#that said time will tell whether truckloads of money at the right time down the road could be able to change their minds lol

[chubbology]

The Munchies

prompt: a stoner feedee's girlfriend uses him to test out new edibles and deals with his munchies

Remmy returned home from visiting relatives on the last day of December, and he was very glad to be back. They’d fed him well and his pants were tight, but all the small talk and bad vibes had been as much of a drag as usual.

He opened the door to his apartment and breathed in a familiar, potent scent.

“Baby!” Brianna ran from the kitchen and tackled him.

“Happy almost New Year! Wanna hear my resolution? Baking and getting baked. Check it out.”

She brought him over to the counter, where she was almost done filling up three containers of what Remmy had no doubt were various edibles. He ignored the kitchen mess.

“I’m liking what I see,” Remmy laughed.

She preened and then pinched his love handle. “I bet you do."

"These aren’t your typical brownies, though," she said. "This is gourmet.” She kissed her fingertips in a muah.

The first container was full of moist shortbread, the second with a kind of apple crumble dish that looked divine. Last but not least, the third had a jumble of what like peanut butter cups.

“Try something!” Brianna gushed. She seemed to be a little floaty already. “You’re gonna be my new taste tester. I think I could really be good at this. Make some cash, too.”

So Remmy tried one of the peanut butter cups. His eyes widened, and he smiled. “Bri, these are incredible.” He ate another.

“Take it easy. Two should get you stoned. So says the recipe anyway.” Brianna rubbed his pudgy forearm as he eyed the rest in the container, biting the inside of his lip. “Hey. If you’re just hungry, I can fix that. You wanna eat?”

“I’m starving,” Remmy said. A lie, since he’d had a big lunch before driving back. But he could eat.

“Okay, I’ll get you something! Pay day was Monday. Let’s splurge. What do you want?”

McDonalds, Remmy’s mind supplied easily, in an almost salacious tone. His relatives thought they were too good for McDonalds, and now his body thrummed with the desire to just get a truckload of those greasy combos and revel in the guilt and satisfaction of eating every last unhealthy bite.

Then again. Brianna probably wasn’t okay to drive right now, he didn’t feel like getting back in the car, and the scale told him he’d hit 240 recently, “Let’s just order in.”

“Sounds good to me.”

That night, as they ignored the idiots on television bringing in the New Year, the two of them picked at the apple crumble - which tasted as brilliant as Remmy had suspected - and lounged around, enjoying their high. Brianna barely touched her Chinese takeout, and Remmy ate all of his. Then hers. Then he started grazing the kitchen for more food.

Over the course of the next week, the two of them finished off the rest of what she made, plus some more recipes that turned out delicious. Brianna got a pleasant high every time, and Remmy enjoyed the edibles, too, although his experience was slightly different. It was just—

He just—

He got hungry. Munchies but on unholy overdrive. Cranked to eleven and a half. With every high, Remmy became a little more overwhelmed by the sheer amount of food he felt compelled to pack away, savory and sweet. Takeout and fast food and quarts of ice cream. Nuts and fruits, too. Jar of peanut butter here. Tub of icing there. He’d never been very active, so it came as no surprise when his clothes began stretching over his chest and belly and thighs and ass. He popped a button getting dressed one morning and couldn’t stop thinking about it the rest of the day. He hadn’t realized it would happen so quickly, his body converting all the calories into flab. Flab that padded him out chubbier than he already was, and then more on top of that. In the mirror, he started to look big.

Brianna seemed unfazed by her boyfriend’s growing girth. She took to her baking resolution with as much gusto as she did anything that interested her, and even into March, April, and May, she was selling the edibles well and raked in money that almost made her day job obsolete. Remmy was constantly praised for being “the bestest taste tester ever” and enjoyed a steady stream of free highs to balance out the lows of spending most of his time working his IT job from home.

Working, gaming, watching old movies. Remmy already stayed sitting most of the day, but as he gained weight, gained a lot, filling out his desk chair to its limits, crumbs becoming his constant companion, he felt even less like standing up. His weight climbed to 280, 290, 300.

June, July, and August passed uneventfully, and pretty happily, too. Brianna stopped asking him what food he wanted from the grocery store and just bought him things. Bought him things she knew he’d eat when he got high, things that made his ass spread wider on the couch, his arms round out like sausages, his pudgy chest start to really droop. The scale said 320, 330, 340.

Remmy gave up trying to gain control of the new appetite Brianna’s heavenly edibles seemed to install in him irrevocably. When he craved, he ate, and he ate. And like a dam breaking, his body surged with so much excess fat he began spilling out of even his newest clothes.

He was a little ashamed, sure. But quite a few of his relatives were fat, so they couldn't talk, and it felt like sweet revenge to embarrass his irritating parents by becoming so overweight. As for everyday life, well, he just moved around from room to room slower, wore the same stretchy clothes a lot, and that was it. Remmy did mention his weight in passing sometimes to gauge Brianna’s feelings about it, but Brianna only ever giggled, called him cute, and passed him her venti sugary monstrosity of a coffee concoction, which he thoughtlessly sucked down to the dregs, ingesting a thousand-plus calories just like that. This made her eyes sparkle, huge and utterly endeared.

“Like a piggy,” she said, thumbing his fat cheek. “Always willing to eat.”

In bed, she made it clear she liked him the way he was, and was becoming. And it wasn’t long before Remmy realized he was into how big he was becoming, too.

They continued like this. Getting high together and watching movies and making out and snacking. Well, Brianna snacked. Remmy feasted. Gorged himself, to put it precisely, with Brianna’s enthusiastic help. “You look good soft,” she’d tell him, playing with belly fat that his stretchiest t-shirts couldn’t cover anymore.

Remmy would swallow another bite of a snickers and spread his huge thighs a little, with effort. “You call it soft, but I’m the one who gets tired moving from the office to the kitchen.” I’m so heavy, he wanted to say. God, I’m so heavy.

“Just move your computer to the kitchen then,” she said. “Duh.”

It was a seed planted that came to fruition a month later - when Remmy’s food cravings became unmanageable and his weight climbed past 360 - that he felt he would simply be more productive during his day job if his breaks to get food from the kitchen were shorter.

By November, whether he was high or not, Remmy was grazing all day, everyday. What Brianna got from the store became insufficient, and he started a habit of ordering take out most days. In big portions. His scale creaked at 375. When Brianna wasn’t home, he sometimes ate takeout on the scale to see if the number would rise.

On Remmy’s birthday in early December, Brianna made a fresh batch of his favorites again: the peanut butter cup edibles. After ordering pizza for delivery, she got in the shower, and Remmy scarfed down three of the big cups as soon as they cooled. Then he waited, leaning against the counter, scrolling on his phone, belly hanging, feet hurting. He didn’t want to go to the effort of sitting on the couch and getting back up again when he could just stay in the kitchen, where he knew he’d end up anyway.

He scratched his supple underbelly. Found a pack of Twizzlers and started eating those.

Soon enough, his breathing slowed as he felt the high slowly come over him. And, as expected, his whole body immediately began to tingle for satiation. Fattening food sung to him from the pantry and fridge and freezer all at once, and it was all going to make him so huge and heavy he wouldn’t be able to stand on his own wide feet, but he wanted it anyway.

He didn’t care if he was pushing 390 now. He’d blown up, yeah. Inflated from a thick guy to obese and waddling. At this point, he was so pumped so big with blubber that he couldn’t twitch without jiggling, but so what? He was hungry. Being high made him want to consume, and so he did. He couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to.

Remmy opened the fridge and took out his birthday cake, which Brianna must have stuck in there after getting home from work. He couldn’t wait to eat it properly. There was no way he could wait until after the pizza came. Besides, it was his birthday. Remmy took off the plastic lid of the round, triple chocolate cake and felt his nerves light up with anticipation. He was going to eat it all, and there was no stopping him.

He found a knife and cut himself a slice three times the size any reasonable person would take. Desperate to get the goodness into his mouth without delay, he skipped a fork and bit right into the gooey, dense cake and mouse and fudge. God, Brianna was so perfect for getting him the unhealthiest cake imaginable. She knew he didn’t care if he was ten pounds heavier tomorrow, if his fat ass ripped his sweatpants open, if he ate so much he couldn’t haul himself to bed—she knew he needed this.

He ate slice after slice, and it was mostly gone when Brianna got out of the shower, looking sexier than usual in her matching purple lingerie. She’d gotten chubbier with so much junk food in the apartment, and fat clung to her in all the right places. But her pudge was a far cry from his angry-red stretch marks and neck rolls. Hell, his moobs had grown bigger than her tits.

She found him in the kitchen, eating and holding his drooping belly, and she rubbed his back, cooing at him when he apologized.

“It’s okay. I figured you wouldn’t be able to wait all night. How are you feeling?”

“Good,” Remmy said, but all he could think about was getting his next bite. As she watched him, he tried to hold out. Tried to prove he could stop eating for two seconds. Three seconds, four - his resolve broke and he crammed the rest of a slice into his mouth and chewed, choking back a moan.

“You get the munchies so bad, don’t you?” Brianna grinned and leaned against his belly, patting and cupping his weighty breasts in the way she knew pleased him. “Let’s get you sat down. I’ll bring you what you need. Just sit and relax and watch whatever you want.” They moved to the couch and Remmy sat, the cushions wheezing, his thighs and belly quivering. Brianna tucked the remainder of the cake into his pudgy hands. “Don’t worry about a mess. It’s your birthday. And there’s more where that came from.” She winked. “I just needed to keep this cake refrigerated because it’s fancy. There’s a whole sheet cake on top of the fridge that’s cheap and huge. Covered in icing. Perfect for munchies.”

Remmy could only feel a wave of relief at this news. There would be more cake. And after that, there’d still be more junk in the cabinets. There was pizza coming. His high was just right. Brianna turned on the television to his favorite show and he settled further back into the cushions, feeling his second chin swell out and engulf his first. Everything was just right. He was lucky to have Brianna and food. So much food.

A year later, around the same time, Remmy skipped his usual trip to see his relatives for the holidays. At 520 pounds, it was simply too much effort to move.

*

Thank you to the reader who commissioned this work!

I'd love to write more. Check me out <3 etsy.com/shop/Chubbology

[gayenerd]

Green Day Deals with the "Rock Star" Dookie 

by Tom Lanham 

(First appeared in BAM Magazine, March 10, 1995)

 Young, loud, and snotty equals beaucoup bucks? What pencil-pushing, graph-charting trend spotter could've predicted it? But the facts speak for themselves: As of late February, Dookie--the brattish, snap 'n' snarl Reprise salvo from Berkeley's sloppy punk trio, Green Day--has sold six million copies. Six million. Chances are, somebody on your block is jumping up and down in his living room at this very moment to the scrap-metal power chords and ardent apathy of "Longview," "Burnout," "Basket Case," or "When I Come Around" and getting lost in the teen abandon of these testy 22-year-olds--weasel-voiced, Montgomery-Clift-like charismatic singer/guitarist Billie Joe; tom-tom tribal percussionist Tre Cool (of the ever-morphing hair-color fame); and bassist Mike Dirnt (who survived Green Day's appearance at Woodstock '94, although several of his teeth did not). 

Yes, punk rock is a marketable phenomenon these days, leaving many involved with the music's initial late-'70s, early-'80s wave scratching their heads, wondering why it didn't take the first time around. Public reaction started as curiosity ("Hey, honey, c'mere and lookit these goofy, green-haired little whippersnappers in an insane asylum on MTV!"), but spiraled up to rock-diet necessity (Green Day just won Grammy and they're nominated for quite a few Bammies as well, including such categories as Outstanding Group, Outstanding Album, and Outstanding Song--"Longview" and "Basket Case"). The fact that they've been nominated at all probably sends a shiver up the old dinosaur backbones of Eddie Money, Huey Lewis, and Boz Scaggs, a time-creepy feeling of "Gee, what the hell do we do now?" Because this isn't just some flash-in-the-pan punk movement, folks--this is a youth movement; Green Day are, as they hiply term it, "bored in the 'burbs," and reaching out, through TV and radio, like some prodigal preachers to other American kids who sense the same slacker ennui. Obviously, we're talking truckloads of kids. 

Ironically, the more fame edges into the Green Day ruffians' lives, the more mature they seem to become. They've turned down all interview requests as of late, even People magazine, preferring to lay low until this tide of interest recedes. Billie Joe got married last autumn, and spent his honeymoon--not in any exotic, expensive locale--but in Berkeley's grand old Claremont Hotel. Cool recently became a father, and Billie Joe's child is due any day now. It's a responsibility they've both eagerly undertaken. Rob Cavallo, the boys' coproducer and A&R man at Reprise, swears they're "old souls, the smartest young kids I've ever met." It rings true. 

The first time I spoke with Green Day, in January of '94, Cool, Dirnt, and Billie Joe were lazing around their dingy basement apartment in Berkeley, sitting on chairs and couches with potentially painful springs poking through. Rock 'n' roll bubblegum cards were scattered across a coffee table, along with several bongs of various sizes, plus a four-and-a-half foot red plastic pipe dubbed "Bongzilla" leaned against a doorway. The only wall decoration, besides a Ren & Stimpy poster, was a Twister game mat nailed up in its entirety, presumably for high-schoolish humor's sake. 

When I'd met Billie Joe a few months earlier at a campus concert, his hair was dyed lime-green and featured squidlike tufts. Now it was dark brown, with only two tufts remaining, and both his ears and nose had piercings. Periodically during the interview, he'd ram a finger into that pierced nostril, rummage around, then stare idly at the resultant booger before flicking it on to the carpet. Cool wandered out of the rec room for several minutes, but returned, red-eyed, to proudly proclaim, "Lookit me! I'm stoned, dude!" Dirnt--when he wasn't strumming an acoustic guitar--kept watching their windowsill Sea Monkey tank, finally noting, "Hey, these Sea Monkeys look just like sperm!" 

Despite all these schoolboy, poo-poo wit trappings (dookie, after all, is kiddie slang for excrement), there was a sense of seasoned wisdom about them, a feeling that they were, as Cavallo postulated, truly old souls. Like the class clown who frustrates all of his teachers by also maintaining a 4.0 grade average, Green Day can afford to play because their work--brilliantly skewed three-minute pop songs, delivered with such vehemence and vitriol you don't dare doubt them--certainly speaks for itself. But, sooner or later, of course, the band has to speak for itself, too, so what follows is a set of excerpts from that first ratty-digs meeting, as well as a later chat with Billie Joe, sans sidekicks. How did Green Day take over the rock world in less than a year? That's the six-million-copy question, and hopefully we'll provide a few answers. 

* * * 

So punk is back, whether America likes it or not? 

BILLIE JOE: It's always been around, and everyone has their own interpretation of it. It's weird to actually call it "punk" again, when it's been there all the time. 

MIKE DIRNT: It's been springing up in little suburban areas, where people grab it and express themselves. 

TRE COOL: It's people who make a point of setting aside all responsibilities and just playing music. And doing fat joint after fat joint--you have to let go of things like paying rent, going to school, having a job. 

BJ: And, if you can't tell by my house, we don't have a very high standard of living. 

How does today's punk rock differ from its late-'70s cousin?

 BJ: I think it was all about art and fashion back then, really, because everyone who was a punk in England was in art school. I read an early interview with Dee Dee Ramone, where he said he wished the Ramones had more of a glamorous appeal, too, instead of playing in jeans and leather jackets. But it was definitely about fashion, until the Clash really brought out the political side. Our music came from being bored in the 'burbs. You get put in this high school situation, where you're learning someone else's rules in a room with 30 other people that you don't really like. There's nothing interesting about it whatsoever, so you pick up a guitar instead. 

But you all tried college, at least for awhile, right? 

MD: And then we started touring. Constantly. 

TC: So most of our reading now comes from highway signs. 

MD: It's the old grasshopper and the ant story. The thought of actually working is just so... 

TC: Sickening! 

MD: Yeah. So we put everything we had into not working. This is what I do best, and I was always told, "If you're gonna do something, do it the best you can." So why not do the best thing you can, too? 

You guys--at least Mike and Billie Joe--have known each other since you were 10? 

BJ: And the first conversation we ever had was about writing songs. And then we just started playing music. 

A lot of the stuff on your early Lookout! records shows what was on your mind at the time--namely, girls. 

BJ: That was pretty much the viewpoint of a 16-year-old kid. I don't write stuff like that anymore. The new songs are more about coming of age and being apathetic and neurotic.

 Where were your parents when you were touring [at age 16]? 

MD: At work, doing their own thing. 

BJ: My mom's worked a waitress job for like the past 40 years or something, and whatever I was doing was OK with her. 

MD: I moved out when I was 15, and I worked all the way through high school. 

BJ: And me, I've never held a job longer than two weeks. I tried to flip pizzas--it didn't work. I tried cleaning toilets in the Red Onion in El Sobrante. Me and TrŽ, we used to work for the SF Chronicle, selling papers. I sold three the first day, and the next day we just smoked pot, and we smoked pot the next day after that. So we had hella extra papers lying around. Our ultimate goal wasn't to get rich or famous or anything like that. It was to not have a regular job and not be miserable. 

MD: And I've lived in every city around here, except for Albany. Literally. And one thing we want to establish about ourselves is that we're just a bunch of geeks from the suburbs. 

Well, one of the first times I saw you, you guys were closing your set with Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." That's pretty geeky. 

MD: I grew up on radio--that's all I had. When I was a little kid, I couldn't afford records. I'll tell you, I've been down to a dollar in my pocket a lot of times. I've even lived in my truck. I can remember shooting rats with a BB gun in the flat we used to live in, before they'd make it to our food. 

BJ: I've always been really good about saving. If I got some money, I'd put it away instead of spending it, and I'd buy ramen. 

Why name your disc Dookie? 

TC: Warner's said we could do anything we want, as long as we didn't say "Cop Killer." 

BJ: Somebody told our manager that the ad for it was the most tasteless thing they'd ever seen in Billboard magazine. 

What exactly do you mean on Dookie by "Welcome to Paradise"? 

BJ, MD, TC [in unison]: West Oakland! 

MD: Living in West Oakland, and going out to parties every night. 

So it cost, what, around $100,000 to make Dookie? 

MD: Yeah. We kept the advances low, because you gotta pay all that shit back. Everyone knows you can't become an instant millionaire just by signing, because there are so many people that want a piece of you. 

BJ: We hang out with mostly punks though, and they don't want anything we have. They could care less. And a lot of our friends don't even agree with us being on a major label. 

Is Green Day angry? 

BJ: No, I'm not angry, like, walking around all the time with a frown on my face. But the way my music is interpreted is very angry. 

MD: When you feel really strongly about something, you want to let it out in the most powerful way possible. 

Like the way you baited your old high school principal from the Warfield stage recently? 

MD: I think he was an asshole. He treated me with no respect. And for high school initiation, we got our heads shaved--that's the kind of small-town shit we had to deal with! Sometimes they made you push a penny up the street with your nose. But that's life, and anywhere you go, you're gonna hate a lot of shit in your life. You'll be handed

Dookie? 

MD: Yeah. Yeah, you'll be handed dookie through all parts of your life. And see, what you need to do is just deal with the dookie, build upon what you have, and make something out of the dookie, you know? Like an adobe dookie building! 

* * * 

Several months later, and Dookie is oozing its gooey way into the public consciousness big time. The fading summer heat sticks crackling to the Berkeley sidewalks as punks--many sporting monstrous green or fuchsia mohawks--zing by on skateboards by day, and huddle in Telegraph Avenue doorways by night, conserving feral body heat the whole time. It feels like another world here, a throwback to the Bay Area's DIY/hardcore scene of the early '80s, when squatters reigned supreme and burlesque Broadway--fueled by all-ages shows at the Mabuhay Gardens, On Broadway, and even an occasional GBH or UK Subs booking at the Stone--made weekend conversions to "Punk Playground, USA." It was the best of times; it was the worst of times--despite relentless touring, most of these bands sold bupkus in the way of records, and few, save Metallica, ever held pen in shaky hand over a major-label contract. 

Billie Joe saunters into the Berkeley coffeehouse in rumpled jeans and a grease-spattered flannel shirt; his once-green-and-tufty tresses have grown out into Wally Cleaver waves and been dyed a Rod Stewarty blond. He looks like one of those feisty punks of yore; like he could hold his own through sheer physical endurance in the wildest of thrash pits. There's a new authority about him, the way he strides confidently to the counter, orders a pint-size glass of coffee, then swims through a sea of late-lunching yuppies to grab a table. The singer doesn't seem to notice them at all. Or maybe he's just too tired from nonstop touring to really give a shit. He smiles a goofy grin, revealing a set of generally crooked or chipped choppers, with an entire half of one front tooth missing. But there's such charisma behind it, the same kind of "Who, me?" innocence that little kids use. Billie Joe, you might say, has quickly become the Bart Simpson of the alternative set. 

How else could you explain his uncensored performance at a certain outdoor arena where--in a hyperspeed set lasting only 30 minutes before management threatened to pull the plug--he a) unzipped his fly and paraded his privates around for all to see; b) handed a stunned fan his beat-up, sticker-plastered guitar and urged him to play it; c) destroyed a $600 microphone by smashing it into the stage, then destroyed a second mike he was handed as well; and d) encouraged half the venue to chant, "Rock 'n' roll!" and the other half to respond with, "Shut the fuck up!" He then closed the show with a proposition--"They'll be really angry with us, but what we could do is rip out the seats!" he told the audience, which promptly gave Green Day a standing ovation. Billie Joe not only shrugs off such shenanigans as artistic license, he gets away with them! He's even encouraged to continue by fans who empathize with his uppity "fuck authority" attitude. 

But the facts were all on the table as Billie Joe sipped his house blend that afternoon, and it didn't take a fortune teller to read 'em. Green Day was hitting big time. Fast. And the sheer enormity of the undertaking, the weight of all its accordant responsibility, was just beginning to hit him. He looked older, wiser, and spoke in more grownup tones about his future, which then included a pending marriage to longtime girlfriend Adrienne. You could practically feel this new maturity encircling him like some protective aura. 

* * * 

=Where do all these punks on Telegraph come from? They can't all be local and homeless. 

I think Telegraph has just become this cultural mecca for punk rockers, because most of 'em who are on the Avenue aren't even from here. They're from Arizona, Minneapolis, New York, Florida. They just come out and end up squatting in houses in Berkeley. Why here? It's the climate, and the scene itself--Gilman Street and Maximum Rock 'n' Roll are in this area, and have a link to each other. But at the same time, it's separated, because there are so many different factions of punk now. There are the squatters, the pop-cores, the mods, the crusties. And all these types of people come out just to check it out. Plus, there's the best coffee in Berkeley, and a lot of 'em are real super coffee-drinkers, just pounding cup after cup all the time. It's pretty rare to come across a punk who doesn't drink coffee. I can't drink too much coffee myself--it gives me the shakes at night, so I just have a little bit during the day. Then I can smoke dope and go to bed. 

=What's the attraction in squatting or homelessness for these kids? 

For a lot of 'em, it's the first sense of freedom that they've had. It's like, "You mean I don't have to be home by midnight?" They've pretty much told their families and schools to go fuck themselves, so they go off and do their own thing. When I was 17, I did the same thing. And I had this total sense of freedom, where no one's telling you what to do, you don't have a clock to punch in on, you don't have people breathing down your neck; you don't have any deadlines to meet. You have this endless schedule where you can stay up all night drinking with your friends, or do anything you want. 

=But isn't "Coming Clean" about leaving behind your wilder ways? 

It's also about coming to grips with your sexuality. There's one line, "Skeletons come to life in my closet." And it's like, "Am I homosexual or heterosexual?" You go through this adolescent stage in your life where you don't really know what you are, and one side is taboo because your parents brought you up to think being gay was wrong. And if you come to grips with yourself, that you happen to be gay or bi or whatever, well, that was one thing about punk that was so accepting--all creeds were welcome, all sexualities, everything. 

=Was this something you went through personally? 

Yeah, to a certain extent. But I don't want to go around waving a gay flag or anything. 

=Well, you had a beautiful girl on your arm backstage at the last Green Day show. 

That's Adrienne. She's cool. Actually, we're engaged. That's why it took me so long getting here today--I had to get this! [Rolls sleeve up on tattooed arm, points to a bandaged-on cotton swab] Blood test, dude! We're getting married next week! 

=Has anybody tried to tell you you're too young for such a serious move? 

Of course. There are a lot of people who've said stuff. My parents have been a little more understanding than her parents. I just called my mom yesterday and said, "Mom, I'm gettin' married," and she said, "That's fine, son. Have fun!" I can hardly surprise my mother nowadays. But [this relationship] has been a recurring thing for the past four years, and we just decided to get serious about it. She's coming out here, and we're moving in together, so it's like, "Why not?" I don't really have any wild oats to sow, or anything like that. I'm not into the "Gettin' chicks all the time" thing.

 =I know a lot of girls who'll be really bummed that you're gittin' hitched. They all seem to have developed a crush on you... 

Me?! It must be the teeth [grins again].

 =OK, so maybe you didn't brush often enough when you were young. But you were busy developing a direction... 

I wouldn't necessarily say I had a direction or anything. I just knew I wanted to write songs. It comes from...uh...I don't know. I have no idea. It wasn't any kind of cosmic force or anything like that; it was just a matter of having a guitar around and wanting to play it all the time. I've had the same guitar since I was 11--I bought it off this guy at a guitar store. And I still play it--you know, the blue one with stickers all over it? That's my blue guitar, and, for some reason, things come to life, and everyone calls it "Blue" now--"Where's Blue? Can I pick up Blue and play it?" 

=And you let just anybody touch it? 

Oh yeah! Blue's not prejudiced. 

=It's interesting to note that the general public seems to think Dookie is your debut. 

Yeah, but that's just the general public. There are people who've been with us since the beginning, who know how long we've been around, since our first 7-inch came out back in '89. 

=And now you can afford to trash pricey microphones. 

Actually, Warner Brothers paid for those. It was pretty nice of 'em. They looked really nice--I remember looking at 'em and thinking, "Nice microphones!" They gave me one mike and I took it and threw it down, and they gave me another, and at the end of the set I creamed it pretty hard, I guess. We toured Europe with this band Die Toten Hosen--we played nine dates with 'em--and we got charged for a microphone every night. I dunno, for some reason we just started smashing shit. We'd start throwing equipment around at the end of each set, and these kids would start grabbing Tre's drum set and throwing it, and then they started smashing the microphones too. And the bouncers just couldn't do anything about it. 

=And you actually yanked your dick out onstage too? 

I did. Totally. It was the real thing. I dunno. The bands that we were playing with were just boring. It was more like making a mockery of the whole thing. The big arena rock thing is just so dated now, like Journey or Queen. Which is why I think punk rock started to begin with--it was this reaction to all the dinosaur bands. So for me, that show was, "How can we make a complete mockery of this but at the same time have fun with it?" I like to leave people guessing, "Did he hate that or did he like that?" It's not that I don't care--it's more that I'm careless. I try to be as happy-go-lucky as I can, but you can become apathetic at the same time. 

=Do you feel like Green Day is a part of, or represents, the so-called "slacker generation"? 

There's one side of me that doesn't mind it, because it's a generational thing, and another side of me that says, "Fuck that!" The reason I wrote the songs is, I ended up going back to Rodeo, where I'm from, for a week. And then I said, "Fuck it," and left. But I managed to get several good songs out of it. A lot of my friends had just turned into complete burnouts. And these are kids I've known since kindergarten, because it's a small town and you know everybody. And it was all fixing cars, staying up all night on methamphetamines, smoking dope, and finding out all these rumors about people I haven't heard of in 10 years. Like, "Oh, did you hear about so-and-so, who got married, had three kids, and ended up shooting everybody in his family?" And it happened! It was a true story! You're there for one week, and you get caught up in it. You get so bored, all you wanna do is watch television. And there are no record stores, nothing around, so you end up hanging out with all these delinquents who aren't punkers at all, just cultural idiots. So I was watching all these people rot and rotting with them until I realized, "Shit! I gotta get the fuck outta here!" 

=As they say, you can never go home again. 

Oh yeah, definitely. Unless you get pregnant, like my sister did. Then you have to go. But I quit school my senior year--I just wasn't getting anything out of it. I was taking nine periods a day, plus night classes, which left me no time to smoke dope whatsoever. And my mom even suggested I drop out, because she was a dropout, too. I come from a long line of dropouts. I still have nightmares about being late with my homework assignments. When I finally went in to sign out of high school, the teacher went, "Now, who are you again?" 

=And if that teacher could see you now! 

A lot of people think you get this big connection with a corporate label, and you make millions of dollars, but they don't understand that you just don't make that much money. And when you do, it's easy to piss it away. I mean, every cent that I've made, I've pissed away. I'm not gonna say how I did it, but I don't have it But I don't think you necessarily have to be a punk to decide to say, "Fuck it." You don't even have to have a direction. It's just a matter of getting the fuck out and exploring things for yourself. 

=But didn't you feel abject terror when you first set out on your own? 

Nah, I didn't. Because, for some reason, I knew things were gonna be all right. You can create your own future as long as karma's on your side. And I'm a strong believer in karma. I think things can come back to you if you're just willing to give. 

* * * 

True enough. At least six million times over!

1995 Tom Lanham

[alexsmitposts]

It’s been One Hell of a Year in the US and its “Not Over with Yet!”

What is really going on in the US? Lots of people are having a difficult time, and see more of the same, if not worse, for the future. Most Americans are just thinking about one more stimulus check, just before Christmas, with so many unemployed, locked down with COVID restrictions, etc. And they should not get their hopes up too much, as they may be waiting for a long time.

All the while the US government is working to get Covid-19 vaccinations to the American public, but now they want strings attached, as people have not only lost faith in the government but the public health system. One proposal, from former congressman John Delaney of Maryland, aims to link the provision of stimulus checks to getting vaccinated, which is virtual blackmail.

Herd Immunity or Herd Mentality?

Since there’s such massive censorship, especially in the mainstream media and on social networking sites, people who would never otherwise give much credence to far-fetched allegations are now starting to believe there’s a conspiracy, or a “cluster-fuck” of conspiracies, starting out with Russiagate, Crossfire Hurricane Investigation, which proved to be the proverbial witch-hunt.

In light of everything that transpired during its run up, the recent US elections have really opened a Pandora’s Box. Take for instance absentee ballots. Several people claim they’ve seen boxes full of postal ballots not collected or counted after hours. According to Jackie Pick, a volunteer attorney in the State of Georgia who presented the evidence to the state Senate, said four suitcases ‘come out from underneath a table at the site while there was no election supervisor present’. But…. if they’re mail-in ballots, they would be for Biden anyway, right?

The mainstream media continue to totally dismiss claims of voting irregularities and fraud, without being willing to address the fact that the thing is remotely possible, claiming that Trump is merely “crying foul over the results”. But this only adds fuel to an already roaring fire. For example, CCTV evidence recently presented to a Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee shows poll workers waiting for observers and media to leave before accessing ballot-stuffed suitcases from under a table, but no one has bothered to explain this, considering it not worthy of a democratic country’s attention.

Bearers of Bad News

Why is it necessarily to look elsewhere, to “off-the-wall” media outlets for alternative views on the election? Some of their insight into election cyber security, diverting votes by electronic means, Dominion Voter Machines, and old-fashion vote rigging is starting to make sense, and a democracy should be concerned about such claims, not treating them as part of sour rhetoric.

Some are now claiming that large transfers of money were made by Chinese investors prior to the elections, which brings a smile to my face in the light of Biden and his son Hunter, and a plethora of allegations of corruption involving them, including influence peddling and other backhanded moves, reported by the New York Post and other non-mainstream publications and outlets. Such stories, and even more scandalous ones, are quickly discounted or not reported in the respectful American mainstream media. They call that fact-checking.

However, a range of pundits and born again types, also not to be believed, are saying that 5 or 6 counties (cities) in the US were able to control the entire election process, and had known in advance what would be the outcome. In these same 6 cities the voting count was held up due to water problems, and allegedly people were robbed of their votes. There were also water main breaks in those same cities: Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix…, and a few other cities also decided the election: Dallas Milwaukee and Seattle.

It is more than sheer coincidence that all these allegations are buttressed with the erosion of fundamental rights that Americans hold so close, free speech, majority rule, an array of constitutional rights and mainstream values. There is little doubt that the mainstream media, especially news networks such as CNN, have been manipulated in recent years, driving domestic and foreign policy, to a degree Joseph Goebbels would have been envious of.

At last some inside information concerning the agenda of the news networks is beginning to surface, and this is not good timing for those who have been manipulating the news. There is no longer a fine line between the truth and the lie, and CNN and others in the same stream of media flows have taken one maxim to heart: “If you tell a lie often enough people will come to accept it as truth.”

Some of the born again types, and their media outlets, seem to know what is going on, including the backdating of absentee ballots. They believe that Trump will somehow remain in office.

In the Meantime!

It is becoming clear that until Trump is out of the White House, he will be a problem. It does not matter whether he won or not. People continue to send him money that he can use for his own personal use. I liken these people to “useful idiots” or “real patriots.”

Yet many Republicans say nothing – which is sad, as without this force, which saw them of them riding on Trump’s coattails, many would not be in office now. It is so depressing to see that people can be so ignorant, or arrogant, or both. If Trump refuses to leave office – which I don’t believe – there will be huge protests. But he will leave office – he may not like it – but he will leave and continue to “suck” money from his supporters.

CNN Defect and Manufacturing Dissent

Recent breaking news is that James O’Keefe of Project Veritas caught CNN red handed conniving to influence the election over a period of two months during conference calls. This network made a concerted effort to report in favour of Joe Biden in the run-up to the election, and in its wake, thus adding more layers of conspiracies to an already complicated mess.

In the video he has released, O’Keefe enters into a CNN conference call, unmuting himself, telling the CEO, Jeffrey Zucker,

“We’ve been listening to your CNN calls for basically two months and recording everything. Just wanted to ask you some questions, if you have a minute … do you still feel you are the most trusted name in news? Based on what I’ve been hearing on these phone calls, I don’t know about that. I mean, we’ve got a lot of recordings that indicate you’re not really that independent of a journalist.”

The plot thickens as to how media and politics are joined up, and the playing field is less than level. The Washington Post, another media outlet which has also been accused in recent years of one sided coverage, reported that “while Project Veritas had previously disseminated covert recordings of CNN’s daily meetings, in this video O’Keefe himself could be seen dialing in to a private CNN call — apparently without the knowledge or consent of participants”.

It is clear that these recordings, legal or otherwise, show that CNN took sides in the US election, and even in the coverage of Trump’s bout with COVID, and made a concerted effort not to show him and his party in the best of light. What escapes critical attention, however, is what degree of conspiracy may have taken place with those outside of the media, such as the DNC. Based on the 2016 election, CNN is still referred to by some by the nickname, Clinton’s News Network, and that is not a good position for the network itself to be in.

I Smell a Rat!

I remember the news about the “stopped counting” on the night of the election. When this was first reported a few days after the election, election officials added an excuse that people were tired and needed to sleep. Nowhere else in history, especially on Election Day or before a deadline, and “where does a company send night-shift workers home because they’re afraid their workers are too tired?”

I smell a rat. This clip of vote counting clearly shows the counting votes continuing after hours, when everybody else, such as the election monitors, has left. Due to one sided media coverage, only now is this getting the attention it deserves, with recent Senate Hearings, e.g., Congressional Oversight in the Face of Executive Branch and Media Suppression.

Taken together, the media coverage, election results and all else happening now reminds me of an old film about the nexus of media to politics and American values. This is A Face in the Crowd (1957), directed by the rather controversial Elia Kazan, who has long been vilified for naming names during McCarthyism.

Some recent liberal critics have begun to maintain that the film predicts the Trump era, as it exposes an unhealthy alliance between populism, media and politics, while others claim just the opposite. However it definitely shows how lies and manipulation are part of any election process, and what has apparently transpired shows much more than just how low lying, deceitful politicians, journalists and governmental election oversight watchdogs will go to achieve their ends.

We’re Nowhere Near the Thick of it!

There are several videos of postal contract workers saying they saw suspicious dealings with truckloads and boxes full of ballots. As for the movie, readers should watch this carefully, stop at places and take notes, as it tells it all. Think of your own political history, your country – many countries have had, or still do have, similar vote rigging, media manipulation, playing the same political games. Compare for yourself with what is being alleged in the US, and see how your own people are manipulated into accepting all this as normal by government and media.

Think back to Dr. Goebbels, and how Hitler grabbed and consolidated power, and how it all fell apart in the end. The US is supposed to protect the world from that sort of thing. Whenever it is criticised by doing the opposite, it deflects this by saying that can’t be true because such things don’t happen in the US itself. Once the global community had to accept that argument but will it now?

Nobody is going to be the winner in the US presidential election, and the vote count is a moot issue; only democracy will have been lost. This will only empower those who want a different system – dictators, radicals and extremists of all kinds. These are same people who then dress their deeds up as “democratic”, Soviet-style, to give them legitimacy. They day they don’t will be the day US-hegemony ends, and it make be as soon as the day you read this article.

[oselatra]

Hope, help and a whole lot of water in flooded Northeast Arkansas

Dispatches from the deluge.

You can love a river. Love the birds that glide just above the water in the morning. Love the commerce and beauty and grandeur of it, the hidden bounty, the river simultaneously a kind of clock that counts the years and a brown thread that binds those who live along it to the past and future.

But loving a river is and always has been tempered with the knowledge — as old as mankind's tendency to found civilization on any bit of higher ground — that, sooner or later, the rain is going to come and not stop for hours or days. When it does, that tranquil, lazy flow that you love will be transformed into a beast with an unending appetite for sullying the best laid schemes of mice and men.

The rains came to Arkansas in early May. By the time the sun returned, according to preliminary estimates by the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, 937,000 acres of farmland had been inundated across the state, at a time when almost 90 percent of the state's crops were already in the ground. Rice will reportedly be the hardest hit, with an estimated 156,000 acres — and $29.9 million in revenue — feared lost. According to the UA, total financial losses to farmers in the state due to impacts from the floods will top $64 million.

The town of Pocahontas in Northeast Arkansas's Randolph County was hard hit by the flooding, boxed in as it is by five rivers that are, in normal years, celebrated as tourist attractions for fishermen and canoers: the Black, the Current, the Elevenpoint, the Spring and the Fourche, along with dozens of creeks and streams and sloughs, unnamed and named, in the woods and fields around. The old-timers founded the town proper on high ground that sits above the Black, the city shelving down from the old courthouse to a sharp bend in the river that snakes past the bounds of Pocahontas and out of sight. Subsequent generations built on lower-lying land in east Pocahontas, on the other side of the river. Flooding wasn't really a problem until recently, people in town will tell you, but this is the third time the waters have risen and smote the low-lying areas of Pocahontas since 2008. Something is wrong with the weather, people say.

When the rains came, the Black River rose and drowned the Walmart store and whole neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city to a depth of 3 feet or more in some places. A mandatory evacuation order was issued for east Pocahontas on May 2. The river was scheduled to crest at over 31 feet, which would have been an even bigger disaster, but only managed 29 before the levees broke.

Media reports said it was the levee breach that flooded portions of the town, but it was actually the opposite, according to the mayor. With the levees protecting the city to only 27 feet in some places, there was already widespread flooding by the time the levee broke. The breach siphoned water out of flooded stores and neighborhoods at the rate of two inches an hour once the levee failed and set water pouring into the fields to the south. Talking to people in Pocahontas about the levee breach, you find a strange mix of relief and sadness, the city mouse knowing that he or she had been spared some unknowably worse measure of calamity at the expense of country cousins downstream. Everybody knows everybody in Pocahontas, which means that everybody seems to know somebody who lost everything.

Days after the Black began to recede, Stan Vinson was working at stripping sodden carpets out of the home of his sister, Cleva Dean, near the corner of Old Country Road and Knott Street, more than half a mile east of the river. His clothes were covered in mud from his waist down to the soles of his shoes. Across the way, a commercial building sat surrounded by a hastily constructed dirt berm. After a final, desperate attempt to sandbag the house and move the appliances and furniture to higher ground as the rain came down, Vinson and Dean had been forced to evacuate to Vinson's home in Corning. They hadn't been able to get back to the house until days later, and found a mess. A friend had scared up some help to get the carpet and carpet padding out. It lay in soggy heaps on the lawn.

"We knew that if [the Black River] went to 31 and a half, there wasn't any hope," Vinson said. "Then the levee broke. The water went down, but we still got the carpets wet. We could have done a better job at sandbagging, and we will if we have to do it again."

Inside, Cleva Dean stood in her dark and empty kitchen. The house smelled of dank river water, the air conditioner and gas heaters running full blast to try to dry things out. With the carpet stripped away, the bare plywood sheathing was spongy underfoot.

Dean has lived in the house since 1972, and said flooding had never been a problem until recently. She'd evacuated to her brother's house during a flood in 2011. Water didn't get into the house that time. This time, she was not so lucky. She seemed always on the knife-edge of tears, speaking like a woman who was expecting to wake up in her dry house at any moment. She doesn't have flood insurance, she said.

"I've lived here for years without it doing anything," she said. "I didn't think it was worth it, but I guess it was. Flood insurance is pretty high and then it doesn't pay off nearly anything. ... You just have to roll with the punches. You don't have any idea when FEMA is going to be around, do you?" Her brother has told her they should be able to get things righted and have her moved back in in about six weeks, but who knows?

A little further into east Pocahontas on Redbud Street, Cody Grice was standing in front of the peeling white frame house he shares with his father. Nearby, just on the other side of a crooked line of traffic cones, Redbud Street disappeared into murky brown water like a boat ramp. What looked to be a small brick church stood flooded just up the block.

As the Black River rose, Grice's house was saved by a neat, 3-foot wall of white sandbags surrounding the house; the product of a 13-hour, all-day thrash by Grice and his friends. They brought in at least 10 truckloads of sand donated by the Highway Department, he said, and then worked in the pouring rain with shovels to get the job done. Though the water got high enough to overtop the sandbag wall near the back porch, Grice said no water got into the house.

"If it wasn't for all my friends coming out and helping us, man, we would have been under water. It got up to almost the floorboards in the back," Grice said. "Friends are great. If it wasn't for them, we'd probably be sitting somewhere else right now. Might not be talking to y'all."

After the mandatory evacuation order came down, Grice and his father had fled with their dogs to his mother's home on the other side of the river, then spent several nail-biting days not knowing whether their efforts to keep the house dry had paid off. "My mom's house was the only place we had to go. We were lucky we had that. Our neighbors didn't have that. They were asking us for help and we couldn't do nothing for them. We were worried about our house," Grice said. Some of his friends lost everything in the flood, he said. He's given others money for food. It hurts, but he's happy that his home was spared, and for the friends who helped.

"Everybody came together when we needed it," he said. "It's hard to get people together when they're getting paid, let alone just to help. Maybe America will take a note from small- town Arkansas."

The Sea of Arkansas

South of town, the day after the Black River crested at Pocahontas, state troopers and National Guardsmen manned a roadblock, the Guardsmen in the cab of a brontosaurus-sized high-water truck with a tall air-intake snorkel that could, theoretically, allow the truck to drive underwater. Beyond them, the great Sea of Arkansas stretched to the horizon over what had been fields in the midst of planting season a week before. In the distance, the water was dotted with flooded grain silos, churches and houses. Near Shannon, U.S. Highway 67 was submerged for at least five miles toward Walnut Ridge, the water reportedly 7 feet deep in places. Just up from the roadblock, the water caught the light as it gurgled over the shoulder of the highway, as if over a spillway. Nearby was a soaked house and a car sunk to the axles in the saturated ground. Even where the water had receded, yards and houses and barns had been buried in corn stalks and shucks, washed up from the fields in brown drifts. Closer to Walnut Ridge, it was even worse, the land flatter and lower and more populated, multiplying miseries.

One of those helping lead the Arkansas National Guard's operations in town in the days after the flood was First Lt. Ryan Jones, with the 875th Engineer Battalion. By the time we talked to him, Jones had been on the ground in Pocahontas for almost a week. From a base at the Pocahontas Community Center, his soldiers had worked pretty much around the clock helping the Randolph County Sheriff's Office with evacuations and cleanup while spending their nights on the hard gym floor. A native of Jonesboro, Jones looked young enough that he probably couldn't buy a beer without getting carded. But there he was, marshaling forces with crisp efficiency.

"We're here to help our community," Jones said. "At the end of the day, the Arkansas National Guard is made up of people from this community. We have people in our National Guard unit right now who just live a couple miles down the road. It's neighbors helping neighbors the best they can." The mission in Pocahontas, Jones said, is exactly what the National Guard is all about. While there's not a lot you can say to people who have lost everything, Jones said, he tries to stress that it will get better.

"We try to reassure people that they will make it, and they will be OK," he said. "I know it's really hard. It is. They've lost a lot. But we're trying to the best of our ability to get them comfortable and give them some hope that it will be OK. Maybe not at this time. But it will be OK eventually."

Pocahontas Mayor Kary Story, reached by phone the week after the Black receded, said the city is trying to get back to normal operations. The flood heavily damaged an estimated 50 homes and had soaked countless others to the point of requiring extensive tear-out. There was no good estimate, he said, of the number of businesses that took water, but it was substantial.

Story said that at the time the levee system along the Black was constructed in 1938, east Pocahontas was a low-lying wetland that wasn't really inhabited. Over the years, however, the area has slowly filled in with homes and businesses, development receiving a boost after Walmart built a store there in the 1990s. In the intervening 79 years since the levee along the Black was built, Story said, the landscape has been changed drastically by precision land leveling, further levee construction and dredging of drainage ditches. This year's deluge could have been much worse for the city, Story said, if the levee hadn't breached. "When it did, we watched the water go down two inches per hour. It just sucked it out of here. I was wanting it to be breached, but I don't have any control or authority over that levee system so I can't do anything to it. But, yeah, it was definitely a relief."

Though the city secured and spent $250,000 in grant money to raise certain portions of the levee after the 2011 floods, Story said that he doesn't want to propose a "kneejerk reaction" solution now. A town hall meeting is in the works, with representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scheduled to be in attendance. "I want to wait until emotions cool down and we can start talking about solutions to this problem," Story said. "I don't want finger pointing and whose levee is high and whose levee costs what. Nobody won in this thing. The people that the levee protected, it didn't protect them well. The farmers to the north suffered losses because of it, farmers to the south suffered losses, and east Pocahontas suffered."

Story said that he's been proud of the reaction by the city and how the townspeople have come together for the good of their neighbors. Like Lt. Jones, he said that the best thing to tell people is, it will get better.

"It's hard for me to say much to them," he said. "I haven't been in their shoes of losing everything, so I don't know how they feel. I know that they've got to keep their heads up. ... We've just got to hold our heads high and fix our lives the best we can."

Happy camper

Up the hill from Black River Overlook Park, where the water still stood high enough to almost touch the nets of basketball goals two days after the worst of the flooding, the former Randolph County Nursing Home was a hive of activity. Closed in 2016, the nursing home had been reopened as a shelter as the storm bore down on the city and the river rose.

The day we visited, the parking lot was full, National Guard Humvees sharing space with tractor-trailers rigs, compact cars and good ol' boy lifted trucks. Legions of volunteers streamed in and out, hauling bleach and Bibles, shovels and rakes, pallets of bottled water and cardboard boxes of wrapped ice cream cones to hand out to evacuees and the all-volunteer staff. There were still over 50 people seeking refuge at the shelter the day Arkansas Times visited, some arriving with not much more than the clothes on their backs.

Outside, at the end of the long covered walkway leading to the door, Arthur Scroggins and Michelle Erickson were sitting in lawn chairs in the sun. Residents of Hardy, they'd been stuck in Poplar Bluff, Mo., for days after the flood, only coming south after the water receded enough to open the roads. They were going to wait another day at the shelter in Pocahontas to let the water go down a bit more, then make a try for their cabin on the Spring River. "We know the cabin hasn't been touched or anything, Scroggins said. "It's just getting there. Hopefully this rain is going to lay off for a while." It was good to be back in Arkansas, they both agreed.

Nearby was Kenny Garrett, a Pocahontas resident who stayed at the shelter for five days after the mandatory evacuation, until the streets to his house were passable. "I checked out this morning, and came right back with some supplies I'd bought out of my own pocket," he said. "Donated them. I know they're shorthanded here."

Garrett, who works as a landscaper, said he'd had a total of 12 hours sleep during the previous week. Anytime you see him, he said, you can be sure there's a coffee cup somewhere nearby. "I'm here until it's over," he said. "I've got a regular job I've got to go back to, but I'll come up here at night. My pockets ain't that deep, but I'll do what I can do."

As we were chatting, Paula Ricker walked up in her scrubs and asked if we knew when the government was coming to help. A home health nurse who lives in Pocahontas, she was there to check on a patient, a man in his 70s whose home had been totally flooded. "He's lost his house," she said. "He's going to have to replace floors and walls and everything, and he's on oxygen 24/7. His daughter is supposed to figure out what to do so he can go back home." As she spoke, two workers in heavy gloves wrestled a gleaming panel of sheet metal from the back of a nearby truck, the metal booming like vaudevillian thunder. "I feel so bad for him," she said. "I'm really close to him because he reminds me of my dad. I'm hoping he can get everything fixed."

Just inside the doors of the shelter at a desk, Marti Little, the volunteer coordinator for the operation, rarely put down her phone. She's a schoolteacher by day, but necessity had turned her into the Decider of this place, part general and part traffic cop, her attention ping-ponging from phone to volunteer and back to phone as she directed resources and guided worried people through the maze of flooded roads that stood between desperation and shelter. She was wearing a T-shirt that said "Happy Camper." She'd been there almost a week by then, working 16-hour-plus days. Asked how much sleep she'd managed to get during her time volunteering there, she could only smile and shake her head.

"We have volunteers working around-the-clock," she said. "Twenty-four hours a day, we have people working here, people working elsewhere, people helping. We're taking donations at any hour." Even after she starts back to school, she said, every waking hour she can spare will be spent at the shelter, until the need there is gone. As she spoke, someone in the lobby's phone rang, and the ringtone was Alanis Morissette singing: "It's like raaaaaiinnnn, on your wedding day ... ." If she noticed it, Little didn't smile.

"In this community, we do all we can," Little said. "A small town is different from Little Rock. Here, most of us know each other. People will open their homes. We've had people come in and say, "If you have anyone who needs a place to stay ... ." We have people staying in churches, in peoples' homes, trying not to take up a bed here."

Then somebody came in requesting phone chargers and Little told them there were none to be had. Then somebody came in with a handful of religious tracts and she pointed him to a table where they could be placed. Then a bin full of fresh laundry rumbled through and she pointed the way. Then somebody came in with a cardboard box full of stuffed toy mooses donated by the local Moose Lodge, and she directed him to people sitting nearby. Then her phone rang and she spoke into it, saying: soap, cleaning supplies, storage tubs, 50-gallon trash bags, nonperishables, socks for the National Guard, crackers are good. Then her phone rang again and she started giving, for the thousandth time, the long and involved directions to come overland from Imboden while dodging the frustrating labyrinth of flooded roads between points A and B, speaking soothingly, a beacon of hope to someone far away.

She turned back to my recorder, but then her phone rang again. Little listened, muttered a hasty apology, then literally ran out the door, phone pressed to her ear, to catch a truck bound on some mission of mercy before it could pull out of the parking lot. And down the hill, out of sight, the swollen Black River poured on toward the sea.

Hope, help and a whole lot of water in flooded Northeast Arkansas

[sneaksite]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.”��Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://news.yahoo.com/major-gop-nightmare-moves-step-083244975.html

[weopenviews]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.” Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/386ZsAZ

[itssquidwarsjournal]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.” Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/386ZsAZ

[newslegendry]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.” Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more. from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/386ZsAZ

http://newslegendry.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-major-gop-nightmare-moves-step-closer.html

[7newx1]

Legislation to make the District of Columbia a state is poised to pass the House on Friday, a major advance from the last time the measure came before Congress 27 years ago and 40 percent of Democrats joined with all but one Republican to defeat D.C. statehood. After decades of benign neglect, the movement to make D.C. the 51st state has gained new life with Black Lives Matter and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heightened profile. President Trump’s efforts to use federal force to dominate streets around the White House exposed the subservient status of a city that must answer to Congress for how it spends money while its 706,000 residents are without full voting representation in the House or Senate. Republicans appear unmoved by pleas for equality. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton took to the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats’ move in a racially tinged speech depicting D.C. as an elitist conclave of the “deep state” and Mayor Bowser as someone who could not be trusted to keep the city and its statues safe. “Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population,” he tweeted, “but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging, and construction, and 10 times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state."Opinion: I Fixed Tom Cotton’s Op-EdThe bill to rename D.C. “Washington, Douglass Commonwealth” is going nowhere in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. But if the Democrats win the White House and flip the Senate, statehood becomes imaginable, since statehood requires only a vote of Congress. “Trump says Republicans would have to be stupid to support D.C. statehood and that’s what the battle is about these days, maybe that’s what it’s always been about,” says Michael Brown, D.C.’s non-voting “shadow senator.” Actually, Trump said Republicans would have to be “very, very stupid” to support statehood for D.C. because it would add two Democratic senators, which McConnell would never let happen. “But it’s about more than McConnell,” Brown told the Daily Beast. “We can’t get one Republican (in the Senate), and there are still six (Senate) Democrats who are not on the bill.” In the modern Senate, 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a vote on legislation of any significance. The exception is judges, where Republicans exercised what is known as the “nuclear option” to confirm two Supreme Court judges and 200 lower court lifetime judges with a simple majority. Democratic leader Harry Reid opened this dangerous door by striking the filibuster for Executive Branch confirmations that McConnell was blocking. Several Democrats who ran for president, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, favor doing away with the filibuster if Democrats win the Senate. Otherwise, they argue, McConnell (or his successor, should he happen to lose his own race) will obstruct everything Democrats try to do.  The District of Columbia has a population of 706,000, more than Wyoming and Vermont, and D.C. residents pay more in total federal income tax than 22 states. It has long been a sore point that fighting in every war and contributing blood and treasure is not enough to gain more than a symbolic vote in Congress. D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has served almost 30 years, has a vote in committee but not on the House floor, and if her committee vote breaks a tie, it doesn’t count. Even that small measure of democratic largesse was taken away by Republicans when they gained control of the House in 1994 and again in 2010. Democrats restored Norton’s limited right to vote when they won the House in 2006 and 2018, and since then Norton has been on a roll when it comes to statehood. She has 226 co-sponsors for the bill, including the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer from Maryland, who opposed statehood until now. Speaking before the Rules committee Wednesday, Norton explained how the legislation before her colleagues was personal to her own history. “My great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who escaped as a slave from a Virginia plantation, made it as far as D.C., a walk to freedom but not to equal citizenship,” she said. “For three generations my family has been denied the rights other Americans take for granted.” Opponents of statehood argue that the Founding Fathers didn’t want the District to be a state, but our vaunted forebears also didn’t want women to vote, or Black people to vote, so that argument seems lame. “Whether you’re a textualist or an originalist, I don’t believe the Founding Fathers had any more reason to deny representation to people who pay federal taxes, serve in war and do everything a citizen should—than they would have wanted my neighbor down the hall to have a closet full of AK-47s,” says Ellen Goldstein, who served until recently as a neighborhood advisory commissioner for the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood, home to the Obamas, the Kushners, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “You can unearth the minds of the Founding Fathers to justify anything,” Goldstein told the Daily Beast. “As somebody who has lived here for 50 years, I believe the only reason we’re not a state is because of race.” Race has a lot to do with it, says Brown, a former political consultant whose unpaid position’s main perk is identifying as a senator. The Constitution grants Congress jurisdiction over the District in “all cases whatsoever,” which allowed some committee chairmen of the House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia to run the city like a plantation. In his recent book Class of 1974, John Lawrence recounts how John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat and a segregationist, sent a truckload of watermelons to the office of appointed Mayor Walter Washington to let him know how little he thought of the budget Washington submitted in 1967 for the committee’s review. The District couldn’t even elect its own mayor until after Home Rule passed Congress in 1973. For a long time, D.C. pridefully called itself “Chocolate City,” acknowledging its majority Black population. No state has ever come into the union with a majority minority population, says Brown. In 1993, the last time Congress voted on statehood, the city was 56 percent Black, a factor in the outcome despite President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for statehood. During his final weeks in office, Bill Clinton had the newly authorized D.C. license plate with the slogan “taxation without representation” affixed to the presidential limousine. His successor, President George W. Bush, had the plate removed. It wasn’t until after President Obama won re-election in 2012 that he ordered the controversial plate installed on all presidential vehicles. In 2011, the District’s Black population fell below 50 percent for the first time in over 50 years. According to 2017 Census Bureau data, the African-American population is 47.1 percent. Unlike the Clinton-era vote, when Democrats were divided on the political merits of D.C. statehood, a newly awakened Democratic leadership is rallying around the cry for equal rights. “It’s beyond statehood,” says Goldstein, citing congressional meddling in District policies on marijuana legalization, gun regulation, and funding for abortion. “If we decide to do it, they take it away. They take our money and tell us how to spend it.”  Goldstein doubts the House vote will change anything, but in her thinking, modern America cannot continue to deny D.C. is a state any more than Macy’s Department store in the movie classic Miracle on 34th Street could deny Kris Kringle was Santa when bags of letters addressed to him were delivered by the Post Office. Using the same reasoning, Goldstein notes that when she shops online on Amazon and scrolls down, D.C. is a state: “If the Post Office thinks you’re Santa, you’re Santa. And if Amazon thinks we’re a state, then by golly, we’re a state.”Until a miracle happens on Capitol Hill, that will have to do.  Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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Hi, my name is Afif Ghannoum and I’ve launched over 13 consumer products that have been sold in 27,081 stores across the US. I've also launched an ecom brand that does seven figures in the supplement space.I’m a co-inventor on two patents and I’ve licensed technology to a big pharmaceutical company through a royalty deal for a product that is sold in tens of thousands of stores in the Unites States and Canada.I’ve also raised over $17 million in investor capital for my various companies.I’m often asked how I went about raising that amount of capital, so I figured I would share.I don't sell a program or anything (I still run my companies), I've had people help me out along the way, so this is part of my pay it forward.Let’s get to the good news upfront….You Really Don’t Need a Lot of Capital Upfrontbut here’s the thing…You don’t necessarily need that much capital to get through a large part (if not all) of the product launch process.Part of this is going to depend on the type of product you’re creating.If it’s a specialty chemical (like a skin cream, car wax, mouthwash, etc.), it’s typically extremely cheap to get a prototype product together.I’m talking a few dollars a unit (which will get even cheaper when you buy in bulk).One option is to purchase the ingredients yourself and do your own formulation, which has become a lot easier in the internet age. You can purchase in quantities ranging from a small order to entire truckloads. You can even have products private labeled for just a few hundred bucks.Point being, for literally less than $100, you could easily start creating and launching a brand of products.But even when you’re past the “launch” stage, you can often sell a product to a retailer with just a prototype in hand.I’ve actually sold major retailers on just a concept of a product with only mock up packaging to share.So the big takeaway upfront is: “I can’t afford to launch my own product” may have been true just a few years ago, but it’s just simply not the case nowadays.YOU WILL (LIKELY) EVENTUALLY HAVE TO RAISE MONEYWith that being said…even though you can get pretty far down the road to launching a product with a relatively low budget…sooner or later you’re likely going to have to invest capital to make sure you’re able to grow and scale your product.In fact, even once you’re in market, you may still have to invest significant capital in your business.I’ll give you a quick personal example….With one of our biggest launches, our product won “Best New Product” of the year. An award that was especially meaningful (and important), because it was awarded by 100 of the largest retailers in the country.The result?We instantly got distribution in over 20,000 stores…..GREAT NEWS RIGHT!?Yes….and no.Yes, because obviously we were getting mass distribution right off the bat with everyone from Walmart, Target & CVS, all the way down to local independent pharmacy stores.We were also getting a ton of publicity.No, because the downside to instantly getting that much distribution with such high profile retailers was that we had to be able to produce over a half a million units in a matter of months.We also had to pay for a national television, print, and digital advertising campaign in order to support all that distribution.So while we had raised a substantial amount of funding up to that point, and had money in the bank from sales of other products etc., it was clear we were going to have to raise A LOT more money in order to make sure we could comfortably pay for all of the expenses headed our way.Well thankfully, I put our fundraising process to work, and we were able to raise millions from investors over a few months and were off to the races with our national product launch!HOW I RAISE MONEYNow you may be saying, “Afif, that’s great, but I don’t have a financing background, I’ve never raised any money and I don’t have any venture capital relationships, so I don’t think I can raise money.”Well when I started, I had never raised money, I didn’t have a financing background, and not a venture capital connection in sight.How?The analogy I like to use is that I like to take the Obama approach to fundraising (this is nothing to do with politics…just fundraising…everyone relax).Basically, when Obama was running for President in 2008, he was up against the Republicans’ giant fundraising machine made up of a Who’s Who of America’s wealthiest families and political donors.While Obama eventually got those guys on board as well, he started out by reaching out to every day people and basically saying, “I don’t care if you can only spare $5, if you’re willing to donate it, I think it’ll make a difference.”And slowly but surely those small figures amounted to a TON of capital. Along the way he also added big dog investors, and we all know how the story ended.That’s sort of how it went for our company.At first, it was friends and family, some of whom put in just a few thousand dollars, and slowly, as we continued to make progress, we raised a substantial amount of money and attracted very large angel investors.Point being, you do NOT need any experience, background or connections to successfully raise money for your product and business.You just need a strategy and a process you will stick to.THE TOUGHEST PART OF RAISING FUNDINGNow before we get into the meat of the strategy for raising money, it’s incredibly important to address the three toughest parts of raising money:AttitudePerseverance, andBeing AND STAYING organizedATTITUDEWith attitude, you MUST be willing to reach out to people, and ultimately, you have to ASK them to invest in you.Trust me, it’s very difficult when you first start asking (especially when someone says no, and they will), but you have to do it.No one will do it for you.Over time it gets easier, and the quicker you realize that some people are just never going to invest, the easier it gets.PERSEVERANCEWhich brings me to perseverance. Even when someone says yes, you’re likely going to have to follow up several times to get the paperwork signed and ACTUALLY receive their money.It can sometimes take months of following up with someone until they finally come on board and even then it can take a while to receive their funding.Not because they’re just being purposely slow or blowing you off, but sometimes investors have to get things organized on their end to get the money in place and to feel comfortable with your fundraising documents.It’s also about taking the extra steps that no one wants to do…Like asking someone who invests (or even someone who doesn’t) if they know of anyone else who may be interested, and making the effort to follow up with the people they introduce you to.In fact, almost HALF the money I’ve raised has come through asking and following up with referrals from my investors.Trust me, it is a lot easier to convince someone to invest in your company if someone they know and trust has already decided to invest with you.In fact, just getting a meeting with a potential investor can often come down to whether you come to them through a personal contact.STAYING ORGANIZEDNow, all of the attitude and perseverance in the world is meaningless if you don’t stay incredibly well organized.It’s as simple as keeping a spreadsheet with the name, contact information and status of each and every possible investor, and then following up with each one, again, and again, and AGAIN until they either say they’re in or they’re out.I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to stay organized.See, the critical thing you must remember is…when you take other people’s money, it is now your OBLIGATION to make sure you are on top of all the details of their investment.It’s beyond the scope of this post (and I promise I’ll cover this in detail in a subsequent one), but you’ve got to have a simple but robust system in place for staying on top of potential investors, investor paperwork, updating investors, investor equity holdings etc.I won’t harp on it, but you’ve got to bring your A Game when it comes to staying organized.THE 8 STEP STRATEGY TO RAISING MONEYOk, so let’s get right into the strategy…If you are going to have any success in raising money for your company, you must create a compelling fundraising story.It’s not enough to just tell them about your product and how amazing it is.That’s important…but that’s not going to shake a dollar loose from anyone.You have to realize, when people are investing in your company and product, they are investing IN YOU.Sure you’re product is important, but if investors don’t have confidence in you and (probably more importantly), the confidence that you have your act and strategy together, you’re likely going to have a hard time raising money.Sophisticated investors have a saying for this: “Back the jockey, not the horse.”So, how do you create a story around not only your product but yourself as well?By creating a fundraising story that covers the following 8 components:You (what’s your background, why can YOU be successful)Your company’s backgroundHow you’re going to get the product madeThe logistics surrounding the whole product sales distribution processHow and where you’re going to sell the productHow you’re going to scale upThe pathway to being a success (ergo make money)Terms of the investment dealTELLING YOUR STORY THROUGH A FUNDRAISING PRESENTATION“Ok great Afif, thanks for the quasi-informative general outline of a compelling fundraising story, but how do I ACTUALLY share that story with potential investors”?I’m glad you asked, because it’s actually pretty simple!You tell your fundraising story by putting together a ten to fifteen slide presentation that is visually driven (I like to use a lot of pictures), and a couple of sentences on each slide that you can speak to.I like my presentation to cover the following topics:General Overview of the CompanyHow you got startedhow long you’ve been aroundWho is running the companybrief background bioWho are your vendors, suppliers, sales team, logistics details – show them how you and everyone involved has the ability to MAKE THIS HAPPENYour MarketDetails on the size of the market, how big, other products out thereGap you see in the marketThe problem that isn’t yet solved for consumersIntroduce your productFirst you have a TADA! Slide that only shows your product with “Introducing [Name of your product] with a glory picture of your productNext are details on your product. For example, “___ is the first product that does ______” and maybe have a simple visual comparison chart showing how it stands out against others in the marketA slide or two about any traction you have, or the progress you’ve made to date – e.g. “In only two months, we’ve sold over 2000 units through farmers’ markets alone” or “Already have distribution in 100 regional stores” or “Prototype has been created and ready to be commercially manufactured with distributors standing by”Any other specifics you have like testimonials, sales dataMove forward strategyYour plans for new distribution, how you’re going to promote and market the productHow the brand could be expanded down the lineWhat’s the opportunityWhat have other brands in your space been sold for (e.g. Brand X sold for three times revenue)The Investment OfferWhat are you offering for their investment (e.g. The company is raising $100,000 in preferred shares at a pre-money valuation of $1,000,000)Plans for Using Investment FundingHow are you going to use the money you raise?Investors want to understand how their money is going to make the company make significant progressLay out your plans simplyThat’s it!…That’s how I like to approach putting an investor presentation together.Keep Your Presentation Crisp & CleanIt’s very tempting to cram your presentation with every detail you can think of…DON’T DO THAT! Always error on the side of making your presentation look clean and crisp.The goal of your presentation is for each slide to highlight a few critical points that you can talk to as you go over the presentation with a potential investor…so at the end of your discussion, the investor has a solid OVERVIEW of your company and the investment you’re offering.If they’re interested in moving forward, trust me, there’ll be plenty of opportunities to delve into the nitty gritty details once you’ve set the hook and gained their interest in investing.LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS – BORING BUT CRITICALNow one quick final note that is critical! I’m not going to get into the weeds on this here…but it’s important to at least point it out.In order to raise money, you should hire an experienced lawyer to prepare the appropriate paperwork required for accepting investor funding.Not your uncle Lou that does divorce law “but knows a thing or two about investments.”I mean a lawyer with direct experience in creating investor documents.Don’t skip this step! It’s important you have your legal ducks in a row, and it gives investors confidence that you’re going about things the right way. It’s one more factor that adds to your credibility.GET GOING!So that’s it! That's my strategy for raising money that’s helped me raise over $17 million in investor funding.As with most things in life, the devil’s in the details, so sit down, get yourself organized and start putting your compelling fundraising story together!If I can do it having never done it before, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to as well, especially with the head start this post should give you in the process.Best of luck!

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Catching a Kingpin: The Hunt for ‘El Chapo’ and the Deadly Lessons of the Opioid Crisis

Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán-Loera, the notorious Mexican drug kingpin convicted in New York last month, now faces a lifetime in prison. But for nearly  three decades he played a cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement in the U.S. and Mexico.

Hunting down the man who was said to have controlled a criminal empire surpassing that of both Pablo Escobar and Al Capone combined, was a fulltime job for Jack Riley, a now-retired Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) special agent and his colleagues, and he has turned his story into a new book, Drug Warrior: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo and the Rise of the Opioid Crisis.

Jack Riley

In a conversation with The Crime Report, Riley discussed why law enforcement agencies’ obsession with “metrics” prevented them from seeing the real danger posed by El Chapo’s organization, how the shadowy relationship between drug cartels and U.S. street gangs stoked the violence connected with opioid trafficking, and why Congress can no longer avoid addressing the role of financial interests, particularly big pharmaceutical companies, who profit from America’s addiction to drugs.

The Crime Report: What prompted you to write this book?

Jack Riley: I never intended to write a book when I retired, but with all the attention that Guzmán was getting, with some of the press in Mexico trying to make him look like a hero, almost a Robin Hood type figure, I felt that someone needed to put on paper exactly who this guy was, what a mastermind and mass murderer he was and, more importantly, how responsible he was for the opioid issue in this country.

It took almost two years to do, and it’s a difficult story to tell because there were so many heroic people that I was lucky enough to work with and serve with. I just wanted to make sure the story did them justice and really told the audience how much work we had to do, both domestically and overseas, to finally get this guy locked up.

TCR: In the book you point out that from the very beginning nobody was paying attention to opioids and that you were pushing for more attention throughout your career. Today it’s seen a national crisis. What changed?

 Riley: Many people kept their heads in the sand. [Opioid addiction exists] in virtually in every corner of this country. Every social economic class is affected by it.  It took a lot of convincing for people to really believe that we had a problem. The big pharmaceutical companies have a lot to do with what we’re dealing with now, as does, to a certain extent, the medical profession. Education is really crucial, and when we talk about education, I mean getting to the at-risk people. It’s great to send uniformed policemen into a third-grade elementary school, but we really need to refocus on the at-risk groups: the young adults, high school and college age, and young professionals—people who find themselves in the grip of addiction, whether they started it legitimately through a physician’s prescription or fell upon it in a social setting.

What people don’t realize is that when people get addicted to prescription opioid-based drugs, at some point the doctor stops writing prescriptions, the pharmacist won’t fill it, it becomes too expensive on the street, you can’t steal out of your grandmother’s medicine cabinet forever, so what do they do? They make that long dark walk down to the use of heroin. Chapo saw the prescription-pill addiction taking over, and he developed ways to increase import of heroin, increase poppy production in Mexico, and really flood the market with cheap high grade heroin.

And the difference is this time around much of it is smoked and snorted, much like cocaine, so the fear of using a needle, getting AIDS or hepatitis, is really not there. That accounted for a completely different user group than I think Americans, and certainly law enforcement, were used to. Now it was an every day thing in affluent suburbs around major cities as well as in inner cities. Take that one step further and look at Chicago, because I do believe it was the hub for the Sinaloa Cartel (Chapo’s organization), and probably still is.

He was able to develop a toxic relationship with nearly 100,000 street gang members there who, for the most part, make their living putting dope on the street, and flood that city with cheap high grade heroin. It really exploded across the whole Midwest. When I was the (DEA) boss in Chicago it led to much more violence, increased shootings and homicides, as these gangs fought to control areas. Heroin was really their lifeline in terms of profits. Chapo was able to bring them on board as unwitting contractors, the “Amway salesman” for Sinaloa. That really caught law enforcement and DEA by surprise.

TCR: Why is the connection, between drugs and violence often lacking in today’s narrative?

JR: There were always two schools of thought. One was the addiction and treatment side and the other was law enforcement. The mantra of the “war on drugs” really drives me crazy because it depicts a beginning and an end. There will be no end to addiction and violence, probably, for the rest of our existence, but it’s how we choose to confront it. For so long there was a separation [in recognizing] just how evil the cartels were and what a hold they had on the U.S. market.

This is the new face of international organized crime.

This is truly the new face of organized crime, of international organized crime, and we have to attack it as such. So, we have to maintain a very strong robust law enforcement platform here domestically, but we also have to continue to get involved overseas. If we had not built trust and the ability to share info with our Mexican counterparts, particularly the Mexican Marines, we would have been unable to capture Chapo and he certainly wouldn’t be sitting in jail in New York today.

I think people have separated them for so long because they’ve believed that it was simply an inner-city issue, something that we’ve been dealing with for generations. But, in reality, narcotics in this country, in particular heroin, are really fueling the bulk of our crime right now. It’s a tough concept to comprehend, but unless we understand it I don’t think we’re going to be able to come up with an overall strategy to effectively deal with it in the long run.

TCR: You write that, in the beginning, there was a lot of division and competitiveness between law enforcement agencies tasked with dealing with this problem. Why was it so hard to get agencies to work together?

JR: The one thing that Chapo Guzmán banked on, and what I think was built into his business plan, was that the good guys didn’t talk to the good guys. Cops weren’t talking to cops, we weren’t connecting the dots, and if we didn’t do that we couldn’t effectively attack his organization. Unfortunately, for years we have been tied to metrics. How many people did you arrest, how much dope did you seize? How much money and guns did you get?

Now, those are really important indicators of our success, but the real scorecard should be what impact did we have on the organization and the communities the organization operates in? And that’s a tough concept to get across at the grassroots of law enforcement because many times it means that a smaller investigation has to be turned over to another agency or another department that has a better opportunity to hit that organization. And it was built in for years to the way we reported a success to congress for budgetary reasons.

What I fear has happened is that we are returning to that because of a lack of understanding. That could take us back ten years. These cartels are like a four-legged table. If you remove one of the legs, that table is going to stay standing. You have to go after all of it, the transportation, the command and control, the distribution, the money side, the security side, the communication apparatus that they use, because that’s how you effectively dismantle and disrupt them. That’s when they’re most vulnerable. It is a difficult thing to get across. The DEA has done a nice job, the FBI has done nice job, and many of the larger police departments across the country who are now involved in our task forces understand the importance of sharing info, but there are still problems.

A prime example: a [police] in rural Kentucky stop an 18-year-old illegal Mexican with ten kilos of fentanyl in his trunk. They hold a press conference, the county sheriff gets reelected, but that’s the end of it. All the info that may have been gleaned from the Mexican, the phone numbers, who rented the car, what kind of compartment was the substance concealed in, what hotels did he stay in, what route did he ride [goes unrecorded]. All those things could be crucial to actually attacking the organization that he was supplying. Reaching that understanding can be tough, and we’re getting better and better at it. And I don’t think we’d have been effective going after Chapo and Sinaloa domestically if we hadn’t really upped our game. But, we still need work on that end, and unfortunately [the quality of that kind of police intelligence] varies across the country.

TCR: How does politics fit into tackling the opioid crisis and reducing the power of the cartels?

JR: I think that the relationship between Congress and big pharma is far too cozy and somebody needs to look into that. When I was a deputy administrator of the DEA, far too often we would have to settle for civil fines against these big companies when we really should have been going after them criminally because there were certain CEOs or managers who knew they were violating laws and regulations and did it repeatedly.

If you put a high-level (pharma) CEO in prison, it will send a shock wave through the industry.

My feeling was that if you take one of the top three or four pharmaceutical companies and you hit them for a $150 million civil fines, that’s taking a truckload of narco dollars from Chapo. It’s built into the business plan, they look at it as the cost of doing business. But if you were to take a high-level CEO or manager in one of those multimillion dollar companies and you put him in federal prison, I can guarantee you he’s not going to do too well in the prison yard playing kickball with real felons. It would send a shockwave through the industry that the government is serious. I think that’s where we need to move.

I am concerned that sometimes in law enforcement we have political appointees or politicians who really don’t understand what our agents do around the globe day in and day out. Sometimes because of that misunderstanding we don’t get the right message out to the public. I know the Department of Justice is thinking about those things and I hope the DEA leadership takes a more active role. When I was there I thought it was really crucial that we kept Congress informed on what we were doing, but, more importantly, what we were up against.

I remember we brought a map and showed [a congressional committee] what cartel was working in each U.S. city, and what street gang it was working with to put the dope on the street. Every one of those congressmen came out of their seat at the end of the hearing to check what was going on in their district. That’s really important. If we don’t tell them what we’re up against, we’re really going to just be reporting statistics every year that, on their own, really don’t show the impact on the community.

TCR: Do the affected communities and law enforcement agencies need to work together?

JR: That’s really important. One of the things we did right before I left was the DEA’s “360” program. We found ourselves working with local police and going into trafficker-infested neighborhoods or communities and removing the bad guys. Everything would be fine for a little while and then the new guys would show up. What we wanted, instead of taking that hill three or four times every couple years, was to get social services, community activists, and organizers involved.

It was a two-step process: we would do the law enforcement and then they would maintain control amongst themselves through social services and educational programs. They would police their own neighborhood. It was more effective and it built a relationship between law enforcement, the community, and the people responsible for the community that hadn’t existed before. Things like that, along with community policing, are really necessary, because if we are going to make a stand it has to be a public and private enterprise to make it long lasting. That goes into rethinking the way we educate and rethinking the treatment side of things to make sure it’s available to those who need it and want it.

When I talk about treatment, I’m not talking about repeat offenders or violent guys; let that take place in our correctional institutions. Instead, let’s really make an effort to try to get it to the people who want it. You wouldn’t have heard me say that 15 years ago. I would have said we’re going to arrest our way out of it. But I can tell you right now, with what we’re up against between heroin, the cartels, and now fentanyl, we won’t be able to do that. It has to be a systematic approach over a long period of time.

TCR: Does the media have a role?

JR: Speaking for the DEA, by the very nature of the work we do, sometimes extremely long investigations lasting years, our relationships with the media aren’t very good. When I was in charge of what was going on in the field, I would always encourage our field managers to build relationships [with journalists]. If you’re in law enforcement and you have no relation with the media at all, inevitably something bad is going to happen, and the time to build relationships is not in a crisis, it’s before it happens.

From my own experience, not everyone liked what we were doing, not everybody liked me, but they understood that we were trying to reach out to them so that if they had questions we could answer them. They had a better understanding of what we were up against and what our whole mindset was. I do a lot of speaking now, and what I’m often asked is why so many people have no idea what DEA does. That’s partly because of the job. We can’t talk about what we do, we do operate in the shadows a lot of the time. But we need to do a better job at the community level by going in and explaining things, like this is an area that’s controlled by certain organized crime groups putting dope on the street, here’s what we’re doing to try and mitigate that, and here’s what you can do to help us. That’s a difficult thing to do, but the key is to be consistent.

TCR: Today, on the more liberal side of the discussion, there is often the argument that, instead of fighting the war on drugs, we need to legalize and regulate them. Is that a realistic solution?

JR: I am a cop. I am not a politician. I took an oath to uphold the laws of the United States. There has been far too much pushing the problem down to law enforcement because the politicians either don’t want to deal with it or they want to have a scapegoat. In any country that’s tried legalization at any level, the one thing that is very clear to me is it never eliminates the black market. You even see that with cigarette sales. The criminal part of it is always going to be there.

Some of the original politicians who pushed marijuana legalization are rethinking it.

If you look at some of the states that have legalized marijuana, such as Colorado, whether they have reaped the benefits of the tax money that everyone saw initially or not, what are the things that don’t come to the surface? The social services, the lack of work productivity, you see a lot more driving under the influence and accidents. Those all cost the community and citizens money, but nobody really talks about it. I know in some of those states, if you talk to some of the original politicians who pushed it, they’re all rethinking it.

One of the things that always gets the DEA in hot water is that people think we are the ones who decide whether marijuana is legal or not. We have nothing to do with that. If tomorrow the FDA or whatever governing body said we think there are medical benefits to marijuana and they remove it off the Schedule One list, that’s fine. If there’s research that says the oils derived from marijuana could help childhood illnesses, we’d be the first ones there to wave the flag.

When I was there, any legitimate request for research to use marijuana for those things we fast-tracked and never turned down. I think there’s still that debate, but what I hope doesn’t happen is people don’t forget all the hoops we’ve been through before. I don’t think we need to start again, we just need to have an open dialogue about it and people need to make decisions.

TCR: One of the major talking points in the news today is the border, with many saying that’s where the drugs are coming from. How much does illegal immigration contribute to the import of drugs. Will a crackdown on immigration solve the problem?

JR: They’re related issues, but they’re also two separate issues. I’m all for border security. If they can get the wall built, I’m all for that. But the reality is, unless we put some additional safeguards at our ports of entry, in terms of being able to X-ray, and additional manpower, I don’t think we’re going to see large reductions. We know a majority of this stuff comes through our existing ports of entry. So, I think it has to be a combination of those two.

I do think the wall will have quite a bit of an effect on illegal alien migration. I don’t think there’s any question of that. But, there’s an old saying on the border that if you build a ten-foot wall, I’ll get an eleven foot ladder. I think that we’ve got to do both. And I’m hoping this president will do both, and I’m glad he’s taking it on. I used to tell our guys in Chicago, and the Chicago police, we’re 1,800 to 2,000 miles away from the border but, in terms of narcotic enforcement, we better work as if we’re on the border.

Isidoro Rodriguez is a contributing writer to The Crime Report. Readers’ comments are welcome.

Catching a Kingpin: The Hunt for ‘El Chapo’ and the Deadly Lessons of the Opioid Crisis syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

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7 Things About Top Trucking Companies You'll Kick Yourself For Not Knowing

Trucking businesses are normally cash companies. For example, if you're running a trucking business it could possibly be relevant to understand exactly what you spend on parking, gas and tolls. Contact trucking industry sources and see whether you may come across the refrigerated trucking businesses in your region.

Trucking companies might desire to procure you locked into with their expert services. It is tough to learn whether you are constantly getting the best rates if you use one trucking firm. Trucking organizations are happy to employ felons.

The companies have an immense number of funds on the market. Talking about medication, you will find a fantastic deal of pharmaceutical businesses which are watching for biochemistry graduates. Businesses that process financial information, including taxation solutions that are paid and banks, will always possess documents which are in demand of destruction.

The Ultimate Guide To Best Trucking Companies

Not every company is a member. However, it doesn't hurt to have a look. Really some businesses are a good deal simpler to promote network goodwill because of their industry sub-sectors. Any company will keep and maintain records.

In order to establish and grow the business it will help to be organized. You will need to register your company with the state agency, which means you are able to do company. You can begin your own firm.As stated earlier similar provider transport is provided by every transportation provider. You may wind up out of luck if you opt to attempt to produce the automobile transport company cover it. 1 thing you should not overlook is that finding a reliable auto transport company isn't an simple undertaking to do.

The organization will give you with a free quote for the automobile transportation servicesthat you desire. Inspection Every automobile transport company has to do the inspection of the vehicle to generate a succinct note of dents and damages . If so you need to comprehend how to get the most acceptable Auto Transport business in Florida to finish the task that's ideal for you, seamlessly.

Will Best Trucking Companies Ever Rule The World?

The businesses shouldn't be stiff when it's to do with the date to the exact same in addition to deliveries of the automobile. It's extremely important to compare unique businesses to find the best type of service that would fall under your financial plan. Nevertheless avoid picking if you pick a firm for varieties of package transport that isn't likely to assist you to save hefty sum.

All you need to do is sit back, unwind and watch for the trucking businesses to contact you! Trucking businesses use our website to find truck drivers which fulfill their standards and are from the regions where they need drivers throughout the nation! Trucking businesses work in the United States of america.

The list doesn't tell you so this means that you have to choose your own that is going to be the top one for the requirements and that is the perfect trucking company. This means you can shorten your listing of trucking companies by taking the truck companies which do not provide monitoring of the trucks away. An internet collection of trucking businesses can't accurately reflect businesses that understand that there's art and a science to fuel efficiency.

Enough Already! 15 Things About Trucking Companies Near Me We're Tired Of Hearing

Chose an organization with choices pick on a business that has multiple transport possibilities readily available, along with an asset division and a broker division as it effective at managing various types of freight and meeting the demands of sorts of customers. Some trucking companies enables you to take contracts which keeps you and learn more if you're an person. Trucking firms with transportation choices can find you the ideal shipping option and cost.

You have been a trucker for many years or whether you're just starting out in the trucking industry, there's a truck driving jobs waiting for you. For instance, a company with no affiliates are going to have only a few customers. But if you are choosing a business which produces every service under one roof, you may not find it. As you hunt for trucking companies hiring drivers look at this well-organized collection of trucking companies in the USA.

Check "Hire-A-Mover" or others and you're going to locate the help you demand. Take care you are likely to be entirely delighted and when you package up. Therefore, you save a whole lot of money as you need not cover the truck! You'll need to lower prices if you can't locate a way to earn more money.

If it was not for the service that is superior 2 decades past I'd give 1 or 2 stars to all American transportation. In summary service saves you lots of money. It makes it possible for you to discover high excellent support.

List is simple to do. You have or you must pay to park your rig. Ability of Manage Different kind of Goods you are searching to ship electronic equipment, you and the one which specializes in transport food items will not connect.

Based on the assortments of shipments you're doing and your company, LTL freight can be effective and affordable. Less than loading (LTL) freight is that the transportation of product or goods that doesn't take a full truckload as a result of more compact nature of the parcel. Greater Than Load LTL Freight Choosing the correct transport to ship out your goods to your customers is a significant option, even more so whenever you're in the center of picking out the right Less Than Load provider to manage your logistic requirements for your company operations.

LTL is among transportation services looking to provide the best value to their customers' advantages. LTL is actually considered one of the most inexpensive shipping choices on the market. Actually, the acronym LTL appears rather delight in some sort of foreign language .

LTL is a kind of Less Than truck Load. LTL isn't unique to transportation businesses, but the handling of the protocol produces a difference. LTL may be valuable to your own business offering an economical process to ship goods quick and inexpensive. LTL or less than truckload delivery is the very best delivery option for customers who should send little consignments to regions of the planet.

Whether you're interested in a trucking business to drive for or a institution to manage all your transportation requirements, we have what you want at EverGreen. Trucking businesses offer carriers, meaning that the list to select from may appear never-ending. There are a whole lot of trucking companies on the market it could be tricky to narrow down the best ones.

You have to look whether the provider is trustworthy and dependable enough. The organization may not have trucking jobs to go around. Evidently, it is imperative that you identify at least two to three differentflatbed trucking businesses, which provides you the chance to make significant comparisons regarding the forms of services they give, areas of speciality, number of years in organization, customer guarantees, pricing, and more.

In the event the trucking firm has dived to the next, then it may be a terrible sign. Deciding upon a flatbed trucking organization is a fantastic deal more beneficial. Whether you are searching to control a one-time shipment that is distinctive, or you'll have to locate a truck that you can depend on for all your trucking alternatives, Stein Transportation can provide help. It is very important to pick the best flatbed trucking businesses but if you're unsure exactly what things to attempt and find the search procedure can appear overwhelming.

Many organizations are currently delaying nonessential shipments as opposed to locate a truck. Trucking businesses may want to procure you locked into only using their specialist services. It's tough to learn whether you are always getting the best rates if you use one trucking company. Having said every one of the above, of course there are.

Keep your customers content and business will not be slow. The first thing you have got to do is to rule out your operating system, In case you've got a trucking business. Trucking businesses should consider such as a fleet of small vehicles to conquer a larger piece of the marketplace.

Entire businesses are built around serving their needs and requirements. Some smaller companies might be hesitant to explore marketing because of their lack of trust and comprehension. If you're in a really low margin business ( for instance, trucking) driving your care team to maximum productivity is an enormous part of your margins.

Over 80% of you see was on a truck later or earlier. Right now, routes that are long must be taken by the majority of the trucks back as they don't get a ideal return trip. Truck driving is only concerning the occupation in the nation without needing a post-secondary degree to deliver a strong middle class salary. Big trucks also are simpler because you donat need as low as a way to work on.

There is no way for trucks. The truck needs assistance, it's going alert the driver. For one, you've got trucks.

The organization is gearing up, in which the idea of having a car gets obsolete as the industry is, to get a future. If it finds that someone else owns the domain name to their name or product trademark, the company may select a different name or fight to get the domain . Truck businesses are reputable companies which are a portion of our nation's infrastructure.

If you stop ahead of your 12 month obligation is completed working for the company you will be requested to cover the part of the schooling that stays. Cargo is transported by trucking companies. The trucking provider becomes notified if a truck that is commercial inculpates an accident. Business trucking firms have budget limitations but a security application that's employed within the security budget will be devised by the suitable security business.

A lot of people in addition to firms have realized the value of getting your business name or product name as your domain name on the web. Of course there's not anything wrong with the manner trucking businesses have operated in a while it's clear matters have to be shaken up. Industrial trucking businesses want the services of security guards and safety firms for explanations that are numerous.

Companies have to fit in 1 aircraft because many products since sending auto parts using air freight is more costly than using different routes. You can not just afford to really go for kinds of international transport businesses. Global shipping organizations are currently playing part in household and commercial goods movement to another. There are a great deal of global shipping companies that offer shipping quotes that are different.

In 1 manner, the business is obtaining a partner. Such freight businesses have warehouses to guarantee that the dispatch in safe and genuine. If you're searching for a seasoned worldwide freight forwarding firm, follow the link below and get connected!

The 10 Scariest Things About Flatbed Trucking Companies

The business is strict with respect to safety difficulties, insisting when they're out on the streets that its drivers place a premium and delivering cargo. If a freight company doesn't have its carrier prices that are negotiated, there are other sorts of partnerships and technology which could be utilized instead of a transportation management system. Worldwide air freight companies may add a whole lot of value in your planning by assisting you to construct a shipping time matrix and also assist you to earn decision on back-up choices and first on routes that are unique. Experienced global air freight businesses can enable you to optimise your purchase processing time and help you to provide your freight.

Freight transports. There are lots of trucking businesses that you're able to get the job done for big and little. There are trucking organizations to select from, both big and little. There are lots of things and in the modern article I will touch on the trucking companies to work for. It's a 642 billion dollar industry and professional drivers are essential to the U.S. market. Whether you're just beginning in the trucking business or you've been a trucker for years, there's a truck driving jobs awaiting you.

Not all businesses will take to employ current CDL graduates or students. Bottom Line If you're looking for any number of the best trucking businesses, UPS is definitely worth another appearance! It's essential to pick the flatbed trucking businesses but the search procedure may seem overwhelming, if you're unsure exactly what things to try and find.

As a new driver, you won't have the ability to select the business that will hire you. Largest trucking businesses and the finest need to be in a position to offer most, if not all, of the characteristics listed above. Conclusion Top 6 Best Trucking Services With so many choices for the trucking company, it can be difficult to pick the one.