KAMALA'S CAMPAIGN COST
What happened to the $1 billion war chest that Kamala Harris managed to blow through in less than three months during her failed campaign for the White House? The answer seems to be that it was more or less stolen by her own party, starting with her campaign operatives and celebrity endorsers. Beyonce reportedly cost the Harris campaign $8 million, for which she couldn't be bothered to sing even one song. Oprah got $1 million. Al Sharpton got two payments of $250,000 to his personal charity in return for interviewing the Democratic presidential nominee on an MSNBC broadcast with zero viewers. Election night concerts featured Katy Perry, Lady GaGa, Jon Bon Jovi, and 2 Chainz to appear to cost an additional $20 million. Then there’s all the money collected in Harris’s name by outside PACs, starting with $700 million raised by the “secretive” Future Forward USA Action to “test ads” and the additional hundreds of millions that were raised to back the candidate's “ground game” — which lost seven out of seven critical swing states. It seems like Christmas came early for Democratic political operatives and endorsers this year, if not for the Party's candidates and voters.
— County Highway Newspaper
BILL KIMBERLIN: If you have never been to the Cloverdale History Museum, you might want to walk from the nearby Plank coffee shop and have a look. If you have ever wondered how people like Jack London got to Anderson Valley or more likely the Mendocino Coast and then back to Boonville, on horse back, and staying at the Boonville Hotel, which was then called, "The Berry Hotel", well you just might learn something that interests you.
A REAL SHOCKER!
I thought the food in the army was pretty good. Definitely as good as at Harvard and both were better than my dear old Ma.
Fort Carson was a major training base in the Vietnam era. I guess they've downsized it.
Fred Gardner
RUMMAGING through a box of notes, old letters, random pages of newspapers I'd clipped, there was a page from Willie Brown’s column in Sunday’s Chronicle circa Obama, significant because I'd forgotten the run-up to Joe Biden's elevation to the White House. “Biden,” Brown wrote, “brings age, experience to the table for Obama.” If age and experience were the standards, why not snag a much smarter, much less corrupt person from a rest home? Biden already seemed out of it, Chauncey-like.
BROWN went on to say he’d have preferred Sam Nunn because Nunn, Brown claimed, would nail down “the Southern vote” that the soporifically ponderous Nunn allegedly represented. Brown described Biden as “a common guy,” which Biden hadn't been for many years unless you consider U.S. senators common guys. And Brown took a smug swipe at what was the first of many smug swipes from bigwig Democrats to this day at the millions of people who know that both parties, and their dreary candidates, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the forces destroying them, “What a break for the Democrats. The whole Cindy Sheehan crowd will be out in the middle of the Nevada desert for Burning Man.” Nader got it, of course, and in the election just past, the Democrats had sicced lawyers on Jill Stein of the Green Party.
BURNING MAN is a largely apolitical constituency, I’d say, based on the Burning Man people I know, but the witless dismissal by Brown of the millions of people to the left of corporate Democrats showed how worried the Democrats were that they wouldn't be able to scare people into voting for them. Sure 'nuff, in 2024, oblivious as always, we got preposterous squared.
IN THAT SAME 2008 newspaper there was a story about then-Frisco mayor Gavin Newsom, just back in his crumbling town from a honeymoon in Hawaii after his spectacularly decadent wedding at a Montana “ranch.” The city Newsom allegedly governed remained the same wherever the mayor was —murder and mayhem on its dirty streets with Golden Gate Park an open air drug market, derelicts everywhere and the Muni, as always, running late and crazy. Across the Bay in Oakland the gun punks have begun hitting the upscale neighborhoods while what passes for Oakland's government wrings its over-compensated hands and does nothing. Whole Foods on Haight posted armed guards in anticipation of gun battles over the organic strawberries. Newsom, freshly returned to Baghdad by the Bay, immediately announced that Biden had “an extraordinary mind,” an extraordinary mind that the credit card bagman from Delaware had led him to conclude that the bipartisan war on Iraq was a swell idea. Brown said Biden would give Obama “the foreign policy experience that is necessary to govern in an unsteady world.”
AND, at the time, the always moist Scott Simon of NPR, a man who has taken audio ass kissing to pornographic levels, described Biden as “astonishingly eloquent.” WTF? The only time Biden got anywhere near eloquence was when he ripped off a saccharine speech by Neil Kinnock, a British labor politician who wrote about how he was the first person in the thousand year history of the Kinnock family to go to college. Biden riffed on Kinnock to say that he was the first person in his family to go to college in fifty million years, I think it was. Without a teleprompter Biden's virtually non-verbal, and even with a teleprompter he goes incoherently on and on like a dry drunk.
BROWN, NEWSOM, NPR, and the rest of insulated political opinion only reflects how far removed these people are from the lives of most of us.
AND TO THINK that in 1934 working people shut down San Francisco to advance the real interests of another group of working people — longshoreman. In 1934 working people understood who was who and what was what, and they knew political parties of millionaires did not represent them. Working people still know that, which is why they recently abandoned the contemptible party that claimed it represents them for… the unthinkable.
COUNTY OFFICIALS are likely oblivious of the fact that Anderson Valley's Nobel Prize winner (for chemistry), Kary Mullis, made his breakthrough DNA discovery on Highway128 right at mile marker 46.7 near Navarro as he drove to his home on Gschwend Road. How do we know that? He told us and the world simultaneously. I bring it up with the gratuitous shot at the supervisors because most places would memorialize a location from which a scientific discovery benefiting all mankind has flowed, that being the cloning of DNA ,which resulted in huge medical and forensic advances.
A READER WRITES: “I no longer wince at misspelled words. If actors appear in rolls, so be it. If bells peel out, let ‘em. I’m resigned to the fact that nobody any longer distinguishes between the verbs lie (intransitive) and lay (transitive). As for split infinitives, it now seems pedantic not to split them. But now and then misuse of a word bothers me. So it was when you said that ‘The Major, who tends to the crepuscular, his gait as deliberate as a land tortoise…..” Either you confused the word with crepitant or The Major, like a vampire or a bat, only emerges at twilight. Not knowing The Major, I can’t judge.”
KNOWING THE MAJOR, I can judge, and when he looms up out of the corner murk of his work station at whatever hour, well, he seems down right crepuscular. I concede the point, though. My usage stretched the definition beyond all known previous meanings.
GET READY for repeats times a million. ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, once needed 125 agents to round up 23 Mexicans in Arcata.The undocumented immigrants were at work at Sun Valley Floral Farms, and if there’s a sadder sight than a working mother being led away in chains from her job for the crime of seeking a better life, I can’t think of one.
ARBITRARY CRUELTY, though, is typical of ICE, an agency synonymous with random sadism. My friend Pol Brennan was living proof of ICE’s independence from rational oversight. An Irish nationalist prominent in the now disarmed IRA, Brennan was long ago granted permanent resident status by the federal courts based in San Francisco. Years later, he was driving through Texas with his wife to visit his mother-in-law when he was stopped by ICE in one of their highway hunts for Mexicans, and was then locked up in a for-profit prison for more than a year, occasionally appearing before a Bush-appointed judge who continued to keep him locked up for no reason at all other than, apparently, as a funding unit for the for-profit Texas prisons housing thousands of people whose papers are allegedly suspect.
THE UKIAH DAILY JOURNAL of August 27th, 1958, reported that “Sheriff Reno Bartolomie told supervisors yesterday that if they insisted upon placing the county’s prison honor camp in the Comptche region, he would have to have armed guards to protect the prisoners from the populace! Bartolomie said he had received constant heckling from anonymous phone calls threatening to shoot the prisoners if they were located in that area. ‘They call me all during the day at the office and from 11 at night to 4 in the morning at home,’ Bartolomie said. ‘You don’t get a chance to say nothing; they just tell you what they’re going to do and hang up.’ The Sheriff said he was powerless to check on the calls because the phone company here did not have the equipment necessary to trace the numbers. ‘If I knew who they were,’ Bartolomie said, ‘I’d go over there and throw them so far into jail you’d have to pipe daylight to them.’”
THE BOONVILLE DAILY, as most of you regular readers know, is hostile to capitalism as social foundation. Sooner or later capitalism breaks down and takes a lot of us with it. Unfettered free enterprise is inherently unstable because the money always collects in fewer and fewer hands. The wolves of big money need strict regulation because they're smarter than most of us and they're absolutely ruthless, which is why FDR appointed Joe Kennedy, RFK Jr's great grandfather, to clean up Wall Street as the chairman of those first regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission, privately telling people in so many words that he appointed Kennedy because “it takes a big crook to keep all the other big crooks in line.”
KENNEDY, a proto-fascist who admired Hitler, is often alleged to have made his dough as a bootlegger just as fortunes are made today in dope. At the time of his appointment as stock market czar in 1932, Kennedy was the 10th richest man in the country. Now that it's 1932 all over again and the free enterprise system — you have the enterprise, they have the system — has again been entirely freed from oversight by the two party dictatorship, most of whose stars are funded by the thieves.
WITH THE ELECTION of the magic comb across, the wolves have been formally elected. But we have a much larger, much less docile population than we had in 1932 when about half of us still lived in small towns and rural areas where we raised chickens, maintained big summer gardens, and grandma put up fruit and vegetables she traded for milk, butter and cheese from the neighbor's cow, and then used some of that to pay for the visiting doctor.
THE WAY out of the economic stranglehold the wealthy had on US was to tax incomes over a hundred grand at better than 90%, that and large-scale public works programs, with a big boost from World War Two, put money back in people's pockets, and free enterprise started up all over with a lot of regulation to make sure the wolves didn't eat it again.
BUT THE BI-PARTISAN brothel of Demo-Republicans gradually, then with a rush, un-regulated the wolves and here we are.
SUPERVISOR-ELECT BERNIE NORVELL
The city of Fort Bragg has been successful with its homeward bound program. We do require a contact on the other end before we send people anywhere. That other end has to be available to meet the traveler at the bus stop. Until recently the county had paid for this program. At some point the county decided to stop the funding and required we send our travelers to Ukiah Building Bridges and allow them to facilitate the travel. Two of the first four clients processed this way failed to reach their destination prompting calls to our CRU program, “ where is our family member?”
No longer willing to accept those odds the City immediately decided to appropriate $40k to the program. This will ensure the clients will remain our responsibility from port to port.
GOOD NEWS, especially for those who down quarts a day: Drinking coffee regularly may lengthen life by nearly two years. It’s associated with a lower risk of heart and respiratory diseases, stroke, some cancers, diabetes, dementia, and major depression, according to a new study in the journal, Ageing Research Reviews. Coffee may have multiple healthy effects, they say, including building up a better resilience to stress.
MENDOCINO'S COMMUNITY SERVICES DISTRICT will convene a public forum today (Tuesday) to discuss long-term water sources for the historically parched community. See their website for details. (www.mccsd.com)
MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: What happened to that $5 million grant for a 500,000 gallon water tank and associated wells and plumbing that Senator McGuire announced in March 2022 right after the big drought the year before that was supposed to be somehow merged with the town’s school district’s water system? In June of 2022 McGuire posted: “A big water storage project is coming to the community of Mendocino — 500k gallon water storage tank and new water wells! This has been a 100% partnership between the District and the State with nearly $5 million in State drought relief funds being invested. Grateful for the coordinating meeting with Supervisor Williams, the Mendocino Community Services District, Mendocino Unified School District and the Mendocino Volunteer Fire Dept. A lot more work and information ahead!”
The only “information” that came “ahead” was that it might take five years. But even so, why do they need a “forum” now if that project is in the works? Is it not enough? Why isn’t it mentioned in the forum announcement? According to the MCCSD website this $5 million “infrastructure project” has got so far as to have an MOU signed, a hydrogeologial report and a well siting report prepared. But it doesn’t look like anything else has happened since early 2023. (Mark Scaramella)
A LOCAL CONTRACTOR we spoke to recently had almost half his 12 person “illegal” tradesmen quit on him, saying they were going back to Mexico for fear of getting caught up in a surprise ICE raid after January 20. The five Mexican tradesmen were all related (brothers and cousins) and they decided as a group to return to Mexico, what Trump calls “self-deportation,” and take their chances there rather than take their chances here in the light of the anti-immigration rhetoric and plans. Two of the tradesmen reportedly had kids with women who were American citizens and those mothers/wives do not want to return to Mexico. We don’t know how those family negotiations are going. But the contractor says that because he doesn’t think he can hire comparably skilled and reliable replacements, he’s not bidding any new jobs. (Mark Scaramella)
WHEN THE LATE GENE HERR asked the Supervisors about the usefulness of Mendocino County’s General Plan Update in 2008…
After a few remarks about the awkward timing of the General Plan update process Ms. Herr asked, “Is there any compulsion anywhere that says that you have to do what you say you're gonna do?”
A long, embarrassed silence was followed by an uncomfortable round of nervous laughter by the Supervisors and their General Plan consultants. Finally, County Counsel Jeanine Nadel whose office was and continues to be complicit in the General Plan boondoggle as well as all County boondoggles, replied with a non-sequitur:
“The attempt is to try,” a statement that of course elicited more laughter from the Supervisors, acknowledging its ridiculousness.
Ms. Herr then pointed out that by her calculations the County had spent at least $2.5 million on the General Plan Update so far, and will probably spend another $1.9 million in 2009.
“You’ve spent lots of money, and you continue to spend money on a document that does nothing for us. If you're not gonna do anything, why have you done all of this work?”
“Thank you for your comment,” blandly replied Board Chair Jim Wattenburger.
IN 2008, the Board of Supervisors got a report from their then-budget analyst Jennifer Wyatt about the County’s expensive new financial software package, “MUNIS,” which didn’t work very well in 2008 and has never worked very well, causing individual departments to do their own individual budget tracking with conventional spreadsheet software.
Ms. Wyatt told the board that “MUNIS only produces canned reports which are very limited in scope. They can not be printed and read easily by the board.”
It’s now more than 16 years later and MUNIS still doesn’t work very well.
(Mark Scaramella)
A READER WRITES: “If this note has an opinion within it I leave it to you to find it. One of the many rewards for subscribing to the AVA is your facility for recounting various tales of the more colorful events that routinely occur with alarming if not predictable regularity in your domain. It must be something in the water. I picked up a subscription to Lapham's Quarterly. As a reader I know you surely enjoy the efforts of Lewis Lapham. Lapham's Quarterly is a collection of the arcane and I admit my ability to stay focused on some of what has been placed there makes for tough sledding in places, like the AVA. Among the many nuggets however is this: books condemned in the United States public schools during the 1980s last happened in 1989 in Laytonville, California. Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax was challenged because it 'criminalizes the forest industry.' Well! Does this book ban hold? 'The Lorax' appears to have been prophetic in its message, if one's first impression of the crossroads known as Laytonville can be trusted. You may remember that I worked as a timber faller in the 1980s so I have formed some ideas about cropland for history and the myths of renewable and sustainable. 'What does Labor want?' We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed: more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and children more happy and bright.' — Samuel Gompers, 1893. If newspapers should have no friends does it follow that they should make a few of enemies? Thanks to both of you there at the AVA.”
MENDOCINO COUNTY has its own Billy Ayres. You remember Billy? The guy John McCain beat Obama over the head with, suggesting that Obama was also a bomb-throwing radical? Ayres the remodeled 60's terrorist? The professor of education with the cush job at the University of Illinois?
AYRES and his girl friend, Bernadine Dohrn, also now a professor, with Bernadine's wealthy, connected parents running interference for them, managed to elude lengthy prison sentences for spending their youths as revolutionaries, crossing over the line when they placed bombs in places like a Pentagon bathroom and at draft boards.
A LOT of young people got caught up in pseudo-revolutionary activity, then became middle of the road extremists when they hit their 30s as the overthrow-the-government fad ended with their less well-placed comrades dead or locked up for the rest of their lives.
YOU'D SEE the Ayres-like people in the late 1960s stomping around like Black Panthers, their leather jackets just open enough to display a gun butt. They tried to act like tough guys but were just caricatures of themselves, really, with their wallets full of credit cards and mom and dad's fancy lawyer at the other end of the hot line if they got arrested. One group of them blew themselves up trying to make bombs, and lots of them spent time in Mendocino County, sheltered by rich friends in up-market Mendo homes.
FIFTY YEARS down the road, I saw a bunch of them popping up in the news as think tankers, professional commentators, judges like John True in the East Bay, spokespeople for politicians like Phil Trounstine, academics, Democratic Party hacks and hackettes. You could see these see-through opportunists coming, and here they were, including Mendocino County's former lead garbage bureaucrat and marijuana fighter, Mike Sweeney, self-reinvented as a respectable citizen after a youth as a Maoist revolutionary, but in Mendo, land of self-reinvention, a fanatic anti-pot warrior.
A RICH KID from a politically connected Republican Santa Barbara family, Sweeney belonged to a Billy Ayres-like group at Stanford led by an English professor named H. Bruce Franklin. They called themselves Venceremos and waved the Great Helmsman's little red book around. They even wore a kind of khaki Boy Scout-like uniform, which of course led their fellow students to accurately assess them as dweebs of a whole new kind.
BUT THEY KILLED PEOPLE, including an unarmed prison transport officer with a young wife and two toddlers at home. His name was Miguel Hernandez, a kid of 23. The great revolutionaries forced Hernandez and the other unarmed transport guy, an older man, to their knees by the side of the road outside Bakersfield and shot them in the backs of their heads. Sweeney's comrades did this to free a prisoner who later snitched them all off and sent several of Sweeney's comrades to prison for long stretches. They're probably all out by now and solidly behind Kamala. Professor Franklin got fired by Stanford but merely moved on to Rutgers where he rattled tea cups with the other lions of the faculty lounge until his comfortable retirement.
SWEENEY married Judi Bari, who he'd met at a Maoist conclave, and later blew her up with the kind of device he'd semi-mastered in his Stanford days, although you don't semi-master a pipe bomb — the thing either works or it doesn't, and Sweeney's bombs were never quite fully functional. Back in 1980, prior to his Mendo interlude, Sweeney, presently a resident of New Zealand, blew up a hangar at the old Navy airfield not far from the home he shared with Bari in Santa Rosa. The weekend fly-overs irritated him, you see.
HE AND BARI had separated by the time he tried to kill her in Oakland in 1990, but still lived on the same property in Redwood Valley where they'd built a spec house together. Bari became semi-famous as NorCal's Earth First! leader as Sweeney re-invented himself as garbage bureaucrat, built himself a big house in the hills west of Ukiah, moved Glenda Anderson of the Ukiah Daily Journal and Press Democrat in with him, had his own key to the Mendocino Environment Center on West Standley in the building owned by John McCowen, and has presumably lived anxiously ever since, waiting for the knock on the door.
BUT SWEENEY, like Billy Ayres, has not only gotten away with all this stuff, he prospered in Mendocino County, land of amnesiacs, where you can be anything you say you are, no questions asked, and history starts all over again every day.
MONOMANIA? I have lots besides this one, but where I come from, mister, persistence is a virtue, and it outrages me no end that the Bari Bombing is presented by the old girl's dwindling but active cult as a mystery, and an aggrandizing mystery at that with the FBI, timber corporations, Old Testament fanatics, and men generally — phallocrats every last one of them — as among the likely perps, the ex-husband always magically excluded from suspect status. The FBI knew almost immediately who did it, so why didn't they move on Sweeney? Because, I'd say, he was a loyal informant going back to the middle 1960s as a Stanford student. The cunning little fellow was also uniquely placed to reveal the FBI's activities in Mendocino County during the Redwood Summer period, which would have caused no end of embarrassment to quite a number of locals, including former supervisor John McCowen. With the FBI itself about to be vetted by a MAGA man, who knows, maybe the feds will take a fresh look at the agency's Ukiah antics?
FOR A DEEPER DIVE into this nearly unbelievable case, including a link to Steve Talbot’s famous 1990 PBS documentary, go to the AVA’s Bari Bombing special series at: https://theava.com/archives/1235
SAN FRANCISCO'S ruling junta has described itself as “progressive” for many years, although these “progressives” are all the way behind retro development policies that have littered the city's skyline with high rise apartments (and endless hotels) for the very rich, a demographic and an aesthetic never to be encouraged, let alone by anybody describing himself as a “progressive.” The Frisco progs also think the legalization of prostitution is a swell idea, that the Aarrghs have a constitutional right to live on the street, and concerts in Golden Gate Park are simply boffo. I often walked in the park, rode my bike in the park, praying that the park could survive the unending battering it takes. If the Aarrghs aren't shooting up in the bushes, they're defecating in them, in between times trying to sell me dope. Shoals of dealers cluster at the Stanyan Street entrance, and one wonders where the cops are when you have 30 dope heads concentrated within a hundred yards, and camps of Aarrghs aarrghing all day opposite hundreds of little kids playing soccer? A mannerly young Aarrgh actually jogged after me one day to ask, “Would you like to buy some bud, sir?” I come from The Land of Bud, young man, and anyhow I prefer my reality straight up, not that I ever turned down a shot of Maker's Mark or single malt, which I haven't yet tried out on my new throat but look forward to doing this holiday season.
AS THE CRANKY GERMAN in the British Museum liked to point out, the capitalist system is always in crisis. Crisis is integral to the system. In too many ways, over the past four decades, brooding on its own crises, the left has forgotten that and in the low contour of radical ideas and of radical political organization in this electoral cycle we are suffering the consequences.
— Alexander Cockburn (2008)
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[[1] My dog and I stay at Motel 6 when we travel to see family or friends. It’s all we can afford what with outrageous lodging prices everywhere and we only need a room to sleep and shower. When certain places in California started using these less expensive motels to house homeless, the prices for PAYING customers skyrocketed. Because the agencies buying rooms with OUR tax dollars pushed the residency rates up so high — it was like room rates in Eugene when the Ducks have a football game meaning 4-5 times what they were normally. So…regular working poor such as myself were cut out of being able to stay anywhere except…sleeping in our cars. Or not travelling to see our family/friends. It’s bizarre that these wonderful helpful government folks cannot even grasp or care about the obvious consequences of their actions on the working poor or lower middle class people. California is the worst in this regard. I often had to push the driving to get a room in Oregon or Nevada where it was affordable. I’m not sure why these “geniuses” even have jobs doing this kind of stuff…giving homeless druggies free rooms to destroy with OUR tax dollars while pushing working poor or elderly into their cars to sleep. It’s almost like…They don’t even care.
[2] It’s going to take more than ‘prayers' to do everything that needs to be done. Eschewing screens of all kinds in favour of simple, direct, peaceful and completely civil conversations focussed on actions that result in positive outcomes for all would be an excellent place to start.
[3] Start small - big pharma can no longer advertise, just like big tobacco can not. That will change much of the narrative as news outlets (sic) will no longer receive 75% of their income pushing unnecessary drugs. Maybe they will do some actual reporting.
Next up - you can no longer work for any outfit you've "regulated". No more retiring from the government service just to jump over to the MIC. That has to stop. While we're there, any government employee who works from home is instantly fired - let them try to sue for their pension.
Finally, term limits and election reform. You can not donate money to anyone that you can't vote for—period. This would be followed by term limits in the Senate and House, and that would remove a fair chunk of the problems.
[4] My understanding is that there is evidence for Homo sapiens sapiens going back at least 240,000 years. That would put our species overlapping with H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, and H. neanderthalensis. Possibly also H. floresiensis if our species made it to Java by that time.
If some people freak out today about mixed-race relationships, imagine bringing someone of a different species home to meet the parents.
[5] We're going to run government as a business! Private not public! No one hunts in the King's forest but the King and his friends. Americans are slaves mentally and soon will be physically. Libertarianism is just a different kind of opium.
[[1] The idea being floated is to change the makeup of the occupants/invitees of the small room (holds about 4 dozen seats) for press conferences.
The idea would be to arrange for podcasters to be in the mix, and possibly exclude dying organizations with low viewer #'s such as CNN and MSNBC.
My point being the 'news' you refer to is dying off, with low ratings and sparse viewership except in a shrinking demographic.
I think it's safe to say more people watch Joe Rogan than CNN. Is it news? Sometimes. Does it ask tough questions, mostly yes.
[6] A good friend of mine just started selling black market like the old days. Turns out a lot of his old friends don’t grow anymore but still smoke the herb- and they are very happy to buy ounces that are Better, Fresher and Half The Price of any of our local dispensaries. It’s just a side gig of his but he says it is increasing weekly now about a pound a week. He buys killer black market flowers from old friends who still do grow. It’s funny how much of a shitshow the government has made of this corporate “legalization”. Same thing with dispensaries back east- Friends in NY and NJ are selling better weed than the dispensaries and at about half dispensary price. There was about a year when everybody wanted to check out those shiny new dispensaries but many of them are coming back to their old neighborhood dealers because….Better product at Better prices. They are not idiots. And everybody is laughing about these clowns with permits, clowns with licenses and the clown cops pretending to be doing something for “everybody to be safe”. LOL. It’s a farce, alright!
https://city-countyobserver.com/did-people-really-pay-91-tax-rates-in-the-1950s-if-not-what-was-the-reality-compared-to-today-the-claim-that-the-top-1-of-earners-in-the-1950s-paid-a-91-tax-rate-is-based-on-the-statutory-top-marg/#:~:text=1950s%3A%20The%20number%20of%20people,lower%20effective%20rate%20through%20deductions.