The Muslim Ban: America Loses Its Mind.

You already have minimum wage zero hour contracts fire at will workers in Amazon warehouses literally shitting in their pants because they will get sacked if they go to the toilet.

Its the anecdote about slowly boiling a frog. You already sleepwaked into a fascist leadership, the small steps to total subservience will pass without hue and cry. They can eradicate the middle classes with white collar automation and healthcare costs, the poor already live in a shoot to kill environment. Face it, unless you start putting these people up against a wall soon you or your grandchildren are fucked.

And then we should eat their hearts to gain their power.

You have a high ranking place in Glorious Penbladian Socialist-Authoritarian Utopia whenever you want it, comrade.

Keep in mind family farms aren’t these little peasant plots. With hundreds of acres and a few million dollars worth of mortgage they are all automated to the hilt too. It’s not like they can’t afford machines with all that equity. Bigger corporate farms are a bit more efficient due to scale, but not so much that their big profits (in good years) don’t leave room for smaller-but-still-big family farms. Of course when there are too many bad years in a row the family farmer has to sell out because they wind up maximally mortgaged, but that’s a different problem.

I’m hoping that the current situations playing out in Washington and certain red states will have the end result of said people essentially putting themselves up against the wall (at least politically) resulting in a swing back towards normalcy starting in 2018 and culminating in 2020. Mitigating the damage done between now and then is the mission.

I’m aware of what they are. I lived across from an orchard. I rode my horses through the lines of trees until a large corporation basically closed that off. I’ve known actual ranches, raised pigs for 4-H too. I was also in high school when CA experienced a bumper crop and when the migrant workers didn’t continue north they tried to recruit from the schools.

Family farms can vary in size, and based on the crop automation may or may not be entirely feasible. The local farmers also have the additional challenge of inheritance, or at least a number of them don’t have kids that actually want to stay in the business…

My point is though, there is no such thing as a job someone wont’ do, for a price. We have dangerous, physically difficult jobs today, but they pay more. It’s not lazy to decline a wage, and that doesn’t mean no one will work the job either. Just not for the price.

Lower income families spend about a sixth of their income on food, which is much higher than middle class or higher income families. While I’m sure a pay raise would be nice for farm laborers, it would also likely be a huge burden for the poor.

Personally, I don’t understand why the plight of family owned farms is more of a crisis than, say, the plight of family owned bookstores. If anything, I’m more interested in maximizing economies of scale for the former. People won’t die if they can’t afford to buy the latest bestselling novel.

Looky `ere boys! We got ourselves a READER!

Tradition. America from it’s beginning was an agrarian society and really remained so until the Great Depression for the most part.

Yes, and America also has a tradition of slavery. Not every tradition is worth keeping.

Well, many of the people claiming it’s worth it to prioritize the tradition of private farms and the tradition of coal mining would probably love to also reinstate the tradition of slavery. It would sure make private farms a lot more affordable to run!

Food security is actually a thing to be concerned about. You don’t want to monopolize your food production with a few giant producers the same way you don’t want all your media to come from a few giant cable companies.

You can live without books, food is a bit more of a necessity.

Cable companies do form monopolies. In many markets, you only have one choice for high speed Internet.

Food production, even in the hands of 2-3 producers, is not the same. You would still have competition. After all, there is fierce competition over operating systems, even though everyone has only three options. Only two for mobile.

Seattle is suing over the sanctuary city thing.

Woohoo! Go us!

Good for Seattle because stuff like this:

The “sanctuary” label is unofficial. It isn’t a legal term with a single, agreed-upon definition.

Actually needs a definition before you make a law about it, and after that’s done… should probably still be able to sue the Fed,

http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-hawaii-judge-trump-travel-1490816530-htmlstory.html

The Hawaii federal judge who brought President Trump’s revised travel ban to a national halt this month extended his order blocking the ban’s enforcement.

The move Wednesday sets the stage for the Justice Department to appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the ruling.

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson’s original order halting the travel ban was issued March 15, a day before the ban was to go into effect, in the form of a temporary restraining order.

At a hearing in Honolulu on Wednesday, federal lawyers asked Watson to either dismiss that order or narrow the restrictions to apply to fewer parts of the travel ban.

Instead, Watson said he would turn the order into a preliminary injunction, which has the effect of extending his order blocking the travel ban for a longer period.

Watson said he would keep intact the restrictions on the travel ban – a block of its 90-day moratorium on travel to the U.S. from nationals of six majority-Muslim countries and its 120-day pause on new refugee resettlement.

The California Senate has passed the so-called sanctuary state bill, which would limit police statewide from cooperating with federal immigration agents in carrying out President Trump’s promised mass deportations. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has vowed to withhold federal law enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities. The bill, SB 54, now heads to the California State Assembly. Click here to see our full interview with the bill’s author, California Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León.

https://www.citylab.com/housing/2017/04/landlords-are-threatening-immigrant-tenants-with-ice-deportations/521370/

Emboldened by President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, landlords across California are threatening to report undocumented tenants to immigration authorities. Landlords looking to evict their tenants, raise their rents, or stifle their complaints about their living conditions are exploiting undocumented tenants’ fears about being deported, according to housing advocates and attorneys.

While undocumented renters and members of mixed-immigration-status households have always been vulnerable to abuse and intimidation, California legal-aid experts say that reports of explicit deportation threats are pouring in from every part of the state.

“The scale at which it’s happening has increased dramatically since the November election,” says Jith Meganathan, policy advocate at the Western Center on Law & Poverty. “We have somewhere between two-and-a-half million and three million undocumented individuals living in California, most of whom are renters. Unscrupulous landlords are taking advantage of their knowledge of that fact to deprive tenants of their legal rights.”

Most often, landlords who threaten to report a tenant to Immigration and Customs Enforcement do so in response to complaints about the rental unit: plumbing leaks, mold, exposed electrical wiring, and so on. In the past, legal-aid advocates might occasionally field calls from a building when a slumlord threatened to dial up an ICE raid in order to get out of fixing a problem.

In rent-controlled jurisdictions where housing prices are skyrocketing, however, some landlords are now threatening to report undocumented tenants or mixed-status households to ICE in order to raise their rents. Or to evict tenants seen as undesirable, in the hopes of drawing a more affluent renter class in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Sounds familiar