Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023

Partly Sunny | Pacific Coast | 12/5/92 | Mayor Reception | Ice Skating | Dump Day | Burroughs Painting | Adventist Monopoly | Toy Drive | Covered California | Raven | Water Bureaucrats | Candidates Forum | School Truancy | Fungi Find | Ed Notes | Philly Funk | Partners Gallery | Cobalt Gallery | Socialist State | Flies Backward | Intimate Concert | Yesterday's Catch | Oaxacan Celebration | Holiday Poem | Huntington Beach | Incredible Change | Presley Fan | Big Weed | Teapot Kid | Petrodollar System | Twice Fouled

NEAR TO ABOVE NORMAL TEMPERATURES along with mostly dry weather today, with some light rain showers in Del Norte County. A stronger system will move in tonight bringing gusty winds, moderate to heavy rainfall and high elevation snow through Thursday night. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A Large Surf 20' To 24' / Sneaker Wave Warning Is Posted Along The Coast Tonight & Thru Tomorrow - be very careful near the ocean's edge. A partly cloudy 51F on the coast this Tuesday morning. Cover that firewood today weather fans as we have 2 days of good rain starting tomorrow. Clearing on Friday then more rain chances for the weekend. Next week starts out dry thru Wednesday so far.

ON THIS DAY...December 5, 1492 – Christopher Columbus became the first European to set foot on the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

THERE WILL BE A RECEPTION to welcome Ukiah City Mayor Josefina Duenas at the Civic Center in Ukiah at 5:30pm on December 6.

CALTRANS TO HOST CLEAN CA DUMP DAY EVENT IN CASPAR

Caltrans District 1 announced a Clean California (Clean CA) Dump Day in partnership with the County of Mendocino and Solid Wastes of Willits for Saturday, Dec. 16 at the Caspar Transfer Station.

This Dump Day allows residents to drop off accepted large items for free. Dump Day events were made possible through Governor Gavin Newsom’s Clean California initiative. A sweeping $1.2 billion, multiyear cleanup effort led by Caltrans to keep roads and waterways free of litter, create thousands of jobs, and transform state and local public spaces through beautification efforts.

Saturday, Dec. 16, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. or until capacity is reached.

Caspar Transfer Station, 15000 Prairie Way, Caspar

Free Dump Day collection is limited to household items including furniture, appliances, mattresses, scrap metal and other large, bulky items. No tires, construction materials, electronics, business waste, hazardous waste, treated wood waste, or asbestos of any type will be accepted.

Caltrans reminds motorists to properly secure and tarp all cargo loads prior to driving. Transporting unsecured loads is unsafe, illegal, and pollutes California's roads and waterways. Loads that are not tied down, enclosed, or secured by tarps or other means will not be accepted.

Tips for securing your load:

Completely cover loads with tarps or cargo nets. Debris can escape from gaps. Remove loose material and trash before driving. Don't overload; keep materials level with your truck bed. Put light items lower, tie large items to the vehicle for traffic safety.

For questions about this Community Dump Voucher, please contact Brenda.Rose@dot.ca.gov or call (707) 572-7266.

Clean California Community Dump Day events are made possible through Governor Gavin Newsom's Clean California initiative, a sweeping $1.2 billion, multiyear clean-up effort led by Caltrans to remove trash, create thousands of jobs, and engage communities to transform public spaces.

Since launching Clean California in July 2021, Caltrans and local partners have removed an estimated 1.86 million cubic yards of litter from state highways — a trash pile that would be more than 370 times taller than Mount Whitney (14,505 feet, the state’s highest peak). The program has created more than 4,000 jobs that have helped Californians overcome barriers to employment, including 357 people experiencing homelessness, and drawn more than 10,000 volunteers to events ranging from community cleanups to large debris collections for appliances, tires and mattresses.

Visit CleanCA.com to learn more about how Clean California is transforming communities and educating the public.

COMMENTS ON ADVENTIST CANCELING BLUE SHIELD COVERAGE

Michael Turner: Adventist always poor-mouths its finances to the public. Many of its “expenses” are in fact hefty salaries going to top-heavy administrative salaries largely consisting of church members. Whatever belt tightening might occur as a result of this fiasco, it won’t include salary cuts for their elite. What will happen though is an increase in medical bankruptcies among working people with health insurance that no longer pays for medical emergencies. Try applying for an out of network waiver from your bed in the ICU. The Adventists are playing hardball using the “leverage of 26 markets”, meaning the lives of people living in poor rural counties. If you are uninsured you pay full retail prices for big ticket medical expenses. I know of several individuals who have been forced to draw down their retirement accounts to cover such costs. This number will increase. But don’t worry, Adventist Health should be ok.

* * *

Julie Beardsley: Regarding Adventist canceling Blue Shield coverage – this is not acceptable. We are a large rural county and for example, Adventist Ukiah Valley provides the ONLY labor and delivery services in the entire county. To expect pregnant mothers to travel to Santa Rosa or Lake County for care is simply not acceptable. The Adventist Hospital system was granted an exception as a monopoly for health care in this county, and they MUST provide access to health care for all insurers. If not, then I hope the community bands together to file an anti-trust complaint against them. I suggest everyone who has Blue Shield insurance contact them and let them know they must provide care as a monopoly.

You can contact the corporate offices at:

COVERED CALIFORNIA OPEN ENROLLMENT PERIOD FOR HEALTH CARE COVERAGE

The Covered California Health Exchange offers health care coverage plans for Californians. Please review your options to ensure that you receive the benefits of health care coverage and all the financial subsidies to help cover the cost. It only takes a few minutes to see what's available and what subsidies you may qualify for.

Open enrollment began November 1 and continues through January 31, 2024.

In addition, there was a change this year that may affect millions of Californians. During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal funding ensured continuous Medi-Cal coverage for those who qualified; however, this requirement ended on April 1, 2023. Now, many Californians will need to enroll in alternate sources of coverage.

Below are some resources I hope will be helpful to you:

• Visit Covered California for detailed information on coverage plans and estimated costs and to start your enrollment.
• Covered California has launched the Medi-Cal to Covered California Enrollment Program for those no longer eligible for Medi-Cal. This program provides a seamless transition to a qualified health plan offered by Covered California, maximizing financial help.

Your health and access to quality care are important to me, so please ensure you get the best coverage for you.

Best,

Jim Wood
Assemblymember, District 2

THE ALWAYS INFORMATIVE Monica Huettl covers on the Redwood Valley Water Board meetings for Mendofever.com. She reports some interesting insider perspective on the problems associated with rural water storage and gauging which are ignored in wet years but can become significant in drought years:

“Director Bree Klotter wanted to know how much has been spent on water, versus how much was sold. On the water use worksheet showing year to date, about 128-acre feet is not accounted for.

“Board President Adam Gaska said some of the water purchased is stored at the holding pond, but not yet sold. General Manager Jared Walker said there are various reasons for water loss: sometimes the ag meters get stuck, in hot weather the holding pond evaporates quite a bit, there is leakage in the ag system, and some water theft. The holding pond is unlined, which could result in a 5-10% loss of volume. The Board discussed whether it would be advantageous to install a pond liner, but concluded that it would be hard to justify draining the pond to put in the liner, and there would be no water for fire protection during the installation. The District is replacing water meters, beginning with the broken ones as needed, rather than replacing them all at once.”

* * *

Huettl also reported: “Mendocino County LAFCO was presented with options for raising money for the Ukiah Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency. The plan to fund the GSA will either be a property tax assessment or a bill for water usage. The GSA submitted another invoice to the water districts to fund the rate study. Redwood Valley’s portion is around $9,000, due in March 2024. The benefit to the landowner is that by monitoring groundwater, hopefully, the existing wells won’t go dry, as many have done in the Central Valley.”

WE WOULD BE VERY SURPRISED if Redwood Valley water users accept or support a tax or fee for this dubious “Agency” and its wine-industry dominated Board which the state forced on the Ukiah Valley and has been paying for until recently. Especially if all they’ll get for it is some vague hope that the GSA will ensure that their wells don’t go dry. The only thing we’ve seen that the GSA has produced is some consultant-generated water modeling studies that few people besides themselves have shown much interest in. Ukiah Valley needs water, not another layer of water bureaucrats.

(Mark Scaramella)

LEW CHICHESTER: One of the features of the AVA which I find consistently informative are the reports from Louise Simpson, AV School Superintendent. I have served as a trustee of the Round Valley School District for ten years now, and her updates and perspectives from a rural school district are relevant here as well. Regarding truancy and enforcement both our school districts have similar issues. No enforcement. But it is not a police problem but a failure or refusal to prosecute policy from the DA’s office. This comes up from time to time in our school board discussions and we are informed consistently that the DA will not prosecute truancy, claiming it is not cost effective or worthwhile, as if this is a crime without a victim. I find this to be extremely disappointing as one of the goals in education is to instill in youth the understanding that behavior has consequences. The DA is teaching our young people, inadvertently, the benefits of antisocial, selfish, lawless behaviors, which have no negative consequences.

* * *

UNTIL RECENTLY, Mendocino County had a County School Superintendent, Michelle Hutchins, who made truancy a priority. In 2019 before she was voted out of office and replaced by former Ukiah Unified under-supe Nicole Glentzer, Hutchins wrote:

“There’s a great website called absencesaddup.org that goes into why attendance is so important and the reasons students skip school. To be clear, chronic absenteeism includes both truancy (unexcused absences) and excused absences. Whether students have a good reason to miss school or not, when they are not in the classroom they are not benefiting from the teacher’s instruction and interactions with their peers. The data on this is quite clear. Students who can read at grade level by third grade are about three times more likely to graduate from high school and go on for post-secondary education as compared to their peers who do not make the transition in third grade from learning to read to reading to learn. Authors of another study followed a cohort of students through high school and were able to correlate a lack of graduation back to their sixth-grade attendance, behavior and course failure. School builds on material taught the year before. When students get behind in the early years, it can be incredibly difficult for them to catch up. Unfortunately, students who live in communities like ours with high levels of poverty are far more likely to be chronically absent than others because of factors out of their control such as unstable housing, unreliable transportation and a lack of access to health care. So how do we address this problem? The answer varies because the reasons for chronic absenteeism vary. Our large school districts—Ukiah Unified, Willits Unified and Fort Bragg Unified—have put considerable time and resources into helping families get their students to school every day. Ukiah Unified, for example, added family-community liaisons to their staff and hired an additional school resource officer to work with families whose students are chronically absent. Our smaller districts rarely have the resources to hire additional staff, so school employees do their best to follow up with struggling families between other responsibilities. To help them, the County Office of Education provides training on how best to use their limited resources to combat chronic absenteeism. Whether districts can afford more staff or not, at some point there needs to be legal consequences for chronic absenteeism. I worked in a county with a successful school attendance review board (SARB). Both (then-)Sheriff Tom Allman and DA Dave Eyster support the reduction of truancy, but they are pragmatists. Schools are not the only organizations with limited funding and stretched resources. DA Dave told me, “If I have to choose between prosecuting a murder case and prosecuting a parent whose child isn’t attending school, I’ll prosecute the murder case.” Who can blame him? However, both he and Tom have said that if we created a family court system that only referred a small fraction of cases—the most egregious ones—to the DA’s office, that might work. So, that’s what I’m working on right now.”

Unfortunately, none of these suggestions (attendance review board or family court) were implemented. But at least Ms. Hutchins acknowledged the problem and offered the services of her County office staff to help. We have seen no evidence of even this small level of awareness at the County office lately. It’s clearly more of an issue for small schools than for larger ones, and support for smaller schools was a specific point of difference between Hutchins and Glentzer in the last County election.

In her letter endorsing Ms. Hutchins in that election, local organizer Linda McClure wrote:

“Previously, Mendocino County was among the lowest performing counties in California. State funding to develop resources was being passed directly to districts. Three of the County’s 12 districts, the largest ones, got most of those resources, contrary to state requirements. Michelle Hutchins brought the county into compliance while improving resources to both large and small schools. But many Ukiah Unified officials were unhappy with that change. They boycotted the County office's resources. Ukiah's Assistant Superintendent Nicole Glentzer is opposing Michelle Hutchins in this race. Ukiah's annual budget is about $108 million. The County Office's budget is about $24 million for all schools. Still, Ukiah ranks very low for student achievement per the state measurements (academic, attendance, truancy, suspensions, and graduation rates).”

Local school administrations and Boards should be lobbying the County office for the kind of even handed distribution of resources and specific truancy support because besides the obviously educational shortfalls that it causes, the funding of those already resource-strapped districts is further eroded when eligible students aren’t in class.

(Mark Scaramella)

ED NOTES

THE NEW GUY AT THE PRESS DEMOCRAT: “The newspaper is there to do what great organizations do, and hold power to account, and lift up the folks who need lifting up,” Fusco said. “To me, the great thing about news organizations is that if we do our jobs well, we get the haves to care about the have nots. And I think the Press Democrat and its sibling publications really embody that — at a time when it’s more important now than ever, given the political climate in America.” 

— Chris Fusco, freshly appointed exec editor of the Press Democrat

CONGRATS, CHRIS, on your new job. Your inaugural statement is suitably ambitious. But on the off chance you're serious, I suggest you look into your owner's mysterious ownership of the old Northwest Pacific Railroad, the most lucrative parts of it anyway, that former Congressman Doug Bosco somehow came into possession of. I also understand that the Bosco Group, or however he, Anderson and the rest of that rapacious gang are organized, is making a move on the old state hospital property near Sonoma, much to the horror of nearby residents who fear even more traffic on overburdened Highway 20 and a total end to the few shreds of rural remaining in that area. 

POWER in Sonoma County has seldom been held to account, beginning with the routing of Highway 101 directly through the City of Santa Rosa to accommodate Hugh Codding's shopping center on the north end of town, thus destroying a once coherent, pretty little place which, since, is long gone into a hellish, San Jose-like sprawl indistinguishable from every other town in America ruined by the Haves. Even fast-fading Healdsburg, book-ended by massive, under-construction housing developments for well-heeled geriatrics certain to destroy that town's small town charm, wisely routed 101 away from its city center. 

AS A SUBSCRIBER since 1971, and a family friend of the late, great Art Volkerts under whom the PD really did take on the Northcoast's outback Babbitts, the paper, like all big circulation paper-papers, has faded, becoming little more than a wine promo sheet and clumsily written press releases. I don't know, dude, your paper seems like it's on auto-pilot, with a lot of young reporters who… Well, no point in criticizing a paper with no apparent copy editors. 

SOME YEARS AGO, the late R.W. Apple, a dominant figure at the New York Times for many years, stopped in at Boonville's beloved weekly on a swing through NorCal. He mentioned that he'd been offered the top job at the Press Democrat when the Times owned it but had refused “because I'd have to fire everybody and start over again.” He said the reporters were ok but everyone above them would have to go. Which has been my assessment of the enterprise from the outside looking in ever since Volkerts.

I LOVED this pre-game rant from an Eagles football fan: “You know, a real professional football team, with real professional men, take a loss. Instead, they cried about it. ‘Oh if our quarterback wasn’t hurt…’ If you would have frickin’ blocked for him, he wouldn’t have been hurt! You suck, you’re not man enough to admit it. Now you’re going to come back here, and you’re going to get your ass kicked again, and we’re going to show you how men play. Not like those little whiners from the West Coast who drink their little wine with their pinkies up, and act like they’re so superior. Guess what? This is Philly. You’re going to lose. You suck!”

I HOPE SOMEONE tracks that guy down for comment on the drubbing his Eagles got from the allegedly effete San Francisco 49ers on Sunday.

THE PHILADELPHIA fans are the consensus worst in sports. When you have five-year-olds flipping off visiting Niner fans already running a gauntlet of curses and insults, well golly, I'll bet that kid is a handful in kindergarten. Niner fans are rabid but nothing like the oafs and oaf-ettes in Philly.

I THOUGHT our sports fans were pretty bad until I watched a Netflix documentary on the great Brit soccer player, David Beckham. Beckham got red carded (kicked off the field) during the 1998 World Cup. England went on to lose the game to Argentina after a penalty shoot-out. England's loss was blamed on Beckham and, for a time, he became the most reviled man in England. Volumes of death threats and insults aimed at him and his family necessitated a phalanx of security men everywhere he went.

ORWELL described sports as “war minus the shooting.” Here's his essay, The Sporting Spirit:

Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.

Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at least two of the four matches played led to much bad feeling. At the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was there, a British and a Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee. The Glasgow match, someone else informs me, was simply a free-for-all from the start. And then there was the controversy, typical of our nationalistic age, about the composition of the Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as claimed by the Russians, or merely a league team, as claimed by the British? And did the Dynamos end their tour abruptly in order to avoid playing an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions according to his political predilections. Not quite everyone, however. I noted with interest, as an instance of the vicious passions that football provokes, that the sporting correspondent of the russophile News Chronicle took the anti-Russian line and maintained that Arsenal was not an all-England team. No doubt the controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of history books. Meanwhile the result of the Dynamos’ tour, in so far as it has had any result, will have been to create fresh animosity on both sides.

And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

Nearly all the sports practiced nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport frankly mimics warfare. But the significant thing is not the behavior of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe – at any rate for short periods – that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.

Even a leisurely game like cricket, demanding grace rather than strength, can cause much ill-will, as we saw in the controversy over body-line bowling and over the rough tactics of the Australian team that visited England in 1921. Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners, is far worse. Worst of all is boxing. One of the most horrible sights in the world is a fight between white and colored boxers before a mixed audience. But a boxing audience is always disgusting, and the behavior of the women, in particular, is such that the army, I believe, does not allow them to attend its contests. At any rate, two or three years ago, when Home Guards and regular troops were holding a boxing tournament, I was placed on guard at the door of the hall, with orders to keep the women out.

In England, the obsession with sport is bad enough, but even fiercer passions are aroused in young countries where games playing and nationalism are both recent developments. In countries like India or Burma, it is necessary at football matches to have strong cordons of police to keep the crowd from invading the field. In Burma, I have seen the supporters of one side break through the police and disable the goalkeeper of the opposing side at a critical moment. The first big football match that was played in Spain about 15 years ago led to an uncontrollable riot. As soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused, the notion of playing the game according to the rules always vanishes. People want to see one side on top and the other side humiliated, and they forget that victory gained through cheating or through the intervention of the crowd is meaningless. Even when the spectators don’t intervene physically they try to influence the game by cheering their own side and “rattling” opposing players with boos and insults. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century. Dr Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school, looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism – that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige. Also, organised games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity for creative labour. In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such as fishing, cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one’s physical strength or for one’s sadistic impulses. Games are taken seriously in London and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome and Byzantium: in the Middle Ages they were played, and probably played with much physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with politics nor a cause of group hatreds.

If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will “lose face.”

I hope, therefore, that we shan’t follow up the visit of the Dynamos by sending a British team to the USSR. If we must do so, then let us send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten and cannot be claimed to represent Britain as a whole. There are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.

(Tribune, 14 December 1945)

PARTNERS GALLERY WINTER SHOW

Dec 7 - Jan 8

Second Saturday Meet the Artists Dec. 9, 5-7pm

In December, Partners Gallery is presenting The Winter Show featuring a variety of works in different media by gallery artists. Artworks include drawings, paintings, mixed media pieces, sculpture and jewelry. There’s a special focus on the handcrafted cards suitable for gifts as well as greetings.

On display are hand painted wooden boxes, lantern slide collages, chalk drawings, painting puzzles, mousetrap pieces, dog portraits, a book house and more.

The show opens December 7 and continues through January 8.

Second Saturday Meet the Artists, December 9 from 5-7pm.

The gallery is located at 45062 Ukiah St in Mendocino. Winter hours are Thursday through Monday 11 to 4pm. Closed Christmas and New Year’s Day. www.partnersgallery.com

JOHN REDDING: Just musing, here.

If you live in the socialist state of CA, your electricity bill will soon change in a significant way. It will be based on how much income you have and be mostly a fixed amount. No longer based on how much electricity you use.

Aside from the pesky constitutional issue of equal treatment under the law, why is this a bad idea? The politicians say it will lower bills for most people, affecting only the rich. Like they said of Obama Care. However, the real intentions show up in how the money will supposedly be spent. Yes, on Green Energy to put a stop to Global Warming. What these climate mongers want is for you to use as little electricity as possible. So, sooner rather than later everyone's bill will be jacked up and you will be paying $100s a month for using light bulbs. You can bank on it because this is what history tells happens in all socialist countries.

Once people accept the principal idea here, the politician will be on to other things. As Will Rogers once said, no one's family is safe while the Legislature is in session.

ED NOTE: If California was a socialist state, PG&E would be a PUBLIC utility, not a utility whose first allegiance is to its PRIVATE shareholders.

AN INTIMATE CONCERT

On Saturday, December 16 at 7:00pm, the Willits Center for the Arts presents ‘A Rare Intimate Evening Concert with Spencer Brewer and Friends: A benefit for Willits Center for the Arts, featuring Ben Rueb, the Mendocino Piano Quartet, and Dr. Wenbo Yin.’

Composer/pianist Spencer Brewer presents a private concert benefiting the Willits Center for the Arts after a 25-year hiatus performing locally. Join the Art Center for this entertaining event kicking off the new concert series coming to the WCA Great Room celebrating their new grand piano. Spencer has arranged for numerous extremely talented musicians to play at this intimate event as a gift for the Willit’s community. All musicians are performing free helping to support the Willits Center for the Arts.

The players in the Mendocino Piano Quartet have a long respected musical history as well as numerous Grammy nominations. Ben Rueb has been a piano teacher over 20 years hailing from the Netherlands. He has made quite a name for himself in Mendocino with his impeccable piano skills and encyclopedic knowledge of classical music as well as his family’s highly successful mushroom business, Mulligan Farms, featured weekly at the Willits Farmer’s market. 

Cellist Joel Cohen was with the Vienna Symphony for years as well as Quartet San Francisco creating numerous celebrated records. Violist Paul Yarborough was a founding member of the world renown Alexander String Quartet and just recently retired to Mendocino Co. Jeff Ives just had his new symphony performed at Symphony of the Redwoods to a standing ovation and is the principal violist in the symphony. 

Dr. Wenbo Yin is a relative new resident to the county. Having been awarded his doctorate in saxophone, he is praised for his mastery of a diverse range of genres. Yin’s performance will include jazz as well as the amazing violin transcription piece for saxophone and piano, Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo, performed using non-stop circular breathing. Yin recently appeared as a soloist at Carnegie Hall and has played in numerous concerts with prominent jazz artists. 

Tickets are $20 in advance and at the door day of after 5pm. Purchase in advance at https://www.willitscenterforthearts.org/

For more information call 707-459-1726.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, December 4, 2023

ALBERT BELL, Palatka, Florida/Ukiah. Marijuana for sale, conspiracy.

KATHERINE BOWES, Covelo. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, failure to appear.

MELISSA CROW, Willits. Vandalism. 

CARLOS GARCIA-ARENAS, Fort Bragg. DUI, suspended license for DUI, DUI while on court probation, no license, probation violation.

KODY IDICA, Redwood Valley. Probation revocation.

CHRISTOPHER KEYES, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-under influence.

RAFAEL LOPEZ-RAMIREZ, Sonoma/Ukiah. DUI.

RACHELLE MARTIN, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

DEMETER MCFADIN, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

LATTERAL PETERSON, Ocala, Florida/Ukiah. Marijuana for sale, conspiracy.

TIMOTHY STEVENS, Ukiah. Burglary, grand theft.

MAKANA YUEN, Lakeport/Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

OAXACANS CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF ORGANIZING

Photographs by David Bacon

On December 1st the Centro Binacional de Desarrollo Indigena Oaxaque (the Binational Center for Oaxacan Indigenous Development) celebrated its 30th anniversary. Dancers, musicians, gigantes and diablos led several hundred indigenous Oaxacan families, together with a handful of community supporters, as their procession made its way out of the Hall of Industry, and then through the Fresno County Fairgrounds…

davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2023/12/oaxacans-celebrate-30-years-of.html

A HOLIDAY POEM

— Mazie Malone

HUNTINGTON BEACH During The Oil Boom Of The 1920s

On May 24, 1920, the first Huntington Beach well began producing oil. By October 1921, the field had 59 producing wells. Even with 16 of those 59 wells being idle, the field produced 16,500 barrels of oil per day, with each well producing from 50 to 200 barrels daily.

The discovery of oil was followed by a real estate boom in the surrounding communities. As the Huntington Beach Oil Field expanded, the homes in that area that stood in the path of drawing oil from the ground were physically relocated north 6 miles in 1921 and 1922 to lots in Midway City, California.

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Maxed out credit cards? I can believe that. I don’t eat out very often - personal preferences - but the cars parked at all of the restaurants show that I am an exception. How do people afford to eat out with their families - several times a week? This past spring 4 of us sat down for lunch at Black Bear Diner in Woodland, California. Two of us had burgers, one a sandwich, and the fourth had a salad. Three waters, one soda. With the tip it came to $100.00. A hundred bucks for lunch. Debt, debt and more debt. I read somewhere that even in Weimar Germany, during the hyper inflation nightmare then endured, the restaurants were always full. Perhaps that is what is happening here. People sense things are bad. People know in their guts that things are not as they should be. So they say “to hell with it” and whip out that plastic for a nice meal knowing it may be the last time they get to enjoy it. I don’t know. What a do know is we are at the precipice of incredible change. Incredibly bad or incredibly good. Who knows. My wife and I eat out once a week and to keep costs as well as our waistlines down, we buy one meal and split it between the two of us. Believe it or not, we always leave the joint very full and satisfied.

REMEMBER BIG TOBACCO? MEET BIG WEED.

A century ago, Big Tobacco calmed people’s health fears with outrageous claims that smoking was actually good for you. Camel “promote[s] good digestion” and gives you “healthy nerves,” it touted. In a new First Opinion, physician and former NYC commissioner of health Thomas Farley draws parallels between Big Tobacco then, and Big Weed now.

Farley and others worry about weed’s risk of addiction, strong link to schizophrenia, intoxicated-driver car crashes, and harms not yet proven. A true public health approach to legal marijuana should be based on the tobacco model, he writes, and would first regulate the product to reduce its risk: putting safer limits on potency and prohibiting new THC delivery forms until they were evaluated for safety. That includes prohibiting, for example, gummies, lollipops, sodas, and other edibles that are attractive to toddlers. 

Read more on the comparison, and how Farley believes we should approach it.

(Steve Heilig)

* * *

Big Weed Today Is A Whole Lot Like Big Tobacco In The 1950s

by Thomas Farley

OK, marijuana is now legal. So where’s the public health approach?

Strictly speaking, marijuana use isn’t fully legal across the U.S. yet. But when Montana and Missouri have legalized recreational use and the Senate is debating legal banking for cannabis companies, you know it’s all over but the shouting.

For years health experts have argued that criminalizing marijuana use was a mistake, and that rather than handling the drug as a law enforcement problem, with cops, lawyers, and jails, we should manage it as a public health problem, with prevention, treatment, and harm reduction. I have served as health commissioner for both New York City and Philadelphia, and at one time I had hopes of moving to a public health approach to illegal drugs. But instead, to my horror, the legalization freight train rolling across the nation is replacing law enforcement with corporate marketing reminiscent of the tactics of Big Tobacco in the 20th century. It’s time for us to 

Doctors’ opinions about marijuana vary. Some believe it’s valuable for people suffering from chronic pain, like that from cancer. Many others (including me) worry a lot about its risk of addiction, strong link to schizophrenia, intoxicated-driver car crashes, and harms not yet proven. (Remember, the lag between starting smoking cigarettes and lung cancer is about 25 years.) But I hope we can all agree at least on this: As a society we should not be actively encouraging people to use this drug. Yet encouraging recreational marijuana use is exactly what is happening.

In the first half of the 20th century, the tobacco industry’s clever, ubiquitous marketing of an addictive drug transformed smoking from a niche hobby into a daily habit for nearly half of American adults. Today’s cannabis industry is using the same manipulative methods — and then some.

The tobacco companies, for all of their marketing savvy, offered just a few products to deliver nicotine: cigarettes, cigars, loose tobacco, pipe tobacco, and chewing tobacco. But today’s marijuana stores are pushing a jaw-dropping array of products to deliver tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — well beyond leaf and vape oils. There are THC tablets, tinctures, dried concentrate, gummies, mints, lollipops, fizzy drinks, salves, patches, lip balms, massage oils, “personal lubricants,” and even bath bombs. Retailers sell these products in cheery, brightly colored packages that are attractive to kids.

A century ago, Big Tobacco calmed people’s health fears with outrageous claims that smoking was actually good for you. Camel “promote[s] good digestion” and gives you “healthy nerves,” it touted. “A famous New York research laboratory,” R.J. Reynolds told Americans in 1934, had “confirmed” that Camel has “a positive ‘energizing effect’ … a healthful and delightful release of natural, vibrant energy.” Today, cannabis companies grease sales with their own health claims — among them that marijuana helps you lose weight, prevent diabetes, and “protect[s] your brain.”

The tobacco companies advertised in the media channels of the day: newspapers, magazines, radio, and, from its very early days, television. They used scores of what we would today call “influencers.” Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, were there to tell you that “[y]ou’ll be glad tomorrow that you smoked Philip Morris today!” (Desi probably wasn’t glad when he died of lung cancer in 1986.) Today’s marijuana corporations are advertising on radio, billboards, and digital channels. The industry’s influencers — from Wiz Khalifa to Seth Rogen — count followers in the millions and are as likely to own their brands as be owned by them.

In the 1990s, Americans were scandalized by the news that for decades Philip Morris had secretly manipulated “freebase” nicotine levels in Marlboro to hook more smokers. Today’s marijuana manufacturers aren’t bothering with secrecy. They are in a public arms race to raise THC levels in their products to make them more addictive. Fifty years ago, weed sold on the street had a THC concentration of about 2%. Now retailers routinely offer buds with THC levels more than 10 times that, alongside concentrates that are nearly 80% THC.

All of this marketing, of course, is about “getting new customers,” as one expert admits. And sure enough, this marketing has — a lot. The number of Americans who use marijuana daily or almost daily nearly quadrupled from 2002 to 2021, to 17.4 million from 4.7 million. The states that legalized early, like Colorado, Oregon, and Washington are seeing the highest marijuana use, with roughly a third of 18- to 25-year-olds now using the drug at least once a month. Those states have seen increases not only in legal marijuana use, but also illegal marijuana use and marijuana addiction.

Marijuana marketing originates from increasingly large and increasingly multinational corporations. Wall Street itself is becoming hooked on marijuana. “Global marijuana markets are growing like a weed,” an investment websitereads. “It’s no wonder that many investors are interested in owning cannabis stocks.” It’s reminiscent of something Warren Buffett is quoted as saying in the 1989 book “Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco”: “I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive.” The global cannabis market is now estimated to be more than $50 billion per year. Twenty-four cannabis companies have market capitalizations of more than $100 million, of which five are worth more than $1 billion. Curaleafboasts that it operates more than 150 dispensaries in 18 states and has 21 cultivation sites. Tilray sells THC products under more than 10 different brand names and has operations on five continents.

To the federal Food and Drug Administration and Drug Enforcement Administration, marijuana is still illegal, so we have to look to states to rein in this marketing. And so far, state governments have done little to prevent the harms of legal marijuana use. The model they tend to use is the one for alcohol — issue licenses, grab the tax dollars, but otherwise let the industry do what it wants.

Alcohol is the wrong model. To find a better model, we don’t have to look far: It’s tobacco. Since World War II, alcohol use has been roughly level in this country, but thanks to a public health approach, smoking has fallen by about 75%.

A true public health approach to legal marijuana based on the tobacco model would first regulate the product to reduce its risk: putting safer limits on potency and prohibiting new THC delivery forms until they were evaluated for safety. That includes prohibiting, for example, gummies, lollipops, sodas, and other THC-containing edibles that are attractive to toddlers.

It would, as with packs of cigarettes, regulate the packaging. That would include requiring child-proof containers (while some states have requirements on the books, there is little enforcement, and accidental poisonings are skyrocketing), limiting the total THC amount in a package, requiring generic text and prohibiting graphics, and including traffic light-style labeling of THC content.

It would put strict limits on the number, density, and location of retail operations and prohibit home delivery that can be used by teens. That could include state control of retail sales, as some other countries and U.S. states do with liquor.

It would prohibit advertising, promotion, and sponsorship (do you really want the local weed store sponsoring your kid’s soccer team?), and ban any unproven health claims. (The FDA has occasionally warned companies about unproven health claims related to CBD and delta-8 THC, but states need to crack down much more than they are now.)

It would tax the product heavily enough to discourage use and base the tax on THC content to counterbalance the drive to higher potency products.

And it would use some of those tax revenues to fund not just treatment for marijuana addiction but also strong anti-marijuana education campaigns, like those Centers for Disease Control and Prevention antismoking ads that are effective in prompting smokers to quit.

Locking people up for selling or possessing small amounts of marijuana never worked. Now that our nation is revising its approach to this drug, we have an opportunity to do better. But we can prevent the damage from marijuana only if we set firm limits now on a ravenous industry that cares only about profit.

(Thomas Farley, M.D., MPH, was commissioner of health for New York City from 2009 to 2014 and for Philadelphia from 2016 to 2021. He is currently writing a textbook on public health strategies.)

THE UNITED STATES DOLLAR is today the world’s reserve currency, but it is not backed by gold. In fact, it is the first reserve currency in history to operate without backing by any precious metal whatsoever. How did this strange situation arise?

At the end of World War II, Great Britain was a debt-ridden and war-weary country, and the pound sterling was no longer capable of serving as the world’s reserve currency. In July 1944, hundreds of delegates from 44 Allied nations gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, for a 21-day summit to determine (among other things) a new reserve currency. The United States, which held two-thirds of the world’s gold, dominated the proceedings. At the conclusion of the summit, the so-called Bretton Woods System was put in place with the gold-backed US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. 

The Bretton Woods System worked well for several decades. By 1971, however, the US government had begun running huge deficits to fund the Great Society and the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Germany and Japan had rebuilt into manufacturing powers that ended American industrial dominance. These factors led to the US dollar declining in value. Countries began redeeming their dollars for gold, which resulted in an unsustainable decline in our gold supply. To preserve our gold holdings, Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard on August 15th, 1971. 

Of course, this immediately caused a further loss of confidence in the US dollar. Countries that had previously held the dollar as a reserve currency began to abandon it, causing its value to drop even more. American consumers felt this as an increase in the cost of imports. In addition, since the dollar no longer tied to gold, the US government could, and did, print even more dollars, which increased the currency supply even as demand for dollars declined. America began to experience widespread inflation.

Then the situation got worse. In a brief span of years, Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia all nationalized the assets of the Western oil companies operating in their countries. This gave OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) almost total control over global oil production. The OPEC members had long felt that oil prices were kept lower than they ought to be to the West’s benefit and their detriment. In 1973, OPEC members unilaterally raised oil prices.

The effect of rising energy prices on an economy is quite complex but, to a first approximation, the result is that prices rise on all other goods and services while economic growth stagnates. The US economy was terribly battered - its currency had been devalued just when oil had gotten expensive! This was the cause of the dreaded stagflation that began in 1973 and lasted until 1983.

And then the situation got… worser. The emboldened nations of the Middle East decided to renew their ongoing war with Israel. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 began with a two-front assault, with Syria attacking the Golan Heights and Egyptian attacking the Suez Canal. The USSR had supplied the Arab armies with anti-tank guided missiles and air defense missile systems. These new weapons, deployed for the first time, dealt exceptionally heavy losses to Israel’s forces. The Arab’s initial onslaught was so overwhelming that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized a nuclear alert, ordering 13 atomic bombs be readied for use by missiles and aircraft.

As it happened, the Yom Kippur War ended without atomic bombs being deployed. But everyone knew the Middle East had come close to nuclear annihilation. 

This posed a problem for, well, everybody. The entirety of industrial civilization depended on the ongoing flow of oil from the Middle East to the rest of the world. Nobody wanted the world’s most precious resource consumed in a mushroom cloud. The Arab states were especially nervous about what the next war might do to their burgeoning position.

Henry Kissinger, at that time US Secretary of State, saw a way to solve the problem. Actually he found a way to solve three problems: the Arab-Israel problem, the oil problem, and the currency problem. He traveled to Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, and negotiated a deal with them to create the petrodollar system. The arrangement had two components: 

• The US would guarantee the security of the Saudi Arabian regime and agree to sell them the best arms and equipment our military-industrial complex could supply. In exchange, Saudi Arabia would use its position in OPEC to guarantee that all oil trade was denominated in US dollars.
• The US would open its markets to foreign investment from OPEC members. In exchange, a substantial portion of surplus oil proceeds would be used to purchase US Treasury debt.

This deal formed the basis of the petrodollar system. The US dollar was now backed, not by its own gold, but by other country’s oil!

The Financial Effects of the Petrodollar System

The financial effects of the petrodollar system cascaded across the US and the globe, impacting life for every consumer and producer on the planet.

The immediate or first-order effect of the petrodollar system was to restore the US dollar’s hegemony. Since every country in the world outside of OPEC needed to purchase oil, and OPEC would only sell oil for US dollars, every country in the world needed US dollars. The dollar became king again.

The second-order effect of the petrodollar system was to flood the US with inexpensive imported goods. As mentioned earlier, when a business sells goods within a country, it is paid for those goods in the country’s currency; and the cost of goods in that currency is based on the value of the currency internationally. The primary way to get US dollars is to sell goods in the US, so everyone in the world suddenly wanted to send us their goods in exchange for our US dollars. And since those dollars were the only way to buy oil, the dollar was strong, meaning the imports were cheap. At the time, this seemed like a remarkably good thing for American consumers — we will send you cheap imports and you will send us pieces of paper you print for free. (Not even pieces of paper — digital zeros in a ledger!)

But it wasn’t actually a good thing. The third-order effect of the petrodollar system was to reduce the demand for exports from the United States. Remember, under the Bretton Woods system, trade with the US had basically worked like this:

• Japan (or any other country) sold goods in the US in exchange for US dollars.
• The US sold goods in Japan in exchange for Japanese yen. 
• Japan either redeemed their US dollars for gold from the US, or sold its dollars in exchange for yen. Which of these options its pursued depended on how much yen the US had to exchange, e.g. it depended on US exports to Japan.

Foreign exchange, imports, and exports thus formed a triangle that tended to balance out. (We’re ignoring investment at this time, as foreign investment into the US wasn’t a major factor for the US until after the petrodollar system went into place.) Under the petrodollar system, foreign countries no longer needed to redeem their US dollars for American goods or gold. Instead, they could use them to buy OPEC oil. And they did.

Put another way, before the petrodollar system, the US had to export goods to keep the dollar strong. But the petrodollar system made dollars the only currency capable of purchasing oil, which everyone needed. And so, after the petrodollar system, the US could just export dollars. 

The fourth-order effect of the petrodollar system was to financialize and deindustrialize the American economy.

When a country can produce a particular good for export at a lower relative cost than other countries can produce it, that country is said to have a comparative advantage in that good. The petrodollar system gave the US comparative advantage in manufacturing dollars. It could manufacture them at zero cost! No one else could manufacture them at all. 

Under conditions of free trade, a country will both produce and export more of the good for which they have a comparative advantage, but will produce less and import more of those goods for which they do not. And that’s exactly what happened in the United States. America produced more dollars and produced much less of everything else. 

When I say “produced more dollars,” I mean that literally. When a commercial bank makes a loan, it creates new dollars out of thin air. It manufactures them on demand, like Printful.com but instead of t-shirts, banks make greenbacks. The finance industry was, by far, the biggest beneficiary of the petrodollar system. The manufacturing sector, along with its union workforce, was the biggest victim. The collapse of America’s manufacturing heartland into the wasteland we call the Rust Belt was directly caused and/or exacerbated by the petrodollar system. 

So at this point, the US was exporting dollars and importing goods; and Europe and Asia were exporting goods and importing dollars, then spending the dollars to import oil from OPEC members. What were the OPEC members doing with their dollars? Well, some of those big bucks were spent buying M1 Abrams tanks and other expensive products of the US military-industrial complex. (That’s the reason the US can still manufactures guns, missiles, and tanks even though it can’t manufacture diapers or telephones.) 

But even the most paranoid sheik only needs a few thousand tanks and fighter jets. The rest of OPEC’s dollars were invested in the United States in a process known as petrodollar recycling. Within 5 years, over $450 billion had been recycled, with 90% of that made by the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf along with Libya. What did they invest in? US government debt. US stocks. US real estate. In short: assets. 

Thus the fifth-order effect of the petrodollar system was to create a sustained increase in the price of American bonds, stocks, and real estate. The petrodollar created asset inflation. Banks benefited, as did existing homeowners and investors. The working class felt asset inflation in the form of rising rents.

Viewed as a whole, then, the petrodollar system was incredibly beneficial for (a) commercial banks, (b) arms manufacturers, (c) real estate owners, and (d) stockholders. 

For everyone else, the petrodollar system turned out to be a Trojan Horse, a promising gift that destroyed the recipient. By ending the oil crisis and reducing the price of imports, the petrodollar initially seemed to benefit consumers. But in order to consume, consumers needed to have money, and to have money they needed well-paid jobs. By deindustrializing the US, the petrodollar system destroyed the manufacturing jobs that had sustained the working class. In order to maintain their standard of living, US consumers began to borrow money. As their debt rose, though, their position only worsened. 

In short, the petrodollar system is directly responsible for almost all of the financial problems that plague the American economy. This is a radical claim, to be sure. To help buttress my theoretical argument, I’m going to close out this essay with some empirical data drawn from a wonderful website called WTF Happened in 1971?…

treeofwoe.substack.com/p/running-on-empty-part-i