Squid buries Squid's head in history books.

History Lesson…After a rough week, Squid just wanted to kick back this weekend. Squid reached into the fridge for a beer, and felt a sinking sadness—had even Squid’s taste for beer become politicized, after Judge Brett Kavanaugh tearfully testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his fondness for beer, then and now? (According to a count by mic.com, Kavanaugh used the word “beer” 29 times in his comments, responding to testimony by Christine Blasey Ford that in 1982, Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while he was drunk.)

Squid instead decided on a soothing cup of tea, and sat down to read other news from the week, and paged through the Carmel Pine Cone.

There was a page 1 story about a $10,000 “doggie dream house” that looks swankier than Squid’s lair, and Squid’s three-chambered heart sank again—are dogs getting better housing than cephalopods, and humans? There was an editorial dismissing people sickened by foodborne illness, including the E. coli outbreak in 2006 that originated with Salinas-grown spinach and sickened more than 200 people and killed three. “Believe it or not, that was a perfectly natural occurrence,” Publisher Paul Miller wrote. “Bacteria have been making people sick as long as there have been people.”

Ah, an enlightening, if decidedly uncompassionate lesson in human history!

Then Squid got to an even more bizarre lesson in history, this one in a half-page advertisement. It’s paid for by the Committee Against Fascist Economics (CAFE), Libertarian Party of Monterey County and Seaside Taxpayers Association—which is a long way of saying, one guy, specifically Lawrence Samuels.

(Samuels is chair of the local Libertarian Party, vice chair for the Seaside group and founder/president of CAFE. In the less ideological realm, he’s a real estate agent in Carmel Valley.)

As if there weren’t enough arguments already swirling in opposition to Measure J—which would require a feasibility study and, if feasible, subsequent public buyout of California American Water—Samuels has taken it upon himself to pile on with something new.

“What does that have to do with historical Fascism? Plenty!” according to the Pine Cone ad, and corresponding blog post on committeeagainstfascism.com.

Among the reasons given: “The 13-point plank of the 1920 National Socialist Program demanded the ‘nationalization of all trusts’ (corporations).” Squid is here compelled to note that Public Water Now is not trying to “nationalize” anything, nor is it attempting to compel a public takeover of an entire corporation. Cal Am will go on with or without the Monterey Peninsula’s system, although the company does dearly want to keep it. (A recent appraisal paid for by Cal Am pegs the value at $1 billion; PWN’s analysis puts it closer to $300 million. Squid’s guess is that the correct number is somewhere in between those two.)

Samuels goes on to list other points—Benito Mussolini’s claim that “three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state.” He says the Third Reich expanded fast economically, to the point that by 1943, more than 100 firms were state-owned.

So Squid called Samuels, who is working on a book about all this that he plans to publish in 2019, to ask: Really?  

His short answer: yes. (His long answer includes a story about how the English government used to execute people for hunting deer without permits, the voluminous writings of Hitler and Mussolini, and the process of working on his forthcoming book which has taken six years and is 1,500 footnotes deep. Among his qualifications, he tells Squid’s colleague: “I have a Wikipedia page.”

He offers this probing insight: “The Nazis were just horrible to the business community.” And, um, everyone else?

Maybe Squid will just have to reopen the fridge, avoid the spinach, and reach for a beer, whether it’s politically tainted or not. Anyway, the real question isn’t beer or no beer anymore, it’s this: foreign or domestic?