Posted as a reminder that management and capital often really doesn't care that much what happens to labor and regular people.
In 1911, it was textile workers. In 2026, it's everybody. You may care, for example, about big oil and big ag, but it doesn't care about you. It doesn't care that much about you if you are working for it, and you can't be assured that it cares if your children inherit a planet with the surface temperature of the sun.
Oh, sure, there are some that might, on occasion. But don't fool yourself that Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or Jeff Bezos, and their pals, are pulling for you.
146 garment workers—123 women and girls and 23 men, out of a workforce of 500, died in Manhattan's horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Most of the victims were Italian or Jews immigrants 14 to 23 years old. 62 of the victims jumped to their deaths.
The fabric fire in the fireproof building broke out five minutes before end of shift. The doors to the stairwells and exits were locked to prevent unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft
Oh, but don't worry. . . today's oligarchs have your vest interest at heart. . .
A really interesting Richard C. Miller photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken, which we learned of due to Reddit's 80 Years Ago Sub, and which we repost here via fair use.
Miller had "discovered" Monroe, who was already modeling following her photo spread in World War Two's Yank. Miller, typical for the era, photographed her in swimsuits, including bikinis (very modest ones by today's standards), but also had a an entire series of other topics, including the subject shooting firearms. Here he depicted her in a wedding dress.
The real life model had already been married and divorced by this time, having married at age 16 and then filing for divorce while her husband was deployed in the Navy during the Second World War. This photograph is actually commonly claimed to be a wedding photo from her first marriage, which it is not, although the veil is remarkably similar to the one she actually wore in her wedding.
Actual photograph of Monroe at her first wedding, when she was 16 years old.
In the studio photograph she's holding some sort of book with a Christian cross on it, with that style of cross depiction very common for the era. This is what causes us to note this photograph in a way, as it brings up the topic addressed here:
While indelicate, this also shows the portrayal of a really beautiful woman before Playboy perverted all of that.
Monroe was, as is well known, Playboy's first, and unwilling, centerfold. But what's interesting here is that prior to Playboy arriving on the scene, this was not an uncommon depiction of a really beautiful woman. There were, of course, already some women who were focused on for being really busty, Jane Russell giving an example, but the theme did not absolutely dominate. To look at the 19 year old Monroe here, you would not have thought of her in that fashion. A decade later, you would, and even after Life intervened to push her nude photograph first as an art item. We've dealt with that before here as well, although frankly we need to modify our entry. That post is here:
An agricultural country which consumes its own food is a finer thing than an industrial country, which at best can only consume its own smoke.
Chesterton.
A long time ago I started a post on one of our companion blogs about agriculturalist and the Republican Party. I can't find it now, maybe I published it, or maybe I didn't.
As I"m in both worlds, the urban and the agricultural, I get exposed to the political views of both camps. The Trump administration has made this a really interesting, and horrifying, experience. By and large professionals detest Donald Trump and regard him as a charleton Farmers and ranchers are, however, amongst his most loyal base, even though there's no real reason for them to be such. Indeed, with the damage that Trump is doing to agriculture this will be a real test of whether farmers and ranchers simply reflexively vote Republican or stop doing son and wake up.
The Democratic Party, not the GOP, saved family farmers and ranchers in this country when the forces of the unabated Homestead ACt and the Great Depression were going to destroy them. They've seemingly resented being saved from those forces, however, as an impingement on their freedoms, and they've bristled at every government act since that time. Farmers and ranchers would rather sink in a cesspool of their own making than be told how to properly build one, basically.
We here, of course, aren't a pure agricultural blog. This is an Agrarian blog, and that's different. We are, quite frankly, much more radical.
Still, we can't help but notice that American agriculturalist, more than any other class of businessmen, have voted to screw themselves by voting for Donald Trump. They voted for tariff wars that leave their products marooned here in the US while foreign competitors take advantage of that fact. They've voted for a guy who thinks global warming is a fib (which many of them do as well) in spite of the plain evidence before their eyes, and the fact that this will destroy the livelihoods of the younger ones. They've voted to force economic conditions that will force them off the lands and their lands into the hands of the wealthy.
Indeed, on that last item, they've voted for people who share nothing in common with them whatsoever and would just as soon see them out of business, or simply don't care what happens to them.
They've voted, frankly, stupidly.
Well, nothing cures stupidly more than a giant dope slap from life, and they're getting one right now. The question is whether they'll vote in 2026 and 2028 to be bent over, or start to ask some questions.
We're going to post those questions here.
1. What connection does the candidate have with agriculture?
They might not have any and still be a good candidate, but if they're running around in a plaid shirt pretending to be a 19th Century man of the soil, they should be dropped.
They should also be dropped if they're like Scott Bessent, who pretends to be a soybean farmer when he's actually a major league investor. Indeed, big money is the enemy of agriculture and always has been.
I'd also note that refugees from agriculture should be suspect. The law is full of them, people who were sent off to law school by their farmer and rancher parents who believed, and in their heart of hearts still believe, that lawyers, doctors and dentist, indeed everyone in town, don't really work. All of these refugees live sad lives, but some of them spend time in their sad lives on political crusades that are sort of a cry out to their parents "please love me".
I know that sounds radical, but it's true.
2. What will they do to keep agricultural lands in family hands, and out of absentee landlord hands?
And the answer better not be a "well I'm concerned about that". The answer needs to be real.
From an agrarian prospective, no solution that isn't a massive trend reversing one makes for a satisfactory answer to this question. Ranches being bought up by the extremely wealthy are destroying the ability of regular people to even dare to hope to be in agriculture. This can be reversed, and it should be, but simply being "concerned" won't do it.
3. What is your view on public lands?
If the answer involves transferring them out of public hand, it indicates a love of money that's ultimately always destructive to agriculture in the end.
Indeed, in agricultural camps there remains an unabated lust for the public lands even though transferring them into private hands, whether directly or as a brief stop over in state hands, would utterly destroy nearly ever farm and ranch in local and family ownership . The change in value of the operations would be unsustainable, and things would be sold rapidly.
Public lands need to stay in public hands.
4. How do you make your money?
People think nothing of asking farmers "how many acres do you have" or ranchers "how many cattle do you have", both of which is the same as asking "how much money do you have".
Knowing how politicians make their money is a critical thing to know. No farmer or rancher, for example, has anything in common with how the Trump family makes money, and there's no reason to suppose that they view land as anything other than to be forced into developers hands and sold.
5. What is your position on global warming?
If its any variety of "global warming is a fib", they don't deserve a vote.
6. What is your position on a land ethnic?
If they don't know what that means, they don't deserve a vote.
7. What's on your dinner table, and who prepares it?
That may sound really odd, and we don't mean for it to be a judgment on what people eat. . . sort of. But all agriculturalist are producing food for the table. . . for the most part, if we ignore crops like cotton, or other agricultural derived textiles, of which there are a bunch, and if we ignore products like ethanol.
Anyhow, I'll be frank. If a guy is touring cattle country and gives an uneasy chuckle and says, "well, I don't eat much meat anymore" do you suppose he really cares about ranching? If you do, you need your head checked.
You probably really need it checked if the candidate doesn't every grill their own steak but has some sort of professional prepare their dinner every night. That would mean that they really have very little chance of grasping
8. What's your understanding of local agriculture?
That's a pretty broad question, but I'm defining agriculture very broadly here. Indeed, what I mean is the candidates understanding of the local use of nature, to include farming and ranching, but to also include hunting, fishing and commercial fishing.
Indeed, on the latter, only the commercial fishing industry seems to have politicians that really truly care what happens to them. How that happened isn't clear, but it does seem to be the case.
Otherwise, what most politicians seem to think is that farmers wear plaid flannel shirts. I see lots of them wondering around in photographs looking at corrals, or oil platforms, but I never see one actually do any work. . . of pretty much any kind. That is, I don't expect to see Chuck Gray flaking a calf, for example.
Last and prior editions:
Claiming the mantle of Christ in politics. Don't support liars and don't lie. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 4.
Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
We just published this item here on Donald Trump's insatiable lust for the destruction of land, lands even beyond our borders.
In the movie The Patriot, which is okay but not great, commences with these lines:
I have long feared, that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bare.
In a lot of ways, that opening scene is the best one in the movie.
No nation has a singular linear history, even though people tend to hear things that way. "This happened, and then that happened, resulting in this. . . ". In reality, things are mixed quite often, and things are quite fluid with juxtapositions.
Shakespeare claimed:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Perhaps. But in reality the tide in the affairs of men drags everyone along with it. But it's a rip tide. People's individual goals, desires and aspirations often are quite contrary to the tide on the surface.
That's certainly been the case with the United States.
If you have a Trumpian view of the world, the history of the United States looks like this, sort of:
Lots of people have that view. We came, we saw, we exploited, and everyone got happy working for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Trouble is, that's not true for a lot of reasons, a core one being it doesn't comport with who we really are. The entire worship of wealth and what it brings, and the wealthy and who they are, is deeply contrary to our natures, and frankly men like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are deeply perverted. Not because of their relationship with women, or because their names appear in the Epstein files in some context, although in the case of Trump, we really still don't know what context, but because of their shallow avaricious acquisition for and desire for wealth.
Timothy warns us:
Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.
And not only have their pierced themselves, but they pierce others, and entire societies with them.
So let's look at a few concrete things that we feel should be done.
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men
Revisit the Homestead Act.
Right from the onset of English colonization of North America, there was a pull between business exploitation and the simple desire for an agrarian place of one's own.
The truth of the matter is that when the nation started off, most people weren't "Pilgrims" seeking shelter from religious oppression. Nor did they wish to be servants of big mercantile enterprises. Most of the early English colonists were from agriculture or the trades and wanted to just work for themselves. That's about it.
The American Revolution was as much about that as anything else. When American Colonials dumped tea in harbors, they were protesting taxes, but what they were also doing is dumping mercantile controlled property into waste. It was grown somewhere else and it belong to rich remote classes.
The struggle was always there. The American South in particular had the planter class which depended upon enslaved labor to raise a market crop. That was about generating wealth. Most Southerners, in contrast, were Yeoman who had small places of their own. When the Civil War came the wealthy had the South fight the war.
The analogies to the present day are simply to thick to ignore.
The Homestead Act came about during that war, and in real ways, it expressed a Jeffersonian dream. People willing to invest their own labor could acquire a place of their own.
The drafters of the Act never envisioned the wealthy controlling the land. In some very real ways it was wealthy landowners that the North was fighting at the time.
Over the last few days residents of Wyoming have read about Chris Robinson, CEO of Salt Lake City-based Ensign Group, L.C., buying the Pathfinder Ranch. I have nothing about him personally, but the listed price for the ranch was $79.5M due to its giant size.
I can personally recall when it was owned by locals At that price, rather obviously, Robinson isn't planning on making money from cattle. And to make matters a bit worse, residents of Natrona County got to read about another local outfit going up for sale, which is much smaller, for $9M.
Even into my adult years, by which time it was already impossible for somebody not born into ranching or farming to buy a place such that it could be their vocation, most ranches were owned by locally born ranchers. This trend of playground pricing is making the status of the land the same as that which English colonists were seeking to escape from.
This could be fixed by amending the Homestead Act. The homesteading portion of that is fixed, but it would still be possible to go back and amend it such that land deeded to individuals under it, had to remain in agricultural use, and had to be held by families that made their money that way. exclusively.
I know it won't be, anytime soon, but it should be.
Revisit "Ad coelum ad damnum"
One of the absolute absurdities of the original Homestead Act is that it gave away not only the surface of the land, but the mineral rights as well. This made the system sort of like buying lottery tickets. Some people got rich just of because of where they'd chosen to homestead.
I really struggle with the concept of private ownership of minerals, including oil and gas, in the first place. I understand private enterprise exploiting it, but owning it? Why? It's not like private enterprise put the minerals in the ground.
Addressing this creates real constitutional problems, but ideally the mineral wealth of the nation should belong to everyone in it, not private parties. And it should be exploited, or not, in the national interest, not in the primary economic interest of those who claim to own it.
I know that this brings up the cry of "that's Socialism". It probably really is, but an unequal accidental distribution of mineral wealth on lands taken from the native inhabitants isn't just. At a bare minimum, something needs to be looked into. Indeed, as there was no intent to transfer that mineral title in the first place, perhaps it could collectively be restored and held in truth for the descendants of those original inhabitants.
Tax the wealthy
Every since Ronald Reagan there's been a ludicrous idea that taxing the wealthy hurts the economy. We know that this is completely false. We also know that a certain percentage of the wealthy will allow themselves to become obscenely wealthy if allowed to, and that they'll harm everyone else as a result.
There's no reason on earth that anyone ought to be a billionaire. Indeed, if you have more than $50M in assets, you have too much and something is potentially wrong with your character. High upper income tax rates and wealth taxes can and should address this. Elon Musk can be nearly just as annoying if his net worth was $50M as whatever it currently is, but he'd be a lot less destructive.
An alternative to this, if this is simply too radical, is to prevent corporations from owning most things, and to provide that once they get to be a certain size, at least 50% of their ownership goes to employees of those corporations. It'd at least distribute the wealth some, and keep avarice from defining our everyday existence.
Final thoughts
What seems to be clear in any event is that we cannot keep going in this directly. Today's "conservatives" serve the very interests that the American Patriots rebelled against, remote wealth. In spite of their tattoos and car window stickers, they'd form the Loyalist Militia trying to put down an an agrarian revolution in 1776. The thing is, that those conditions always lead to revolution. They did in 1776 in North America, and then again in more extreme form in France a few years later. They lead to the uprisings of 1848, the Anglo Irish War in 1916 and the Russian Revolution in 1917. It's time to address this while we can, as it will be addressed.
I experience synchronicity in some interesting ways from time to time. Ways which, really, are too strong to put up to coincidence.
Sometime last week I saw this post on Twitter by O. W. Root, to which I also post my reply:
O.W. Root@owroot
Nov 29
Sometimes I have wondered if I should write about being a parent so much, but I've realized that it's one of the most universal things in the whole world, and one of the most life changing things for all who do it, so it's good to do.
Lex Anteinternet@Lex_Anteinterne
Nov 30
It's also, quite frankly, one of the very few things we do with meaning. People try take meaning from their jobs, for example, which are almost universally meaningless.
My reply, was frankly, extremely harsh. "[A]lmost universally meaningless"?
Well, in fact, yes. I was going to follow that up with a post about existential occupations, but I hadn't quite gotten around to it when I heard some podcasts and saw some web posts that synched into it. I've been cat sitting recently and because of that, I've been able to catch up on some old ones (note the synchronicity of that. . . the tweet above was from November 29/30, but the podcast episode was from June). The podcast episode in question is:
That episode discusses a very broad range of very interesting topics, and it referenced this one amongst them: Catholicism Is So Hot Right Now. Why?
I haven't listened to the second podcast, but the first is phenomenal.
These are all linked?
Yes they are.
I've noted here on this blog and on Lex Anteinternet that the young seem to be turning towards social conservatism and traditionalism. It's easy to miss,. and its even easy to be drawn to it and participate in it without really realizing it. This is different, we'd further note, than being drawn to the various branches of political conservatism. There's definitely a connection, of course, but there are also those who are going into social conservatism/traditionalism while turning their backs on politics entirely, although there are real dangers to turning your back on politics.
What seems to be going on is that people are attracted to the truth, the existential truths, and the existential itself.
Put another way, people have detected that the modern world is pretty fake, and it doesn't comport at all with how we are in a state of nature. It goes back to what we noted here:
I think what people want is a family and a life focused on that family, not on work.
As noted above, most work is meaningless. That doesn't mean it's not valuable.
Very few jobs are existential for our species.* We're meant to be hunters and gatherers, with a few other special roles that have to do with the organization of ourselves, and our relation to the existential. Social historians like to claim that society began to "advance" when job specialization, a byproduct of agriculture, began, and there's some truth to that, but only a bit, if not properly understood. That bit can't be discounted, however, as when agriculture went from subsistence agriculture to production agriculture, i.e., agriculture that generated a surplus, wealth was generated and wealth brought in a great perversion of social order. Surplus production brought in wealth, which brought in a way for the separation of wealth from the people working the land, and ultimately ownership of the land itself. Tenant farming, sharecropping and the like, and agricultural poverty, were all a byproduct of that. When Marx observed that this developed inevitably into Feudalism, he was right.
Agriculture, originally, was a family or family band small scale deal. While it's pretty obvious to anyone who has ever put in a garden how it worked, social theorist and archeologist got it all wrong until they made some rather obvious discoveries quite recently, one of the most obvious being that hunter/gatherer societies are also often small scale agricultural ones. How this was missed is baffling as Europeans had first hand experience with this in regard to New World cultures, most of which were hunting societies but many of which put in various types of farms. Even North American native bands that did not farm, it might be noted, were well aware of farming themselves. Even into the present era hunter/gatherer societies, to the extent they still exist, often still practice small scale farming.
It turns out that grain farming goes way, way back. But why wouldn't it have?
Additional specialization began with the Industrial Revolution, and that's when things really began to become massively warped for our species, first for men, and then with then, with feminization, for women. We've long noted that, but given the chain of coincidences noted above, we've stumbled on to somebody else noting it. As professor Randall Smith has written:
It’s important to understand that the first fatal blow to the family came during the Industrial Revolution when fathers left the house for the bulk of the day. The deleterious results that followed from ripping fathers away from their children were seen almost immediately in the slums and ghettos of the large industrial towns, as young men, without older men to guide them into adulthood, roamed the streets, un-mentored and un-apprenticed. There, as soon as their hormonal instincts were no longer directed into work or caring for families, they turned to theft and sexual license.
Randall Smith, A Traditional Catholic Wife?
So, in the long chain of events, there was nothing wrong at all about farming. There was something wrong about the expropriation of the wealth it created, and that fueled the fire of a lot of development since them. That first set of inequities ultimately lead to peasant revolts in Europe on occasion, and to a degree can be regarded as what first inspired average Europeans to immigrate to various colonies. . . a place where they could own their own land. . and then to various revolutions against what amounted to propertied overlords. The American Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, and the Russian Revolution all had that element to them. Industrialization, which pulled men out of the household, sparked additional revolutions to counter the impacts of the Industrial Revolution, with some being violent, but others not being. The spread of democracy was very much a reaction to the the evils of the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately, so was the spread of Communism.
Money has never given up, so the same class of people who demanded land rent in the bronze and iron age, and then turned people into serfs in the Middle Ages, are still busy to do that now. As with then, they often want the peasants to accept this as if its really nifty. People like Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk are busy piling up money and concubines while assuring the peasantry that their diminished role in the world is a good thing as its all part of Capitalism.
It is part of Capitalism, which is a major reason that Capitalism sucks, and that there's been efforts to restrain its worse impulses since its onset, with efforts to limit corporations at first, and then such things as the Sherman Anti Trust Act later on.
All that's been forgotten and we now have a demented gilded prince and his privileged acolytes living off the fat of the land while people have less and less control of their own lives. Most people don't want to glory in the success of Star Link of even care about it, but people feed into such things anyway, as the culture has glorified such things since at least the end of the Second World War, the war seemingly having helped to fuel all sorts of disordered desires in society that would bloom into full flower in the 1960s. A society that grew wealthy from the war and the destruction that it created, saw itself as divorced from nature and reality, and every vice that could be imagined was condoned.
And we're now living in the wreckage.
I think this is what is fueling a lot of this. Starting particularly in the 1950s, and then ramping up in the 60s and 70s, careerism really took hold in American society, along with a host of other vices. Indeed, again, as Professor Smith has noted:
The “traditional Catholic family” where the husband worked all day and the wife stayed home alone with the children only really existed – and not all that successfully – in certain upper-middle class WASPy neighborhoods during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Working in an office all day is not necessarily evil (depending upon how it affects your family). It’s just modern. There’s nothing especially “traditional” about it.
Most careers are just dressed up jobs, not much else. Nonetheless people have been taught they need to leave their homes, their families, they're very natures, in order to have a career, sometimes abandoning people in their wake. They're encouraged to do so, to a large extent.
Indeed, I dare say, for most real careerist, nearly always abandoning people.
And average people are sick of it.
That's why young men are turning towards traditionalism of all sorts. They're looking for something of value, and they're not going to find it behind a computer in a cubicle. And that's why young women are reviving roles that feminist attempted to take away form them.
I was going to use the work "revolution", but didn't as I don't want it suggested that I mean an armed revolution. I'm not. Indeed, I'm not keen on violence in general, and as I intend to refer to the American Revolution in this essay, I'll note that had I lived in the 1770s, I'd have been genuinely horrified by events. I highly doubt that I would have joined the "Patriots" and likewise I wouldn't have joined the Loyalist either. I'd have been in the 1/3d that sat the war out with out choosing sides, but distressed by the overall nature of it.
Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State. The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.
Oligarchy is now where we are at.
I've been thinking about it, and Dr. Jones has really hit on something. The nature of Americanism, if you will, is in fact not its documentary artifacts and (damaged) institutions, it is, rather, in what it was. At the time of the American Revolution the country had an agrarian/distributist culture and that explained, and explains, everything about it.
The Revolution itself was fought against a society that had concentrated oligarchical wealth. To more than a little degree, colonist to British North America had emigrated to escape that.
We've been losing that for some time. Well over a century, in fact, and indeed dating back into the 19th Century. It started accelerating in the mid 20th Century and now, even though most do not realize it, we are a full blown oligarchy.
Speaking generally, we may say that whatever legal enactments are held to be for the interest of various constitutions, all these preserve them. And the great preserving principle is the one which has been repeatedly mentioned- to have a care that the loyal citizen should be stronger than the disloyal. Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state. A nose which varies from the ideal of straightness to a hook or snub may still be of good shape and agreeable to the eye; but if the excess be very great, all symmetry is lost, and the nose at last ceases to be a nose at all on account of some excess in one direction or defect in the other; and this is true of every other part of the human body. The same law of proportion equally holds in states. Oligarchy or democracy, although a departure from the most perfect form, may yet be a good enough government, but if any one attempts to push the principles of either to an extreme, he will begin by spoiling the government and end by having none at all. Wherefore the legislator and the statesman ought to know what democratical measures save and what destroy a democracy, and what oligarchical measures save or destroy an oligarchy. For neither the one nor the other can exist or continue to exist unless both rich and poor are included in it. If equality of property is introduced, the state must of necessity take another form; for when by laws carried to excess one or other element in the state is ruined, the constitution is ruined.
Aristotle, Politics.
Corporations were largely illegal in early American history. They existed, but were highly restricted. The opposite is the case now, with corporations' "personhood" being so protected by the law that the United States Supreme Court has ruled that corporate political spending is a form of free speech and corporations can spend unlimited money on independent political broadcasts in candidate elections. This has created a situation in which corporations have gobbled up local retail in the US and converted middle class shopkeeping families into serfs. It's also made individual heads of corporations obscenely, and I used that word decidedly, wealthy.
Wealth on the level demonstrated by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump simply should not exist. It's bad for average people and its corrupting of their souls. That corruption can be seen in their unhinged desire for self aggrandizement and acquisition. Elon Must acquires young white women of a certain type for concubinage Donald Trump, whose money is rooted in the occupation of land, has collected bedmates over the years, "marrying" some of them and in his declining mental state, seeks to demonstrated his value through grotesque molestation of public property.
Those are individual examples of course, but the government we currently have, while supported by the Puritan class, disturbingly features men of vast wealth, getting wealthier, with a government that operates to fork over more money to those who already have it. The MAGA masses, which stand to grow poorer, and in the case of the agricultural sector are very much already suffering that fate, deservedly after supporting Trump, continue to believe that the demented fool knows what he's doing.
I don't know the source of this, but this illustration perfectly depicts how MAGA populists treat Donald Trump.
This system is rotten to the core and it needs to be broken. Broken down, broken up, and ended.
The hopes of either the Democrats or the Republicans waking up and addressing it seem slim. The GOP is so besotted with it's wealthy leaders that the Speaker of the House, who claims to be a devout Christian, is attempting to keep the release of the names of wealthy hebephiles secret. Only wealth and power can explain that. The Democrats, which since 1912 have claimed to be the part of the working man, flounder when trying to handle the economic plight of the middle class. Both parties agree on only one thing, that being you must never consider a third party.
It is really time for a third part in this country.
In reality, of course, there are some, but only one is worth considering in any fashion, that being the American Solidarity Party. Perhaps it could pick up the gauntlet here and smack it across the face of the oligarchy. Or perhaps local parties might do it. In my state, I think that if enough conservative Republicans (real conservatives, not the Cassie Cravens, John Bear, Dave Simpson, Bob Ide, Chuck Gray servants of the Orange Golden Calf Republicans) it could be done locally. The U.S. has a history, although its barely acknowledged, of local parties, including ones whose members often successfully run on the tick of two parties. New York's Zohran Mamdani and David Dinkins, for example were both Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialist Party. Democrats from Minnesota are actually members of the Democratic Farm Labor Party, which is an amalgamation of two parties. There's no reason a Wyoming Party couldn't form and field its own candidates, some of whom could also run as Republicans.
Such a party, nationally or locally, needs to be bold and take on the oligarchy. There's no time to waste on this, as the oligarchy gets stronger every day. And such candidates will meet howls of derision. Locally Californian Chuck Gray, who ironically has looked like the Green Peace Secretary of State on some issues, will howl about how they're all Communist Monarchist Islamic Stamp Collectors. And some will reason to howl, such as the wealthy landlord in the state's legislature.
The reason for that is simple. Such a party would need to apply, and apply intelligently, the principals of subsidiarity, solidarity and the land ethic. It would further need to be scientific, agrarianistic, and distributist.
The first thing, nationally or locally, that such a party should do is bad the corporate ownership of retail outlets. Ban it. That would immediately shift retail back to the middle class, but also to the family unit. A family might be able to own two grocery or appliance stores, for example, but probably not more than that.
The remote and corporate ownership of rural land needs to come to an immediate end as well. No absentee landlords. People owning agricultural land should be only those people making a living from it.
That model, in fact, should apply overall to the ownership of land. Renting land out, for any reason, ought to be severely restricted. The maintenance of a land renting system, including residential rent, creates landlords, who too often turn into Lords.
On land, the land ethic ought to be applied on a legal and regulatory basis. The American concept of absolute ownership of land is a fraud on human dignity. Ownership of land is just, but not the absolute ownership. You can't do anything you want on your property, nor should you be able to, including the entry by those engaged in natural activities, such as hunting, fishing, or simply hiking, simply because you are an agriculturalist.
While it might be counterintuitive in regard to subsidiarity, it's really the case, in this context, that the mineral resources underneath the surface of the Earth should belong to the public at large, either at the state, or national, level. People make no contribution whatsoever to the mineral wealth being there. They plant nothing and they do not stock the land, like farmers do with livestock. It's presence or absence is simply by happenstance and allowing some to become wealthy and some in the same category not simply by luck is not fair. It
Manufacturing and distribution, which has been address, is trickier, but at the end of the day, a certain amount of employee ownership of corporations in this category largely solves the problem. People working for Big Industry ought to own a slice of it.
And at some level, a system which allows for the accumulation of obscene destructive levels of wealth is wrong. Much of what we've addressed would solve this. You won't be getting rich in retail if you can only have a few stores, for example. And you won't be a rich landlord from rent if most things just can't be rented. But the presence of the massively wealthy, particularly in an electronic age, continues to be vexing. Some of this can be addressed by taxation. The USCCB has stated that "the tax system should be continually evaluated in terms of its impact on the poor.” and it should be. The wealthy should pay a much more progressive tax rate.
These are, of course, all economic, or rather politico-economic matters. None of this addresses the great or stalking horse social issues of the day. We'll address those, as we often have, elsewhere. But the fact of the matter is, right now, the rich and powerful use these issues to distract. Smirky Mike Johnson may claim to be a devout Christian, but he's prevented the release of names of men who raped teenage girls. Donald Trump may publicly state that he's worried about going to Hell, but he remains a rich serial polygamist. J.D. Vance may claim to be a devout Catholic, but he spends a lot of time lying through his teeth.
And, frankly, fix the economic issues, and a lot of these issues fix themselves.
Well, yes, he owns a ranch. But a working owner he is not. He's a pharmaceutical industry titan.
In a more just society, frankly, he wouldn't own the ranch at all. It'd be owned by those who actually derived a living from it.
Also of interest, Iron Bar Holdings, the petitioner, is represented by Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP of Denver, with Robert Reeves Anderson as counsel of record. The respondent is represented by a local Wyoming firm. I note this as there's no reason that the common attorney bullshit claim "I'm only doing my job" really ought to hold, for civil litigation. If you run into a Colorado attorney in Wyoming, ask them who they work for. if they work for this outfit, tell them to go home, we don't want them here.
For that matter, if you are a Colorado user of public lands, as they want to take part of what you own, there's no reason to accommodate them with a seat at the table, literally. "Want a cup of coffee sir? Drive to Texas. . . ."
At the trial court level, Iron Bar had been represented by Gregory Weisz, who is a Wyoming attorney. He's left private practice and is with the AG now. A lawyer with his firm took his place, but the case was well developed by then, and in the appeal stage, so they really had no choice.
So, what am I saying. Well, I'm saying that people who don't derive their income principally form a ranch, ought not to own it. And I'm saying that by representing carpetbaggers, you are a carpetbagger. The old lawyer bromides about serving the system are BS. Regular people, including other lawyers, don't have to excuse your choice of clients when you are taking on a plaintiff. It's not like being assigned a defendant.
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