Greetings …
Welcome to another of our Baja Arizona Kos Sunday Open Threads. Click through for some news, some views and some items of interest from around Tucson and Southern Arizona.
Did everyone get some rain ?
We got quite a bit at Rancho Tres Palmas on Friday and a little more yesterday. It was much appreciated, I must say. The plants needed it. The weather people are saying that it’s not really an early monsoon since the change in prevailing winds that drives our Wet Summer has not yet occurred. The National Weather Service has declared June 15 as the official start of the monsoon season. The traditional start date is June 24, el Día de San Juan. I usually don’t start watching the sky for rain until Fourth of July. Here’s George S. Hand’s diary entry for June 24, 1876:
June 24. San Juan’s Day. No work, no business, no nothing. Among Mexicans there was much dancing, drinking, riding, and a general holiday. Rain kept the dust down and made it much more pleasant than usual on this day. There were several arrests for fighting. Puck Ryan left on the express stage. Billy Gale returned from the Gila. Circus tonight. I went to bed at 9:30 o’clock.
There will be a Día de San Juan Fiesta again this year at Mercado San Augustín.
I-11, it’s all about the crap ...
The Arizona Department of Transportation is holding public hearings on proposed routes for Interstate 11. I-11 is our little piece of the Canamex Corridor. It will run from Nogales to Wickenburg, bypassing the congestion of Tucson and Phoenix. From there it will got to Las Vegas and on to Canada.
The idea is to increase, or at least facilitate, trade among the three NAFTA countries. Not being a fan of NAFTA, or Neoliberal “Free Trade” deals in general, I look at it a bit differently. It seems to me that they want an easier, cheaper way to get cheap plastic crap from China into markets in the US and Canada. As it stands now, the crap enters the western US through ports in Oakland and L.A. Those ports are a bother. US dock workers get decent wages and occasionally go on strike, as they did last year. A container port has already been built in Guaymas. Longshoremen there will no doubt be paid less and can be counted on not to strike. It’s just more of the ”race to the bottom.”
A musical interlude …
Add Neoliberalism …
University of Arizona President Ann Weaver Hart will step down in 2018. That’s when her contract expires, she will not seek a renewal. Star columnist Tim Steller’s thoughts can be read here ☛ AZ Daily Star. One sure way to identify a Neoliberal ideologue, whatever their political affiliation, is their attitude towards Public Education. They don’t like it. They see education, not as a societal good, but as a consumer service that is best, and more profitably, provided by the private sector. They favor Charter Schools and For-Profit, Corporate “universities.” President Hart is such an ideologue and her pro-privatization policies prove it. She presided over the sale of University Medical Center to the Banner corporation and she took a paid position on the board of directors of for-profit DeVry University. The Banner/UMC deal was proudly hailed as a public-private partnership that would benefit all Arizonans. It seems to me that these partnerships are abusive relationships where the greedy and dishonest private partner profits at the expense of the docile public one. Banner Health is currently organized as a non-profit but corporate-style cost-cutting is already underway and not everyone is pleased. Privatization of public teaching hospitals is apparently a nationwide trend, one that I wish we hadn’t taken part in. It’s all about the money now. As for Ann’s gig with DeVry, what can I say ? For-profit colleges are straight-up scams, fraudulent enterprises that charge much more than public colleges and deliver much less. Shame on anyone who has anything to do with these slimy, rip-off institutions.
OK …
That’s all I got for this week. How ‘bout it Baja, anybody out there ? Talk to me.