Friday Homestead Dispatch
Week Number Sixty-Nine
Every human being imagines, but few disclose. Children are quick to share their strangest thoughts and inventions. They cease to do so only after the shaming or baffled reactions of adults, portraits of which the child hangs on her inner walls, until at last, she closes the gallery.
— Heartwood, Amity Gaige
1.
As you are considering candidates for the upcoming mid-term elections, you may want to consider those who are not taking AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) money. Lobbying is totally legal in the halls of congress, and most of our politicians gladly receive money from many sources, especially AIPAC.
According to AIPAC tracker, over 360 members of the 118th Congress, spanning both parties and leadership, have accepted contributions from AIPAC or its affiliated pro-Israel groups, with 362 supported in the 2024 cycle. AIPAC and its donors provided, on average, over $100,000 to hundreds of House members and even more to Senators, making it a leading source of campaign funds.
The only member of the House in Arizona to not accept any AIPAC money is Adelita Grijalva, who happens to be the representative of my district. It’s interesting and telling that in Kansas the only Democrat in the House, Sharice Davis, accepts more AIPAC money than all the Republicans in Congress from that state except for Roger Marshall.
Why am I concerned about AIPAC money, you ask? I am not against the people of Israel, nor the ordinary people of any other country, but I am against the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and the destruction of Gaza as implemented by the current regime. Israel is no democracy. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli NGO B’Tselem have all said Israel operates in whole or in part as an apartheid system.
There are many candidates across the country up for election between now and November that are endorsed by AIPAC Tracker. Not one Republican made the list and only a few Independents. Check it out here for your state. (BTW, only one presidential candidate is not taking AIPAC money: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Hmmm, JUST VOTE BLUE? Why, yes, just vote blue.)
As a side note, I’ve had email exchanges about this situation with a friend of mine who recently moved back to Israel. He writes that personally, I define myself as a Zionist and secular Jew, who supports our state, and I have no doubt about the existential need for the State of Israel. At the same time, I oppose the rising nationalism in society and in the government that currently rules here.
In the religious context, there is a very large internal conflict in the country. A small portion of the population (about 13%) is ultra-Orthodox (Haredi), who do not serve in the army (which is mandatory for all citizens), receive disproportionate subsidies relative to their size in the population, and do not take a meaningful part in our shared civic duties. This community also opposes studying core subjects, which leaves this population weakened at the expense of the rest of the citizens.
I truly hope that the terrible situation in our country will come to an end, that the war will be over, and that our crazy leaders will be replaced very soon.
2.
I’ve been listening to interviews lately with economist Clara Mattei who believes that capitalism is NOT the natural order of things—it’s enforced upon us. Here are some of the salient points made from the interview below.
Capitalism is built on two pillars. 1) Wage labor, a system where workers have little to no option but to sell their capacity to work for given wages, producing much for value than what they actually receive in their wages. 2) Private Investment. A very few actually choose what is produced and why.
Austerity is the key to keeping wage-earners in a subordinate position. Also, workers are the ones taxed, not investors. And that tax money is not spent on social services or for the good of the people, most goes to the military.
Liberal Democracy: Very few make decisions and our only power is in the voting system, which a small percentage of people bother to use.
Participatory Democracy: Based on people having a say on the material conditions being decided and built in a given community.
Mattei currently lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is on the board of FREE, a forum for real economic emancipation. The website states that the organization is a community of neighbors, organizers, and thinkers working to understand the economic and social systems that shape our lives and to build new ones rooted in care, not control.
Here’s one more interview where she dismantles the myth of the free market, explaining how what appears to be freedom and choice is actually a system of control. If everything we need to survive is commodified, we must sell our labor to live. That dependency, she argues, creates a hierarchy where workers produce more value than they receive, and where policy is structured to protect that imbalance.
3.
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani erased a budget deficit that exceeded $12 billion and balanced a $124.7 billion executive budget through spending reductions, new taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and state aid.
4.
I have donated money to both New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury and to Governor front-runner Deb Haaland, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior. They have both seemed like honest and decent representatives of all people.
As I’ve been following Alisa Valdez-Rodriguez’ reporting on the web of lies and deceit surrounding Zorro Ranch and all things Epstein, one of my bubbles of naiveté has been popped. In her outreach to both of these officials, every lead that pointed toward a Republican enabler of Epstein was met with interest. Every lead that pointed toward a Democrat was met with silence. Valdez-Rodriguez is digging deep to know whether the commission created to investigate child trafficking is actually investigating child trafficking and not just saying it is.
Also, another Democrat, New Mexico State Representative Andrea Romero (D-Santa Fe), is supposedly a reformer in charge of the New Mexico Epstein Survivors Truth Commission. You can read more on her and the rest of the panel here.
Fun fact: Both of New Mexico’s Democratic Senators and three Democratic Representatives (including Stansbury) take AIPAC money.
Yesterday, Alisa’s reporting is spreading quickly as she appeared in an interview with Wajahat Ali in his Substack, the Left Hook.
The shit’s getting deeper and deeper…stay tuned.
Tiny Tidbits of Goddamn! (…and stories NOT in the national media)
— Joyce Vance details the ‘Redistricting Race To The Bottom’ in her latest post. The MAGAs, formerly known as Republicans, are afraid they can’t win elections on the merits of their governance and policies. So now, they’ve turned to moving the goalposts, changing the rules for winning elections so they can try to hold onto power nonetheless.
She reports Georgia’s minority leader, Harold Jones II, saying: If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities.
June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn’t good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from Black people and undo the progress the South made in the last 60 years.
Let’s sum it up for everybody. The biggest bloc of middle and working class voters are Black people. When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations. That’s what redistricting means for you.
— Secretary Sean Duffy’s participation in a reality show production called “The Great American Road Trip” over several months may have violated federal gift and travel rules. Secretary Duffy spent parts of seven months on a road trip with his family to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, squeezing in time to do “some work” in his taxpayer funded job.
— Now *rump has gone and completely screwed the pooch with the historic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Jeff Tiedrich writes nobody asked for any of this fuckery, but that’s just too goddamned bad for you and me. We’re getting it anyway, whether we like it or not — because President Pussygrabber is not that big on consent.
HCR wrote that *rump ignored the review process and used an exemption designed to prevent “serious injury, financial or other, to the government” to award a no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which has never before won a federal contract but which had worked at one of his golf clubs. The contract is for more than triple the $1.8 million Trump promised, and officials say the repairs will last for seven to ten years, rather than the 50 years Trump claimed. Even that might be generous: One expert warned that the motorcade the president took onto the pool yesterday to review the project was heavy enough to have sprung the newly-repaired joints between the concrete slabs that make up the pool bed.
— ProPublica reports that the *rump administration has granted more than 180 polluting facilities nationwide a two-year pause on compliance with Clean Air Act rules. No rigorous application was needed. An email, which they had until the end of the month to send, would suffice.
The fuckery is non-ending.
— And for the cherry on top, read HCR’s post from last night where she unpacks the insane corruption of *rump and his entire administration. Regarding the trip to China she writes, he took along seventeen CEOs of companies—many of which do business in China—including billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook of Apple. Together, the members of the delegation are worth more than a trillion dollars. Trump also took his son Eric, who runs the family business. As economist Paul Krugman said today, “He might as well have been walking around Beijing with a sign that says—in block capitals, of course, this is Trump—BRIBE ME.”
One last thing…many thanks to those of you who showed up and helped Dropped By Birds celebrate our last performance for the season at the Tucson Hop Shop last Tuesday. We had an absolute blast, and the band brought it. Stay tuned for the possibility of more hijinks in the fall…who knows?
And now…
