All Dried Up
Livestock
We talked last week about the ongoing poultry genocide in the United States. The needless deaths of tens of millions of chickens was horrible to think about. What if 57 million dead chickens was only, like, two and a half times the yearly Needless Chicken Death baseline?
Approximately 20 million chickens, 330,000 pigs and 166,000 cattle are dead on arrival, or soon after, at abattoirs in the US every year, analysis of publicly available data shows. A further 800,000 pigs are calculated to be unable to walk on arrival.
I don’t know man. Multiplying the spot price of chicken by the two-and-a-half pound estimated average weight of a roaster according to a random recipe website, the poultry industry is conservatively losing $83 million dollars a year trucking dead chickens across the country. Or an astonishing $260 million dollars’ worth of pork, based on the lean hog spot price and an average weight of 254 (!) pounds.
Obviously, dollars and cents are the wrong metrics, but it illustrates the point that the meat industry is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year rather than creating humane conditions for its animals. We are often told that markets are efficient, and that corporations are disincentivized from doing harmful or cruel things because it will cost them money or create bad press. And yet, despite years of blatant price gouging, mistreatment of animals, and the occasional mass extermination of hens, the US meat industry seems impervious to any of these alleged market forces.
In a bit of incrementally good news, many EU nations are finally putting a stop to livestock exporting after public pressure, and the bloc may ban the practice entirely.
Water
A recent census report told us what we already knew: Americans continue to migrate south, to warmer climes. States like Georgia, Arizona, Florida, and Texas saw the largest population growth last year, despite being some of the worst states to live in politically and socioeconomically. All that aside, the Sunbelt is a very hot place to live, and it’s only trending hotter when the global warming its residents don’t believe in gets progressively worse.
Polls consistently rank climate change near the bottom of American concerns, and the populace has shown a dogged short-sightedness to move where there is sun right now with no concern for whether it will be livable in ten years, or whether it will be under water every time there’s a tropical storm.
Post-apocalyptic movies sometimes refer to 'water wars’ as a peril of our near or distant future. In one Arizona town, the water wars have already begun:
On Jan. 1, the city of Scottsdale, which gets the majority of its water from the Colorado River, cut off Rio Verde Foothills from the municipal water supply that it has relied on for decades. The result is a disorienting and frightening lack of certainty about how residents will find enough water as their tanks run down in coming weeks, with a bitter political feud impacting possible solutions.
The federal government is pressuring seven states - Arizona included - to cut their reliance on the dwindling Colorado River by up to 30 percent.
Scottsdale warned Rio Verde Foothills more than a year ago they’d lose water access. In response, the town sought other options, but its residents’ libertarian bent scuttled plans to contract with a Canadian private utility. The local company they did want to work with still needed Scottsdale’s help to treat the water, and the city refused.
Now, residents are paying haulers to deliver literal tanker trucks of water to their homes. Many private wells have run dry as aquifers are exhausted.
How did this Arizona town end up here? Well, for starters, the average water consumption for Americans is greater than most of the rest of the world. Here is one retired couple:
These measures have dropped the [Coniaris’] average water consumption from 200 gallons per day last year to 30 gallons per day in the first week of January, as they anxiously await a solution for their community.
They aren’t doing laundry at home, they’re collecting rainwater, and (according to them!) are urinating outside, and they’ve managed to cut their water usage down to thirty gallons a day from two hundred. For reference, the average European uses around 38 gallons of water a day, meaning these retirees were using nearly three times the water of their Euro counterparts.
Here’s another family:
Cody Reim, who works for a company that installs metal roofing, normally pays $380 a month for the roughly 10,000 gallons per month he consumes along with his wife and four young children
Again, this is thirty percent more than the average European family. Also, weirdly, about half as much as an entire horse ranch??
The Miller Ranch, which attracts visitors from around the world to ride their collection of Missouri Fox Trotter horses, uses about 24,000 gallons a month to sustain some 40 horses and the people who visit and live on the 20-acre ranch.
I am not pointing this out to shame residents of Rio Verde Foothills specifically, because this story is going to be retold over and over as the Sun Belt runs out of inexpensive water and our political and class divisions begin to pit neighbor against neighbor.
It is not all bad news - cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas have done impressive work conserving water, but they will soon be facing more dangerous heat waves. One study predicts Phoenix will spend nearly half its calendar year above 100 Fahrenheit by 2050. And yet, people keep moving there, or to suburbs with lush golf courses and a way of over-watered life that can only truly be enjoyed by Boomers brain poisoned by climate denialism or selfish enough to not give a shit whether there’s a livable planet available for their great-grandchildren.
George Santos
Say what you will about maybe-soon-to-be-Congressman Santos, but he is good for content. I have read more about this clown in the past seven days than about any sitting Congressperson in the seven months.
While we’re awaiting his ouster from Congress and pivot to OANN anchor or whatever, it’s worth taking a look at the political system that both elevated Santos to his current position and is doing its best to avoid holding him accountable.
Last week we discussed Santos’s penchant for spending exactly $199.99 at restaurants so he didn’t clear campaign disclosure requirements. One of those restaurants is called Il Bacco Italian in Queens. If the name sounds at all familiar it’s because you read an article in 2021 about a raucous Republican Christmas party at the restaurant, in violation of state COVID-19 restrictions. The place is a veritable beehive of New York Republicans:
The restaurant’s Instagram page features photos of Rudy Giuliani alongside the restaurant’s owner, Oppedisano, and his daughter Tina. Andrew Giuliani, Rudy’s son, who lost the most recent Republican primary for governor, is featured as well. The Republican city councilwoman Vicki Paladino has visited.
In exchange for dropping something like $50 thousand dollars of campaign funds at the restaurant, its owned kicked Santos some campaign donations:
[Joe] Oppedisano is a Santos campaign supporter; he donated $6,500 to Santos’ campaign and related PACs. So, too, is Oppedisano’s brother Rocco, who kicked in $500 to Santos, a donation the Daily Beast called “almost certainly illegal.”
Why was Rocco’s donation illegal, you might ask? Was it the firearms and drugs at his brother’s homes in 2009?
Rocco “was stripped of his permanent resident status following a firearms and drug bust at homes belonging to Joseph Oppedisano.”
Yes, sure, but was it also due to his drug and human trafficking business?
A decade later, the Coast Guard intercepted a yacht that Rocco was sailing from the Bahamas to Florida. Customs and Border Patrol found 14 undocumented Chinese immigrants aboard the boat, a Bahamian national, and $200,000 in cash socked away in the vessel’s walls. Rocco pleaded guilty to smuggling and was expelled from the U.S., which still wasn’t enough to deter him from doing his part for the 3rd District’s newest congressman.
Maybe his brother Joe runs a fine, upstanding Italian restaurant in Queens that happens to be closely tied to local and state Republicans. Maybe Joe has nothing to do with Rocco’s international smuggling, or the drugs and firearms Rocco kept in Joe’s home(s). You can’t choose family, right?
Restauranteurs aside, Santos’s campaign staff were aware of his, uh, checkered past:
In late 2021, as he prepared to make a second run for a suburban New York City House seat, George Santos gave permission for his campaign to commission a routine background study on him.
[…]
Some of Mr. Santos’s own vendors were so alarmed after seeing the study in late November 2021 that they urged him to drop out of the race, and warned that he could risk public humiliation by continuing.
That is…not a good sign! When the background check company’s main note is ‘you should immediately drop out and probably change your identity (again)’ your campaign is off to a lousy start. Except, he won? People donated millions to his campaign? Including people who claim they knew he was shady?
Well-connected supporters suspected him of lying and demanded to see his résumé. Another former campaign vendor warned a state party official about what he believed were questionable business practices. And the head of the main House Republican super PAC told some lawmakers and donors that he believed Mr. Santos’s story did not add up.
It wasn’t just donors either, high-ranking members of the GOP were made aware of his reputation:
Mr. Santos claimed to one of them, Kristin Bianco, to have secured the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump, when he had not. That prompted her to express concerns about Mr. Santos to plugged-in Republicans, including associates of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, one of Mr. Santos’s biggest early backers whose top political aide was assisting his campaign.
That’s Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican. Then there’s the Speaker himself:
In the run-up to the 2022 contest, Dan Conston, a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy who leads the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main House Republican super PAC, also confided in lawmakers, donors and other associates that he was worried information would come out exposing Mr. Santos as a fraud…
[…]
Mr. McCarthy, who ultimately endorsed Mr. Santos and helped his campaign, has said relatively little about the fabrications, and has refused calls to try to oust him from the House…
It should come as little surprise that Republicans, clinging to a thin majority in the House, are loathe to come out against Santos. For them - and many Democrats - lying, corruption, and fraud are not disqualifying bullet points on a Congressional resume. What’s truly surprising is how little vetting the New York and DC political press did of Santos, given how quickly his house of cards has fallen in the slightest breeze.
Republicans - and their main constituency of…cable news pundits - do have their limits, as we discovered when Madison Cawthorn was unceremoniously booted from the House. Santos maaaaay have crossed that invisible line, with news coming out literally (!) today (!) that he stole money from a disabled Navy vet and his sick dog and regularly dressed in drag during his time in Brazil. Who’s to say which of the ten thousand Santos-related scandals will finally sink his brief Congressional career, but rest assured it won’t be lying about his resume or accepting campaign contributions from human traffickers.
A Correction: last week I described the alleged fraud Santos committed while in Brazil as ‘check kiting’ which is the incorrect term. Santos was simply doing run-of-the-mill identity theft and check fraud. I deeply regret the error.
Jen Shah
Let’s talk a little about current/former Housewife of Salt Lake City Jen Shah. We sometimes say around here not to blog, teach, post, or rap your crimes. Another thing you should not do, if you are currently or were previously engaged in crimes, is to make your catchphrase on television something like ‘the only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing’. Taunting the Feds while under investigation isn’t a great idea! They might, like, show up to your set while you’re filming:
As producers fussed and camera operators adjusted their lenses, Shah answered a phone call. Flustered, she asked a castmate to turn off her mic and climbed out of the van. There was an emergency, she said, before driving away.
Moments later, a helicopter appeared and Homeland Security agents and New York City Police Department officers swarmed the van as sirens blared. The officers were looking for Shah, they said: She was being arrested on federal fraud charges.
On-screen antics aside, let’s talk about the telemarketing scams Shah ran for years before finally pleading guilty. Her companies operated what are called ‘BizOpp’ programs. They’re less popular these days, but they used to be all the rage in the late aughts and 2010s. Essentially, the ads (or phone calls) promise business coaching, entrepreneurship courses, and guides to setting up an at-home business - web design, ecommerce, something like that.
In 2011, Shah and her accomplice Stuart Smith were working at a BizOpp company that later went on to settle with the FTC for $27 million dollars. Shah struck out on her own with what she’d learned, starting multiple companies and bank accounts in…Kosovo (??) to hide her involvement. Basically, according to multiple cooperating witnesses including - eventually - her business partner, Shah instructed her telemarketing employees to lie to and badger customers into spending hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for a variety of educational packs to build their own online business.
It was all bullshit, and her victims lost tens of millions of dollars. We’ve talked before about the ways aggressive telemarketers can prey upon the naïve and desperate - it may seem preposterous to someone looking in from the outside, but a savvy pitch-person can charm or badger a helpless victim to turn over huge sums of money with the promise of financial stability. We’re a country full of financially unstable people, and Shah spent years stealing from them.
She also spent years dodging investigations and FTC actions, while building her TV brand as a powerful businesswoman of color in Utah, a heavily white, Mormon state. It was an inspiring story, minus the fraud bit. She’s facing 6-and-a-half years in prison, and remarked to the judge she will have a difficult time finding employment after her sentence, with her TV money gone. If there’s one thing fraudsters are known for it’s resilience, and I am confident Shah will be okay. Apropos of nothing, her husband is an assistant football coach at the University of Utah, for which he is paid $632,000 dollars a year.
Short Cons
AdAge - “Top media agencies pulled clients’ ad dollars from Twitter in the days after Elon Musk took over the company, leading to a 46% year-over-year decrease in ad sales, and the precipitous drop was an anomaly compared to the rest of the social media ad market…”
NYT - “For years, the restaurant association and its affiliates have used ServSafe to create an arrangement with few parallels in Washington, where labor unwittingly helps to pay for management’s lobbying.”
NY Mag - ““You may have a chance to make so much money,” Kurlander, a businessman who had done time in federal prison for conspiring to launder drug money, texted Harris beforehand.”
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