One day after Donald Trump became president of the United States the world saw the largest mass protest ever.
On January 21, 2017, the Women’s March on Washington drew more participants than Trump’s inauguration the day before, and “sister marches” were held in 600 locations around the world. If you are a long-time follower of my blogging, you know that I have attended and videotaped many protests, marches and rallies. This was by far the largest protest march I have seen in my 35 years in Tucson. It was impressive.
The Tucson marchers were a diverse group. Although the event was dubbed the Women’s March, everyone was invited, and everyone came. From children to seniors, all ages were represented. There was an impressive number of men who marched, and the LGBTQ, Latino, and African American communities were also well-represented. There were people in strollers and people who use wheelchairs. For more photos, go to my Facebook page. (Video after the jump.)
Republicans are at a retreat today to come up with policies, er, ways to screw the American people over. And together with our Dear Leader Donald Trump, they have come up with a doozy of a plan to pay for Trump’s “beautiful wall” with Mexico. Trump wants 20% tax on imports from Mexico to pay for wall:
President Donald Trump has decided he will seek to pay for the wall on the US’s southern border by imposing a 20% tax on imports from Mexico and as part of a larger comprehensive tax reform plan, the White House said Thursday.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the comprehensive tax reform package Trump and Republicans are looking to put together will include taxing imports from other countries, like Mexico.
“By doing it that we can do $10 billion a year and easily pay for the wall just through that mechanism alone. That’s really going to provide the funding,” Spicer said, referring to a 20% tax. According to the Office of the US Trade Representative, Mexico’s exports to the US in 2015 was valued at $316.4 billion. The trade deficit is estimated to be $50 billion.
Donald J. Trump used his inaugural address to do what no other American president has ever done before: he described America as a dystopian post-apocalyptic hellscape right out of Escape from New York.
Trump delivered a dark inaugural address in which he pledged fealty to all Americans. But he made little overt attempt to soothe a nation still wounded from arguably the ugliest election season of modern times and signaled that he intends to govern as if waging a permanent political campaign.
Trump reprised the central arguments of his candidacy and harshly condemned the condition of the country he now commands. He said communities had fallen into disrepair with rampant crime, chronic poverty, broken schools, stolen wealth and “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones.”
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” Trump declared in his 16-minute address.
Trump has spent his entire life living in the toney gated communities of wealth and privilege only made possible by his living in America, where this grifter and con artist can take advantage of the vulnerable and the gullible.
The “American carnage” he describes exists only in the fetid imagination of Donald J. Trump (and the fever swamps of the conservative media entertainment complex from which he emerged). Fact-checking President Trump’s inaugural address. As the New York Times editorializes, America was already pretty great, despite its flaws, before Trump took office on Friday. What President Trump Doesn’t Get About America.
Here we can see miles of fields of Romaine lettuce with crews of migrant workers in the distance. In the foreground are 1000s of discarded outer Romaine lettuce leaves. Workers severely trim lettuce heads down, so they can be sold as “Romaine hearts”. The leaves will be plowed back into the ground for nutrients, but still, the waste was surprise to someone like me who heard “waste not want not” many times while growing up.
During our Yuma Legislative Tour in December, we saw miles and miles of lettuce, cotton, broccoli, seed crops, and more. We got muddy and trudged around the Romaine lettuce fields with migrant workers, and we also toured a cotton gin. (More photos are here on my Facebook page.)
After our first day of touring Yuma’s agricultural areas, we heard multiple presentations at a hosted dinner paid for by different growing/ranching industry groups and served up by 4H and JTED youth. The presentation by Paul Brierley, director of the University of Arizona Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture, stuck out in my mind. He talked about using engineering technology to help growers in the Yuma area. According to the UA website, “The [Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture], based in Yuma, is a public-private partnership (PPP) between the college and the Arizona and California desert agriculture industry, dedicated to addressing ‘on-the-ground’ industry needs through collaboration and research.” The website continues on to say: “More than two dozen industry partners from Yuma and Salinas, California, have invested in the center, together committing more than $1.1 million over the next three years.”
Brierley is an affable engineer who grew up on a large farm. According to Bierley, the primary problem that industry partners wanted the PPP center to tackle was “productivity”. He talked about different ways to boost productivity by using technology. For example, Brierley said that the date palms needed help with pollination. He showed a photo of a migrant worker pollinating date trees using a machine that looked like a leaf blower strapped on his back. This human-assisted pollination worked, but to improve productivity, the UA and Yuma growers began experimenting with drones. They found that drones to be more efficient pollinators than people. Technology to the rescue: mechanical birds. (For some jobs, this is the future: people being replaced by machines.)
Another problem area that had been identified as a hindrance to productivity was birds.
LD9 Senator Steve Farley, Rep.-Elect Pamela Powers Hannley and Rep. Randy Friese on Election Night.
At 5 a.m. on Nov. 9, 2016, I had an existential crisis. How could a Progressive candidate like me win election on the same day as Donald Trump?
The LD9 team won early on Nov. 8. Randy, Steve and I were the first winners to take the stage at the Pima County Democratic Party party in the Marriott Hotel, where many of us watched President Barack Obama win twice.
Excitement was in the air. Everyone was so cheery. The polls all told us that our candidate– the first woman president– would win handily. Yes, of course, one poll said that Hillary Clinton would win by only 3%, but how could that be when all other polls were so high in favor of her?
Now we all know what happened. The polls were wrong. Twenty-five years of lies; millions of social media shares of questionable meme attacks and fake news; editorializing instead of news analysis by mainstream news media; Russian hacks; dithering, drawn-out FBI investigation of those @#$% emails; and deep-seeded sexism took down the most qualified candidate and gave us a president who promises to rule with an authoritarian hand.
