leadership to ignore them and to wrest the last vestige of local control away if possible. Last year, Senator Chris Koster (then a Republican) introduced legislation that would have negated the only local control that now exists, which is the power of county health boards to regulate CAFOs for health reasons.

Organizers put so much pressure on their Republican senators that, knowing the bill would be defeated, the Republican leadership decided not to bring it up for a vote. But just because irate rural citizens stopped the Koster bill, that doesn’t mean they can get their Republican legislators to pass Jeff Harris’s bill.

There’s a big difference between bending to grass roots pressure to prevent corporations from taking even more power and outright telling the Farm Bureau and Premium Standard Farms to take a flying leap. Republicans are caught between big time funding and some constituent pressure here. Believe it: they’re not going to cut off that funding unless their very chances of remaining in office are threatened by their support of CAFOs.

Nevertheless, even with the chances being what they are–slim to none–Jeff is introducing his bill to grant local control on this issue. He knows it won’t succeed this year, but that’s no reason not to start the ball rolling. Hey, if the Dems, in November, get those eleven seats they’ll need for control of the House and if they pick up maybe three Senate seats so that the margin is narrower in that chamber, who knows where a bill like this could go next year? If it passed in the House, every rural Republican senator who voted against it would face a storm of controversy.

Sounds good to me.

Photo of hog CAFO courtesy of Gone Mild

Matt Blunt and Department of Natural Resources Director, Doyle Childers drove four hours to Joplin to try to talk the Joplin Globe out of its editorial policy opposing CAFOs.

It is not at all unusual for a Governor or an MDNR Director to call the Kansas City STAR or the St. Louis POST-DISPATCH about some real or perceived slight or mis-reporting. But, it is extremely rare for the Governor or MDNR Director to show up personally in newspaper offices. This had never occurred at the offices of relatively small newspapers, such as the Joplin Globe.

For all the good it did the guv. Which was none. You can read all about it on Ken Midkiff’s site.

See that pretty little Dark-eyed Junco on the left? That’s the papa bird. And the hungry hunk with the open maw on the right is what he thinks is his baby. But it’s not. It’s a baby cowbird, and Mama cowbird deposited her offspring’s egg in the junco’s nest, trusting the junco to raise a baby two to three times its own size. That baby cowbird hatched first and biggest, shoving the other nestlings out and presenting tiny parents with the full time job of feeding it. Ah, those cowbirds. They sure know how to make other species do the heavy lifting.

The term for this avian practice is brood parasitism, and a human equivalent of the practice is the way big ag is fooling rural people into helping “raise” its processing plants and CAFOs. What I mean is, it’s so much easier to make a go of opening a new plant if you put it in a nest where the tiny local economy will feed your giant baby.

For example, the CAFOs that supply those chicken and hog processing plants should have to buy up land for several square miles around each one, because land values plummet. State assessors automatically lower the value of acreage within a half mile of a CAFO by 30-40 percent. That’s a conservative estimate of the loss. Sometimes, people can’t sell the land at all. It just sits there, even if the owner dies and the price is fire sale cheap. No prospective buyer wants that stink. So the landowners are helping feed the cowbird.

Local governments, which were promised new jobs and a revived economy when Smithfield or Cargill proposed a plant in their neighborhood, find themselves instead saddled with unexpected costs. Farmers, it turns out, don’t adjust well to the monotony of factory work. Other workers are brought in to labor for slave wages of five or six bucks an hour. And folks who will work for wages like that generally bring with them a host of social ills that have to be paid for.

They’re less likely to use contraceptives and more likely to use drugs. Local governments find themselves dealing with–and paying for–higher teen pregnancy rates, higher rates of child abuse, exploding meth production and the drive-by shootings that go hand in hand with drug culture.

The plant owners don’t want to pay the kind of wages that would attract more stable workers. They’d rather pay five bucks an hour and let the community feed the cowbird.

And suppose the feces from the CAFOs work their way down through the soil and contaminate groundwater, as sometimes happens? Then the state gets to come up with its share of worms and sunflower seeds–that’s if cleanup is even possible. In fact, the federal government is now spending more than a billion dollars a year on a farm program called EQUIP, and some of that money goes to pay for the manure lagoons where the feces are temporarily stored. So our federal taxes, as well, are feeding the cowbird.

But there’s a major difference between cowbirds and big ag, and that is that cowbirds don’t harm the local ecology. A cardinal or a chickadee will lose the occasional brood to a baby cowbird, but cardinals and chickadees as a whole are doing fine. CAFOs and the processing plants they supply, on the other hand, are parasites killing their host: independent farmers and the communities that depend on their spending.

When Premium Standard Farms plans to build a plant in a community, it puts out lots of hoopla about what a shot in the economic arm its business will provide. Here’s a well heeled concern, they say, that will need to be supplied by the local businesses.

If only. But it just ain’t so.

Ken Midkiff of the Sierra Club says:

CAFOs are huge – with hogs in the thousands, broiler chickens in the millions and laying hens in the hundreds of thousands (Moark/Land O’ Lakes down in Newton and McDonald counties has a permit for 3.2 million laying hens – one of the largest chicken CAFOs in the country).   Before coming in, the corporations that own the animals expound at length on how there will be a new market for locally-grown corn and soybeans.  BUT, not many farmers can drive up to PSF’s or Moark’s feed mills with a semi-truck load of corn EVERY HOUR.  As it turns out, the grains are not bought locally, but come from Cargill-owned grain bins in Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, and other cornbelt states.

So local corn and soybean growers are no better off. Banks are actually worse off. As big ag drives local hog and chicken farmers out of business, savings and loans suffer. Ken again:

Independent farmers relied upon local banks and savings and loan entities to secure money for the next crop – and the local banks and savings and loan businesses then lived off the interest.  No more.   Big CAFOs go to banking chains in Chicago, New York, Dallas-Ft. Worth, etc., but not to the Moberly Savings and Loan.  At one point, the Missouri S&L Association opposed any more CAFOs – mostly because they (S&Ls) were being financially harmed by CAFOs’ practices. Somebody told them to shut up and they did.

As the local farmers and bankers do worse, so do the local groceries, cafes, and hardware stores. The money generated by CAFOs and big ag goes not to Mercer, Goshen, and Pineville but to Omaha and Chicago. About the only thing that thrives in this environment is bars.

And cowbirds.

Ken Midkiff of the MO Sierra Club has an excellent piece in the Columbia Tribune about Hillary Clinton appointing a CAFO advocate as a co-chairman of her rural campaign effort:

I received a press release from the Hillary Clinton camp announcing she had appointed Joy Philippi as co-chairwoman of her rural campaign effort. Having never heard of this appointee, I entered her name into a search engine.

Lo and behold, it turns out Joy Philippi was, until March, president of the National Pork Producers Association (NPPC) and owns and operates a giant hog CAFO on her land in Nebraska. She is still one of the chief pooh-bahs of the NPPC, on its national board of directors. Big Pig. Big Meat.

The NPPC is notorious for promoting takeovers by corporate agribusiness and generally being opposed to most legislation in our nation’s Capitol. For instance, the NPPC opposes country-of-origin labeling, opposed any attempt to impose environmental regulations on CAFOs (“hog excrement don’t stink”) and is opposed to local control. However, the NPPC was totally in favor of NAFTA and has all of the major hog-rearing corporations behind it – Cargill, ConAgra, Smithfield, Seaboard and Tyson among them. There are no independent hog farmers on the board of directors of the NPPC.

Philippi seemed to be an enemy of the independent farmer and was in favor of most things that would lead to their demise.

Midkiff also googled the other two co-chairs of Clinton’s advisory committee on rural matters. He found them to be people who listen to the folks in their districts and who haven’t done anything heinous to promote CAFOs. But why, Midkiff couldn’t help but wonder, would Hillary choose Philippi?

I was left with only two conclusions:

• Hillary Clinton is under the impression that the NPPC is an organization of real farmers.
• Clinton was courting the largesse of the members of the NPPC that include some of the largest corporations in the United States.

In the first of the two conclusions, Clinton comes across as an ignoramus. Given that she is a rather brilliant person, the second conclusion is more likely. Money. Influence. Power. She is singing the same song that has always been No. 1 on the D.C. hit parade.

This is one of those areas Bersin and Clark discussed where real policy differences exist between our primary opponents. You can see the difference between them on rural issues by listening to what the three said at an event sponsored by the League of Rural Voters.

Clinton advocated better links between local farmers and the local institutions, such as hospitals and schools, that might buy from them. That’s OK, but it isn’t much. Obama went much further. He wanted a $250,000 cap on farm program payments.

“When I’m President, I’ll have a department of agriculture, not simply a department of agri-business,” Obama vowed.

Now we’re getting somewhere!

But Edwards made the other two look pale.

Edwards, for his part, railed against the destructive influence on American agriculture of what he called “corporate farms.”

…….

“I think we need a national moratorium on CAFOs – these concentrated animal feeding operations – so that we’re not expanding them and we’re not building new ones,” Edwards said.  

If I were a farmer, I’d be voting for Edwards.

Here are links to three items that might interest you:

There’s a thirty second ad called “The Grinch Who Stole SCHIP” that’s funny and that vividly makes the point about George W. Grinch.

The Monday Post-Dispatch pretended to ask a number of Missouri power players to answer Virginia’s question about whether Santa Claus is real, then the P-D writer put more truth into their mouths about their beliefs than they would ever dare speak. My favorite:

Virginia,

Of course there is a Santa Claus. But thanks to environmental policies I’ve supported, the North Pole is melting, and he’s got to learn to swim. Since I believe that waterboarding is really like training for a swim competition, I say we tie him up and find out what he knows.

Christopher “Kit” Bond

U.S. Senator

This last one isn’t Christmassy, but Gone Mild curls its lip eloquently at CAFOs and at Chris Koster for having sold himself out to Big Ag:

I’m no PETA member, but even I don’t like the idea of eating something that has spent its entire life jammed in a stinky stall like the most crowded and flatulent elevator you have ever imagined.

Setting aside any porcine pity or tenderness for tenderloins, though, CAFOs are huge canker sores on the environment. They pollute ground water with unimaginable quantities of pig feces and urine. Their smell can make your eyes water, or worse – airborne micro-particles of pig feces can pollute entire zones of beautiful Missouri countrysides.

The Turner Report tells us that:

The corporate hog farming industry just latched on to one of the most powerful lobbyists in Missouri, as if it needed any more help.  Missouri Ethics Commission records indicate Smithfield Foods, Inc., Smithfield, Va., the conglomerate which has swallowed up Murphy Farms and Premium Standard, as of Oct. 15, has former state representative Jewell Patek as its lobbyist.

Considering the in-roads the corporate farms have been making under the administration of Patek’s close friend, Governor Matt Blunt, this does not bode well for Missourians who have been trying to stop the spread and the resulting contamination from these businesses.

To describe Jewell Patek as a close friend of Matt Blunt is like describing Tom Hagen as a friend of the Godfather.  It may be true, but there’s so much more to it. 

Trouble is that the “so much more” is tricky to follow for those of us who just get a paycheck and pay our bills.  We’re not in the habit of following the money.  Take a look, for example, at how Blunt, Patek, et. al., pressured Southwest Missouri State University last year to dump their lobbyist in favor of Patek.  Fired Up! explains how it worked, starting with a quote from a front page, above the fold story in the Columbia Daily Tribune in March of last year:

Patek did not return phone calls seeking comment. When his lobbying firm bid on the SEMO contract in July, the firm offered to do the job for $84,000. The firm listed the governor’s brother, Andy Blunt, “of counsel,” meaning that he was available for legal advice. It also listed Jillian Lair as an associate. Lair is engaged to James Harris, who supervises appointments to boards and commissions in the governor’s office.

It is interesting to note that the contract was approved after Harris had worked to make new appointments to the Board of Regents for SEMO on behalf of Governor Blunt.

This story is entirely consistent with ongoing rumors in the Capitol that the Governor’s office routinely pressures groups to hire Patek’s firm as a lobbyist.

So, Harris works on an appointment to a public body from inside the Governor’s Office, and then a firm that his fiancee, Jillian Lair, works at, that has financial ties to the Governor’s brother, just happens to get a contract from the public body.

This is WAY too cozy. And it’s part of a pattern. There are two other public entities that have hired Patek’s firm after Governor Blunt and Harris made appointments to their boards. Both the Kansas City Police Department and the Jackson County Sports Authority hired Patek-Lair-Blunt’s firm after Blunt appointees joined those governing boards.

Now Smithfield Farms has Patek on the payroll.  That sounds like bad news for those trying to rein in the CAFOs in this state, but consider this: how could Matt Blunt do them any more favors than he’s already been doing?  Short of–what?–jailing the Arrow Rock people who’ve filed a lawsuit against the Department of Natural Resources?–a move way too bald even for Matt Blunt–the governor is already doing all he can.  So Smithfield isn’t angling for more drastic measures, it’s just keeping the payments for services rendered up to date. 

But the folks who are fighting incursions by CAFOs know how to pressure their reps and senators so that, Jewell Patek and Matt Blunt notwithstanding, Smithfield is going to have an increasingly difficult time getting a hearing for any legislation it favors. 

Still, the battle against Smithfield, Tyson, Cargill and MoArk will be uphill until Nixon is elected and appoints someone better than Doyle Childers to head the DNR and until Democrats control the legislature so that bills to rein in the CAFOs can get a hearing at all.