Greetings from the Old Pueblo
Welcome to another Baja Arizona Kossacks Open Thread. The purpose of this diary is to promote our upcoming Meet-Up at historic Kon Tiki next Saturday night. This venerable establishment is in its 50th year of operation, serving platters of poo-poo and sweet, but potent, original drinks at its mid-town location. The restaurant and its sign are Tucson icons, although the sign did not make the Star's list of Tucson's 27 best retro neon signs.
Click through for a couple of other items of interest and the always entertaining comment thread.
Water on the Brain
The Star had a big story this morning about water use in different parts of town. (Arizona Daily Star, 11-16-'14) It included a handy map:
You can see that the highest use areas are in the foothills and upper income areas, with Tucson Country Club Estates coming in as the champs. It also had this quote from one of the residents:
“We’re entitled to have a few modest hedges, but this grass in our backyard will get no water until about March,” he said. “My house is about 4,000 square feet, so you’ve got to use a little more water there than in a 1,500-square-foot house. ... If I wanted to live in the desert, I’d go to the other side of Vail.”
The Sonoran Desert, of course, doesn't start in Vail. Our whole city is in the desert, even the parts that have been watered until they resemble wetter regions. I suppose this is how it will play out as desert cities like Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas begin to dry up;
de facto, free-market water rationing by wealth and income. The truly wealthy, the .01%, will have already bugged out, of course, it may come down to local power. I wonder if Jim Click will stay when it gets really bad. In California the rich are using most of the water and a black market is springing up
(Daily Kos, 11-14-'14). The 1% are resorting to tanker trucks to water their estates there
(Politico, 8-24-'14).
None of this should be at all surprising by now. Marc Reisner's classic book Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water came out in 1986 and has since been made into a PBS series. Nor does it surprise students of Neoliberalism that the global elite will try to privatize, control and profit from the universal human need for potable water. Swiss-based global giant Nestlé is profiting by selling bottled water it sucked from one of California's over-stressed aquifers (Salon, 7-14-'14). Nestlé's CEO, Peter Brabeck, is on film declaring that water is not a human right at all, just another commodity to be privatized and sold. You can watch that here ➡ YouTube Also on YouTube is the 90-minute documentary that was made from Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke's 2002 book Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water. Here's the link ➡ YouTube.
Pizza Madness
Only slightly less depressing are the results of the Star's Pizza Madness Showdown. Can you believe that Chariot Pizza, of all places, is one of the two finalists ? Their pizza is eatable, barely, but not near the quality of some I can think of. Not really surprising, I suppose, that the Star's readers would love Chariot's pizza, given the letters-to-the-editor that they write.
OK
That's all I got for this evening. It's an Open Thread, drop a comment, let us know what's on your mind and are you coming to the Meet-Up ?