SULLIVAN'S SALVOS
November 5, 2024
Sullivan’s Salvos 11/7/24
In this edition:
*RIP Joyce Carman
*Happy Birthday Rachel!
*Veterans Day
*The Smell Part I
*The Smell Part II
*Election Day Trivia
*Salvos Timing
*Eating Our Seed Corn
*Did You Know?
*RIP Joyce Carman
I was saddened to hear of the passing of Joyce Carman of Iowa City. Joyce was a teacher and an all-around fine person. She was a great supporter of women and Democrats at all levels; I wish she’d had the opportunity to be around for the election results. RIP, Joyce.
*Happy Birthday Rachel!
Happy Birthday to my oldest daughter Rachel, who turns 33 on the 6th! I love you, Ray!
*Veterans Day
Happy Veterans Day on November 11. Thanks to all the men and women who have served our country. I appreciate your service, and wish you peace.
Veterans For Peace Chapter #161 is sponsoring an Armistice Day Observance to be held on Monday, November 11th at the Ped Mall stage in Iowa City. The event begins at 10:45 AM. Bells will be rung at 11:00 AM, as they rang around the world at the end of WWI in 1918 and on each November 11th for decades thereafter. Armistice Day is a day to promote PEACE and to remember the victims of war, both veterans and civilians.
The event will feature Veterans For Peace from throughout the state of Iowa. The event is free, and the public is welcome. There will be a free lunch at the Iowa City Public Library following the event.
*The Smell Part I
Downtown Iowa City is at least 3 miles every direction from any farm fields. You should not be overwhelmed by the smell of hog manure in downtown Iowa City. But the smell has been pretty bad of late.
Why? The crops are out of the field, and farmers are in the midst of the annual ritual of overapplying hog manure to those harvested fields. You read that correctly. They are *overapplying* manure.
Just to be clear – the fields don’t need all this additional manure cover. It is an excess of nitrogen, which ends up in our groundwater, streams, rivers, and lakes. From there, it harms human health in multiple ways. (See the increasing cancer rates unique to our state.)
So why do it? Because we have too many hogs concentrated in too small an area. The manure has to go somewhere. And Iowa law allows the manure to go wherever the farmer wants. Their economic well-being is placed FAR above the health of Iowans.
Seems stupid, doesn’t it? Why should hog producers get to freely offload their environmental problems on the rest of us? That is a very good question. Ask Kim Reynolds in 2026!
*The Smell Part II
Cargill recently cut off health insurance for striking workers. That stinks! Cargill is the most profitable privately held company on planet earth. There is a special place in hell for Cargill management. Luckily the strike has ended; I hope workers got what they needed! Meanwhile, let’s take on these huge corporations, and make them pay their share!
*Election Day Trivia
Federal law requires Election Day to be “the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.” So you could never have Election Day on Tuesday, November 1 – there was no Monday first. So in that case, the election would be Tuesday, November 8.
This means elections are always held between November 2 and November 8 of each year.
*Salvos Timing
For the past year or so, Salvos have been dated for a Thursday, but actually arrives in your inboxes on Tuesdays. That makes the timing of Salvos quite bad re: Election Day! As this is being sent, I have little to report – I’m out knocking doors! So expect plenty of election discussion a week from today. Meanwhile, I’m going to run an old piece A) just to fill some space, and B) because it is relevant to today’s election. Thanks for understanding.
*Eating Our Seed Corn
(This ran in Salvos and several local newspapers at the start of the COVID 19 pandemic in April of 2020.)
Recent events remind me of an old warning: “Don’t eat your seed corn.” Farmers knew to save a certain amount of their corn harvest. This would be the seed corn the next year. The message is pretty simple. – don’t focus only on the short term. Unfortunately, America has spent the better part of 40 years eating our seed corn.
For decades, the GOP has told people, “You know better how to spend your money than the government does.” So over the years, the federal government has not taxed you a few bucks. At the same time, they have not taxed Jeff Bezos billions. So the federal government cuts back on things like public health.
Now we reach a point where you need a Covid-19 test, a ventilator, or some other public good. Can you just take the money you saved and run out and buy what you need? Nope. Bezos still can. But you can’t. And the government cannot provide it, because they had to make cuts. See how this works?
There is more. The Federal government used to maintain stockpiles of medical supplies. But then came the push to “run government like a business”. Why maintain a warehouse when it can get here from China in a week? How well has that worked?
Obviously, the flaws to that system have now been exposed. But it goes even deeper. The US government is our largest healthcare provider. There is a huge federal need for medical supplies. Those supplies should have ALWAYS been produced in the US. 95% of all cotton swabs are made in China or Italy. Why would the US government EVER allow that? Even if private providers opt for Chinese products, the US government should have been buying US made products all along.
The past three years are a perfect example of short-term thinking. With low unemployment, income pooling at the top, and low interest rates, it was a perfect time to think long term. Instead, President Trump led us in the opposite direction.
He should have raised taxes on the wealthy. Instead, he cut them. He should have increased the social safety net. Instead, he cut it. He should have paid down some of the federal debt. Instead, he increased it. He should have spent on infrastructure. He did less. He should have built out rural broadband. He did nothing. He should have acted on student loan debt. Instead, he has made it easier for sham “schools” to profit. Every step Trump has taken has been for his own short-term benefit. He has been eating our seed corn.
Disasters always have the worst effects on the poorest among us. Covid-19 is no different. The US is bound to have worse outcomes than other countries. Why? The sad state of the social safety net in the US. Consider the following:
· The lack of paid sick days in most jobs guarantees that sick people will be going to work, thereby spreading the virus.
· Because insurance is tied to employment, Americans who get laid off get the double whammy of also losing health coverage.
· Low wages mean Americans cannot be off work for any amount of time and still maintain their housing.
· Childcare is a problem for most American families, made worse during the outbreak.
Many people and small businesses will not recover. And that should come as no surprise. The US has decided that it is important to keep billionaires earning as much as possible, but not important that US workers have sick leave, health insurance, and decent wages. We have eaten our seed corn. There is nothing left in reserve.
*DID YOU KNOW? World War I officially ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919. However, the fighting ended about seven months before that when the Allies and Germany put into effect an armistice on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
For that reason, Nov. 11, 1918, was largely considered the end of “the war to end all wars” and dubbed Armistice Day. In 1926, Congress officially recognized it as the end of the war, and in 1938, it became an official holiday, primarily a day set aside to honor veterans of World War I.
But then World War II and the Korean War happened, so on June 1, 1954, at the urging of veterans service organizations, Congress amended the commemoration yet again by changing the word “armistice” to “veterans” so the day would honor American veterans of all wars.
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---Rod
posted by Rod Sullivan @ 10:24 AM
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