Would you rather spend your $3bn for munitions sent to Israel, to resume carpet bombing Gaza, or for a public-private partnership in the US to improve farming infrastructure and regional markets for a more resilient food system at home?
Which one do you think the people who voted for Trump would want?
Which one did people think they were getting with Don America First?
Trump said <https://x.com/mtracey/status/1837886438903357920 > on the campaign trail that “Miriam and Sheldon” [Adelson] “came [to the Whitehouse] more than anyone, except people that worked there,” “always asking for things,” and “as soon as he would give them one thing they would be asking for something else,” until he “gave them the Golan Heights.” So, if you thought Roger Waters was spewing antisemetic malarky when he called Adelson Trump's “puppetmaster” maybe you should reconsider based on the President's own remarks. Anyhow, looks like Israel has their $3bn in the bag.
Would you rather spend $3bn on Starlink and other Musk projects, or $3bn to make US agriculture more resilient in times of economic and ecological instability? The best long-future thinkers I've heard say, you don't make it to an off-planet civilization without threading the needle of the current ecological and civilizational pinch point on this planet and getting to a stable place here from which to work on the interplanetary project.
I mean... maybe Musk can go die on Mars of radiation poisoning, but I would rather make my stand here, healing the planet we've got-- frankly the best one in the solar system, maybe in a much larger territory, and certainly the perfect one for us. We can heal the land while producing better food by finding ways that agricultural productivity and ecological health coexist.
Now I'm not saying there's not waste in the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program, or that every project is doing exactly the work that we are doing here in the Ohio River Valley. I mean I guess you never get perfect efficiency linking money to impact when you are moving $3 billion. But, I know that we are doing something good, driving cattle supply through up and coming new meat processing capacity in our region is a way to preserve our ability to grow our own food, from here, for here. I know that we are doing something good, having designed a project that does its damndest to keep options open for farmers to decide how to spend $10k 'infrastructure investments' on their farms, focusing on NRCS soil health practices that fit best with their land and on the 'weakest link' that prevents them from farming at the next level.
Speaking of 'waste,' I have to admit I feel like a little bit of a sucker, as I took the hook line and sinker on the tale that the government was the biggest its been ever, and that even with the massive cuts and savings from firing government workers in their probationary periods, that the size of the Federal bureaucracy was still bigger than in 2019. Last night I heard someone say that all the growth in the size of the government was in the Department of Defense. That if you compare the size of the rest of the government machinery to the past, that the bureaucracies are at like 1997 levels. Found this rough confirmation of the second version of the truth <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-reflections-on-the-size-and-composition-of-todays-federal-government/ >. Dang, that's a really different story than the one put out by the DOGE bros.
So, guys, let's not get taken in. Trump brought a certain story to the campaign: I'm REALLY REALLY hope and change, not that measured Obama style thing, we're past that, I’m the wild current of REAL CHANGE, I mean it! But maybe he's crossdressing as a new-type populist, pure flair and not the real thing. Watch what he does not what he says. And in the world of do-not-say, here's hoping we will be doing work on the ground on farms in our area soon, running water lines and planting clover and cover crops, spreading biochar. Send us back to work, Don.