Persons – Page 8 – GEORGE ROTHERT

The Changing Agricultural Economy

“This is amazing. I’m not afraid to touch the products without gloves.”

The 2019 wine grape harvest has been tabulated. The total value of the crop from the North Coast of California was down fifteen percent from the previous year. (Super-prestigious Napa Valley grapes did manage a four-percent price-per-ton increase.) California wineries crushed ten percent less tonnage than in 2018. That means 250,000 tons were left unpicked. Industry experts calculate that 50,000 acres need to come out of production for supply and demand to meet.

So what does this have to do with marijuana? you may ask. A lot if you’re a vineyard or winery worker.

Premium wine grapes thrive in the coastal climates of California: Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties. So does marijuana. Cannabis growers are poaching workers from wineries by using the underhanded methods of paying more — including health care and paid sick days — and providing better working conditions.

One marijuana grower put it thusly: “A lot of times in agriculture, the employees get used like a tool. ‘Oh, we’ve got to harvest so let’s bring in 20 people, have them work 10 hours a day and don’t come back tomorrow.’ They don’t care what your name is or how you get your groceries next week.”

That and less pesticide. Wine’s dirty secret is the amount of chemicals used in the vineyards. Cannabis, not so much.

Does this mean that eventually marijuana fields will be hip places to host wedding extravaganzas?

Rosenwald Schools

In the first part of the twentieth century, with Jim Crow in full effect in southern states, before there was any pretense of the equal in “separate but equal,” it was up to African-American communities to take on the responsibility of educating their children. (In the North, there was a pretense.) A half-century earlier, custom and law prohibited teaching slaves to read and write. Taxpayer funding for segregated public schools in the South mostly went to white kids; white schools received more than five times the per-student funding as black schools. (In Mississippi the ratio was thirteen to one.) African-American citizens paid taxes, but were effectively barred from voting.

A black educator and a Jewish business entrepreneur joined together to do something about it.

Surfin’ Safari with Junior & Eric

The Beach Boys will be performing in Reno, at the Safari Club International Convention. Brian Wilson, creative genius behind the group, and long-time Beach Boy Al Jardine want their fans to know that they have no part in it. Brian tweeted, “This organization supports trophy hunting, which Both Al and I are emphatically opposed to.”

Keynote speaker at the gathering is the estimable Donald Trump Jr. Mr. Junior and his little brother Eric are noted trophy hunters. Unlike trophy wives, who are discarded when they reach a certain age, big-game trophy-hunters’ prey are killed.

Co-founder and cousin Mike Love owns the rights to the name “Beach Boys.” (Brother Dennis Wilson drowned in 1983; brother Carl succumbed to cigarettes in 1998.) Brian and Al do not perform with the touring group.

“There’s nothing we can do personally to stop the show,” Brian Wilson continued. so please join us in signing the petition at https://www.change.org/p/beach-boys-stop-supporting-trophy-hunting. The petition reads:

“We the undersigned, pledge to stop buying or downloading all Beach Boys music, going to Beach Boys concerts, and purchasing any Beach Boys merchandise until the Beach Boys withdraw from the SCI Convention and publicly state their opposition to this sick ‘sport’ of killing animals for ‘fun.’”

Mike Love is in it for the money — and presumably the attention. He attended the inauguration of the current occupant of the White House in 2017. Love said at the time, “I understand there are so many factions and fractious things going on — the chips will fall where they may. But Donald Trump has never been anything but kind to us. We have known him for many a year. We’ve performed at some of his venues at fundraisers and so on.”

Black History: from the Great Pumpkin to Ellen DeGeneres

“The fad started with the hippies. I saw them in Haight-Ashbury. Wearing a beard or a mustache or long hair doesn’t necessarily make anyone look like the scum I saw there but it gives an empathy for a movement that certainly is the direct opposite of what we strive for in college football.”
– Ara Parseghian, Notre Dame

February is Black History Month. Ellen DeGeneres kicked it off a couple days early with DeAndre Arnold as her featured guest. The high school senior from a small town near Houston Texas has been in the national news for refusing to cut his dreadlocks. School officials told him that if he didn’t cut his hair they would not allow him to participate in graduation. Arnold said no, dreadlocks are part of his Trinidadian heritage.

To show support for the student, who — depending on whose story you believe — may or may not have been suspended from attending class, DeGeneres introduced Alicia Keys who came onstage carrying a giant check for $20,000, payable to Arnold, as a scholarship contribution for his college education. (DeAndre Arnold obviously is a student of history, one of the few in his generation who wouldn’t need to ask “What’s a check?”)

The Lawyers Always Win

“The civil service is under greater assault than at any time since reforms of the eighteen-eighties.”

Fiona Hill, a coal miner’s daughter from northern England, earned master’s and PhD degrees in history from Harvard University. She became a U.S. citizen in 2002. Hill worked in the research department at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and as a national intelligence analyst for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. She was was an intelligence analyst under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Early in 2017 the current occupant of the White House appointed Dr. Hill to the National Security Council as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs. She served in that position until she resigned in July, 2019.

Responding to a subpoena from the House Intelligence Committee, Fiona Hill testified for ten hours in a closed-door hearing on October 14, 2019 as part of the impeachment inquiry. She testified publicly before the same body on November 21, 2019. For her trouble, she received insults from the president, death threats from his supporters and six-figure bills from attorneys. Those who supposedly know estimate her legal fees at somewhere between four hundred and five hundred thousand dollars.

Other State Department career employees who provided such riveting testimony during the House impeachment hearings face similar lawyers’ fees.

The State Department announced that it will provide relief to its employees. The Department will cover attorney’s fees of $300 per hour up to 120 hours a month – $36,000.

Partners at top firms experienced in these matters charge up to $1,200 per hour, “associates” $800 or so. When one needs to engage a team of lawyers, well, it gets expensive.

The American Foreign Service Association, the union representing State Department employees, has set up a legal-defense fund. So far a bit more than $250,000 has been donated. Some public-spirited attorneys from both political parties are working for reduced fees and, in some cases pro bono. The lead lawyer for Marie Yovanovitch, former Ambassador to Ukraine, said, “Unless you’re a full-time public-interest lawyer, you get only a few chances to take cases that you strongly believe in. I took the case because this is why I went to law school.”

Tina Hits the Wall of Sound

“Ike Turner is one of the most dehumanized figures in rock history.”
– allmusic.com

“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” has been well-received by reviewers since opening on Broadway in October, 2019. Critics have especially praised Adrienne Warren in the title role. Warren reprises her performance in the London West End production that opened April, 2018.

A major musical number in the first act is “River Deep – Mountain High,” recreating on stage a Phil Spector production from 1966.