“The framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to; there were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They didn’t provide immunity to the president. And, you know—not so surprising—they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?” —Justice Elena Kagan
1.
I can hardly keep up with the news this week; Bibi calling U.S. university protesters against Israel’s war in Gaza antisemitic mobs, the Supreme Robed One’s insane divisiveness in both the Idaho abortion band and, of course, the presidential immunity case, and, even though he will remain imprisoned because he was convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of another rape, the New York Court of Appeals on Thursday overturned the sex crimes conviction against Harvey Weinstein.
But one note of good cheer are the indictments by a grand jury in Phoenix on April 23 of 18 people, including two Arizona state senators and the former head of the Arizona Republican Party, in a fake elector scheme that aimed to install Donald Trump as the president after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. They are accused of attempting to keep “President Donald J. Trump in office against the will of Arizona voters, and depriving Arizona voters of their right to vote and have their votes counted.” One of the indicted fake electors, Arizona Sen. Jake Hoffman, leader of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, blurted “Kris Mayes & the Democrats’ naked corruption and weaponization of government will long be a stain on the history of our great state and nation.” Bwaahahaahahaaaaa, I think you have it backwards, punk. And one more strike against Republicans in Maricopa County, the Arizona House of Representatives voted Wednesday to repeal a near-total abortion ban from 1864, with three Republican lawmakers breaking from their party to join Democrats in striking it down. You might want to send a note of thanks to Republican Rep. Tim Dunn, R-Yuma, who joined Rep. Matt Gress, R-Phoenix in bucking House Speaker Ben Toma and the rest of the GOP caucus, allowing the vote to occur.
2.
Shortly after I published last week’s Dispatch, the story broke regarding the United Auto Workers union’s huge win in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This makes the Volkswagen plant the first foreign-owned car factory in the South to unionize. Considering that the Republican governors of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas all denounced unionizing, saying they were all “highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the UAW has brought into our states. As Governors, we have a responsibility to our constituents to speak up when we see special interests looking to come into our state and threaten our jobs and the values we live by.” So you know, their names are Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, Governor Kay Ivey (AL), Governor Brian Kemp (GA), Governor Tate Reeves (MS), Governor Henry McMaster (SC), and Governor Greg Abbott (TX).
In an interview with Amy Goodman, Jane McAlevey, the great labor organizer, scholar and writer, said while too many national labor leaders sat around debating, “We can’t really win. We have to change labor law. We have to do all these things,” when all we have to do is actually start trusting that workers are really intelligent, that if we teach them what it takes to win, which is building supermajority organization before the election, that’s going to carry them into a great first contract fight. And that’s just what they did in Chattanooga. And I hope they’re going to march right into Alabama and do the same, because that’s going to really rock the house of the South of this country, if we walk this into the Mercedes plant on May 17th.
She also had high praise for Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, saying he is already becoming the kind of trade union leader that we need many, many more of. And I am thrilled that he is my union president. And I’m thrilled that I got to participate in the direct democracy movement that helped put Shawn Fain in, because we are seeing what one risk-taking, strategic, smart trade union leader can do in literally less than a year. He’s created a movement in less than 12 months.
In an interview in the Guardian, Fain said the governors were the ones “wrecking the economy because they don’t care about working people having a decent wage. It’s working-class people who move the economy.” He added that the governors’ “economy is the economy of the billionaire class and corporate class where they take all the profits, and the workers get left behind”.
Asked about President Biden’s role in all of this, Fain said “He has to continue doing what he’s been doing, which is supporting workers in their fights.” Fain praised Biden for becoming the first sitting president to walk a union picket line – Biden joined a UAW picket line in Michigan last September when the union was on strike against Detroit’s big three automakers. He also praised Biden for making it easier to unionize EV battery plants.
3.
After a shooting just over a year ago at a private Christian school in Nashville left three students and three staff members dead, Tennessee lawmakers have brought forth a giant band-aid to place gently over the issue of gun restrictions and hand a lollipop to those in the business of selling firearms. A bill was passed in the House chamber at the Tennessee State Capitol on Tuesday to allow teachers and other school staff members to carry concealed handguns on school campuses. Hmmm, add learning to handle a weapon to the list of work educators are expected to do each day…even highly trained police officers with hand guns can do little when they’re up against an AR-15.
It took 30 years but President Biden in 2022, with strong pushback by the gun lobby, signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act gun safety bill, which includes incentives for states to pass so-called red flag laws that allow groups to petition courts to remove weapons from people deemed a threat to themselves or others, prevents people convicted of domestic abuse from owning a gun to include dating partners rather than just spouses and former spouses, and expands background checks on people between the ages of 18 and 21 seeking to buy a gun.
And, of course, earlier this year, Fuckleroy said he had firmly protected gun rights while in the White House and vowed if re-elected to undo all restrictions enacted by President Joe Biden.
4.
Got travertine tile in your home, or on your patio? You might want to see if there are any human remains visible. In an article in the Washington Post, a dentist was visiting his parents’ newly renovated home in Europe when he noticed something odd: One of the floor tiles in a corridor leading to a terrace held what looked like a human mandible, sliced through at an angle, including a cross section of a few teeth.
This tile came from a quarry in the Denizli Basin in western Turkey, where the stone has previously been dated to 1.8 million to 0.7 million years ago, according to Mehmet Cihat Alcicek, a professor at Pamukkale University in Turkey who is part of the scientific team that plans to study the mandible.
5.
We dutifully gather all our plastic waste and take it to the recycling bins by the Ward 6 office just off Speedway and Country Club, as do MANY others by the look of things. So much plastic has been recycled in Tucson that a company called ByFusion has contracted with the city to have a facility open by 2025 to take those hard-to-recycle plastics and make them into plastic bricks.
Not to get too far into the weeds, but there is a pant-load of controversy surrounding this sensitive subject. CNN just published a grim article detailing, with pictures, how despite global efforts to give plastic products longer lives, only 9% of them are actually recycled. Most plastic waste goes into landfills or is shipped to places like Indonesia and other Southeast Asian nations, many of which are already drowning in their own plastic pollution. Even the folks at earthday.org claim that carefully constructed promise of recycling is nearly all a lie manufactured by the plastic industry. The dream of recycling was invented by them to distract us from the very real issues of plastic pollution.
This issue is so complicated that the Guardian revealed last year that more than 1,500 lobbyists in the US are working on behalf of fossil-fuel companies while at the same time representing hundreds of liberal-run cities, universities, technology companies and environmental groups that say they are tackling the climate crisis. Mind-boggling.
And just this week, the Washington Post published a detailed opinion piece by Eve O. Schaub, author of “Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman’s Trashy Journey to Zero Waste,” titled Don’t waste your time recycling plastic. She asserts that what many people do not know is that plastic is made from two ingredients: fossil fuels and toxic chemicals. When we say toxic chemicals, we are talking about some very bad actors: heavy metals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), flame retardants and persistent organic pollutants. Tens of thousands of proprietary chemical formulas are involved in the production of plastic, most of which have never been tested for their effects on human health, although many are known to be endocrine disruptors, fertility inhibitors and carcinogens.
Even our own Los Reales Sustainability Campus, where the new ByFusion plant is expected to be built, claims that heating plastic waste to make synthetic fuels – via pyrolysis, gasification, or other “advanced recycling” method – is a problematic technology. The article goes on to say that zero waste systems are the preferable approach and the best way to deal with our waste and reduce GHGs is not to produce so much in the first place.
And Jim Hightower weighed in yesterday with a piece on Coca-Cola’s plastic fairy tale.
Food to chew on…we try to use as little plastic as possible but the system has been gamed worldwide for many years.
6.
Every election season my buddy Michael Herzmark gets busy producing short political video gems from his home due south of Los Angeles. This one is on The DANGEROUS Healthcare Vowels of the REPUBLICANS. Pass it around!
And now…
bringing the light to a cloudy day, thanks Gary. kw
The mandible