Don’t blame Canada for Wisconsin’s dairy crisis

The Canadian news program The National, which airs on Canada’s public broadcaster CBC in Canada, recently did a feature story about the dairy crisis in Wisconsin, which President Donald Trump is trying to falsely blame on Canada and their policies regarding trade of ultra-filtered milk from the United States to Canada.

The CBC featured a pair of Wisconsin dairy farm families, the Sauer family of the Waterloo, Wisconsin area and the family of Sarah Lloyd and Nels Nelson of Columbia County. Having watched the video on the CBC website more than once, it’s inherently clear to me that overproduction, not international trade policies, are responsible for Wisconsin’s dairy crisis. Despite the real problems facing Wisconsin dairy, Trump has tried to blame Canada for the struggles that Wisconsin dairy farmers have faced, and it’s clear to me that Trump has no real understanding of how the dairy industry works.

Additionally, as farmer and Wisconsin Farmers Union (WFU) regional director Chris Holman stated on the WFU website, state government policies in Wisconsin have only made the overproduction problem in the Wisconsin dairy industry even worse, and have also led to fewer dairy farms producing more of Wisconsin’s milk:

Here in Wisconsin, state programs like the Grow Wisconsin Dairy 30×20 Initiative have made the situation even worse. Beyond pushing Wisconsin dairy farmers to reach 30 billion pounds of milk production by 2020, the initiative—with no sense of irony—provides grants “to improve the long-term viability of Wisconsin’s Dairy Industry.” If you dive into data from USDA and the Wisconsin Agricultural Statistic Service, we’ve lost 2,411 dairy farms since March 2012 when the 30 x 20 initiative was announced. That’s an average of almost 500 dairy farms per year. We are growing our production but it is being done by fewer and fewer, larger farms.

The Wisconsin Farmers Union is an organization that seeks to improve the quality of life of family farmers and rural communities in Wisconsin.

Trump can blame Canada and sing the Green Acres theme song all he wants, but it’s not going to change the fact that he doesn’t understand the real problems facing Wisconsin’s dairy farm families.

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Congressional Black Caucus members admit they’re afraid of their own constituents

The only strongly vocal defenders of the undemocratic superdelegate system used every four years at the Democratic National Convention is a majority of members of the Congressional Black Caucus, a group that includes black Democratic members of both houses of Congress. They recently passed a resolution defending the superdelegate system, which grants Members of Congress, Democratic National Committee (DNC) members, and “distinguished party leaders” automatic delegate slots at convention, and grants them the power to vote for any presidential candidate they want at convention:

The letter — which was also sent to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz — follows a Wednesday CBC meeting where members discussed for over an hour the impact of eliminating superdelegates on the African-American community, according to CBC Chairman Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.).

“We passed a resolution in our caucus that we would vehemently oppose any change in the superdelegate system because members of the CBC might want to participate in the Democratic convention as delegates but if we would have to run for the delegate slot at the county level or state level or district level, we would be running against our constituents and we’re not going to do that,” said Butterfield. “But we want to participate as delegates and that’s why this superdelegates system was created in the beginning, so members would not have to run against their own constituents.”

A majority of Congressional Black Caucus members are openly on record as saying that they’re afraid of having to actually campaign for a delegate slot at their party’s national convention. If any politician is afraid of competition, he or she shouldn’t be in public office.

One thing that is roughly equivalent to the superdelegate system is the exemptions from qualifying for the U.S. Open, The (British) Open Championship, and most PGA Tour events in golf for most top professional golfers. However, golf is an athletic competition, so exempting the top professional golfers (the U.S. Open and the British Open exempt a few amateur players from qualifying as well) from having to go through one or more qualifying tournaments in order to get into a professional golf tournament is justified. A political party nominating a presidential candidate is not an athletic competition, but something that should reflect the will of the voters who choose to participate in a particular political party’s nomination contest. Due to elections in the United States being governed mostly, but not entirely, by a patchwork of state laws, a national primary election for any particular party’s nominee is virtually impractical, so the next best way would be for a convention of delegates elected by voters who chose to participate in a political party’s nomination process to nominate the presidential candidate. Currently, the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination process consists of a patchwork of delegates elected by Democratic voters and superdelegates who have a fast lane to the convention. There should be no fast lane to a delegate slot at a major-party national convention. Additionally, the Democratic Party has a very diverse primary/caucus electorate from a national standpoint, so a national convention composed of entirely elected delegates should be very diverse.

Hillary supporter John Lewis disses Chicago

All right, John Lewis didn’t actually diss Chicago explicitly, although the civil rights leader, U.S. Representative, and Hillary Clinton supporter claimed that he didn’t see Bernie Sanders participate in the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th Century, and used that claim to justify his support for Hillary.

While I have a ton of respect for John Lewis, as he’s someone who put his life on the line to fight for racial equality in America, just because I have respect for someone doesn’t make someone immune from my criticism of him. I think that Lewis’s remarks, while likely accurate, were very elitist of him.

While Lewis’s claim that he never saw Bernie in the Civil Rights Movement are probably true, since most of Lewis’s activism was concentrated in the South, virtually all of Bernie’s civil rights activism, outside of being one of hundreds of thousands of people in the crowd at the 1963 March on Washington, was on the campus of the University of Chicago, located in Illinois’s largest city. Specifically, Bernie, Bruce Rappaport, George Wells Beadle, and other civil rights activists fought against racially-segregated apartments that were owned by the University of Chicago, and Bernie has the arrest record to prove it.

The reason why I’m criticizing Lewis over a likely factual remark is this…Lewis implied that he thinks that he’s the gatekeeper who was and wasn’t a civil rights activist (he’s not, and nobody is), and he also implied that civil rights activism in Chicago wasn’t/isn’t as valuable as civil rights activism in the South. Both of those are examples of absolutely absurd logic. Even today, there are many activists affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement who are based in one part of the country who haven’t met Black Lives Matter activists in other parts of the country. That doesn’t devalue their work for racial equality in any way. What John Lewis did was devalue Bernie’s work at ending segregation in Chicago, and that is flatly unacceptable.

The CBC features one of my tweets about Scott Walker’s ridiculous Canadian border fence idea on their website

For the second time that I’m aware of, the Canadian media has picked up on something that I’ve published online. This time, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s national public broadcaster, featured this tweet, which I made a couple of days ago, on their website:

https://twitter.com/AaronApolloCamp/status/638121254470459396

My tweet referenced the unbelievably idiotic idea of building a giant fence along the international border between the United States and Canada, which was proposed by Wisconsin Governor and Republican U.S. presidential candidate Scott Walker. Walker suggested that idea in a desperate attempt to pander to supporters of Donald Trump, an anti-immigration zealot who is one of many Republicans running for that party’s presidential nomination.

The reason I apologized to Canadians over Walker’s remarks is because not all Americans are right-wing crazies like the Republicans running for president are. Many Americans are rational people who believe in common-sense, progressive values like supporting human rights, strengthening the American middle class, and diplomacy to prevent war…many of them are, like me, supporting the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.