A visit to Decatur, Illinois — the personal playground of Howard Buffett, son of one of the richest men in the world.
Read this whole piece. It's entertaining and enlightening. Here's an excerpt:
In June 2019, something happened that offered an alternative vision for Decatur’s economy beyond Archer Daniel Midlands and Howard Buffett: The state of Illinois passed House Bill 1438 and legalized cannabis for the new year. In turn, individual Illinois municipalities began the process of granting licenses to dispensaries.
Girdler and other activists began agitating for approval in Decatur. Locally, the dispensary question became so heated that a few months before legalization went into effect statewide, the city council organized a special town forum on the issue. There, Girdler gave an impassioned speech built around a reference to a famous event in World Wrestling Entertainment history: that time Undertaker threw Mankind off the Hell In A Cell in 1998. Within the surrounding region’s leftist circle, Girdler went viral. “I became, you know, a quasi-local celebrity,” he says.
As The Intercept’s Rachel M. Cohen reported at the time, the immediate battle was lost: In September of 2019, the city council voted against the dispensary, 6-1. But Girdler and other local activists felt like there was a longer war strategy to pursue. With support from the Democratic Socialists of America’s Central Illinois chapter, Girdler became part of a motley network. They called themselves the Decatur Cannabis Coalition and they campaigned steadily for support for the dispensary from the larger population in hopes of convincing the city council to overturn their decision.
By then, Gav and Girdler had already formed Decatur Public Library Watchdogs, a government oversight group. Gav had learned how to request documents via the Freedom of Information Act from an online course for government employees. She began incessantly peppering requests for city council members’ discussions over the dispensary. (Girdler jokes that in the action movie version of the events, Gav would be the tech wiz in the van with the earpiece shouting out instructions.)
What they found was both remarkable and predictable: correspondence, directly from Buffett, pushing back against the dispensary.
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