Friday Homestead Dispatch
Factious Flibbertigibbet Fiddle-Faddle
“It’s designed to make you miserable,” Frank had said. “Capitalism only works if everyone’s unhappy. And they think they have to buy their way to happiness. It’s a fool’s pursuit, but that’s the way it’s supposed to work. The only way it can work. Everybody has to chase after something, and then be dissatisfied once they’ve got it and go chase after something else. We’re trapped by the pursuit of happiness, but it would all come crashing down if we were actually happy.” – from “Just Thieves” by Gregory Galloway
1.
Many of you know I’ve been playing drums with Kevin Pakulis for several years. Recently he’s been posting (on Facebook) many of the posters and flyers designed for various venues throughout our time together (also with bassist Karl Hoffmann). So, in that spirit, I thought I’d show a few from my previous band, the Carnivaleros, that were made before the pandemic…
2.
Republican Cochise County Supervisor Peggy Judd, a former cake decorator at Bob’s IGA Grocery Store Bakery and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, lives in Willcox but her offices are in Bisbee. She, along with one other supervisor, voted last month to reject $1.9 million in pandemic aid. “We’re done,” snarled Peggy, “We’re treating it like the common cold.”
The New York Times reported that by rejecting the federal money, it became one of the rare places in America to turn down Covid-19, er, I mean ‘common cold’ assistance from Washington. This ‘common cold’ has caused the death of 522 Cochise County residents thus far.
On January 6, 2021, Judd attended the Stop the Steal rally and March that led to the Capitol Insurrection. The Tucson Sentinel reported that Judd has claimed that the takeover of the Capitol right after a speech by Trump just down the National Mall was possibly a planned "false flag" operation in which "Antifa" activists and corrupt Capitol Police officers duped innocent Trump supporters into appearing in videos of the violent clashes on the steps and inside the Capitol building. "In fact, while I was walking there, about to die because I'm old and not in such good shape, I was actually thinking, 'this is kind of like, you know, like marching for our rights and our freedom' — I kind of almost felt like it was equal to the Martin Luther King march. We did a great thing today and please know [all] of us standing up all over America today have made it possible to move on to the next level of action by our current amazing president!"
And the other Cochise supervisor who voted against the money, Tom Crosby, compared Covid-19 vaccines to Agent Orange, the cancer-causing herbicide that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands during the Vietnam War. He said he wanted “to get the county out of the vaccine business.”
On September 23, 2021, a Cochise County citizen submitted an Application for Recall in response to allegations Peggy Judd violated A.R.S. 38-231: Oath of Office by attending the rally in Washington. Cochise County Republican Committee Chairman Richard Montgomery said, "I'm really not going to get into that nonsense. Ah, that's just some goofy shit from, ah, disgruntled losers. I don't have any opinion to give you about it. A million to a million and a half people were there. What do you want to do, fire or imprison all of them? Or get them to resign their jobs?"
Well, yes, I do…
3.
In a bit of good news in regard to other insane elected officials, state Rep. Mark Finchem and state GOP Chair Kelli Ward (Arizona) are among six people issued subpoenas Tuesday by the House Jan. 6 Committee. Among the many of Ward’s wacky doings, she sold her osteopathic clinic in Lake Havasu City in 2009 in a buyout paid with half a million dollars in Obama Stimulus Funds that came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, all while telling her her prospective voters she HATES Obamacare.
The Daily Kos reported she has appeared on the radio show of a local Arizona conspiracy nut named Luca Zanna, where she chatted about mysterious helicopters that had been spotted in Arizona, finding agreement how Common Core standards were turning children into “slaves”, as well as the prospect of martial law, or the possibility of a foreign power sending troops to subdue American citizens.
And according to Mother Jones, in 2017 she headlined a dinner at the annual convention of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons in Tucson. Despite its dull name, AAPS isn’t some stodgy medical organization. It’s actually a fringe doctors’ group whose medical journal over the years has featured a host of discredited theories, including arguments that abortion causes breast cancer, HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, vaccines cause autism, and illegal immigrants caused a leprosy outbreak in the United States. Founded in the 1940s, AAPS had ties to the right-wing John Birch Society and has been a steadfast foe of anything its members view as socialized medicine, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Its statement of principles says that the effect of government health care plans “is evil and participation in carrying out its provisions is, in our opinion, immoral.”
Just a week ago or so, Mother Jones reported Mark Finchem took more than $6,000 from the Trump campaign in December, as he was pushing fellow state lawmakers to overturn the November election results. Previously, Finchem has claimed to be part of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing extremist militia that was also present at the Capitol on January 6. In 2014 he sought to recruit new members to the group, according to a Facebook screenshot, and also claimed to be a member of the group in 2014 ahead of that year’s elections.
4.
There is so much talk of climate change that industrial pollution gets short shrift these days. Reuters reported that pollution from pesticides, plastics and electronic waste is causing widespread human rights violations as well as at least 9 million premature deaths a year, and that the issue is largely being overlooked … "Current approaches to managing the risks posed by pollution and toxic substances are clearly failing, resulting in widespread violations of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment," the report's author, U.N. Special Rapporteur David Boyd, concluded.
ProPublica says that Polluters are turning neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones” where residents breathe in carcinogens. The EPA allows it. ProPublica undertook an analysis (https://www.propublica.org/article/toxmap-poison-in-the-air) that has never been done before. Using advanced data processing software and a modeling tool developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, we mapped the spread of cancer-causing chemicals from thousands of sources of hazardous air pollution across the country between 2014 and 2018. The result is an unparalleled view of how toxic air blooms around industrial facilities and spreads into nearby neighborhoods.
To see what lovely pollution-spewing plants are near you, click here. One of Tucson’s worst is Caid Industries located, of course, in South Tucson. Caid has an estimated excess lifetime cancer risk from industrial sources of about 1 in 64,000, or 84% lower than the EPA's acceptable risk, emitting Chromium and Nickel.
By researching this issue a bit it brought to my attention the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), a global authority that sets the environmental agenda, promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment. Their mission is to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations.
The right to a healthy environment has gained constitutional recognition and protection in more than 100 States; the strongest form of legal protection available. About two thirds of the constitutional rights refer to a healthy environment; alternative formulations include rights to a clean, safe, favorable, wholesome or ecologically balanced environment. Below is a map of the participating countries. Notice that Canada, the United States, and Britain are not on board.
Dark green: Countries with the constitutionally protected right to a healthy environment
Light green: Countries with constitutional provisions for a healthy environment
5.
You need some Hightower Lowdown relief today! He writes Everyone's feeling the strain of inflation, but what's the real story underneath those jacked-up prices? Spoiler alert: corporate greed! It turns out that the billionaires who run major conglomerates are not eating from their own pockets, but instead using monopolies and monopsonies to squeeze everyone else: the producers, the workers and the consumers. We're sitting down with Steve Charter, a rancher in Montana and chair of the Bull Mountain Land Alliance, and John Boyd, Jr., a Virginia farmer and president of the National Black Farmers Association, to get into it all-- and learn what everyday people can do to fight back.
In a recent newsletter, he writes Last July, several GOP senators combined their 5-watt intellects to charge that inflation was rising because of the “insane tax and spending spree of President Biden and the Democrats.” Never mind that the “insane” spending was for such sensible and enormously popular national needs as childcare and jobless benefits, Mitch McConnell’s rabidly partisan flock saw the chance to weaponize the public’s legitimate worries about rising prices. You poor consumers, they wailed, are being made to pay more for basics like groceries and gasoline because of “Socialist Joe’s” investments in grassroots people. But there’s one big problem with their virtuous circle: It’s a laissez-fairyland fraud that implodes when it hits the hard reality that our economy doesn’t remotely resemble a competitive marketplace. As the Lowdown detailed in October, nearly every economic sector in the US (from high tech to farm and food) has been locked down by a handful of overpowering corporate giants. For some 40 years, corporate-directed government policies have (1) intentionally promoted (even subsidized) mega-mergers; (2) gleefully green-lighted anticompetitive business tactics; and (3) aggressively inculcated and celebrated the economic lie that bigger is better. Thus, in short order and with practically no public awareness, much less discussion, America has been transformed into Monopoly Nation.
I tend to agree when he says asserting democracy over plutocracy is a momentous, brawling struggle for fundamental structural repair, requiring gutsy leaders willing to go right at the bastards with unconventional outsider strategies. The key to winning is not by schmoozing McConnell and Manchin, but by going into the countryside and rallying the majority of people fed up with corporate arrogance and abuse by…
- Go to the people. Embark on a series of whistle stop tours to excite and enlist grassroots fighters.
- Join ranchers and workers at the Big Four meatpacking plants to dramatize and protest the abuses.
- File actions under the Justice Department’s authority to break up anti-competitive combines.
- Pursue high-profile criminal charges against price-fixing executives.
- Ban stock buybacks.
- Deploy cabinet members across the country to publicize local abuses and demand stronger anti-trust laws.
- Bring outsiders like Steve Charter to the White House to tell their stories and personalize the issue.
6.
And then there’s that darn Hillary Clinton, once again speaking up about Republicans. At this point, what does she have to lose? Speaking at the New York Democratic Convention on Thursday, she said “Republicans will claim they’re on the side of parents and family values, but they will do nothing for actual parents or families…nothing on child care, nothing on paid leave, nothing to help working moms and dads get by and get ahead. They will do nothing to invest in our schools or make college more affordable. they’ll ban books but do nothing about guns. They’ll make it harder for people to vote but easier for big corporations to bust unions. They’ll let polluters trash our environment and let Donald Trump trash our democracy.”
And now…
I don’t even know where to start, all so good. And man, that Hillary, she was ON it!