Punishing Homeless People

I read that the Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury found that recently passed ordinances and policies designed to punish homeless people have been ineffective and counterproductive. No Shit Sherlock! Groups like AHHA (Affordable Homeless Housing Alternatives) have been telling us this for years, with plenty of evidence to back up their claims. Hell, I’ve been telling you this for years, and it’s not like anyone with half a brain couldn’t have figured it out for themselves. Of course, these policies have never been driven by what is true, or right, or even practical. We punish homeless people for completely different reason that have to do with who we are as a community.

First, we should not forget that among us are quite a few sadistic bullies who will beat up on anyone who can’t fight back. These are just mean-spirited people who see homeless people as vulnerable and helpless and as such, present the perfect opportunity to express their sadistic tendencies. We also have a lot of people, who, when confronted with a bully/victim situation, will join-in on the bully’s side. These people are relieved that the bully hasn’t targeted them, so they join-in because they want to be accepted and don’t want to be picked on themselves.

Then we have a lot of people who feel resentful in general. They hate their job. They hate their boss. They hate the rude customers they have to serve all day. They hate cleaning up other people’s messes. They resent how hard they have to work for the meager pay they earn, and they are sick of forking over half of their income just to have roof over their heads. To them, homeless people seem like freeloaders and sleeping outside in the cold and rain just isn’t punishment enough. Unfortunately, these are the people who have the most to gain by making life easier for the poor. The more affordable housing we have, the easier it becomes to find a place to live, and the easier it is to find a place to live, the more competitive rent prices become, but these small-minded people are too blinded by their own hatred to recognize this, and they only see homeless people as someone they can safely dump their resentments on.

Then we have the flag-waving, love-it-or-leave-it, patriots who still believe in the “American Dream,”and still think that this is the greatest nation on Earth, that it is blessed by God himself and run “by the people, and for the people,” despite all of the evidence to the contrary They can’t understand, or refuse to understand, why so many people lack housing, have mental problems, use drugs, etc. It couldn’t possibly be anything structural, or have anything to do with any flaw in our social, economic or political system, because, of course, our system is the best. Therefore, the problem must be those derelicts who won’t get with the program, and they should be punished for it.

We also have a lot of business-people who blame homeless people, rather than their own business plan, for the poor performance of their businesses. Lots of people dream of running their own business, especially a high-class eatery, or a specialty store for luxury items they like. However, most of us don’t have the money to eat out often, nor do we have the resources to buy high-priced luxuries. So these business-owners dream of hypothetical rich people who might wander into town, as tourists, to patronize their businesses, and fear that the visible poverty that surrounds them will turn these tourists off. In reality, their business plans were based on their own stupidity, self-indulgence and wishful thinking, instead of looking for ways to serve the needs of the people who live in their community, profitably.

Then we have the greedy real-estate people who expect to get rich off of the land under our feet. Not only do they want the police to sweep poor people out of site, so they can promulgate the illusion of prosperity necessary to sell properties at ridiculously inflated prices, but they also campaign tirelessly against any proposed affordable housing.

Of course, these real-estate bloodsuckers wouldn’t be successful without politicians, who happily pass these draconian ordinances, and implement these inhumane policies designed to punish homelessness, as a way of distracting people from their own corruption, and to scapegoat the poor and powerless for the problems facing our community that they lack the courage or will to address. And of course the politicians need law-enforcement officers, who happily accept the job of punishing homeless people with nightsticks, guns, jails and fines, for their, very large, taxpayer subsidized salaries. Now that taxpayers have tired of financing the War on Drugs, these overpaid thugs need someone else to beat-up to justify their existence.

Finally, we have the lazy and cowardly journalists and editors of the press, who care about little else besides filling the space between ads in their publications. They are afraid to say anything that might offend anyone with any economic clout, but pictures of trashed encampments, freak-show mug-shots and stories about “homeless crime” are as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

So as you can see, even though we all know that punishing homeless people for their poverty does nothing to solve the problem of homelessness, and in fact only makes it worse, for a lot of mean-spirited, small-minded, stupid, cowardly, lazy, greedy and dishonest, citizens, homeowners, working people, business people, cops, politicians, and journalism professionals, punishing homeless people has become a cherished part of life here in Humboldt County.

The Southern Humboldt Health Care District Wants to Know

The Southern Humboldt Health Care District wants to know what I think of their plans for our local hospital. They sent me a survey to fill out, and when I didn’t respond, they sent another, reminding me that I had not responded to their previous inquiry. I haven’t responded to that one either. I suspect they want to know how I voted in the last election, and how I’m inclined to vote in this one, so they can decide whether to cut me out of the district or not. Last year Blocksburg voters voted more than 2 to 1 against the hospital tax. This year, Blocksburg voters, and land-owners, have been excised from the health-care district, and the potential tax.

Personally, just thinking about health-care feels like stepping into the La Brea Tar Pits. I’d rather not think about it at all, until, God forbid, someday I get stuck in it, after which I expect to struggle futilely, until death becomes my only escape. I don’t want to think about health-care; I want to know how to avoid the health-care system entirely because I know I’m fucked if I ever need it.

That’s how it is for most people around here. We can’t afford health-care, because the bills quickly become even more debilitating than the disease. Health-care in America is a dark, sticky pit full of twisted logic, untenable compromises, and vicious, heartless greed, dusted with a thin layer of boring-as-fuck. I can’t even pay attention to the subject of health-care, let alone afford it, and I am disinclined to throw any more of my money into that pit. Apparently, a lot of people around here feel the same way, and with good reason, I think.

First, we should never forget that the health-care system in the US was not designed to promote health, or even to treat disease. Our health-care system was designed to make money. Our health-care system has been so successful in this regard, that it has blossomed into a central pillar of our economy. Unfortunately, the success of our health-care system lies in it’s coercive ability to extract absurdly high fees from people, at the very moment when they are most vulnerable.

Because of this, our current health-care system has become both a major source of wealth and a major source of poverty here in the United States. The system creates wealth for health-care providers, hospital administrators, insurance companies and their share-holders, while it creates poverty for the unfortunate people who chose any other career path, but find themselves in need of medical services.

As health-care professionals become more enriched by this system, they find that they tire quickly of the time they must spend with poor sick people, and they start looking for ways to insulate themselves from us. They often move to more affluent neighborhoods, where they can charge even more for their services. Eventually, that leads to the extreme situation that we face here in SoHum. We have a building that looks like a hospital, but the only doctor there probably just flew in for his shift at the ER, and he has no intention of providing services to anyone, except to offer directions to the nearest real hospital, in Fortuna, where our closest local doctors actually live.

We can’t even convince a hospital administrator to live here, no matter how much we pay them. When Harry Jasper worked here, he was probably the highest paid man in SoHum who didn’t carry a gun, but we had to pay him an extra $30,000 a year, as a housing allowance, so that his family could live in a nicer community, and his kids would not have to associate with ours. No wonder it didn’t last.

Without a doctor, a hospital is just an expensive building full of expensive equipment and overpaid people with nothing to do. Even with a doctor, that’s pretty much what we have here in Garberville, because most people who live here already know that all they will do for you in Garberville is send you to Fortuna, and stick you with a fat bill.

If you live in Garberville, and you have a heart-attack, there’s a chance they could save your life at Jerald Phelps Hospital, because they have a defibrillator and know how to use it. For almost anyone else, you might as well forget about our local hospital because all you are likely to get from them is a fat bill on your way to another fat bill, so the hospital offers very little value, as a health-care provider, to the people here in SoHum.

On the other hand, the illusion of a hospital has an important role in propping-up property values. Prospective real-estate buyers notice signs pointing to a hospital, and the building itself. These features make many prospective buyers feel more secure about purchasing land in such a remote place. Few of them actually check to see if the hospital has a real doctor. Because of this, our mostly useless hospital mostly benefits real-estate agents looking to pad their commissions, and land-owners looking to sell-out. Fuck them!

The sooner our real-estate bloodsuckers move on to greener pastures, the better, and sell-out dope yuppies will take whatever they can get for their land now that the black market gravy train has left the station. For the rest of us, I think we should work on becoming the kind of community where a good doctor might want to live, because unless we can convince a good doctor to move here and open a practice, we might as well get used to driving to Fortuna to see one.

We aren’t going to attract a good doctor by waving our black market profits at them, even if we still had them to wave, and we aren’t going to get a good doctor by voting for a new tax. The only way we are going to get a good doctor in SoHum is by being better neighbors. If we can’t do that, we might as well save our money.

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.

Human Rights in SoHum

 

Last Thursday, I attended the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission’s regular monthly meeting on the first Thursday of the month. This “regular” meeting of the HRC proceeded very differently from the “special” meeting they held in Garberville back in February, which I also attended. At that “special” meeting back in February, the HRC conducted no business. Instead, they listened to us for a couple of hours, and scribbled notes in magic marker on a big pad of paper.

This, most recent, meeting was very different. This time, we got the see the HRC in action, and after seeing what they do, I understand why the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors appreciates them so much. The HRC does a lot of work for the Board of Supervisors. In this particular meeting, we watched them hammer out language for a county ordinance modeled after so-called “sanctuary city” laws that other places have passed, or are now considering, in response to recent changes in Federal immigration policy. The volunteers of the HRC drafted the resolution at no charge, so that the Supervisors can get paid to grandstand about it. What a deal!

“Human Rights Commission” is a great sounding name, and if you read their charter you could imagine that they have awesome power, especially when you read the part about them investigating human rights abuses. The charter makes them sound like UN Peacekeepers, but the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission doesn’t work like that. The HRC is made entirely of laypeople, chosen, it seems, because they know how to give good meeting. They have no training in recognizing human rights abuses and no expertise in investigating them, because, as HRC Chairman Jim Glover put it, “That’s not what we do.”

I started going to these meetings because of an ongoing pattern of violence against poor and homeless people in Southern Humboldt. The HRC has received sworn testimony from people who claim they were assaulted, robbed and evicted by vigilantes in Southern Humboldt. These vigilantes handed out eviction notices bearing the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department logo, and told their victims that they were acting on behalf of the Sheriff. I’ve seen a lot of corroborating evidence for these allegations, and investigative reporter Nicole Norris, aka Shakti, has been covering the story for KMUD.

These evictions were, at the time they occurred, just the latest violent attacks on poor and homeless people in Southern Humboldt, and concerned citizens were very careful to get statements from the victims, and sent those statements to the HRC, because this kind of violence has gotten so out of hand in Southern Humboldt. We demand an investigation into these crimes. We want to know who conducted these raids, and what, if any, legal authority they had to do so. We want to know how the Sheriff is involved, and why they have been so slow to investigate and prosecute these crimes, and we want the perpetrators of these crimes to be held accountable for their actions, and the victims compensated for their losses, because we don’t want vigilante violence in SoHum.

That’s why we went to the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. We went to the HRC because of these specific human rights violations, and because we want to see them investigated. By now, it has been six months since these events took place, and two months since the special meeting where we complained about them not doing anything about the complaints made four months earlier. In the meantime, the HRC has gotten another dozen or so complaints of human rights abuse in Humboldt County, and another one walked in the door on the night of their most recent meeting. The HRC has investigated none of these complaints, and I doubt they would even know how.

I did get a copy of the HRC’s second draft of a new “proposed resolution” for “Houseless Emergency, Affordable Housing Zones and Sanctuary Parcels” which was at least partially motivated by testimony the HRC heard in Garberville back in February. The commissioners told us that the HRC had made similar recommendations to the Board of Supervisors in the past, which the Board of Supervisors repeatedly rejected. Commissioner Byrd Lochte told us that these recommendations had strained their relationship with the Board of Supervisors, because the Board of Supervisors just doesn’t want to hear it.

 

The way I see it, we have three overlapping problems here in Southern Humboldt:

1. The ongoing housing crisis in Humboldt County, which the Board of Supervisors doesn’t want to hear about, because the real-estate developers and property owners who pull their strings are too busy coming with ecstasy over all of the money they make from it.
2. As a result of the ongoing housing crisis, we have a lot of people living outdoors and in vulnerable situations, by necessity.
3. We have serious allegations against local vigilantes who attacked poor people in their camps, stole and destroyed the belongings of their victims, and evicted them from their camps without due process, using an eviction notice bearing the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department logo.

 

This vigilante violence remains an ongoing problem in Southern Humboldt with deadly consequences. We demand an investigation into these crimes, and that the perpetrators be held accountable. We also want to know if anyone at the Sheriff’s Department gave these vigilantes permission to hand out eviction notices or in any way endorsed or allowed vigilantes to commit violent crimes against poor people in Southern Humboldt. These specific allegations of human rights abuse must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Our Sheriff tells people that if someone breaks into your home, holds you at gunpoint and steals your money, you should call 911, even if you have a ton of weed around, because they want to catch violent criminals, and they’ll overlook the weed. Shouldn’t the Sheriff protect people who camp illegally, out of necessity, from violent vigilantes who raid their camps at least as much as they protect black market growers from the shady characters they associate with?

We need to know that the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department is not protecting violent criminals within our community, and we need to know that they will uphold the law, and protect the peace by protecting the most vulnerable people in our community. Garberville is crawling with cops these days, and they spend most of their time harassing poor people, but we still don’t know who killed Stephany Gawboy, who set Ron Machado on fire or who’s been leading the vigilante raids into homeless camps in Southern Humboldt. It’s not enough for the Sheriff to be visible; the Sheriff has to arrest and prosecute the violent criminals who prey on the SoHum community, including those who prey on the poor and homeless.

SoHum’s Latest Embarrassment

If you want to see, first-hand, why you can’t build a community with people who cheat the social contract, come to Garberville to see just how dysfunctional a town dominated by drug dealers and real estate leeches can be. From the vandalized and burned-out vehicles along our county roads, to the open hostility towards the poor and homeless in town, to the online comments that stack up, like so many stale crackers, beneath every slab of “Hardin” cheese, SoHum shows off its dysfunction with a breathtaking lack of self-consciousness. It’s embarrassing, frankly.

A number of people approached me on Friday to ask if I planned to write about our latest embarrassment, namely, the hideous orange fence around the new Garberville Town Square. The Garberville Town Square, as the Garberville Town Square Association reminds us, is on private property. So, the owners of the Garberville Town Square have decided that they don’t like the way the public uses their space. They’ve fenced it off with repulsive orange plastic temporary fencing, and asked the Sheriff to evict anyone who dares set foot in it. The Garberville Town Square Committee announced this 60 day closure, just as the annual influx of seasonal workers and cannabis tourists began to arrive to celebrate and bring in the Fall harvest.

Every year, right about this time, every pot-smoking free-spirited freak and hippie in the world thinks about coming to Humboldt County to get high, camp in the woods, and make some money trimming weed. Some of them actually go through with it. Trimming remains a huge bottleneck in the cannabis industry, and with so much recent expansion, the need for temporary workers at harvest time has only increased. People wouldn’t keep coming back if they didn’t find work, and people do come back, year after year. It’s a thing.

Cannabis attracts a really diverse group of people, trending towards the young and enthusiastic, from all over the world. Trim jobs especially appeal to foreign travelers looking for a way to make some money without a green card. Some of them have never seen a mature cannabis plant before. Few of them will make a career of trimming weed, but all of them want to spend a few weeks buried in marijuana and have some cash money to show for it. It’s also a great opportunity to meet people, share stories and make friends.

Every year, these people show up. Every year, they have nowhere to go, so they hang out in town, and every year, people in town get angry, call the cops, and rout them out and fence them off from anyplace they try to congregate. Neighbors’ complaints about people congregating in the Garberville Town Square, especially after dark, prompted the Town Square closure, and the ugly orange fence. I understand that having a whole lot of rambunctious young people in town can impact your life in a lot of ways, and I sympathize, but it’s not like you didn’t know they were coming.

It really amazes me that a community that depends so heavily on the marijuana industry, could treat the people who make that industry profitable, so badly. If you want the people who love marijuana and smoke marijuana every day to think highly of “the Humboldt Brand,” it seems to me that you would want them to enjoy themselves, and feel good about the time they spend here in Humboldt County. Instead, we try to make it into a war zone for them, in hopes that they will leave, but they stay anyway. Thanks to the War on Drugs, they are used to living in war zones, and have come to expect this kind of treatment.

If we had any sense around here, we could turn harvest season into the biggest tourist draw of the year. It could become a two month festival, that makes Reggae on the River kind of money, week after week until it starts to rain. Just open a huge campground, down at the Community Park perhaps, park a few food trucks down there, open a canteen, offer “trimmer training” courses, set up a flea market, a cafe, and plenty of porta-potties, and keep it all out of town.

A lot of people come here looking for work, and the industry, as it stands, genuinely needs most of their labor. The more we cater to their needs, the more of that money we can keep in our community. The infrastructure necessary to accommodate the people who come here every year would not cost that much. It wouldn’t look like much of a status symbol, nor would it provide a scapegoat to vent pent up frustrations on, but it would solve the problem, help the Humboldt brand and create new opportunities for economic diversity which we desperately need.

Instead, we cultivate this escalation of hostilities. We vent. We build fences and hold town meetings. We pass around photographs of human feces like we’ve never seen it before. We pass new ordinances to criminalize poverty, and sleep, and asking for help. We go out into the woods with tazers and video cameras and cops to harass, humiliate and evict our poorest neighbors, and now, for this year’s twist, we fence off our charming little Town Square as though it’s contaminated with radioactivity.

It never works. It didn’t work last year. It didn’t work the year before. It didn’t work the year before that, and it won’t work this year. They’re coming. You can’t stop them any more than you can hold back the tides, or prevent the next earthquake. They’re coming. They’re young. They’re excited. They’re having fun, staying up late at night, taking drugs and blowing off steam, just like you did when you were their age, and they’ll be here until it starts to rain. It’s a fact of life. The sooner we face that fact, the sooner we can solve the problem.

The people who come here for the harvest season really appreciate cannabis. These people love weed, and Fall harvest provides the opportunity to build the Humboldt brand. If people have a good, positive experience while they are here, whether or not they make any money, that could easily translate into a lifetime preference for cannabis products bearing the Humboldt name. Now that prohibition has all but ended, people have lots of cannabis choices. Brand loyalty can easily make the difference between success and failure in the legal market.

If we can just face the fact that people need a place to be, and make space for people, we can solve a lot of problems, relieve a lot of stress, and create a lot of new economic opportunities. We can’t keep pretending that we’re just a normal quiet small town and that we have no idea why all of these hippies keep coming here every Fall. We can’t make them go away, but we can solve problems, make peace, and make money, if we can just face facts and take responsibility. That is, we could, if we were that kind of people.

We Sent an Invitation to “Big Pot”

I had a nice chat with Linda Stansberry about “the Greenrush,” and it got me thinking about how ridiculous it is for so-called “Mom and Pop” growers to complain about it. First, it is hilarious to watch people, who made their living, for decades, by evading the law, complain to the Sheriff and ask why he isn’t doing more marijuana eradication. They’ve been completely blindsided. Even they had no idea how big the marijuana industry really was.

 

Second, after all of the wrangling about big grows vs small grows, the terms of the new county medical marijuana ordinance don’t seem to matter nearly so much as the fact that we were the first to adopt one. Because Humboldt County passed the first industry-friendly ordinance, we painted a target on ourselves. While they worked so hard to craft an ordinance that would keep prohibition-era farmers in the game in a legal market, they unwittingly wrote an invitation to every major drug syndicate in the world. We constructed our ordinance with an eye towards keeping out “Big Tobacco,” but we completely forgot about “Big Pot.”

For large-scale black market distributors, Humboldt County’s ordinance offers low-risk vertical integration as well as an opportunity to “go public” when the time is right. Who knew there were so many big fish lurking in the murky waters of the marijuana industry, just waiting to devour Humboldt County. Now we face a feeding frenzy that threatens to displace most of our community. As large distributors take over production, marijuana money will increasingly flow out of the area, while long-term locals fall into poverty and homelessness. Property becomes even more unaffordable, housing even more scarce and good paying jobs go extinct because big distributors cycle through temporary help, none of whom want to live here long-term, rather than hire locals.

Since these operators work the, still strong, global black market, they pay no taxes and ignore regulations, while they suck the rivers dry and level the forest with impunity. They don’t care about this place or the community. They got the invitation and now that they’re here, we’re going to have a hell of a time getting rid of them, especially if we’re not willing to say good bye to the marijuana industry too.

 

We should have said goodbye to the marijuana industry years ago, back when Anna Hamilton asked us to think about “What’s after pot?” People just couldn’t imagine an “afterlife.” If we had worked as hard to build a diverse economy based on cottage industries, arts and crafts, ecotourism, hospitality, and who knows what else, as we did to expand our marijuana production and lobby for price supporting regulation, we wouldn’t be in this mess. What’s our excuse for not investing our pot money in education, skill building or starting legitimate businesses while we had the chance?

Instead, we put all of our eggs in one basket and naively told our Supervisors that we wanted to protect the marijuana industry. So, the Supes passed an ordinance that created another real-estate bubble, and with it, one more opportunity for agents, brokers and appraisers to get obscenely rich, while the rest of us lose our homes, the fish die and our forests become an industrial wasteland. Not only have we failed to protect our livelihood, we’ve insured the destruction of our community and the environment, just because we couldn’t see beyond marijuana, and because we wouldn’t change.

Change happens. Either we make change, or change happens to us. We became obsessed with marijuana and money and “marijuana money” as a community, and the more obsessed we got, the more our world shrank. Instead of thinking beyond pot, we decided to become the center of the legal marijuana industry. We asked the Board of Supervisors for an industry-friendly ordinance, because we thought we were the industry. We should be more careful about what we ask for.

Now that we have passed the ordinance, the industry doesn’t really need us anymore, it just wants our land. The people who used to send guys to Garberville to sit in the Humboldt House Inn and buy your weed all day, now send people here to buy property all day, and then send more people and equipment and money to level the forest, sack your homestead and blow-up another mega-grow.

Whatever reputation Humboldt County growers have earned, that reputation gets transferred, along with the title of the land, to new owners from all over the world, whether they know how to grow weed or not. One or three (or none) of them may even come out on top of the legal cannabis market, when the dust finally settles, proudly bearing the “Made in Humboldt” label. Several more will quietly amass vast personal fortunes in the these chaotic transitional years. The rest of us, on the other hand, will have to find something else to do. We should have done it years ago, but even at this late stage in the game, the sooner we face it, the better.

A Meeting About “the Greenrush”

I attended the “Greenrush” meeting Beginnings in Briceland. It turned out to be a great opportunity to see your neighbors, meet some government officials, and watch four hours of your life evaporate away. The Civil Liberties Monitoring Project hosted the meeting to air complaints about the expansion of mega-grow pot plantations in Southern Humboldt, and because those folks up in Bridgeville got to have a meeting about it, so we had to have one too.

Of course, the mega-grow plantation owners didn’t come to the meeting. They didn’t send a manager, or even a spokesperson. They were too busy growing pot, and making money, to care. Instead, it was all the people who have been complaining about them, including yours truly, as well as 2^nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell, Undersheriff Honsal from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, Adona White of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, Jane Arnold from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Senior Planner from the Humboldt County Planning Dept, Steve Lazar.

It’s still weird to hear pot growers demanding stricter enforcement and more surveillance, but that’s what I heard. People were outraged that the Sheriff wasn’t busting these giant grows we can all see on Google Earth, when they used to look at every ridge in the county, every year, with a magnifying glass and a fine-toothed comb, pulling-up every single pot plant they saw. Undersheriff Honsel told us that since the Feds stopped picking up the tab, the Sheriff doesn’t do much marijuana eradication anymore.

Instead, Honsel referred us to the people sitting at the table beside him, Adona White from NCRWQCB, Jane Arnold from Fish and Wildlife, and Steve Lazar from the Planning Dept, and told us that they would lead the enforcement of the new regulations. All of the people from the various state and county agencies kept telling us, “We’d love to bust these bad guys, but we need you to file complaints against them first. Then we’ll send them a letter.”

“Oh great, a letter.” we all thought. Our neighbors carry machine guns and run international organized crime syndicates, and you are going to send them a letter. We know how mobsters work. Mobsters bribe public officials, but they kill informants. All of our state and county agencies would love to start negotiating with these new “clients,” if they haven’t already, and they’re happy to do it over our dead bodies. They can’t wait to try out these new shakedowns, I mean “regulations,” and they love to let the public do their legwork.

In order to make sense of this whole legalization process, you need to understand what politicians mean when they talk about “a well-regulated industry.” They don’t mean “regulated in such a way as to protect the environment, provide workers with a safe workplace, and insure regional economic stability.” When a government official talks about “a well regulated industry” he or she means that all of the bribes and payoffs that used to get paid under the table, have now been institutionalized as above-board fees and penalties.

 

As the spectre of legalization threatened to expose the corruption at the core of our local economy, the Board of Supervisors worked furiously fast to codify new licensing and fee structures to keep the economic ball rolling. Because Humboldt County acted so quickly to adopt these new regulations, big growers everywhere now know that they can grow big here, and if the county comes after them, they’ll send a letter, instead of 60 trigger-happy cops.

These new regulations have made Humboldt County look appetizing to a whole new category of speculators, gamblers, and weasels working both sides of the law. They pay ridiculous prices for real estate and then totally blow it up with clear-cuts, massive water-sucking light-dep operations, loud generators, bright lights and too much truck traffic. That’s what we mean by “Greenrush.”

The forest has become an unregulated industrial zone as operators race to suck the last gulps from the teat of prohibition while they position themselves to come out on top in the legal market. The stakes are high. No pun intended. The competition for domination of the emerging legal cannabis market is fierce, and Humboldt County has become the battlefield.

That’s why it looks like a war zone around here. Our hillsides are cratered by pot plants instead of bomb blasts, massive convoys of dump trucks, cement mixers and earth-moving equipment crisscross our watersheds while desperate refugees survive in make-shift camps. The War on Drugs has given us all PTSD, and now that the government has finally conceded defeat, growers have gone on the offensive, and they’re fighting each other for market-share. This last battle in the War on Drugs may be the most deadly yet for Humboldt County.

At the meeting, they told us that they can only work with the growers who want to come into compliance. At the moment, about 2% of cannabis growers are actively working towards compliance, which means that about 98% of the marijuana growers in Humboldt County continue to supply a robust nationwide black market that doesn’t take names, ask for licenses or collect taxes. Undersheriff Honsell told us that most Humboldt County growers grow for the black market because: “That’s where the money is.” Duh!

Essentially, they told us that as long as the black market for marijuana remains profitable, we should expect the unregulated destruction in the forest to continue, and accelerate. In the meantime, the Board of Supervisors has proposed a new excise tax on every licensed pound of legally compliant medical cannabis, just to make sure that those cut-and-run greenrushers get a little more time to plunder the forest, while licensed legal growers pick up the tab.

They told us to be patient. In five years or so, this will all be over. By then, everyone will be in compliance and there won’t be any more black market. That’s what they told us. They didn’t bother to tell us that all of the salmon would be dead in five years, along with the local cottage cannabis industry, poof, gone, extinct forever. They didn’t tell us that real estate agents are getting fat as ticks off of this ruse, right now, by inviting every drug dealer in the country to come here to ruin the community, saw down the forest and suck the rivers dry. “Please be patient,” they said. “In five years, it will all be over.”

Yeah, that’s what we’re afraid of.

You Can Count On Me

People sometimes criticize me for my over-the-top opinions and no-holds-barred writing style. They think I should moderate my views and be more sensitive to people’s feelings. Fuck that! In reality, these people just wish I would shut the fuck up and leave them alone with their illusions, but they want to say it in a way that sounds like constructive criticism.

If Carl Hiaasen offered a few words of advice about my writing, I’d be all ears, but when I get writing advice here in SoHum, it usually comes from people who can barely read. I don’t listen to them any more than I would take target shooting advice from an unarmed blind man. If you can’t see the target, and you’ve never handled a gun, you won’t be much help, so relax. I know what I’m doing, and I shoot straight.

You’re lucky to have me, frankly. Thirty years of silence, secrecy and sycophantic schemers has given this community a very distorted image of itself. The injustice of marijuana prohibition turned community values on their head. What began as a new green awakening, degenerated into the same old greed and dishonesty. We celebrate marijuana, but our addiction to the War on Drugs shapes us, and it shows.

 

Greed is uglier than alcoholism. It’s even uglier than meth addiction, and that heartless, senseless, relentless thirst for more takes a toll. Like alcohol and meth, greed hardens people while it kills them from the inside. I see what that disease does to people. I see what that disease has done to this community.

While cannabis may have healing qualities that make the user more sensitive to subtle emotional cues, the War on Drugs produces hard, rotten people. Every community has a few, quite a few, I’m sorry to say, just like every community has it’s share of alcoholics, tweakers and greed-heads. Unfortunately, the opportunities created here by the War on Drugs tend to attract them, so we have more than our fair share. We also have more than our fair share of money, which, like gravity, inexorably draws greedy scum towards it.

The War on Drugs made bad people rich while it drove honest people out of town, just like it does in any drug ghetto, and just like in any drug ghetto, we have enormous social problems as a result. We try to put a nice face on it. We try to look like a normal, prosperous, small town, but the truth shows. It angers the rich ugly, hard, rotten people around here, that they can’t just sweep the poor, ugly, hard, rotten people out of sight, but that’s who we are, and that’s what the War on Drugs has done to us. So long as the War on Drugs continues, we shall remain, as a community, unnaturally rich, unnaturally poor, and rotten to the core.

Greedy bankers and real-estate blood-suckers measure the marijuana industry in dollars, because that’s all greedy people see, but the more money the marijuana industry brings to Humboldt County, the more poverty it produces. The black market marijuana industry produces poverty all over this country, but here in SoHum, it produces some of the most expensive poverty money can buy.

Greedy people, like drug addicts, become so focused on their addiction that they often fail to notice how poor they really are. The people who drive those spotlessly clean late-model trucks, often live in total squalor, expensive squalor, but squalor nonetheless. Lots of children grow up in dysfunctional homes, without books, living on junk food, and we have some of the highest suicide and drug addiction rates in the state. For all the money that the War on Drugs brings in, we sure don’t seem to live very well as a result.

It takes more than money to make a community function. It takes culture, and hard, rotten people produce a hard, rotten culture. It’s a hard, rotten culture that blames the poor for their poverty, and rewards drug dealers for their greed, and this hard, rotten culture belies our deepest poverty: our penurious shortage of intelligence, imagination and moral courage. I know you don’t want to hear it, folks, but that’s the truth. You won’t get that from many people around here, but you can count on me.

Let’s Dump “Housing First” and Declare a Housing Crisis

Everyone knows we have a housing crisis in Humboldt County. Landlords love it, and couldn’t care less. Now that the marijuana industry has taken over much of the residential housing in Humboldt County, landlords can, and do, charge a lot of money for anything with a roof. Most of the rental housing is already sub-standard, especially here in SoHum, because most landlords know that it is easier to find new tenants than fix problems that tenants complain about.

For tenants, it’s a nightmare. Many people pay half, or more, of their monthly income in rent, just to have a roof over their head. The high rent prices in Humboldt County eat working people alive. Business people complain about how hard it is to find good help around here, but it’s damn near impossible for working people to find a place to live, and greedy landlords use that shortage to drain the workforce. Local landlords wreck the workforce because, by the time you’ve been fucked over by a few Humboldt County slumlords, you’ve learned how to live in the woods without water, electricity, heat, a roof over your head, or money in your pocket, for extended periods of time. Once you’ve gotten used to that, why do you need a job, or a home?

The housing crisis is real, working people feel it a lot, and it hurts, to landlords, it just feels like a big sloppy, wet, BJ. Business people complain about not finding good help, but they complain even more about people who prefer not to work, or pay rent, hanging around in public shopping districts. We have a whole complex of social problems, which cause an enormous amount of suffering for the people of Humboldt County, all triggered by an acute shortage of affordable housing. That’s what we mean by the words “housing crisis,” and a “housing crisis” is what we have here in Humboldt County.

For some reason, the Board of Supervisors seem reluctant to declare it. They know that we have all of these problems, and they know that the shortage of affordable housing causes all of these problems. They’ve talked about it a lot, but so far, all they’ve done is hire the consulting firm: Focus Strategies. Focus Strategies have been selling them on the “Housing First” concept. These consultants have advised the county against declaring a housing crisis, and against spending any money on solving the housing crisis, except through their “Housing First” program.

I know that “Housing First” sounds like a great idea, or slogan, or something. I can imagine it on a bumper-sticker, but what does it mean? “Housing First” got a lot of attention as the strategy that Utah used to find housing for all of their homeless people. Utah is a funny place, and most of what made “Housing First” successful in Utah, does not translate well to Humboldt County.

In Utah, it’s hard to overestimate the influence of the Mormon Church. Mormons have a strong tradition of compassion, and for helping the poor. Very few places, other than Utah, have such well funded, and well intended churches, and few churches do as much to help people in need, directly, as the Church of Latter Day Saints. Mormons, however, do not tolerate drugs or alcohol. Because of this, unrepentant drug addicts consistently fell through the cracks in Utah, and ended up on the streets, while others got the help they needed from the church.

This is the crux of the “Housing First” strategy. Under Utah’s “Housing First” plan, the government hired caseworkers to put homeless drug addicts into subsidized housing, so that at least, they would have a room to abuse drugs in, and other people wouldn’t have to see them abuse drugs in public. “Housing First” created a taxpayer subsidized program to put homeless drug addicts into apartments, that did not require people to quit drugs as a condition of receiving help. Once Utah did that, their homeless population disappeared, but only because everyone else got help from the church.

I kid you not! That is the whole crux of the “Housing First” biscuit. “Housing First” means “Subsidized Housing for Drug Addicts.” It means that landlords will get reliable monthly checks from taxpayers, for letting drug addicts crash in a hovel on their property. “Housing First” gives landlords the option of taking a guaranteed monthly check from the government, rather than renting to working people who might have their hours cut, get laid-off, or have other financial difficulties before their lease expires.

“Housing First” does not create any new housing. “Housing First” does nothing to relieve the housing crisis. In fact, “Housing First” will exacerbate the housing crisis by putting subsidized drug addicts, with caseworkers, in direct competition with working families for the, already scarce, available housing.

In Utah, thanks to the Church of Latter Day Saints, they have a compassionate community of organized people who want to help. The challenge, for them, was to get around the church’s objection to helping unrepentant alcoholics and drug addicts. That’s not our problem here. Here in Humboldt County, thanks to the black-market marijuana industry, we’re all unrepentant alcoholics and drug addicts, and we don’t give a fuck about each other. The challenge for us is greedy, well organized, land-owners, who control our local government and consistently use that power to suck ever more blood out of over-taxed and over-burdened, working people.

In Utah, “Housing First” helped a compassionate community overcome its prejudice against drug addicts, which allowed their well-established, common sense approach to homelessness, to succeed more completely. Here in Humboldt County, “Housing First” helps greedy landlords exploit a drug addicted community more effectively, by smothering compassion and common sense beneath a big fluffy pillow labeled “Housing First,” and then creates an expensive bureaucracy that drains county coffers, drives rent prices through the roof, and makes life harder for poor and working families in Humboldt County.

Don’t ever forget that the people who control our Board of Supervisors, are the very same developers and land-owners who created this housing crisis to begin with. They make their living by screwing over poor and working people, and all they want is more for themselves. If the Board of Supervisors implements “Housing First” in Humboldt County as they plan, the only way you will ever find an affordable place to live is if you quit your job, stop bathing, and make a chronic nuisance of yourself in a public shopping district. “Housing First” is a cynical scam designed to put the taxpayer’s money in landlord’s pockets and sweep the chronically ugly off of the streets, while it drives rent prices up, makes it harder for working people to find a place to live, and insures that more of the people who live and work in Humboldt county, suffer hardship and poverty.

It’s time to dump “Housing First” and declare a “Housing Crisis.” The Supes should stop wasting the taxpayer’s money on consultants from out of town, and instead, do everything they can to empower local organizations like AHHA, with compassionate, common sense solutions to Humboldt County’s housing crisis. We need housing solutions that work for our community, because, thankfully, Humboldt County is not dominated by do-gooder Mormon teetotalers , and the solution that worked in Utah will never work here.

We need a homegrown, grassroots solution to our housing crisis, not some fatally-flawed, cookie-cutter clone. We need more than just housing; we need to find a better way to live. We have a proud tradition of alternative, owner-built housing here in Humboldt County. We should continue, and expand on that tradition of innovation, by making space for people to build human-scale homes for themselves. Everyone needs a place to live, and everyone needs a place to live that they can afford. If developers won’t provide that for the people who live here, then let the people who live here, do it for themselves.

Vote NO on Measure Z

I just googled “Measure Z Humboldt County,” and discovered that this blog ranks higher than any other site that opposes Measure Z. Right behind the official Support Measure Z site, the county’s Measure Z page, and a LOCO story about Measure Z, my piece, No Wifi in SoHum Means No on Measure Z ranked fourth, and was the only “No on Z” site to turn up on the entire first page of results.

Fuck! Somebody needs to stand up to Rob Arkley and Lee Ulansey’s plan to screw the poor and working people of Humboldt County. It looks like everyone else is busy with the Eureka Fair Wage Act and the County-wide GMO Ban. Personally, I don’t even garden, let alone farm, and I don’t live in Eureka, so those issues don’t effect me much.

On the other hand, Measure Z, if it passes will hurt me, and a lot of other people in Humboldt County like me, who barely make ends meet, and have neither the time nor the resources to launch a political campaign. I don’t have money for campaign literature. I don’t even have a phone to call other people to help organize a fundraiser. I have a blog. That’s it. That’s what makes Measure Z so unfair. It specifically targets the people who have the least resources to fight it. It’s like taking candy from a baby.

I make my living as an artist. The key to survival as an artist is not talent or hard work, because God knows I lack the former, and avoid the latter like Ebola. The key to survival as an artist is finding creative ways to spend even less money than you make. There is no minimum wage for artists, nor do we get any raises, cost-of-living increases or bonuses. Keeping costs down is critical to my survival, and Measure Z, if it passes will raise my cost of living, and it will definitely hurt.

If Measure Z passes, I will have to pay more for things like shoes, clothes, shampoo and toilet paper, basic necessities of life that everyone needs and has to buy. Everyone who buys anything in Humboldt County will have to pay this tax to county government. Measure Z will raise the price of everything from tampons, condoms and diapers to beer wine and cigarettes for everyone who shops in Humboldt County, but it won’t effect everyone equally.

People who have plenty of money will just shrug it off without a second thought. Land-owners think it beats paying property tax, so they won’t complain. Merchants think they are going to get something for it, namely more sheriff’s deputies tasked with the job of removing unsightly poverty from our business districts, so you don’t hear them complaining. For work-a-day stiffs, low-income families, disabled people and retirees on a fixed income, Measure Z could easily become the straw that breaks the camel’s bank.

The injustice of a county sales tax is that the primary purpose of county government is to protect the property rights of property owners. If you own property, then county government works for you, but if you don’t own property, but instead rent your home, county government are the people who evict you. That’s why, until now, your landlord paid for county government. That’s why a county-wide sales tax is unfair. Everyone pays it, but it primarily benefits land-owners, and hurts renters.

The landlords in Humboldt County have gotten so greedy that they want to make poor and working people pay for their own eviction every time they buy shoes. Listen closely to the way land-owners talk about “transients, ” because when land-owners say “transients” they mean everyone who doesn’t own land. If you’re a renter, they’re talking about you. They’re not satisfied with the exorbitant rent they already charge you. They want more. If Measure Z passes, it will be like giving your landlord an extra nickle every time you spend $10 in Humboldt County.

Your landlord takes too much of your money already! Measure Z is a shameful attempt by rich ranchers and greedy real estate developers like Lee Ulansey and Rob Arkley to steal from the poor and working people of Humboldt County. Measure Z steals from the poor and gives to the rich. We must stop it NOW. Vote NO on Measure Z

…And don’t forget to register to vote!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Following letter appeared in this week’s Independent and Redwood Times:

Dear Editor,

The only thing that looms larger on the landscape of Humboldt County than the majestic redwoods for which we are rightly famous, is the unmitigated greed of some of it’s richest residents. Today, that greed has a stranglehold on county government, and stands poised to reach into the pockets of this county’s poor,

young,

low-income,

and working people.

Measure Z, the countywide sales tax, will make bare necessities, like clothing, shoes and toiletries, more expensive for the people who can least afford them: single mothers,

working families,

disabled people,

and retirees on fixed incomes.

Measure Z steals from the poor, and gives their hard-earned money to Lee Ulansey’s hand-picked Board of Supervisors, who then give it to rich ranchers and greedy developers in the form of subsidies and tax breaks.

The Board of Supervisors, and the puppet-masters who pull their strings, know that poor people are the most generous, community minded people in the county, and they intend to play us for suckers.

The county has not promised to do anything to help poor or working people. Quite the contrary, the county has promised to use the money to harass homeless people, speed up evictions, and to make room in the county jail for people accused of petty crimes.

If the county is broke, it is only because it has so consistently pandered to the desires of rich land-owners, and failed to tax them sufficiently.

If measure Z passes, the county will begin collecting sales tax from everyone who spends money in Humboldt County, including many local residents who can ill afford it.

That money will pay for subsidized infrastructure to support new McMansion developments.

It will pay for subsidized pest control for ranchers, through Wildlife Services, an expensive and outdated agency notorious for cruel, inhumane practices and for indiscriminately killing millions of wild animals every year,

and it will pay for thousands of little perks for land-owners, like subsidizing the cost of hazardous materials inspections at agricultural businesses.

Measure Z will be a windfall for Humboldt County’s richest and greediest 1%.

I urge each of you to stand together with the 99%. Tell the county to tax the rich, not the poor! Make the 1% pay their fair share. Please, vote NO on Measure Z.

Sincerely, John Hardin