Thank you, Art Cullen, for bringing the drought situation across the US and the seriousness of it to our attention [in “It’s always been lean on the Great Plains, but this time feels different,” the front page story from the 5/1/23 TPP]. Our food supply, both animal and vegetable, or manufacturing and, to some degree, our recreation (better said as mental health), all are affected by drought.
Mentioned in the article was the condition of the Ogallala Aquifer, the Republican River in Nebraska and Kansas and the Colorado River, which, after “a series of 14 atmospheric river bombs that laid destruction up and down the Pacific Coast” is running “full” after several years of declining volume.
Shortly after reading this article, I saw on TV how the upper Mississippi River and its Minnesota shores suffered a flood. This got me thinking about something I’ve always said: The Romans had aquaducts and we have the Army Corps of Engineers. It also brought to mind an article or paper by Lyndon LaRouche.
In the first couple of years after the Obama election in 2008, there was a movement to impeach him. A petition and volunteers were outside my local post office. They also had Mr. LaRouche’s article available, which covered a way to regulate the water usage on the Colorado River with portable pumps and power sources. These could be moved up and down the river to better marshall the volume. Why couldn’t these be used in reverse?
Pumps could be installed at the juncture of major rivers and at “pinch points” of bridges. When the river’s volume rises, these points’ pumps could be activated and, if needed, portable pumps could be brought to assist the permanent pumps.
Pipelines could be built from these permanent pumps to major areas in the plains or to reservoirs of metropolises using the water of rivers. These pipelines could be build above ground, on the routes of highways or railroads to the needy areas.
I am a retired electrician, not an engineer, nad this sounds like a simple fix to me. As I said before, the Romans had aquaducts and maybe our Army Corps of Engineers could shine on this problem.
Thank you for the forum you provide.
WILLIAM E. SHAW Jr., Jackson, Mich.
Ted Rall is a waste of page 19 of the 6/1/23 edition of TPP. For the past eight years, Rall’s columns have shown a hatred for Democrats, especially the Clintons and our beloved President, Joe Biden.
In his latest article, he argues that the Biden campaign, and I presume the remainder of Americans, should forget the attempted overthrow of our government on Jan. 6, 2021. The traitors wanted to prevent the duly elected president, Joe Biden, from taking office.
Rall believes the insurrection is past history, but both the disgraced and twice-impeached Trump and dictator-in-waiting DeSantis have both promised to pardon the criminals if elected president.
The ultra-right fringes continue the violence against Democrats and minorities at an increased and alarming rate.
I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal for the financial news and the news about national events. It is a tale of two newspapers, as the editorial and opinion pages are the print edition of the Fox Propaganda TV channel!
Guess who shows up from time to time as a guest columnist on the WSJ opinion page? None other than Ted Rall, bad mouthing our president, Joe Biden and the Democrats. His articles and tone are much more biased, mean and hateful than what appears in TPP.
Rall’s column should be dropped from TPP. While you’re at it, eliminate the column of Ralph Nader. We all know that the votes he received in the 2000 presidential election resulted in a George W. Bush victory, which gave us the Iraq war, a ruined economy and John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court.
Rall and Nader are both cancers on TPP. They need to be removed by surgical means before they metastasize.
STEPHEN LANDUYT, Quincy, Ill.
Editor Replies: Ted Rall likes to be ornery, and he has his fans, as does Ralph Nader, who has been an activist in public-interest issues for nearly 60 years. In the 2000 election, Nader, as the Green nominee, gave voters a more progressive choice than Al Gore, but the Republican-majority Supreme Court stole the election for Bush by stopping a recount in Florida, which a later audit sponsored by news media found would have shown Gore won the pivotal state. Anyway, both Rall and Nader are found on page 19 and if you don’t want to read them, feel free to skip to page 20.
Re: “Hiroshima’s nuclear lesson: The G7 must push for peace in Ukraine,” by Amy Goodman (6/15/23 TPP) nnOne of the most bitter facts of life is accepting that very often the truth is painful.
Today’s evidence is overwhelming that Japan was ready to surrender even before the atomic bombs were dropped on Aug. 6, 1945. On July 13, 1945, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war.
Admiral William Leahy and General Dwight Eisenhower agreed that: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
President Truman, however, had his own agenda. “Having the bomb,” he said, “we have to use it … against those who have abandoned all pretenses of obeying international law of warfare.”
Let’s reflect on that: Truman ordered the incineration of hundreds of thousands of children and civilian men and women because they had abandoned all pretenses of obeying international law of warfare?!!
To many, the world’s most powerful man simply unleashed his lust for vengeance. Understandably, many refer to Truman as the butcher of 600,000 Japanese … but no one knows exactly how many more thousands died years later of radiation poisoning.
DAVID QUINTERO, Monrovia, Calif.
Froma Harrop thinks that Montana legislator Zooey Zephyr is prone to excess — “exhibitionism,” even — in defending transgender youths’ access to gender-affirming medical care (“Why Do We Obsess Over Transgender Issues?” 6/1/23 TPP). To Harrop, Zephyr’s charge that legislators who restrict such care will have “blood on their hands” is a bit much.
If only Zephyr’s comments were mere excess. The consequences of denying gender-affirming care to trans young people are more serious than Harrop seems to realize. LGBTQ people, and LGBTQ teenagers especially, belong to marginalized minorities that face discrimination, abuse, and even violence. For the small subset of transgender people, these vulnerabilities are intensified, especially for trans youth.
A 2017 CDC survey of LGBTQ high school students found that one-third of trans youth had attempted suicide in the previous year. (Findings of a related 2021 study are no less ominous.) We should let that number sink in. For some trans youth, mandated denial of gender-affirming medical care will only raise the risk of suicide. Access to this care, in contrast, is associated with decreased suicidal risk and generally improved mental health.
To her credit, Harrop endorses the availability of gender-affirming care. Then she wishes “happy lives” to transgender people — and wants to change the subject. In our political climate, however, wishing will not make it so. Transgender youth remain at high risk. Sustained attention and advocacy on behalf of these young people and their community are still essential.
DAVID McCURDY, Elmhurst, Ill.
Among all the insults that Republicans routinely hurl at Democrats, the one that is the most nonsensical is that Democrats are Communists. In their minds, there is no space between a party that seeks social and economic justice for all and one that demands uniformity of thought and deed and absolute devotion to a Dear Leader.
In fact the party that most resembles the Communism of Mao, Castro, and Kim is the Republican Party USA. The uniformity of thought and deed is mostly what Republicans are obsessed with lately. From banning books that don’t reflect their preferred world-view, to forcing trans persons to present according to their genitalia, not their sex, They are being as oppressive and censorial as the darkest dictatorships of eastern Europe.
And the most salient characteristic of the Republican Party today is their desperate, clinging obeisance to the worst president in American history, Donald Trump. He is worshipped as a god out of either mass derangement or morbid fear — maybe both. There can be no other but Him, in their minds and hearts.
So the brickbats they fling from the false security of their glass house land with an impotent thud far short of their Marx. The voters can see this, and are responding accordingly, by turning Republican goons out of office at every opportunity. And good riddance.
JEFFREY HOBBS, Springfield, Ill.
I am very concerned by two omissions in the Donald Trump indictment document. nnFirst, the indictment narrates that some boxes of U.S. documents were transported to trump’s golf-residence in Bedminster, NJ. Indeed, it relates how Trump waved a Top Secret map around in front of PAC associates there, trying to impress them. Has the FBI searched the Bedminster facility for more incriminating documents?
Second, the indictment omits identifying Trump’s motive. Why did he obstruct returning the documents so fiercely? Was it just his insecure need to boast and show-off? Or was he using (or planning to use) the documents for some self-serving transaction? Those military secrets could garner him a high price from our enemies, and his threat to reveal them could extort our friends.
The investigation must continue.
BRUCE JOFFE, Piedmont, Calif.
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2023
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