This year, they're one and the same

'Inauguration day/Caucasian day' (acrylic and marker on 16x20" canvas).

Fuck you Mill Creek Brewing and fuck you very much Chris Going

While in middle TN recently I bought a six pack of Mill Creek Brewing company's beer.  It tasted adequate, it was barely a step above Budweiser, which I guess is good enough for some brewing companies, and in the spirit of helping out a small business I made the mistake of sending them an email to ask when their beer might be available here in east TN where I live.  After waiting a week and not getting a response back, I pulled up their little Facebook page and told them how much I appreciated them not getting back with me.  Then the parade of excuses started.  They said they didn't get back to me because they only had four people working there or some shit like that.  Then they got around to emailing me after I publicly shamed them into it and I told them not to bother with it, since they were obviously understaffed and they can't be bothered to spend time replying to peons like me who don't buy their beer that often.

After I sent that email shit got real and they showed their true colors.  One of their four employees, a jackass named Chris Going, who never had the time to email me until I shamed him into it, sent me this picture in an email:

Poor little Chris Going can't be bothered to respond to emails but when his royal thin skinned highness does, he tells me to fuck off.  I hurt his wittle feewings.  So now, I hope to hurt this asshole's business. I'm guessing Going is some kind of entitled white guy who can't take any criticism and if you don't let him get his way he'll stamp his feet and cry.  He expected me to just forget that he and his company were too fucking lazy or disinterested in me and my pitiful little questions.  He wanted me to forgive him because he's got a company to run.  Well, fuck that shit.  Fuck him, fuck his beer, fuck his lazy disinterested shitty customer service, fuck all of that shit with a chainsaw.

I hope he's got the balls to contact me now or to try to leave a comment on this blog because I'll fucking make anything he writes to me public.  I'll post whatever he writes to me verbatim.  But somehow I doubt he'll do anything, because that's how guys like him operate, they talk tough but they shrink from a fight.

If you ever have the misfortune to see any of his crappy beers in stores or in a bar, don't buy it because if the people who make it are crap, then whatever they make is crap too.

Fuck you Mill Creek Brewing.

And you can fuck right off Chris Going.

There are other ways

People think that because things are the way they are now they've always been this way and that's the way things ought to be done forever.  But that's not true, especially when it comes to the disaster capitalism they've inflicted on us ever since the Reagan years.

Things can be different.  Capitalism doesn't need need to be predatory.  Here's two examples of modern capitalism that show us a better way:

• Newman's Own.  Every penny of profit that Newman's Own products generate goes to charity, not to the pockets of investment bankers or Wall Street douchebags.  They've given away millions of dollars to charities.  MILLIONS. And you know what, people still buy their products knowing that all the profits from them will be given away.  I buy their salad dressing, their pasta sauces, their cookies, and other of their products as well.  I buy them even though most of the time they are higher priced than comparable products made by for profit companies.  I buy them because I want the profits from my purchase to be used to help others, not to enrich entitled white people.
• Rick Steves.  Mr. Steves is a travel writer and tour operator.  He produces a TV for PBS about his travels in Europe and gives those shows to PBS AT NO CHARGE.  He's said time and again that he makes enough money off the sale of his travel guides and tours that he operates to be able to give those shows away.  He doesn't need to make more money off his work, so he gives those shows to PBS stations to run free of any fees which means they can run them when and how ever many times they like.  Yes, in a sense it's free advertising for Mr. Steves business but that's beside the point.  The point is he's secure enough in his business model and business life to be able to give away free product that benefits a lot of people, especially the mom and pop owned businesses that he features in his travel shows.

There are other businesses and individuals out there who are changing the face and nature of capitalism.  We need many more to do the same if we're going to survive the rule of corporations and oligarchs. 

One of the most depressing places in the world

It used to be a tobacco warehouse, now it's a dying flea market of the damned.

Ugh, after we left his place we felt like we needed to shower in hand sanitizer.

Been there, done that

It's not like we don't know how all this current deficit, tax, and budget cutting mania is going to end. We do. And history shows us it's not going to end with a happy low tax/business friendly/full employment utopia.

In her masterful history of the carnage wrought by Milton Friedman's economic policies Naomi Klein, my long time imaginary Canadian intellectual girlfriend,

shows us that time and again countries that bought into the IMF/World Bank meme that in order to 'cure' their economy they had to cut taxes in increase investment (which never ever really happens when taxes are cut), slash public benefits (which is actually the worst thing to do in a time of fiscal crisis), and privatize public utilities (which is the worst thing to do for the biggest number of people), all saw their countries go into economic and sociopolitical free fall. They all saw their populations suffer, the poor and working poor the most, and they all, and this is true for every single one of them and it will be true for the USA, Canada, and the UK, came back only after they dumped conventional thinking that said if they followed the IMF/World Bank plan they'd be an economic paradise. They came back only when governments stopped privatizing and cutting taxes. They came back only when governments shifted away from the disaster capitalism models and back to a model that offered regulation of capitalism and a strong government hand in the economy.

The Paul Ryan budget plan will lead us down the same road Chile went down under Pinochet, the same road South Africa went down when they saddled the ANC with the apartheid debts of the past, the same road numerous Asian countries went down when financial speculators caused the 'Asian tiger' financial crisis a few years back, and the same road the Britain is going down under Cameron and the budget and benefit cutting Tories, in fact it's already happening over there, the British economy is not expanding as they said it would once these cuts began, it's contracting, just like ours will if we adopt the Draconian cuts offered up by Republicans and conserva-Dems.

Disaster capitalism benefits the capitalists who rigged and still control the system.

Everybody else gets screwed.

Commodore Capitalist and the Crisis of Conscience

One day Commodore Capitalism suddenly out of nowhere developed a conscience and he felt sorry for all the bad things that the capitalism had done to the people the whole world over. He confessed to his butler, "Jeeves old boy, I'm feeling ill about misery, injustice, and harm capitalism has done to the poor, to the working classes, to women, to the Negroes, to the Latinos, to the children, to everyone! I've been chosen by God himself to promote and uphold this economic system through any means necessary and yet now I see all the harm that our rapacious greed hath wrought. The economic system that benefits my friends and family is crushing those who would have no truck with it and it's destroying the very planet we live on! What ever shall I do now that I have seen what the horrors has capitalism done?"
Jeeves said meekly, "Perhaps sir could now find it within his heart to give me a raise so that my son may finally get that heart transplant that he's had his eye on?"

"Jeeves, old man, you're fired," shot back Commodore Capitalism. "And don't even think of asking for any severance pay or a recommendation. Get out of my mansion before I throw you out you despicable ruffian."

The sad butler left his employer and he wandered the streets spreading the news that Commodore Capitalism had gone soft and was questioning the very economic system that he was sworn to uphold at any cost.
"He fired me after I asked for a raise so that my son could get a heart transplant operation..."

"Here now, wot's unusual about that? You ask fer a raise, you git fired, that's how it is," said the stranger who Jeeves had told his story to.

"Right you are guv, but in the old days before he went soft on capitalism, he would have fired me, beat me up, and dragged me through the streets to the hovel that I share with my family, whereupon he would have disemboweled me in front of them."

"Blimey," said the stranger, "he 'as gone soft, ain't he."

When word of all this reached President John Q. Moneybags Bush-Clinton the Fourth, he was incensed, so incensed in fact that he had the FBI track down and murder all the people Jeeves had blabbed to. Then he ordered them to beat Jeeves up and have him dragged through the streets to his home whereupon he and his family were disemboweled.

Still the word spread.


"Oh heavens, Commodore Capitalism has gone soft. He's questioning our right as rich white people to use up all the world's resources as we see fit, to treat people with dark skin like so much chattel, and to make the peasants and serfs our wage slaves!"

"That wastrel deserves a good trashing I say! A GOOD THRASHING!"

"Harrummmph!"

Then the unthinkable happened, Commodore Capitalism decided to go out to see what life was like for those who did not earn over $250,000 a year.

"I'll just go see for myself how the lower classes live," he said as he rode off into the slums.

Once inside the nearest slum he stopped a worker and asked him how he would make the world a better place if given the chance. The worker said, "I'd make sure that people like me got paid a living wage that could lift my family out of poverty. I'd make them bosses stop taking all the profits for themselves and make them share it with the people who made them rich. I'd make health care free for all people and I'd make sure all workers were in a union or trade guild..."

Commodore Capitalism could bear no more of the working man's prattle so he bitched slapped the man and he kicked him in the balls while he was down.

Meanwhile, across town the Capitalist Cabal was convening.
"Something's got to be done about Commodore! He's not protecting us properly. Those bastard workers are starting to organize. They're grumbling that we don't pay them enough and that we don't pay our fair share of taxes!"

"How dare they suggest we pay taxes! How dare they organize! Those ungrateful wretches, I'll see they all burn in hell."

"Question capitalism? Those god damn dirty Commie socialist pigs!"

Suddenly the door to the Capitalist Cabal Clubhouse burst open and in walked Commodore Capitalism! He stared them trio of hard bitten capitalist fat cats down and he said, "This was all a test to see if you men still believed in the free market system and in the God given right of the white upper class to use capitalism to keep ourselves in power. I had to know that you all backed unregulated unrestrained capitalism and would be willing to defend it with your very lives if need be!"

The men roared with laughter. "Us? Give our lives to keep our soul crushing system afloat? Oh my no, we'll pit the workers against each other and we'll use those Bronze age religions to keep them in line, so we're going to rule forever!"

A smile crept across Commodore Capitalism's smooth face. Before he rode off he told the men, "Where ever a union is being formed, I'll be there to stop it. Where ever someone demands worker's compensation after a work place accident, I'll be there to silence them. When someone asks for a raise I'll be there to get them fired. When someone suggests we pay more in taxes, I'll be there to raise theirs. When some sick kid with an incurable disease drains the profits of a hospital, I'll be there to pull the plug on the little bastard. When some Negro, female, or Latino demands that they be paid the same as a white man, I'll be there to make sure they get a pay cut. When someone speaks ill of this blessed economic system that has made us wealthy beyond our wildest dreams and that allows us to treat the world like it's our play toy, then I shall be there to call them a god damned dirty Commie and to discredit them any way I can. Gentlemen, I shall be ever vigilant and on guard to keep rich white male privilege and glorious capitalism alive!"
And then as Commodore Capitalism rode off into the night, the men of the Capitalist Cabal Club slapped each other on the back, lit cigars with $1000 bills, and sexually harassed the poor but honest buxom young waitress who brought them their snifters of brandy.

Go, go Greek lightning!

You've heard the Greek people are rioting. You've heard they're pissed off over the economic austerity measures Germany, the European Union (EU), and the IMF are forcing on the people of Greece. But do you know why they took to the streets over all this?
In a nutshell Greece, Portugal, and Ireland, are the economic 'weaklings' of the EU. They don't manufacture much, especially Greece, and they have all amassed huge debt over the years while the rest of Europe was making and exporting the hell out of stuff. Greece, Ireland, and Portugal then relied mainly on tourism and their government spent a lot of their budgets on social welfare programs and on paying government employees.

When you hear the words 'economic austerity measures' and 'the IMF' in the same sentence what that means is a country is about to get screwed. Well actually, the poor, the working poor, and, anyone who isn't outrageously wealthy is about to be screwed. What the IMF means by economic austerity is that government employees get their pay slashed, the budgets of any social welfare programs get drastically cut or cut out all together, utilities get privatized and sold off, and public pension accounts get raided to pay the debt. It means that the people who did nothing to get their country in sad economic shape must pay off the debt amassed by idiot politicians and their corporate cronies. It also means that food, utility, fuel, and housing prices skyrocket and that workers lose their retirement that they've paid into all their lives and they lose any job security they have.

If I was about to be screwed like that I'd take to the streets and burn down banks too.
This 'economic austerity measures' tactic has been used by the IMF for years now. They screwed all of the countries of South America with it, the fucked over most all of the countries in Africa with it, and they used it to bone the people of Asia too. It's nothing more than the take over of a country's economy by corporate interests. And what makes the Greek case so appalling is it's being led by Germany, a country that was allowed to use the socialist economic model to grow and to prosper after the the second world war but which won't allow Greece to do the same now, alongside the IMF. The IMF, the EU, and Angela Merkel's conservative government in Germany want to force Greece to through the kind of economic hell that Chile, Argentina, and Brazil had to endure in the 1970's and early '80's.

What they will find out sooner rather than later is that the only way for Greece to get out of it's economic mess is for it's government to take over it's economy like Chile did and like FDR did here in the USA during the Depression. Government intervention coupled with a progressive tax that is paid by both individuals and by businesses, especially by multi national corporations, is the only fair way for Greece to get out of it's economic morass. When companies like Microsoft, IBM, Pepsi, Coke, Ford, and all other multi nationals are forced to pony up their fair share of taxes then the burden of balancing the books will come off the working classes. But I'm not going to ever hold my breath while I wait for that to happen. Especially not when the corporate thugs and the IMF bullies run things.

I'm 100% behind the Greeks who are protesting and rioting. I'm all for them storming Wal Marts, or what ever the multi national equivalent in Greece is, and taking food, clothes, and other necessities. If Wal Mart, Microsoft, and Coke are going to dominate the market and not pay their fair share of taxes, then it's perfectly fine for the Greek working class to appropriate whatever they can while they can. After all, they're about to be fucked royally, so why not fuck the corporations back?

Just wondering

After Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans intolerant Christian hate monger John Hagee said that his god punished that city because it had a level of sin that was unacceptable to it. So if all natural disasters come from his god, I wonder if he'll claim that Haiti had an unacceptable degree of poverty and or voodoo and that's why his god had to destroy all those buildings and kill all those people.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the folks in Haiti would appreciate cash, clothes, food, medicine, pillows, blankets, and a less oppressive corporate presence in their country more than they would your thoughts and prayers.

Calm the hell down

America, calm the hell down. I mean it. Stop with the nervous Nellie bullshit.

The financial crisis is not a crisis for you. It's a crisis for the greedy pig fuckers at the top of the financial food chain who made all those bad loans. They thought they were oh so smart by lending big sums of money at high interest rates to people. But I could have told them that no amount of interest is going to save you when you loan money that is never going to to be repaid.

Many years ago, before Bush McCain and Phil Gramm and all those other Republicans and some Democrats deregulated the banks and the financial sector of our economy and they laid waste to all those great Great Depression era laws that would have prevented this shit from happening, when you went to a bank and you didn't have enough money to repay a loan the bank told you, "No, you can't have a loan, please get out." But after deregulation they said, "Hells yeah you can have a loan but since you are a credit risk we have to charge you a higher interest rate and we have to fudge your loan application a bit so that it looks like you've got more assets than you really do." The point is they made many loans to people who were credit risks, and please understand I'm not blaming the people who applied for those loans, I would have done the same thing if I had been in their shoes. I'm blaming the banks who made the loans. They got stars in their eyes and a boner for more profits when they decided to wade into the less than stellar credit pool. No one forced these banks to give loans to people who were considered credit risks, they did it all by themselves because they wanted to make more money.

And now when after they see what their actions have wrought they want us to bail them out and that's bullshit.

My over all point here is that you all need to calm down. Your home, your job, your bank account is not at risk here. It's the people at the top who are going to suffer. They want to scare you so you'll turn over more control to them. They want this to the the financial equivalent of what they did in the aftermath of 9/11. Don't fall for it, it's bull shit. remember all this panic is being brought to you by the people who gave you the Patriot Act, the never ending war of terror on Iraq and Afghanistan, and the bungled response to Katrina. Do you seriously believe the man who stood on a flight deck in front of a banner that read "Mission Accomplished" and told us that the battle for Iraq was over and that we'd won? He was wrong then and he's wrong now. He's worried that his pals in the very top of the business world will lose money while he is in office and that's why he's in a panic. He's worried that they might toss him into their version of Gitmo and do bad things to him for losing them all this money.

But seriously America, calm down. This shit storm is not going to hit you, it's all on them. You keep on keepin' on, go to work, pay your bills, and live your life. And if you laugh as the chickens come home to roost on Wall Street, then I certainly wouldn't blame you.

The Shock Doctrine

I finally finished reading this great book last night and you can read my review over at the Winter Reading Challenge blog.

If I ever meet you Ms. Klein, I'm giving you a high five for writing such a great book.

Oh okay, if you insist, I'll give you a medium five.

You load 16 tons and what do you get?

These days you get more absurd crap from this guy: Yep, that's the guy who owns the mine in Utah where those six miners are buried now and where some rescuers died when they tried to dig them out. But have no fear, those brave miners and rescuers did not die in vain, or would it be vein? The memory of those brave men will live on because Mr. Murray wants to reopen the mine in question! That's right, the bodies of those dead miners are still warm but that's not going to stop the relentless march of disaster capitalism!


From Think Progress:
Yesterday, Crandall Canyon mine co-owner Robert Murray said that while he plans to “abandon any effort” to mine at the site of the initial collapse where six miners were trapped, he believes “that other parts of the mine remained safe for work and that mining should resume.” An MSHA official said he was “shocked that the subject was even brought up.”


Don't get the wrong impression about all this though, Mr. Murray is suffering as much if not more than the miners and their grieving families.


From the AP:
Coal mine boss Bob Murray said he is hurt and stung by criticism that he operated an unsafe mine and wasn't doing enough to find six miners trapped more than two weeks ago in a cave-in. "I didn't desert anybody,'' he said early Wednesday, responding to victims' relatives who say officials have given up on finding their loved ones. "I've been living on this mountain every day, living in a little trailer.''


My god what a heroic sacrifice! He's living in a little trailer! Do I smell a Time Man of the Year award for his noble sacrifice? Nobel Prize? MacArthur Genius Grant perhaps? When you stop and think about what this man has lost in the past few weeks it should make you weep. He's lost valuable exploitation of the workers time, he's lost money due to his mine being closed, and now he tell us he's given up living in one of his luxury homes! I am on my knees worshipping this selfless human being. Move over Gandhi, step aside Mother Theresa, get off that cloud Martin Luther King, there's a new humanitarian in town!

If there is any justice in this world or the next then Murray the Mine Owner will be locked in a prison cell with Michael Vick and they'll both die long painful deaths.