We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
Kurt Vonnegut, Iowa City, 1966
Seethe accompanied by its other tenses is one great word. It’s so good that I suspect non-speakers of the English language can derive some sense of its meaning just from the sound and spelling. But like all great words, it should be used sparingly and only for special occasions when it is most needed, like a trick play in football.
Here goes:
I’m seething. Seething over the story that Bruce Rastetter’s Summit Carbon Solutions has sent Cease and Desist letters to five of his fellow Iowans (Barb Kalbach, Tom Mohan, Robert Nozario, Steve King [yes, that Steve King], Jess Mazour), and one Nebraskan (Trent Loos). This apparently for not taking a knee and bowing down to Bruce the Zeus, the anointed king of Iowa who along with his wife Hera (Kim Reynolds) and sidekick The Cyclops (Tom Vilsack) is going to ram the carbon pipeline and corn based ethanol down our gullets whether Iowans want them or not. I’ve had occasion to meet three recipients of the threats: Steve King (who’d probably like to be called Zeus), Barb Kalbach, and Jess Mazour. Of those I only really know Jess Mazour, who is a salt of the earth and salty foot soldier courageous enough to stand up for what’s right and just in our state, the type of person without which you don’t have a democracy. That’s something that has become as rare as a meadowlark in Iowa. Come to think of it, maybe we should call these people meadowlarks.
At any rate, Jess and the others have gotten nastygrams from Zeus’ attorneys, Federalist Society member Jason Torchinsky (Washington, D.C.) and apparent Willie Mays wannabe Todd Lantz (Des Moines), who describes himself on his website as “as a five-tool player, which is a baseball term for a player who excels at every facet of the game.” Todd, ego much, dude? I think it’s safe to say that Atticus Finch, Todd’s not. They threaten lawsuits if the six folks opposing the pipeline don’t stop saying mean things about Zeus and in Jess’ case, they want her to retract a statement she made about Zeus being in collusion with the Iowa Utilities Commission.
[Here’s yet another reminder that former Iowa governor and current Rastetter employee Terry Branstad said Des Moines Water Works declared war on rural Iowa when they sued three upstream Boards of County Supervisors over polluted water.]
As my fellow Iowa Writers’ Collaborative member Randy Evans wrote yesterday (dammit Randy you beat me to the punch) Summit is trying to silence critics that have built an audience that goes beyond the next barstool. Zeus is especially pissed about Jess’ collusion comment and is threatening her with a legal thunderbolt. I’m not an attorney like the Federalist Society dweeb or the Say-Hey Kid sporting a $200 haircut and a diploma from a fancy school, so collusion, schmollusion, what’s the diff? How would I know. But I do know this: Zeus donated $160,000 to Hera’s political campaigns from 2015 to 2022, Hera appointed a pipeline-friendly replacement for Geri Huser as chair of the Iowa Utilities Commission (IUC), which then subsequently accelerated the approval process for granting Summit eminent domain powers, and inspired the lone possible opponent on the IUC to change his mind on the process. As I said, I’m not an attorney, but like most people I have played connect the dots a time or two. Rocket surgery, it ain’t. Connect the dots, that is.
What further causes me to seethe is The Cyclops Family involvement in Zeus’ operation. It’s been reported by me and whole bunch of other mortals that son of Tom, Jess Vilsack, butters his bread at Summit Carbon Solutions serving as its General Counsel.
Thanks to Joe Biden, windfalls from the 2022 the increase in the federal carbon tax credit from $50 to $85 per ton will keep Zeus obscenely rich at least until he can buy that new luxury condo on Crete. This increase may make some sense for industries like cement where emissions reductions will be agonizingly difficult. But corn production for ethanol? Really? The largest greenhouse gas contribution from agriculture is nitrous oxide emission sourced back to nitrogen fertilizer application (think anhydrous ammonia application to corn). Yeah, the same stuff polluting Iowa’s water is also warming the earth. Did Father Tom ever have the courage to seriously address this while serving in public office? In a word, no. It doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to conclude The Cyclops eyeballed this carbon credit increase and thought ‘Whoa, way easier than asking farmers and my buddies in agribusiness to quit hemorrhaging product into the water and air; my homey Zeus is going to fart lightning bolts when he hears about this!’
If you haven’t noticed, Tom Vilsack has seemed a little insecure about his legacy the past few months. This began before the election when he held a town hall of sorts in North Liberty (IA) where he unveiled an UnVilsackian vision of diverse farming systems that rely less on commodity crops like corn and soy. Now a cynic might question the timing of this, i.e. the 12th year of a 12-year USDA Secretary tenure, and a mere 6 weeks before the election, but maybe he sensed then that Kamala Harris was ready to move on from his one-eyed vision if elected.
Ten days ago he gave an embarrassingly hostile interview to Jonathan Martin of Politico where in his finest Trumpian imitation he blamed the press for virtually every bad instinct the American public has about agriculture, USDA and himself. Writers’ Collaborative member Art Cullen generously (I thought) characterized The Cyclops as ‘prickly’ in the interview, a description that was probably two letters too long in my mortal opinion.
Vilsack also, almost predictably, blamed Earl Butz and Richard Nixon (50 years ago now!) for what still ails American agriculture, especially an over-reliance on commodity crops. But then he also conveniently (for me) reminds us that he ran for Iowa governor 26 YEARS AGO in 1998 on making Iowa the food capital of the world. Seriously folks, do you see anything different about the Iowa agricultural landscape now than in 1998, other than a whole lot more hog confinements polluting our water and air and a whole bunch of ethanol plants hoovering up surplus corn? Oh, and also a whole bunch more people with cancer? Pointing out that it has been 50 years since Butz/Nixon, he repeatedly tells Politico reporter Martin that it will TAKE TIME to fix agriculture and rural America. Of course he avoids mentioning he has been governor and USDA secretary for 20 of those 50 years. If there was ANYONE that could have done something to transform Iowa and American agriculture, it was Vilsack. He failed and failed miserably and his legacy amounts to not much more than doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on fuel ethanol when the scientific evidence supporting its supposed benefits blows away like dandruff off Zeus’ shoulder.
Art correctly noted some of Vilsack’s accomplishments and you can read those at his site. No one who has been in public life for as long as Vilsack is without successes and failures. But I’ll just remind you this is a Democrat(!) who came to Iowa and said ag pollution should not be regulated, supported water quality schemes with little hope of success like the Iowa Nutrient Strategy, openly mocked the European Union’s Farm to Fork climate program because it forced farmers to adopt various practices, let big agribusiness write safety rules, left the meat cartel intact and oversaw increasing consolidation in the supply/value chain on both sides of the farmer while increasing Biden’s vulnerability to grocery price inflation, and, let us not forget, fired a black administrator because he gave more stock to the conservative Breitbart website than to her. At least she (Shirley Sherrod) had the courage to tell him to shove it when he offered her another job after the truth came out. She must be a meadowlark.
The tragedy for Iowa is that much of the old Democratic political establishment here seems to still hang their hats at the happy place of 12 continuous years controlling the executive (8 Vilsack, 4 Culver). Given the 2008 economic crash, they’re much more inclined to criticize the latter rather than the former, and criticism of Vilsack still seems like a 3rd rail for Iowa Democratic politicians. I’ve come to believe that the party will never ween itself from the drug cocktail of ethanol and CAFOs until the big agribusiness policies favored by Vilsack become irrelevant, and Iowa Ds will ride them both (ethanol, livestock) into 3rd party oblivion before swearing them off.
And my take on Vilsack is that he does not seemed interested in going away any time soon.
Resources
https://www.usda.gov/article/secretary-vilsack-highlights-historic-investments-us-agriculture-and-four-years-climate-progress
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/04/tom-vilsack-democrats-rural-america-interview-00192127
https://www.usda.gov/article/usda-releases-assessment-agriculture-and-forestry-carbon-markets
https://cdn.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/16093309/ira-carbon-capture-fact-sheet.pdf
https://www.charlescitypress.com/general/2023/09/02/governor-denies-influence-over-summit-pipeline-process/
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/natural-resources-environment/climate-change/#:~:text=U.S.%20agriculture%20emitted%20an%20estimated,carbon%20dioxide%20(EPA%202024).
https://cdn.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/16093309/ira-carbon-capture-fact-sheet.pdf
https://substack.com/home/post/p-153210749
https://www.thegazette.com/government-politics/usda-secretary-vilsack-envisions-innovations-in-farmings-future/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/04/tom-vilsack-democrats-rural-america-interview-00192127
https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2021/02/01/five-reasons-to-reject-tom-vilsack/
https://thefern.org/blog_posts/ferns-friday-feed-worried-about-food-prices-break-up-the-u-s-meat-cartel/
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2015/01/13/branstad-nitrates-war-rural-iowa/21722629/
Have you explored the variety of writers, plus Letters from Iowans, in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? Members are shown below.
Magnificent.
https://open.substack.com/pub/artcullen/p/barking-and-howling-into-christmas?r=d6scw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true