The Legal Pad

Of Licorice and the Law

    This week, Congress is grappling with a very complex situation -- health care and insurance. Complex problems are never easy to fix. If a one-page bill can be interpreted in a variety of ways, requiring a judge's interpretation to determine how to apply it, imagine the possibilities for misinterpretations and mistakes in what will probably be a one-thousand-page health insurance bill. My mind can't comprehend this, so I turn my thoughts instead to licorice.

    I'm not even sure I understand licorice and the laws affecting it. I enjoy eating licorice. Or, at least, I thought I did. I like those red rectangles that taste like cherry, and I have pleasant memories of buying licorice at Saturday matinees, and how the little bag of black, oblong pieces of licorice had camels on it. So much for nostalgia. In the good old days, things were simpler. Or were they?

    I bought a couple dollars' worth of licorice the other day from a place that carries a wide variety of the stuff. I ordered it over the Internet, and a few days later, when I found the UPS package at my door -- I could barely wait to unwrap the cardboard and dive into the licorice.

    I quickly tore open the box and checked the contents to see what sort of stash I now had in my possession. Then I did something I had never done before. I picked each of the sacks of licorice up, holding them close enough to my face to read the list of ingredients. As a kid, I didn't care what I ate, as long as it tasted good. As an adult, I worry about the junk that's in our food supply. What I discovered disappointed me. Most of the licorice -- had no licorice in it. I had bought a glob of high fructose corn syrup and "flavoring". Even the long, twisted braids of standard, black licorice weren't really licorice.

    Should there be a law against labeling something as licorice when it has no licorice in it? I'd like to see Congress do something about controlling the rising cost of health insurance before anyone in a position of responsibility gets a notion that it's time to drain the swamps of all these companies that sell us licorice, but delivers yet another dose of high fructose corn syrup -- which, of course, adds nothing but calories to a nation already struggling with weight control -- which, of course, if we can't control -- leads to diabetes -- which, of course, leads to high health care costs for all of us.

    

Slavery in the 21st Century ~ Still Alive in Missouri

    If you stayed in a hotel in Missouri, it's possible that the person who made your bed was a slave.

    Although slavery was abolished in our country in 1865 with the adoption of the 13th Amendment --  it still exists -- in a new form -- with a new name -- human trafficking. Don't believe me?

    Here in Missouri, a federal grand jury recently indicted 12 defendants on RICO (racketeering) and human trafficking charges. The indictment charges many of the victims of this scheme were forced to work at hotels in Kansas City and Branson, MO.

    People who are the victims of human trafficking are typically immigrants, tricked into coming to the U. S. with promises of good pay and steady work. What they find instead is that they are paid far less than minimum wage, cheated, and forced to live and work where their trafficker tells them. They are threatened and told that if they quit working for that, their families in their homeland will be harmed or forced to pay thousands of dollars. Some are sexually abused; others live in fear, making their traffickers wealthy, while they're given barely enough money to subsist.

    In a recent interview Dr. Deb Hume of the University of Missouri and Co-Chair of the Central Missouri, "Stop Human Trafficking" group, explains how to spot people who may be human trafficking victims and how to help them.