We are NOT All in This Together

Just stop with this bullshit that “we are all in this together.” We are not all in this together, as any musician, restaurateur or bartender can tell you. A few people, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and other high-tech scumbags are getting even filthier rich as the rest of us retreat from the real world into their online cesspit. Dr Anthony Fauci, who would otherwise only be remembered for his leaky bio-weapons lab at Ft. Detrick, can enjoy his newfound fame and gets to play this amusing game of “Simon Says” with a terrified American public. Big Pharma, like Pfizer and Moderna just had a truckload of money dumped at their doorstep, even though they’ve been ripping us off for decades and usurping our democracy with the money they extort from us. They recognize the pandemic for what it is, an opportunity to tighten their stranglehold on the throats of the American people, and to rake in a hell of a lot of cash.

These people do not share our pain. They’ve always treated us commoners as though we were infected with some dreadful disease, and we are, it’s called poverty, and they cause it. Thanks to the pandemic response, they are now completely immune to it. These people don’t mind wearing masks in public because they know that if we had any sense we’d kill them all, on sight, if we could recognize them.

For the cowardly little twerps who sold their souls for the meaningless life of an office drone, the pandemic has been a godsend. For these people, believing that they are “smart” matters to them. They’d much rather believe that the decisions they made in life were guided by intelligence rather than cowardice, but it ain’t so. They chose the security of a soul-sucking job in a suicidal culture rather than risk the poverty, hardship and unpredictability of a life outside of it. A life lived in fear is bound to suck, but the sight of homeless desperate people begging for spare change scares the shit out of them and keeps them in line.

All these people gave up for the pandemic was their commute, and the necessity of having to get dressed for work in the morning. They already spent most of their life in front of a screen, because they were already deathly afraid of the outside world. For them, the pandemic just reinforces their own proclivities and prejudices. Since all they do is “Zoom” each other all day, its no surprise that they’ve completely forgotten about the people who live in the real world. Unless you are in their “feed” they don’t even know you exist.

Among these sniveling desk jockeys, journalists deserve special recognition. Remember this. The reason most journalists became journalists, was because they couldn’t pass a science course to save their lives. If they could’ve passed calculus, they’d have a better job. Journalists don’t know shit about this disease, and they don’t know enough about science to challenge the bullshit story being fed to them about the pandemic.

For journalists, the pandemic has become an excuse for laziness. Why bother investigating political corruption, corporate crime or the environmental crises when you can just regurgitate press releases from the CDC and local authorities ad nauseam without ever having to leave your bedroom? Journalists ignore the impacts of the pandemic response on people in our community, because investigating them would require effort. They continue to tow the line on government-sponsored fear-mongering propaganda because it is easy, not because it is true, and they berate us for non-compliance because they desperately want to believe that their own obsequiousness is “smart” rather than cowardly.

No, we have never been “all in this together,” in this country. This pandemic response helped some and hurt others. It may have saved some lives, but it certainly destroyed others. Perhaps precautions are warranted, but berating people for non-compliance with draconian civil rights restrictions is not, because this crisis deserves an intelligent response, not a cowardly one.

Vote NO on Measure O

I still remember how much you disappointed me, Humboldt County, when you voted for Measure Z the first time around. What a ripoff that was! Schemy SoHum dope yuppies got their puppet, Estelle Fennell to craft a ballot measure that would sucker gullible NoHum liberals into voting to make Eureka, Arcata, Fortuna and McKinleyville retailers, not to mention Humboldt’s working poor, pay for forty new Sheriff’s Deputies to act as bouncers and security guards for the phony businesses in Garberville that launder their drug money. That diabolically sleazy maneuver took Chutzpah, but that’s how SoHum’s dope yuppies decided to flex their political muscle.

You fell for it hook line and sinker, Humboldt County. Do you feel safer? Are there less drugs on the street? Have they eradicated the homeless? No! We have more violent crime, more murder, and more drugs, and the housing crisis has only gotten worse since Measure Z passed, but now law enforcement has gotten hooked on this money that we never should have given them in the first place.

If I told you that the solution to your affordable housing crisis, drug epidemic and general social dysfunction was to recruit high-school seniors ranked near the middle of their class, give them firearms training, lots of weapons, bullet-proof body armor and a license to kill, and then send them out to look for trouble in your neighborhood, you’d say I was stupid and crazy, but when Estelle Fennell calls it a “public safety initiative” somehow it seems like a good idea to you. You’ve heard the old saying: “If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”? Well, what do you think every problem looks like if your only tool is a gun? Remember this the next time they tell you that more cops is the solution to anything.

I saw Sheriff Honsel and DA Flemming out begging you to vote for Measure O. They can’t tell you that they’ve accomplished anything with the millions of dollars that Measure Z dumped in their laps. All they can say is that they can’t live without it. What could they say? Could they say “Without Measure O we will be able to arrest, prosecute and convict even fewer of the murderers responsible for the many unsolved homicides in Humboldt County.” Is that even possible? As far as I remember, nothin’ from nothin’ still leaves nothin.’

In reality, This sales tax, Measure Z turned Measure O, was never about “public safety.” This little trip to OZ was a vicious and regressive tax scheme designed to make the poor pay for their own brutal oppression. If you recall, Measure Z was part of a strategic offensive conducted by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to drive poor people out of the county with a campaign of violence and harassment carried out by a small army of new cops. While encouraging voters to pass Measure Z, the Board of Supervisors also passed a number of cruel, draconian, and ultimately unconstitutional county ordinances designed to criminalize poverty.

One of these ordinances prohibits sleeping in Humboldt County unless you own a home here. Another prohibits people from asking for help. Measure Z was supposed to pay extra cops to enforce these stupid, cruel and unconstitutional county laws. Since then, these laws have proven unenforceable. Instead they have attracted expensive lawsuits that challenge their constitutionality, so now we pay cops not to enforce them, while we pay lawyers to defend them in court.

I think it’s funny that Measure Z, designed by pot farmers and business retailers in SoHum, to drive poor people out of Humboldt County, will now, as Measure O, just make Humboldt County a more expensive, and even less competitive place to buy and sell cannabis, or anything else for that matter. Now Measure O will make the pot farmers and retailers poor so they can see how much they like it. What goes around comes around, and it don’t get any more round than Measure O.

Bad people voted for Measure Z because they are bad people. We have more than our share of them here in Humboldt County, but too many good people voted for Measure Z because they were stupid and gullible and got hypnotized by the words “public safety.” In the spirit of civic responsibility and selfless generosity, they voted for Measure Z, which, much to their chagrin, then unleashed a wave of government sanctioned violence against the poor in Humboldt County. Don’t fall for that bullshit again! When politicians tell you that they are doing something because of “public safety,” you should know that they intend to screw you.

Politicians don’t give a fuck about “public safety.” “Public safety” is a fig leaf that politicians use to cover up something ugly. They passed Jim Crow laws for “public safety.” They made cannabis illegal for “public safety.” Mandatory minimum sentences and Rockefeller Drug Laws were all about “public safety,” and they always use “public safety” as the reason to violate your civil rights whenever you get mad enough about something to go out and protest. In political double-speak, “public safety” really means “police state.” A vote for Measure O is a vote for endless war against the poor, and endless subsidy for SoHum dope yuppies. It’s a vote for violence, oppression and economic apartheid, not to mention, the economic ruin of Humboldt County. You can’t afford to make the same mistake twice, Humboldt County. Please vote NO on Measure O.

The Cannabis Community and the Fog of War

I was reminded recently of a peculiar event that took place at the Mateel Community Center a couple of years ago called the “Community Values Conference.” A group of cannabis entrepreneurs wanted to use the term “SoHum Community Values” as a marketing tool to promote and distinguish their fine cannabis products. I attended to remind them that, while they still had a great concert hall, SoHum offers very little in terms of community services.

We had, and have, an extreme housing shortage in SoHum, but we have no shelter or services for people without housing. At the time, we had a rash of brutal assaults, mostly against defenseless elderly disabled men who had nowhere to go, and local social media sites dripped with hatred and vitriol aimed at our unhoused population. I wanted to see what kind of values statement the people whose kids beat a helpless old man into a coma and left him lying on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood could come up with.

Besides that, we have several homicides every year, where young people come here to work, but instead, someone kills them and buries them in the woods. Those bodies are rarely found. Arrests and convictions are much rarer still, but law enforcement continues to find egregious environmental destruction at grow sites all over SoHum. People around here don’t bat an eyelash about any of it. If not human life and the natural environment, one has to wonder, what do these people actually value?

At the event, we worked through a series of exercises where we pulled a bunch of positive sounding platitudes out of our asses and reassembled them, according to their popularity, into statements of incomprehensible happy-talk. I can’t recall any of these statements, but I do remember that they seemed quite unmemorable at the time. Still, I think I recognize what the organizers of this event hoped to highlight about their community, and why they might think it would be good for business.

I say “their” community, because of the difference between SoHum’s cannabis growers’ community, and the SoHum community at large. SoHum, as a whole, remains as alienated and fractured as any rural American community, and we’re not likely to agree on much, including values. However, one segment of our community enjoys a rare degree of acceptance and comradery. For cannabis growers, SoHum is a very special place.

In most of the country, cannabis growers tend to live very isolated lives. Because of the stiff criminal penalties for commercial cannabis cultivation, growers have to be very careful about who they allow into their lives. If you grow weed in Kansas, you might not know another grower. They don’t have highly specialized garden supply stores in Ohio, at least not in my town, and you couldn’t just drive across town to pick up a tray of rooted clones. If you grow pot almost anywhere else in the country, you do it all yourself, and you do it all alone, and the more you grow, the more isolating it becomes.

I didn’t know anyone else who grew their own weed until I started working with Mass Cann, where I met a number of other, also very isolated, growers. We compared product and talked about cannabis incessantly. It felt great to meet kindred spirits and I learned a lot about growing weed that way. When I got here, my background and interest in cannabis helped me make friends and find employment. That doesn’t really happen anywhere else, at least it didn’t back then. Here in SoHum, cannabis unites us and brings us together, and that’s a rare and powerful thing.

Over time however, this cannabis-centric culture developed it’s own character, but it also developed a mythology about itself. During the War on Drugs, it was important to portray growers sympathetically, in order to garner public support for their cause. We cultivated the myth of “mom and pop,” the original humble hippie growers, but in reality, secrecy shrouded the whole industry, and we ignored, and accepted, a lot of bad behavior in our own community. We learned to turn a blind eye and keep our mouths shut about the dark side of the industry and what happens here.

Also, people began to conflate the value of cannabis to society with the price of cannabis on the black market. People started to believe that growing cannabis didn’t just pay better than other kinds of work, but that it was worth more. In reality, the value of cannabis to society depends on it being cheap for the consumer. Paradoxically, the more cannabis costs, the less valuable it is, and the less benefit people derive from it. Of course, the quality of our cannabis here in SoHum is so legendary that no one could possible exaggerate it further, but we will continue to try. All of this tends to inflate, in our own minds, the value of what we do here.

In this way, our shared passion for cannabis, coupled with the industry’s culture of secrecy and our own need for acceptance, skewed our perception of reality. We learned to ignore what was really happening around here, and started to believe our own bullshit propaganda. We also forgot that the community of cannabis growers is not the community of SoHum, and that the community of SoHum is not society at large. We’ve lived in this bubble of unreality for a long time, because cannabis growers had real money, and anyone who wanted any of it had to suck up to them and tell them what they want to hear.

Today however, google Earth deprives growers of their secrecy while legalization slashes their income. Growers can no longer afford their own reality, and the people around them are less likely to afford it to them. The bubble of unreality is collapsing. There is certainly a value to community, and it is something to celebrate, but an insulated community can lose touch with reality, and money is the best insulation in that regard. I think it’s really tragic that cannabis culture here in SoHum has been so warped by the dynamics of the War on Drugs. You could call it the “fog of war.” The cannabis community remains reluctant to face reality here in SoHum, and because of that we will likely endure a very difficult transition to legalization.

Homelessness and Mental Illness

Last week I hosted a show about the housing crisis on my local community radio station. Like a lot of the country, we have a chronic housing shortage, especially affordable housing, and as a result, thousands of people sleep outside, or in their cars, on these cold, rainy winter nights. After the show, a woman approached me to make a comment. She told me that the people she sees on the street don’t seem very friendly to her. She noticed that the people who carry big backpacks and appear to be living outside, mostly talk to, and associate with, each other. They don’t make much of an effort to engage with the rest of society. She seemed to think that they owe us more of an effort.

I told her that I didn’t think poor people owed her anything. By the time you’ve made someone sleep outside in the rain, put up fences and bars everywhere, and paid cops to roust them from every dry, sheltered place they can find, you’ve pretty much blown your chances for friendship, and you should not be surprised to find them in a bad mood. Everyone seems eager to offer helpful criticism to poor people as to what they could improve about themselves to better deserve our compassion, but I have to ask, and I wish I had asked: What about mainstream society deserves respect? Why should poor people voluntarily participate in a system designed to oppress them? More importantly, why do any of us participate in a system that excludes so many people and denies them even the most basic of their human needs?

Once upon a time, we would say that our society deserved respect because we followed God’s word and we endeavored to obey God’s command, so only God could judge us, but to disrespect our society was to disrespect God himself. A whole lot of people still believe that, by the way. There’s really no point in talking to those people. Rational arguments only go so far with them, and I respect that. Belief is a powerful thing. A shared belief brings stability and cohesiveness to a group, even if those beliefs destabilize the climate, disintegrate the ecosystem, and contradict compelling evidence to the contrary.

These days, the rest of us mostly fancy ourselves rational, intelligent creatures capable understanding the world around us, and of making wise decisions for ourselves and the common good. This is every bit as stupid and crazy as believing in God’s word, but it is also just as important to our identity as Jesus is to Christians’. What’s more, this idea is foundational to the concept of democracy, which has become our new religion.

The News has replaced Mass, and elections have replaced The Holy Communion, but it’s essentially the same mass stupidity. Still, you can talk to these people, because they believe deep in their heart that they can solve any problem with rational thinking and creativity, even if they have no real experience at doing either.

If you believe in the supremacy of human intelligence, and your own ability to think something through, this is one of those things that maybe you ought to take the time to think all the way through: What about our society deserves your respect? And more tangibly: What about our society merits your participation? Think about that for a moment.

Off hand, I can think of a lot of reasons to be ashamed of our society. We should be ashamed of global climate change, and what it means for future generations. We should be ashamed that we have exterminated half of the world’s biodiversity in the last 40 years, and that we squeeze more than a hundred species of plant and animal out of existence and into extinction every day. We should be ashamed that today, having practically exhausted the Earth’s resources, all we have to show for it is a few billionaires, a host of toxic gadgets designed to exploit our every thought, and poverty, poverty everywhere.

Historically, we should be ashamed of genocide. We should be ashamed of slavery. We should be ashamed of internments, witch hunts, lynchings, black lists, prohibitions, Jim Crow etc. We should be ashamed of US foreign policy. That’s just off the top of my head, but it’s already a pretty serious list. I could go on.

I’m not trying to make you feel bad, I’m just pointing out that we sacrifice a lot, and we excuse an awful lot of really bad behavior, in order to participate in this society. If we could each choose whether or not to participate in modern society based entirely on principle, I’m sure that a lot of people would find our society too distasteful.

Unfortunately, most of us choose to participate in this modern society out of economic pressure, not principle. You work hard and pay taxes, not because of your burning desire to glorify the proud fatherland, but because you are hungry, and because you want to have a roof over your head. We participate in this society largely because of economic coercion, but we tell ourselves that somehow we are in control, and can fix it all with an election, because we are intelligent, rational people capable of understanding the world and making good decisions. That’s the mythology of a democratic society.

In reality, we mindlessly help the likes of Bill Gates, Elan Musk and Donald Trump mine whatever is left of the Earth’s natural abundance to further their plans to re-engineer the world, escape from the consequences of that re-engineering and put their name in gold letters across whatever is left of it, respectively. Not only that, we step over the broken bodies and spirits of our brothers and sisters to do it. Honestly, there’s nothing sane, rational or respectable about any of it. That’s the real crisis today. There is nothing respectable about modern society. It’s a crime, a disaster, and a failure all rolled into one.

Today, we see democracy for the fraud that it is, a thin veneer of populism over a machine built with violence and coercion, for the purpose of violence and coercion. We have plenty to be ashamed of, as a society, and our complete failure to meet the critical challenges of our time, only adds to that legacy of shame.

We no longer believe in God, but now democracy has failed us too. Our gods have died. Only crazy people worship dead gods, but worship them we do, because we have no idea what else to do. What’s more, we still expect the people we sacrificed to these gods to worship them too. And you thought the homeless were mentally ill.

SoHum’s Goose is Cooked

“The goose is dead,” I heard Ed Denson tell the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. He didn’t say “the goose is gonna die if…” He said “the goose is dead.” I’ve heard a lot of that kind of talk lately, but when Ed Denson says “the goose is dead,” I believe him, because he’s the goose’s lawyer. Ed went to the supervisors to complain about the excessive county taxes on legal cannabis, but it appears that the confluence of legalization and regulation created the perfect storm for Humboldt County’s cannabis industry, otherwise known as “the goose that lays golden eggs.”

They could also call it “the goose that eats people, sucks the rivers dry, and turns the community into a ghetto,” but you know how much people around here prefer to focus on the positive. Whatever you call it, Humboldt County’s cannabis heyday is over. The price of black market cannabis collapsed last year in the face of a historic glut in supply. Meanwhile, the CA state regulators dealt the fatal blow to Humboldt’s so called “small farmers” when they decided to license grows larger than one acre. Suddenly, Humboldt County growers are too remote, too dispersed and too small to produce cannabis, competitively in the free market.

The bubble burst. Although it happened suddenly, it didn’t take a genius to see it coming. Anna Hamilton saw it coming a decade ago, and she warned everyone about it. She asked “What’s after pot?” and the community resoundingly replied, “More pot!” Unfortunately, “more pot” quickly turned into “too much pot,” leading to the current collapse in price. It’s a classic small farmer mistake, and it’s why small farmers usually struggle financially, and fail often. Today, the goose still sucks the rivers dry, and it still eats people, but it doesn’t lay golden eggs anymore.

Eventually, life as a small farmer will rehabilitate a lot of black market growers. The people who played smart, paid their land off, love it, and know how to live close to it, will survive on honest labor and thrift. For the rest of Humboldt County’s 12,000+ black market cannabis growers out there, the people who moved here to grow weed, because they thought they could make money at it, it’s just a matter of time. You can tell haw smart they are by how quickly they scram. The smart ones have already left.

A lot of growers will move on to the next sleazy scam. Don’t be surprised if you see them in the health care industry, or working for Big Pharma, but only the smart ones will make that transition seamlessly. Most of Humboldt County growers will not respond well to the economic downturn. Generations of living the low-status, highly secretive, life of a black market drug dealer left us with limited skills, substance abuse problems and chronically low self-esteem, issues we could always cover up, when we had plenty of money. Without money, it’s gonna be a bitch.

A lot of people still don’t know what hit them. They will crumble along with the black market cannabis industry here in Humboldt County. Broken-down cars will continue to accumulate on broken-down homesteads, occupied by broken-down people who have no idea what else to do. We won’t see quite so many big shiny new trucks in town, or cocky young men driving them. Instead, we’ll see more hollow, addicted and despondent young men, hitchhiking and asking for help. We’ll all feel the pinch, but it will be worse for some parts of Humboldt County than it will be for others.

Arcata will be fine. They took steps to run black market growers out of their residential neighborhoods years ago. They also have the college and a strong arts community that will all help buffer and mitigate the impacts of economic upheaval. McKinleyville seems to have inherited most of Arcata’s old indoor grows, and problems, which they are likely to see more of. Eureka and Fortuna have enough economic diversity to withstand the shock, if people, especially in Eureka, could learn to be more humane to each other.

Life up in rural North East Humboldt has always been pretty hardscrabble, and will remain so, but here in Southern Humboldt, where the black market cannabis industry choked out most of our economic diversity decades ago, we will feel the impacts of this collapse most acutely. Despite Anna Hamilton’s warnings, we remain ill prepared for it. Here, instead of facing reality, and preparing for the inevitable, we put our energy into cultivating a mythology about ourselves as growers of superior cannabis, in a region narrowly suited to it. Unfortunately, that myth only fooled us.

The goose has become a liability. Our dream of becoming the Napa County of cannabis just got buried in bushels of bud from Bakersfield. Now, it’s about survival. It’s about recovery. It’s about reality. For the first time in a long time, we’ll have the financial poverty to match our cultural poverty. Ultimately, that’s a good thing. When you build culture, it attracts money, which brings prosperity. A fountain of money, on the other hand, divorced from culture, breeds dependence and weakens communities. It’s time we got back to building culture, here in Southern Humboldt, instead of just growing money.

A New Approach to the Problem of Homelessness

This past Tuesday, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors took up the topic of whether or not to declare a shelter crisis in Humboldt County. At least 20 people came, mostly from the HSU Homeless Students Alliance to ask the Supervisors to recognize the well established fact that Humboldt County does not have nearly enough housing to accommodate its residents and workforce, and that emergency measures should be taken to address this problem.

The HSA is just the latest group to ask the Board of Supervisors to make this declaration. Concerned citizens and organized groups like AHHA have been pressing the county about this for years. The Humboldt County Human Rights Commission, after listening to dozens of hours of public testimony on the subject, has recommended that the Board of Supervisors declare a shelter crisis multiple times. The Board of Supervisors has repeatedly ignored them all.

The Board of supervisors didn’t have any problem taking swift and decisive action to address homelessness, when they thought they could do it by passing radical, draconian, and unconstitutional laws designed to criminalize poverty. Clearly the problem was serious enough that they thought it warranted infringing on all of our constitutional rights, but, alas, this punitive approach failed miserably, yet again.

When this policy of unbridled police state fascism failed, the county jumped on the “Mormon Miracle” called “Housing First,” but even the Housing First consultants, who the taxpayers pay to advise our Board of Supervisors, have told them that there isn’t enough housing in Humboldt County to make Housing First very effective. In reality, all Housing First does in Humboldt County is take housing away from working families, and give it to disabled individuals. We need housing for working families, and for disabled people, and we need it all to be affordable.

We have well established organizations with plans and working models, all home-grown, designed to solve our housing problem here in Humboldt County by creating affordable housing that works for the people who need it. They have made dozens of presentations and attended hundreds of meetings about it. This past Tuesday’s BOS meeting was just the latest. What did the Board of Supervisors decide to do about this serious problem at Tuesday’s meeting? They decided to form an ad hoc committee, which allows them to waste everyone’s time and money for another couple of years without doing anything constructive.

If they could have solved this problem by punishing people, this problem would have been solved years ago. We love to punish people here in Humboldt County, and our Board of Supervisors will eagerly implement our most sadistic impulses and write them into law, but we really hate to do anything that makes life easier on people. Most of us are too small-minded to see beyond our own petty resentments, insecurities and greed, and too well programmed by corporate propaganda to think for ourselves. We don’t mind working two low-wage jobs, just to pay the rent, so long as the people who don’t work that hard, sleep out in the rain. We’re literally just that stupid.

Even without a significant racial divide, Humboldt County gives Mississippi a run for the money in the field of bitter small-minded hatefulness. Honestly, I have never heard hatred and bigotry expressed more openly and frequently, against anyone, anywhere, in all my life as I hear it here in Humboldt County, against the poor and homeless. It is, by far, the ugliest thing about Humboldt County, and all of the media outlets here pander to that ugliness and promote it. It’s shameful.

Unfortunately, the American Genocide, extractive industries, and the War on Drugs have brought out the worst in people here in Humboldt County, and attracted the worst kind of people to Humboldt County for longer that anyone can remember. It shows. It shows in ugly attitudes, bitter resentment, and heartless insensitivity to the suffering of others.

We’re not getting anywhere by reasoning with these people. For them, reason is just a tool for getting their own way. They’ll say anything. Lying is second nature to them, and lying to themselves is first. They’ll make sure that the new ad hoc committee on homelessness does nothing but waste time and money for another year or two, while dozens of people die needlessly on the streets of Humboldt County.

We should stop wasting our time with them. Instead, I think we need to take a more revolutionary approach to homelessness. Instead of appealing to the better nature of people who clearly have no better nature, we should focus directly on providing the needy with the tools they need to secure for themselves, a home, and a brighter future here in Humboldt County.

Instead of appealing to the rich and insensitive to come together as a community, we should arm the poor and oppressed to enable their liberation. For $200 we can put a quality firearm in the hands of a needy homeless man. For $1 we can put a bullet in that gun. With a gun and some bullets, we can give homeless people the tools they need to claim their rightful home here in Humboldt County, the same way early settlers did when they first discovered this beautiful place. That is, by killing, and enslaving the people who already live here.

A lot of our homeless Vets have military training. Providing them with guns and ammunition would give them the opportunity to put that training to use here in the US, and they could train other homeless people how to work together to launch successful tactical assaults. Together, they could overcome any obstacle and rise above their current economic condition, even without the support of Humboldt County’s “Old Guard” or new rich.

Every cop we hire here in Humboldt County costs the taxpayers more than $100,000 a year, and hiring more cops has completely failed to address the problem of homelessness in Humboldt County. The Kevlar vests and semi-automatic weapons our cops carry cost a pittance by comparison. We could save a lot of money, and solve the problem of homelessness once and for all, if instead of hiring cops, we just gave the guns, ammunition and armor to to the people in the street who need them to secure their little piece of Humboldt County and participate in this proud Humboldt County tradition.

Even if we can’t raise the money locally, I’ll bet we can find foreign governments who would be happy to help us out. I know this isn’t a new idea, but I don’t think it has ever been given a fighting chance to succeed in the US before. We could be pioneers here in Humboldt County, with this new approach to solving the problem of poverty and homelessness. They’ll call it the Humboldt Revolution, and it will change the way the world sees poverty in America. It’s got to start somewhere. Why not here?

Drug Treatment Doesn’t Solve the Housing Crisis

I know we need drug treatment options here in Humboldt County, and probably a corporate chain-store methadone clinic is better than nothing, but I can’t help but think that this new Aegis clinic is what they plan to give us instead of affordable housing. Not that long ago 2^nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell toured homeless encampments in Southern Humboldt with law enforcement. Afterwards, when she spoke to the press, she didn’t say, “Wow, look at all of these people living outside, I guess we really need more housing here in SoHum.” Instead, she said something like, “It sure seems like a lot of the people living outside in the rain and cold have drug problems, I guess we need more drug treatment.”

We got the same story from the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. All year we asked the HRC to pressure the Board of Supervisors to declare a shelter emergency so that we could create some safe, affordable housing, and address the growing problem of vigilante violence against the poor and homeless here in SoHum. After more than a year of hounding willfully ignorant and purposefully dense politicians and political operatives about this, I finally got a call from HRC Commissioner Lance Morton to come talk about solutions.

So I make another special trip to town to meet with them, to talk about these alleged “solutions,” and the first words out of his mouth were, “We’re going to have drug treatment on demand!”

None of us had asked for drug treatment on demand. We went to all of those stupid meetings to demand that something be done about housing. We asked for affordable housing. We asked for tiny house villages. We asked for low-cost campgrounds and we asked for shelters. We also asked for respect for our human rights, and equal protection under the law, but instead, they bring us a methadone clinic.

None of my friends have problems with hard drugs. None of my friends can afford hard drugs. All of the heroin and Oxycontin addicts I know live in houses, and most of them own land, or their family owns land. My friends don’t need drug treatment; we all need affordable housing. None of us have very good housing options, and a lot of us have simply learned to do without.

Again and again we take our grievance to the Board of Supervisors and County Government. We explain the situation until we are blue in the face, and they look at us like they live on Mars and have no idea what we are talking about. After a couple of years of this, they come back and say, “Oh, we see what you mean, but you must be high on drugs if you think we give a fuck about your housing situation. Here’s a corporate chain-store methadone clinic for you.”

For us, Aegis will be just another shitty job that doesn’t pay a living wage. For the drug-addicted gentry of Humboldt County, however, who managed to support their hard drug habit for years, by growing cannabis and selling it on the black market, they can now get methadone treatment, close to home, at the taxpayers expense, through MediCal. Aegis will be an out-patient treatment center, and the only people likely to benefit from out-patient treatment are people who have homes to go home to, after treatment. How convenient! Politicians provide treatment options for addicted dope yuppies, while they heap the stigma of addiction on the poor and homeless. It doesn’t get much sleazier than that.

I found it both disingenuous and insulting to hear HRC Commissioner Lance Morton promote this new treatment center as a solution to the housing crisis. I’m sick and tired of of having my time and energy wasted by willfully ignorant politicians and political operatives who refuse to care about the real needs of poor and working people within this community. I’m even more sick of the heartless greed, punitive hostility and outright violence from the segment of our population who put those assholes on the Board of Supervisors in the first place.

The ugliness on display when someone throws a Molotov cocktail at a man sleeping in the doorway of a church, is a thousand times worse than the pitiful image of a poor man sleeping out in the cold. A poor person sleeping in the doorway of a church says “a man needs help.” Poor people sleeping outside, everywhere, says something else. It means there’s been a disaster, an earthquake, fire, flood, or economic upheaval. We had an economic upheaval. We’re beyond that now.

Today we have people sleeping everywhere, and we pay highly trained and heavily armed warriors to harass and evict them from anywhere they try to hide. Besides that, a segment of our population is not satisfied with the level of violence that our law enforcement officers meet out against them, so they form vigilante gangs that beat crippled old men to death, and set people on fire while they sleep. This is something else entirely.

Today, in Humboldt County, we’re looking at something like Apartheid, or an occupation, or Jim Crow. We’re looking at something much uglier than a natural disaster, and a thousand times uglier than a poor man who needs help. Here, the fascist business-class sends well financed, heavily armed warriors to beat-down and intimidate bedraggled, disorganized, traumatized, and addicted human beings who have committed no crimes, but have nowhere to hide and lack the strength to fight. These poor souls have no idea how to respond to the situation they find themselves in, and their only weapons against this oppression are the garbage and feces they leave behind and their own appearance.

That’s that’s all that’s left of humanity. That’s all that hasn’t been bought off or taken over by vicious, insatiable, fascistic greed. That’s what’s so ugly about what we see going on here in Humboldt County, and around the country, for that matter, and that’s why it’s so hard to look at it. Seeing desperate people on the streets reminds us of how much of our own humanity we’ve already sacrificed to participate in this whole exploitative system. This system kills us inside, but we can’t face what it’s doing to us, our planet, and our children’s future, so we take our resentments out on anyone who can’t, or won’t, get with the program.

We’ve constructed a perfectly exploitative culture that consumes our lives and destroys the planet, but instead of resisting, and standing up to it ourselves, we help the fascists wage war against humanity, profit from that war, and jeer at, beat down, and fire-bomb our broken brothers and sisters while the fascist system grinds them to dust. That’s a special kind of ugly, and it is definitely the ugliest thing about Humboldt County. Nobody wants to see that, and nobody wants their kids to see that, but here in Humboldt County, we have no shame.

Estelle Fennell Eliminates “Friction” at the HRC

Last week, I chased down 2^nd District Supervisor, Estelle Fennell to find out why she removed Chris Weston from the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. Having been to a few HRC meetings, it was clear to me that Chris Weston actually cares about human rights. Most of the HRC commissioners seemed surprisingly indifferent to me. I mean, we have lots of “rights” fanatics around here, at least when it comes to property rights, the 2^nd Amendment, and privacy protection, but the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission has got to be the most tepid organization designed for the purpose of promoting human rights, ever, in the whole history of the civil rights movement. I doubt that butter would melt in half of the commissioners mouths.

Estelle told me, emphatically, that HRC Commissioners serve at the pleasure of the Board of Supervisors, so you can bet that we have a weak Human Rights Commission, because that’s what the Board of Supervisors wants. Chris Weston came to the special meeting of the HRC in Garberville, to hear about human rights abuses in Southern Humboldt, from the people who suffer them. Estelle Fennell couldn’t be bothered. Chris Weston wanted human rights issues agendized and acted upon by the HRC. Estelle, apparently, didn’t. Therefore, Chris Weston had to be removed.

Just look at Estelle Fennell’s atrocious record on human rights: She worked to pass two new laws to criminalize poverty, one prohibiting people from asking for help, and the other prohibiting sleep, laws which fly in the face of the most basic of human rights. She supported Measure Z, which shifts the burden of taxation away from land-owners, who reap most of the benefits of county government, and onto the working poor and homeless, who can afford it the least, and to whom the county offers little more than evictions and jail time. Most recently, her decision to hire a poorly qualified new Public Defender with a weak record, a decision which demoralized the County’s well-respected Public Defender’s office, will only make it less likely that the County will respect the rights of indigent defendants. Considering her record, putting a commissioner on the HRC who actually cares about human rights would be out of character, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Estelle Fennell rescinded Chris Weston’s appointment.

I asked Estelle Fennell, directly, why she removed Chris Weston from the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. She didn’t want to tell me. She told me that Chris knew why she removed him, and that I should ask him, so I did. I invited Chris Weston to appear as a guest on my radio show, the Memorial Day (May 29) edition of KMUD’s Monday Morning Magazine. On my show, Chris told us that the reason Estelle gave Chris for why she removed him, was that he created “friction” within the HRC.

“Friction!” We’ve got teenage kids beating homeless old men with baseball bats in Southern Humboldt, and she’s worried about “friction” within the HRC. A man was set on fire in Garberville, but she’s worried about “friction” on the HRC. As Chris Weston said on the air, “Human rights don’t get defended without some friction.” and “if it weren’t for ‘some friction’ blacks would still be slaves, and women would still be the property of men.”

I think it will take “some friction” to address our continuing problem with violence against the poor and homeless in Southern Humboldt. We have a serious human rights problem in Southern Humboldt, and ignoring it won’t make it go away. If Ron Machado were gay, the incident where he was set on fire would be national news, and the perpetrators would face federal Hate Crime charges, but because he was poor, white and heterosexual, in Humboldt County, he’s just good kindling. That’s a cultural problem and it’s a cultural problem caused, not by poor and homeless people, but by the people with six-figure incomes around here, like Estelle Fennell.

We call it a “community” here in Southern Humboldt, but what goes on here is more like a casino. As long as you have money, we don’t care who you are, or where you got it; you’re welcome to stay and play. If you don’t have money, on the other hand, you’d better scram, even if you were born and raised here, even if you have a job and work here, even if you think you are part of the community here. To the rich people around here, like Estelle Fennell, you’re not a contributing member of the community, you’re just a loser, and you are taking up valuable real-estate, so move on. That’s how a casino operates, but you can’t build a community that way.

We don’t make “community” a priority, here in Humboldt County, we make money our sole priority, and ignore the social, cultural and human consequences of that decision. Our current Board of Supervisors has created an atmosphere conducive to gamblers, that lures shady business-people, and outright criminals into our community to loot us of our quality of life, ruin the environment, and exploit us economically, while it sweeps the social problems their policies create for our community, under the rug, or out the door.

They ignore the housing crisis. They ignore the addiction problem. They ignore the dead bodies. They ignore the violence against the poor and homeless. They ignore the sex trafficking, and they ignore the people in our community who are suffering. All they see is money. Everything else, they just brush off, throw away, or pretend it doesn’t exist. Of course, they can get away with that now, because there’s so much money around, but when this casino stops paying, the high- rollers will be gone, along with the money. All that will be left is the wreckage, and the losers. That is, the environment and the community.

It’s happening already. The smart money is getting out while the getting is good, leaving the suckers to lose their shirts on the downhill slide. Meanwhile, large scale organized crime has become entrenched in the area, institutionalizing hard drugs, sex trafficking and other crimes in Humboldt County while honest working people live in their cars or sleep under bridges because drug dealers have taken over most of the available space. That’s what’s happening to our community, and to our home, here in Humboldt County, thanks to our current Board of Supervisors.

The housing crisis here is literally killing people in Humboldt County, and Housing First won’t begin to address it. Our whole economy is based on dealing drugs, but we have almost no treatment for addiction, and we die from drug use at ten times the state average here in Humboldt County. The housing crisis forces people into the drug economy, and the drug economy drives addiction. Addiction leads to poverty, crime, hopelessness, and death. This is no accident. This is being done to us intentionally. This is how greedy parasites suck the life out of a community, and our current Board of Supervisors invited them here to do it. Now that Estelle Fennell has eliminated the “friction” at the HRC, I guess it will just be smooth sailin’ from here.

You Call This an “Emergency”

It’s been a little bit rainy lately. I almost forgot what a rainy winter can be like around here. Twice already, the county has declared an emergency and made special funds available to keep the roads open. What’s the big deal? It’s just a little rain. I know people are upset because their road is out and they can’t drive to town without hitting a bunch of potholes. Sure, the rain caused some property damage. So what? Was anybody killed?

We have been asking the Board of Supervisors to declare a shelter emergency in Humboldt County for years, because people are dying out there. The lack of affordable housing is destroying lives, traumatizing children, and killing people in our community. Every day, people, our neighbors, endure impossible conditions, suffer tremendous hardship, and every year the death toll rises, because the Board of Supervisors refuses to admit that we have a shelter crisis.

If you think this Winter was rough on your road, imagine what it must be like in a tent, or under a bridge, or huddled in a doorway. Imagine having your tent slashed, and your medications stolen by vigilantes, knowing that if you report it to the police you’ll probably go to jail. Imagine trying to raise children, in a car, through these storms, while you work a full time job. Too many people in Humboldt County face those realities, and worse. How bad does it have to get?

The Board of Supervisors just turns a blind eye. Life is cheap in Humboldt County and only landowners lives matter, to them, at least. Landlords love the situation. They don’t even have to maintain their rental properties anymore. Around here, landlords expect new tenants to clean up after the old ones, before they move in, maintain all of the amenities, for the duration, and renters know that a single complaint will likely result in eviction. Landlords laugh all the way to the bank, meanwhile the Board of Supervisors concocts new laws to criminalize the people who have been squeezed-out of their homes, for just trying to survive. It’s a fucking crime.

 

This past Superbowl Sunday I attended a meeting of the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission at the Redwood Playhouse in Garberville. Instead of seeing Lady Gaga’s breathtaking leap from the Superdome, I watched Byrd Lochte scribble down all of our concerns in multi-colored magic marker on a big pad of paper, and instead of the Tom Brady’s thrilling, come from behind, victory, I heard one of Southern Humboldt’s houseless individuals, Okra P Dingle, explain, articulately, in very polite and civil terms, how difficult it is for working people to survive around here, and why it is so important to declare a housing crisis, right now.

Okra wasn’t the only person to speak, but he sure gave them an earful. Everything the Human Rights Commission heard that night related to the lack of housing. Concerns included: untrained vigilante groups who illegally evict people from private and public property, with the Sheriff’s blessing, property damage and theft by vigilantes during those evictions, violent crimes against homeless people on the streets of Garberville, and harassment, by merchants and law-enforcement, of people perceived as “homeless.”

People told their stories about how many months, or years, they lived in their car, or camped-out, while working a local job and hunting for a place to rent, before they ever found a place to look at. People also talked about how they got pushed into the marijuana industry, because pot jobs often include a place to live, and how much more vulnerable workers are, when their boss is also their landlord, and everything is “under-the-table.” I, of course, brought up the impact of the War on Drugs on our local housing situation, and how much of our residential housing has been taken over by marijuana growers, who displace honest working people from the available housing.

The HRC Commissioners themselves were cordial and welcoming. They brought cookies and coffee, but they reminded us, repeatedly, that they have no authority. They can take down our concerns, relay them to the Board of Supervisors, and make recommendations, but they cannot compel anyone to do anything. In fact, the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission has already recommended that the County declare a shelter crisis, but the Board of Supervisors declined to take action.

When asked, on a recent radio interview, about the number of vacancies on the Human Rights Commission, and why they have no budget, 2^nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell pointed out that at least we have a human rights commission. A lot of counties don’t. I think it’s important to remind her, and ourselves, that the reason we have a Human Rights Commission is that we have a long, rich, history, and culture, of human rights abuse here in Humboldt County. We did genocide here. Big time. Not that long ago.

No one was held accountable. The people who committed those atrocities remained pillars of the community. They raised families and passed those beliefs and attitudes on to their progeny. Those attitudes and ideas continue to poison our culture to this day, and we can see those attitudes reflected in our current Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, and in prevailing attitudes towards the poor.

We have a Human Rights Commission to make recommendations about how decent human beings should treat each other, because, and only because, we have demonstrated, violently, repeatedly, and dramatically, a distinct lack of respect for human rights, as a community. We don’t respect human rights here in Humboldt County. We take advantage of people, push them around, and take whatever we want from them, because, who is going to stop us?

That’s just the kind of people we are. We don’t really even understand the concept of human rights, let alone know how to respect them. That’s why we have a Human Rights Commission, and why anyone who does respect human rights, should insist that the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors heed the recommendations of the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission, and declare a shelter emergency in Humboldt County, now.

What has Measure Z Done for “Public Safety?”

A couple of years ago the voters of Humboldt County approved Measure Z, a new, regressive sales tax that disproportionately burdens the poor and homeless. When the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors sold us this ripoff, they promised us that the money would be used for “public safety.” Since then, we’ve had a wave of vicious violent assaults, mostly against the poor and homeless, and more murders than ever before.

Down here in SoHum, post Measure Z, the downtown Garberville shopping district is crawling with cops, who do little but harass street people all day. Then, late at night, after the stores have closed and the cops have gone away, local teenagers go out and beat homeless people with baseball bats while they try to sleep. Measure Z brought more cops to Southern Humboldt, but it also brought more violence to our community as well, and that was by design.

If you believed, for one instant, that the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors wrote Measure Z to make Humboldt County safer for the public you are a special kind of stupid. Unfortunately, the only thing we have more of in this county than greed and marijuana, is stupidity, and we can thank gullible NoHum liberals who voted for Measure Z for unleashing this latest wave of violence and bloodshed in Humboldt County.

What really happened was, the greedy landowners, real-estate bloodsuckers and the merchants down here in SoHum, convinced the tax-friendly liberals up North, to vote for a new tax that hits up the working poor, single mothers, and homeless people of Humboldt County, to pay for a police force for the unincorporated town of Garberville, which is swimming in drug money, but has no tax base. They called it Measure Z, and they said it was for “public safety,” because if they told you that it was a new, countywide, tax to pay for cops to insulate Garberville’s rich dope yuppies from their own customers and employees, you never would have voted for it.

The greedy, hoping to boost property values, and the mean-spirited, eager for blood, tricked naive liberals, who always fall for that “public safety” bullshit, into voting for a war against the poor. Measure Z was the first of a wave of “Fuck Poor People” laws in Humboldt County. The Board of Supes designed Measure Z to hurt poor people, both by taxing them unfairly, and then by punishing them for their poverty, with the cops they pay for. “No Camping” and “No Panhandling” laws soon followed, along with beefed-up enforcement of selective laws that impact the poor. Measure Z came first, however, and because Measure Z was so stacked against the poor, and encountered so little resistance, many people took it as a signal that it was open season on the poor and homeless.

What has it gotten us? Measure Z has given us a record-breaking year for murder, and Measure Z gave us more violence on our streets. Congratulations! And it only cost us, what, 20 million dollars so far? This is exactly what proponents of Measure Z wanted. They wanted more violence. They wanted more violence directed against the poor. They wanted cops to do more of it, but they wanted it done nonetheless.

Another body turned up at a homeless camp North of Redway on Halloween. The Sheriff claims that it is not immediately clear whether the man fell, or was thrown over the cliff, but however you look at it, he was certainly pushed. Local vigilantes known as “Locals on Patrol” have been going into homeless camps during the day to hand-out notices bearing the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Dept. logo and Sheriff Mike Downey’s name. The notices say: “You are on land owned by the State of California, the County of Humboldt or a private landowner in violation of penal code 602 (trespassing). If you are located on this property by any law enforcement officer you are subject to arrest per that section.”

Did the notice from the Sheriff’s office, and the nice people with tazers and pepper spray, who visited their camps to deliver it, scare people into moving their camp to a more precarious position, from which they fell, or did someone go back to the camp later that night to do the dirty work? Will we ever know? Will the Sheriff even conduct an investigation? Oh, and while you’re pondering rhetorical questions, ask yourself, “How does this improve “public safety?”

For politicians, Measure Z is a goldmine. For the poor people of Humboldt County, Measure Z has been a siege, and for the greedy, drug dealers who control most of the Southern Humboldt economy, Measure Z is about political power and selective enforcement. It’s about having cops to bust petty criminals, and harass homeless people around town while allowing major drug kingpins to operate with impunity in the hills, and not having to pay for it. All in all, Measure Z has been a shameful exercise in corruption, coercion, and violence against Humboldt County’s most vulnerable.

Measure Z has not made our streets safer, it has only made them meaner, more dangerous and more expensive, and the problems it was supposed to solve have only gotten worse. Remember that, the next time a politician tries to sell you something else for “public safety.”