Fiddling with National, DC, Beltway Crap while we Burn in our Local Yokel Tracks!
Never will the small things, those beautiful small things like OUR communities’ vibrancy and resilience, be discussed by big wigs
by Paul Haeder / April 22nd, 2023
[Photo: Area mayors pleading for state help to plug funding gaps included, left to right, Rod Cross of Toledo, Susan Wahlke of Lincoln City and Dean Sawyer of, Newport.]
Amazing, no, that in Newport, part of Lincoln County, Oregon, having this big confab, of people, citizens and “stakeholders” alike wondering what the state of the state of decay is as it plays out in Salem (OR capitol) and the blue-red divide — Portlandia gets the votes, while the eastern part of Oregon is vying to break-away into Greater Idaho.
The Oregon Legislature’s Joint Ways and Means Committee has been hosting a series of public hearings across the state, and the committee brought its roadshow to Newport last Friday, where a crowd of around 350 people filled the Newport Performing Arts Center.
Activists, mayors, schoolteachers, community leaders, a doctor, a sheriff and a judge were among scores of supplicants who sat before the high-powered legislative panel to plead for a share of the proposed $32.1 billion state budget. The delegation, chaired by Sen. Elizabeth Steiner, included 22 senators and representatives, divided evenly and spread behind a table on the PAC stage. (source)
Because Capitalism IS a casino, disaster, predatory, zombie, usury, inverted totalitarian economic system, then the elephant in the room is, again, you want Socialism or Barbarity, or Savagery or Socialism, give that discussion a spin.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. That is, we can’t have seven, ten or more cities in one region competing for arts, entertainment, conferences, etc. We can’t have logs from Lincoln County on trucks heading east while trucks from Georgia with logs are going west to Oregon. That old Minute Maid and Tropicana real thought experiment: orange juice concentrate tankers, one coming from Florida, heading for California, the other from California heading into Florida.
We have convention center after convention center vying for concerts, events, fun giant car shows and circuses. Yeah, how is that working out? Everything is privatized, and the socialized costs paid by USA taxpayer is given to the Fortune 10,000, big and small, this and that.
We are here, on crumbling Highway 101, and the weather has been hail, grapple, snow, rain, and alas, we are in a food-health care-services-construction desert, that is, everything costs twice or thrice more than that real cancerous place, the greater (sic) Phoenix area.
Cancer?
So, you pick the Central Coast of Oregon, for lifestyle, and air, and, well, you have to put up with broken sewer systems and three times the cost for milk and gasoline than the cancer of Arizona:
We have people wanting pieces of that federal and state $$$ pie, but in the end, the elephant in the room is, well, “How much can these local and state and federal representatives throw at war, at merchants of death, at big Pharma Thugs, at finance and insurance and Wall Street and hedge finance? How many tax breaks/abatements/giveaways do THEY get, and how hard is it to place our community as well as 20,000 other communities onto the radar of the policy makers, to see that our important issues, people, communities and places of common purpose are worthy of sustainablity? Look at the list of folk wanting some recognition and discussion, from the Newport News Times:
Familiar community leaders took the stage under the PAC spotlights, including Lincoln County Sheriff Curtis Landers and Lincoln County District Court Judge Sheryl Bachart, who argued for more staff to manage the “safe release” of those incarcerated back into the population.
Lesser-known voices called for equal consideration, including elementary school teacher Tamara Madden, who urged the panel to fully fund a $10. 3 billion, K-12 education budget. She said money is needed to stop the “revolving door” employee crisis, especially among support staff including cafeteria workers and janitors.
In all, 61 people gave testimony, while those left out were told to submit written statements. Rep. David Gomberg, who represents Lincoln County’s House Dist. 10, said the declarations underscored how “small towns face big expenses.” He was not unduly optimistic, however.
“I’ve had some success in bringing home dollars by using my seniority, knowledge of the process and a little bit of legislative guile,” he said after the event. “But it’s going to be tough this year because the federal money is no longer flowing into Oregon.”
Again, we talk about Mulvaney and Bud and Trump and Biden and Twitter and Ukraine-USA War Leaks and celebrities of every stripe, including that freak Mulvaney and freak Kid Rock. This is what we TALK about, and K12 is vapidly sinking to new miseducation lows.
It is all divide and conquer, but also distraction(s) to the max, the endless EMFs and pixels and screen scrolls, all the flips of the dumb phone screens, all those Substack crap-o-la blogs, navel gazing shit (and some is good, but really, how many lifetimes do we have finding the diamonds in the rough?), all the endless manure of Mainstream Mush Masturbating for MIC Media, all those so-called hip and edgy folk with Podcasts, all those shows, all of it, this is more than just taking space and time and human breath away from everyday people. It is the fodder, it is the endless ether, the drone and drab and supercillious crap that actually gets deeply embedded into the zeitgeist but also into the gray matter collectively, in the womb and near the tomb.
It all connects, those endless millions of hours dedicated to USA, Ukraine, twenty years of hate spat out and tossed sat China and Russia and Cuba and African nations and and (and) and___________________. It all calcifies in the glands of most americanos and all americanos’ hormones are rushing in all the wrong places, until, we have DSM-V pages of maladies accounting for our mass fear, and entire books of contraindications and intended and unintended consquences of the dirty and mold and fungus and viruses, and bacteria and prions and poisons and chemicals that are all part and parcel the American Way, from smalltown Newport to big time New York City.
Endless dysfunction, endless Americanism, endless stupidity around who we are as a nation, which is definitely a country of horror, terror, thefts, murders, beheadings, starvations, poisonings of the wells, shocks and awes, hit squads, black jack booted goons, Mafia’s, Gangs of New York/LA/Chicano et al. It is a country that now threatens to send in the Merchants of War to Mexico, and it all is ALL connected to the fact local communities are dragging, suffering, smeared into almost non-existence.
The cops want more cops, the sheriff wants more SWAT participants, the courts want more prosecutors; the system is broken, as little rural Lincoln County has high levels of meth addiction, homelessness, Domestic Violence, untreated psychiatric issues, broken development disabilities situations, aging not so well in place, and this is it, man, a community meeting, with lawmakers, and the bottom line is:
Keep on doing the same dirty thing, and expect miracles: “Local officials repeated a common theme, telling legislators that rising costs outstripped their limited budgets.”
Bigger than just show me the money:
Ahh, YIMBY or NIMBY, that is the question, until that elephant in the room is shampooed and manicured and stomping us all to death:
Ironic, that CIA-controlled, the dirt bag TV-Cable monster, NBC, CNBC, all of them, putting this one out:
They just don’t know how many trillions are dedicated and stolen for the Military Industrial Complex. It goes so much deeper than “just” the end producte, whether a flak jacket or Humvee or jet or missile or satellite. Believe you me, it’s all the R & D, all the colleges and universities, all the PR, legal outfits, services, goods and services, from buttons to bullets, and this country is tied to war war war. The average price of a gallon of gasoline, counting all the costs, external and personal, is around $27 a gallon. War, sanctions, digging, pollution, harm to planet, people, community; cancers and culled economies. Hit men for Shell, BP, Exxon, and endless insurance scams, the cars costing $80,000, those microchips, those highways, the amazing amount of work one has to do to keep tires treaded and oil clean and the damn engine running, w/ tune ups, the endless time spent in an ICE or EV (internal combustion engine or electric vehicle) as our lives are sucked away. Fracking, embedded energy, wars wars wars.
Yeah, more than $27 a gallon when you count the nations broken, destroyed by oil monarchs and oil tycoons.
Again, if you build your society on tourism, on Air B & B, on endless vehicles coming in and toilets and washer machines flusing and dumping, then here we are. From the Newport News Times:
Startling news emerged with many requests, including how 400 units of affordable housing have been stalled by a faulty sewer system in Lincoln City. Mayor Susan Wahlke told the panel the town’s infrastructure, which serves 40,000 tourists “on a busy weekend,” could fail at any moment.
The horizona ain’t pretty when we throw money at celebrities, junk, over-priced and under-quality medicine, and the war war war. Tax giveaways and the rich hoarding it all.
For transit, the infrastructure grades range from a B in rail to a D-. Five category grades — aviation, drinking water, energy, inland waterways, and ports — went up, while just one category — bridges — went down. In 2021, stormwater infrastructure received its first grade: a disappointing D. Overall, 11 category grades were stuck in the D range, a clear signal that our overdue infrastructure bill is a long way from being paid off. (source)
Not that I have faith in engineers, civil engineers, who are also part and parcel embedded in America the free, the brave, the best. Remember NOL, and that lie? Find my two parts to the story of, The Storm, as in Katrina!
Arrogant, macho, idiots, the US Corps of Engineers, and engineers in general. And they went after Ivor van Heerden, after him at the university where he taught.
Look, I was at Good Samaritan Hospital, for my spouse’s colonoscopy. We had to travel 90 minutes one way to get it done, and that meant an overnight stay. And, she opted for being knocked out, which I did not opt for when I had my age 50 screening (in Europe, the majority do not get put under, either). So, one doctor with the drugs, and then the gastro doctor. It was, again, another teachable moment.
Yep, that screening costs us, insured, whatever, from $2,800 to $4,700. She had four nurses, and then in the operating arena, maybe two docs, two nurses and then an endoscope assistant/nurse.
Ahh, the lovely coast, and the lack of everything, because it’s all about the US Chamber of Commerce, bed and breakfasts, short term rentals, endless lines of people hunting for tidepools, taffy, t-bones, tequila and toasty beach fires.
One of her nurses, a male, he was proud of his military service, his bullet in the foot (he said he had a corpsman status … a hospital corpsman is an enlisted medical specialist of the United States Navy, who may also serve in a U.S. Marine Corps unit), proud of his 19 years at the hospital, and proud of his entertainment center, sons and teaching them about Naco Libre and Jack Black. He said he was on the USS Nimitz, aircraft merchant of death ship, and how when Whitney Houston sang the racist national anthem for what, the Stupor Bowl, how there wasn’t a dry eye on the deck.
He’s another arrested developed 40-something, with tattoos all over, and yammering about Rambo and Jack Black (he said the guy, Black, sang the second best Anthem after Houston).
Lisa Marie Presley came up, and I said, “Yeah, too bad she’s gone.” Here we go, a guy with 100% service connected VA benefits, with a job that pays $120K, Cadillac health insurance, this is what he said: “I have no sympathy for her. She was a drug addict. When I came back from war, I didn’t use drugs. I bought a crotch rocket (motorcycle) and then when that was too dangerous, I started walking.”
Ahh, so I did push back, saying, “Yeah, I was a social worker for veterans, most on some form of self-medication, and all my female vets had been raped by their own men, so, nah, I have a different take on drug abuse.”
This fellow is just chopped liver in the scheme of things, but think about millions upon millions of boy-children raising other boys (their own). Imagine that, boys hearing a medical services guy, a nurse, who has zero sympathy or empathy for drug users. At Good Samaritan.
The USA in a nutshell, well, there are so many nutshells out there, teachable moments for me. It’s not surprising or upsetting to me, because it is par for the course, since I was probably younger than 13, man.
Man Lost of Tribe? Me? Come on, get over it. Imagine that, a nuke-powered merchant of death ship with 5,000 sailors on it. There’s the rub, no? How much to run it, to fix it, to outfit it, to treat the injured, to pay the sailors, to feed and clothe and air condition them? How much do we pay for their de-enlisting and then coming into society with those “I give a fuck about people who are addicted to drugs and die” attitudes.
Yeah, a guy who loves that insipid overpaid poor acting talentless Jack Black, no, overweight by MD standards (this nurse was carrying too much BMI himself) and, damn, I know about stories of Black snorting and doing speedballs and downing mass quantities of Chris Farley booze.
Who is living in a van down by the dump, or by the highway, or alley (no, not a river)? Oh, veterans, those poor ass achey-breaky hearts. Addicts. Here’s a high school teacher and coach, making fun, man, making fun of the down and out.
Well, we know how comic Chris died: On December 18, 1997, Farley was found dead by his younger brother John in his apartment in the John Hancock Center in Chicago. He was 33 years old. An autopsy revealed that Farley had died of an overdose of a combination of cocaine and morphine, commonly known as a “speedball”.
“I’m not laughing at me. I’m laughing at this person who’s committing so much who’s two feet away from me,” Sweeney said, adding that it has happened more often doing improv than her time at the legendary NBC comedy show, with the notable exception of the Farley sketch.
“When Chris Farley did the ‘down by the river’ Matt Foley, I was in that. They had to cut around me because I was laughing. Because it was like I had the best seat in the house for the funniest friggin’ thing that was happening on the planet.”
Can Americans ever be genuine, or is it just in our fucked up dimwit, TV Boob Tube Shit, Disney and McDonalds, Sesame Street and Tele Tubby, the endless drip drip drip of Holly-Dirt and Masterpiece Theater.
There are no Bruce Willis moments for our ocean communities, for sure. No Build Back Better. We are screwed, man, soap on a rope, rope a dope, all of it, we are screwed because we do not strike them all.
How much will the next war be? No better than D-minus from the engineers! More more war pornography. Watch three fellows you will NEVER see on your TV. This is scary, brothers and sisters. No Bud Lights here!
Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.
