Friday Homestead Dispatch

Acrobatic Aerodynamic Arthropods

1.
The buying up of farmland in Arizona (and California) by the Saudis was reported as far back as 2016, according to this article by CNBC. And this report in 2019 in AZ Central led with the headline These 7 industrial farm operations are draining Arizona's aquifers, and no one knows exactly how much they're taking.

I only heard about this from a piece that Charles Pierce published on Monday in Esquire. He wrote that a Saudi water company leases pieces of Arizona, and at cut-rate prices. So the Saudi water company can grow alfalfa for Saudi cows while draining the aquifers that serve Arizonans. The Saudi water company is raiding Arizona’s groundwater because Saudi Arabia has nearly exhausted its own supply—an exchange that ought to put other states on high alert. He went on to quote from Arizona PBS: Arizona is leasing farmland to a Saudi water company, straining aquifers, and threatening future water supply in Phoenix. Fondomonte, a Saudi company, exports the alfalfa to feed its cows in the Middle East. The country has practically exhausted its own underground aquifers there. In Arizona, Fondomonte can pump as much water as it wants at no cost.

Groundwater is unregulated in most rural areas of the state. Fondomonte pays only $25 per acre annually. The State Land Department says the market rate is $50 dollars per acre and it provides a 50% discount because it doesn’t pay for improvements. But the $25 per acre price is about one-sixth of the market price for unimproved farmland with flood irrigation today, according to Charlie Havranek, a Realtor at Southwest Land Associates.

AZ Central goes on to say It is impossible to know how much water large farms are taking. The state doesn't require meters on wells in rural Arizona, so nobody is tracking how many gallons are pumped out. Well monitoring data is limited by voluntary participation and infrequent readings. And the large corporate farms are all new arrivals, coming to Arizona since 2012.

But well drilling records show these farms own more than 700 wells and collectively have drilled more than 200 wells deeper than 1,000 feet, allowing them to draw down aquifers more quickly and dry up shallower wells. Combined, the seven companies own, farm or control more than 130,000 acres across the state. Though not all of that land is irrigated, if it were, it would equal nearly 15 percent of the harvested cropland in Arizona, as tallied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In Kingman alone pumping draws on groundwater that has built up over thousands of years. As it's pumped out, the scant rain that falls on the desert isn't enough to recoup the losses. A federal study showed that in 2011 groundwater pumping in the Hualapai Basin surrounding Kingman exceeded the rate of recharge by 5,600 acre-feet annually. A state study found that in 2016, that deficit had increased to 37,600 acre-feet — enough water to supply about 113,000 average single-family households in Phoenix for a year.

But it’s a dry heat…

2.
Bertrand Russell's dignified and forceful refusal to debate a British fascist — a return letter to Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, written after a series of provoking correspondences from Mosley for the 89 year old Russell to engage in public "talks" in which Oswald thought he could persuade the moral philosopher of the merits of fascism.

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letters and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell

3.
And lots of yammering going around about the Biden administration announcing it was canceling up to $10,000 of student debt for millions of people and up to $20,000 of debt for low- and middle-income borrowers who previously received a Pell Grant. He said “An entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for an attempt, at least, at a college degree. The burden is so heavy, even if you graduate, you may not have access to the middle-class life that the college degree once provided. Many people can’t qualify for a mortgage to buy a home because of the debt they continue to carry.”

And, of course, conservatives immediately assailed the move as fiscally irresponsible and patently unfair to the millions of Americans who never attended college, never borrowed or paid off their loans. Maybe, just maybe, conservatives had something to do with this mess in the first place.

Here’s Rebecca Solnit: The story of student debt is inseparable from the country's swing to the right that produced tax cuts that meant public education got a lot more expensive, paid for by students rather than by society via taxes on people already established. The people with means gave themselves a break and dumped a burden on the young, in other words. A lot of individual stories exist within the context of this collective story. Which is important to remember because it could be reversed and because it undoes the story that it's individual failing that produced the debt crisis (or that the young should just buck up like grandpa did when the UC system was free).

And yeah, there could be footnotes about how private universities jacked up their prices and scam for-profit colleges bilked the naive and how metastasizing bureaucracy also made education a lot more expensive. But this transfer from the public to the private via the tax cuts and the gutting of funding for colleges is a key piece of the story.

There could be other footnotes about how people back when higher education was cheap to free were able to be idealists, to take risks, to make mistakes. I caught the tail end of that, and I feel like I sprinted through college (SFSU, then UCB) as the doors were slamming shut behind me. I've heard boomers bitch at the young for being less idealistic, but they're just less free. Between the higher cost of living, debt, and the ease with which people now fall into the homelessness it's so hard to climb out of, there are a lot of scary forces to keep people on the financial straight and narrow. It's a harder, crueler world than that peak of economic egalitarianism and funded social safety nets that was the postwar era.

Astra Taylor, who's been a leader with the Debt Collective for a decade, says it better: There are 45 million student debtors in the United States. Did each one of those 45 million people just make a terrible mistake? They just somehow failed to really comprehend compound interest? No. When something is that massive, when you have 45 million people all in the same boat, it’s because of the structural issue, because that’s actually the way the economy is set up. One phrase from the Debt Collective book, which we just published maybe six months ago—it’s called Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition—one line from that book is “We are not in debt because we live beyond our means. We are indebted because we are denied the means to live.”

We’re in debt because we have a basically quasi-privatized education system in this country. The average student graduates from college with $35,000 in student debt, and that of course just balloons because of interest. The United States is buried in medical debt, unlike many other advanced countries, because we don’t have universal health care. This is the only country where thousands and thousands and thousands of people every year go bankrupt because their medical bills, because they got cancer, because one of their family members got sick. So we have a crisis of debt that is not a personal issue. It’s a political issue.

The short film below (under seven minutes), a collaboration between The Intercept, artist Molly Crabapple and her creative partners at Sharp As Knives productions, and writer Astra Taylor, makes the argument for understanding our debt in new ways. Our monthly payments are a source of profit, a form of wealth transfer from struggling borrowers to the well-to-do. These profits are a source of power; debt is never just about money. In the United States, debt has long been used as a form of social control and a tool of white supremacy.

Just for fun, Marjorie Taylor Greene criticized Biden's student loan forgiveness plans as "completely unfair," despite records showing that her own company had $183,504 worth of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans forgiven in 2020. Other MAGA’s who doth protest too much but also had loans forgiven: Vern Buchanan (R-FL): $2.3 million, Markwayne Mullin (R-OK): $1.4 million, Kevin Hern (R-OK): $1 million, Mike Kelly (R-PA): $987,237, and Matt Gaetz (R-FL): $432,321. Bwwaaahhaaaahaaaaaa

And one more nugget from McTurtle McConnell…"President Biden's student loan socialism is a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt, and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve in our Armed Forces in order to avoid taking on debt. This policy is astonishingly unfair… This is cynical and outrageous but perfectly in character for these Democrats. Taking money and purchasing power away from working families and redistributing it to their favored friends.”

As Charles Pierce wrote on Wednesday, Mitch McConnell tried to take health-care away from every one of the groups on which he is so tender here. He passed a tax cut out of which most of them didn’t get car fare. He couldn’t muster a single Republican vote for a bill that would have helped those who “volunteered to serve in our armed forces” and came home sickened by the toxins in battlefield burn pits. He fought against an infrastructure bill that will help the “graduates who paid their debt” get to work without their roadways falling into a river. He rigged the Supreme Court so as to take away essential health-care from the 51 percent of Americans “who chose a certain career path,” and then blocked a legislative effort to bring it back. Mitch McConnell is a charlatan without a single ounce of sympathy for anyone except his donors. And his idea of “socialism” is anything they don’t like.

4.
I first wrote about Rusty Bowers in June shortly after he testified to the January 6 hearings in which he revealed the pressure he was put under to overturn Arizona’s election result. In an interview with Ed Pilkington in the Guardian last Sunday Bowers said, “The constitution is hanging by a thread. The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And it’s my side. That just rips at my heart: that we would be the people who would surrender the constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.” This coming from a VERY conservative Republican politician. As Pilkington wrote, Rusty has been unceremoniously shown the door by his own Republican party. His assailants in the Arizona Republican party wanted to punish him because he had steadfastly refused to do their, and Trump’s, bidding. He had declined to use his power as leader of the house to invoke an “arcane Arizonan law” – whose text has never been found – that would allow the legislature to cast out the will of 3.4 million voters who had handed victory to Joe Biden and switch the outcome unilaterally to Trump.

Tom Nichols, staff writer for the Atlantic, penned a convincing explanation of the cult mindset we are now witness to in the current GOP and its followers.

A Deepening Void

Civil war is among the many terms we now use too easily. The American Civil War was a bloodbath driven by the inevitable confrontation between the Union and the organized forces of sedition and slavery. But at least the Civil War, as I said Friday on Morning Joe during a panel on political violence in America, was about something. Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government.

The United States now faces a different kind of violence, from people who believe in nothing—or at least, in nothing real. We do not risk the creation of organized armies and militias in Virginia or Louisiana or Alabama marching on federal institutions. Instead, all of us face random threats and unpredictable dangers from people among us who spend too much time watching television and plunging down internet rabbit holes. These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.

There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.

What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them.

Donald Trump is central to this fraying of public sanity, because he has done one thing for such people that no one else could do: He has made their lives interesting. He has made them feel important. He has taken their itching frustrations about the unfairness of life and created a morality play around them, and cast himself as the central character. Trump, to his supporters, is the avenging angel who is going to lay waste to the “elites,” the smarty-pantses and do-gooders, the godless and the smug, the satisfied and the comfortable.

I spoke with one of the original Never Trumpers over the weekend, a man who has lost friends and family because of his opposition to Trump, and he told me that one of the most unsettling things to him is that these same pro-Trump family and friends now say that they believe that Trump broke the law—but that they don’t care. They see Trump and his crusade—their crusade against evil, the drama that gives their lives meaning—as more important than the law.

I have heard similar sentiments among people I know.

Some of these people are ready to snap and to resort to violence. A Navy veteran in Ohio was killed in a standoff last week after he attacked the Cincinnati FBI office; a man in Pennsylvania was arrested and charged today for threatening to “slaughter” federal agents, whom he called “police state scum.” But that doesn’t stop charlatans and con artists from throwing matches at the fuses every day, because those hucksters, too, have decided that living a normal life and working a straight job is for saps. They will gladly risk the occasional explosion here and there if it means living the good life off of donations and purchases from their marks.

When enough Americans decide that a cult of personality matters more than a commitment to democracy, we risk becoming a lawless autocracy. This is why we must continue to demand that Trump and his enablers face the consequences of their actions: To cave in the face of threats means the end of democracy. And it would not, in any event, mollify those among our fellow citizens who have chosen to discard the Constitution so that they can keep mainlining jolts of drama from morning ’til night.

We are going to be living in this era of political violence for the foreseeable future. All any of us can do is continue, among our friends and family and neighbors, to say and defend what is right in the face of lies and delusions.

5.
When the ‘adults’ won’t do the right thing, teens are stepping up. Nashville based Emma Rose Smith, 17, has formed Teens For Reproductive Rights, according to the Washington Post. In Tennessee, state law does not require sex education, and it holds that schools in areas with high pregnancy rates must offer “family life education” focused on abstinence. They are part of a burgeoning movement of high-schoolers nationwide who, after Roe’s fall, are stepping up to demand more comprehensive lessons on reproduction, contraception and abortion — and who, if the adults refuse, are teaching each other instead.

The Post goes on to say in Virginia, 15-year-old Rivka Vizcardo-Lichter is organizing demonstrations outside school board meetings to pressure the Fairfax County district to offer students information about reproductive health clinics, more detailed lessons on contraceptive methods other than abstinence (it already includes the basics, but she wants more) — and access to contraception.

“Teenagers are teenagers, and some teenagers are going to have sex,” she said. “They need to be educated on how to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies and STIs [sexually transmitted infections] and sexual risk — especially if we’re removing the right to ... choose whether or not you’re having a baby.”

Lily Swain, Emma Rose Smith, Alyson Nordstrom and Paige Buckley address a crowd of teens, sharing information and resources related to reproductive rights. (William DeShazer for The Washington Post)

Virginia Republican/Puritan governor Glenn Youngkin signed a law last spring that requires school districts to notify parents whenever sexually explicit material is included in lessons, and to offer students non-explicit alternatives if parents request them. Vizcardo-Lichter believes this law imperils students’ access to sex education. She is all the more determined to persuade her school district to expand its sex-ed curriculum by teaching about more contraceptive options and reproductive health clinics, as well as offering students free contraception. Her sex-ed experience was “abstinence 100” percent of the time, she said.

And then there’s Moms For Liberty. Again in WaPo, Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the national parent group Moms for Liberty, said in an interview that “comprehensive sex ed has no place in school.” She said school districts everywhere should convene groups of parents to determine what is “age appropriate” for children to learn. Right wing narratives being tossed around in this group, and where they gather, include lectures about how "social emotional learning" is being used as a subtle form of "brainwashing" to transform children into "change agents" and social justice protesters, and ultimately, to usher in a "new world, with new values" as desired by globalist elites. Warning parents that there was a longstanding communist plot to estrange children from their parents by making "your kid a little sexual weirdo," Lindsay argued that, "Under social emotional learning," parents of public school students "are sending your children to a thought reform program" akin to those in Mao Zedong's China during the Cultural Revolution. Both Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott are pushing this agenda.

Excuse me, I just threw up in my mouth a little…feel free to burn this post after reading. And……JUST. VOTE. BLUE.

6.
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