Simon Davis-Cohen at In These Times details the battle good rural Wisconsinites fight against big ag industrial farming operations trying to muscle onto their land. But they're not just battling the big hog processing corporations that pollute their water and sicken their animals and distort their economy -- they're also battling state legislators who preempt local ordinances and generally do big ag's bidding. Hey, that reactionary legislature has passed preemptions against localities who want to offer municipal broadband and rent control, so extending their gnarled hand to the throat of localities trying to protect themselves from factory farms is a no-brainer for them.
Now it can be told: "A Green New Deal Is Actually More Affordable in the Long Term Than Fossil Fuels," per C.J. Polychroniou at TruthOut. Not just because the likely alternative -- runaway climate change on a hopelessly-polluted planet -- is actually far more expensive, but because green infrastructure spending will not only reduce pollution but create jobs doing so, and those folks with jobs will all pay taxes, too. Also, renewable energy will be cheaper than fossil fuel energy in the long run, since you don't have to repeatedly churn the Earth in order to get renewable energy. That reminds me to create that Let's kick climate change's ass! bumper sticker.
This likely won't surprise you, but lower-income folks tend to overpay property taxes while wealthy folks tend to underpay them, and "the inequities in tax assessments are both very large and very common." You know what else won't surprise you? Some counties (shout out to Maricopa County, Arizona!) actually do a pretty good job of making sure property taxes don't fall mostly on the folks who can afford it least. Sounds like our politicians just need the will to do the job, as usual -- which will require action from us, as usual.
The more I read about how easily QAnon votaries dismiss the actual sex-trafficking accusations against an actual sitting Congressman, the more I think he talked so loosely on Tucker Carlson's show -- normally a bad idea when you're under investigation or about to get indicted! -- just to give these folks more to talk about. A theory so hungry for information to distort does need that information, after all. And thus we are reminded, yet again, that there is no debate possible about whether folks are "stupid of evil," not just because stupid is evil, but because looking stupid is too often the cover for evil.
Finally, dig Sen. McConnell (E-KY) actually saying the corporate criticism of Georgia's anti-voting law is "a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people." And thus Mob Boss Mitch pretends to care about the non-wealthy, pretends the "Outrage-Industrial Complex" doesn't operate almost entirely on his side of the political spectrum, and, worst of all, pretends backlashes occur "outside the constitutional order," as if we don't have a right to say anything unless we say it directly to a legislator, and as if criticism anti-voting laws is "unconstitutional." Of course Mr. McConnell is this big a hypocrite so you'll be stunned into silence.
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