Porn flick about Comcast would be called ‘Insatiable’

Posted on February 14, 2014 by oddmanout215

Comcast Center, the tallest building in Philly, looks like a giant zip drive... or something.

Comcast Center, the tallest building in Philly, looks like a giant zip drive… or something.

Swamp Rabbit and I were reading that Comcast, the nation’s No. 1 cable services provider, has bought out Time Warner Cable, the No. 2 provider. I wondered aloud what’s become of the Federal Communications Commission, the outfit that is supposed to prevent media corporations from establishing monopolies that exploit consumers. And where is the so-called Department of Justice? These questions are at least as old as the 1980s, when Ben Bagdikian wrote The Media Monopoly.

“The FCC done got neutered,” the rabbit said. “I been livin’ in this swamp for years, but even I know that. Where you been?”

Good question. I try to keep up with change, but I can’t figure out how the feds justify allowing companies like Comcast to make such crudely obvious power grabs. It’s hard to overestimate the effect of Comcast’s multimillion-dollar lobbying efforts, or the power of David Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president, but still…

Here’s part of the explanation, from Guardian UK’s Dan Gilmor:

America’s cable companies grew up in the cozy embrace of local governments that gave them monopoly franchises, which they’ve expanded over the years via mergers and acquisitions, not just normal growth. The noncompetitive local franchise model means that when one cable giant buys another, the customers generally have the same choices as before for subscription TV (cable or satellite) and internet service (cable or phone company DSL).

Whose interest is served by such a deal? The shareholders of TWC and Comcast would be thrilled, for sure. So would the NSA and other surveillance statists, who would undoubtedly be happiest if we reverted to the era when a single behemoth telecommunications enterprise served, for all practical purposes, as an arm of the spy services.

The other main winners would be the remaining telecom “competitors” that would be part of an ever-cozier oligopoly of enterprises that upgrade reluctantly and, compared to providers in other developed nations, grossly overcharge their customers. So look for more mergers, even less user privacy, higher prices and – if this is possible for the generally loathed cable companies – even worse service.

Monopoly wouldn’t be possible without pervasive political corruption. As City Paper’s Daniel Denvir wrote:

Philadelphia’s elected officials will no doubt line up to back Comcast, which recently announced its plans to build a second (taxpayer-subsidized) skyscraper here in its hometown. This is a company that works hard to make political friends, and which is energetically supporting Gov. Tom Corbett’s imperiled reelection campaign.

But still… Isn’t it the job of the feds to make sure media corporations don’t become so powerful they can avoid competition by buying the people who write the laws? And to make sure regulations regarding things like net neutrality don’t get wiped out by the courts?

Maybe the current FCC commissioners and the DoJ have decided today’s media monsters are too big to have to abide by quaint anti-trust laws. In the case of Comcast and TWC, we should know by the end of the year.

Footnote: If the goal is to own all the infrastructure, or “pipes,” then why did Comcast bother to consume NBC Universal, a “content” provider, last year?

“Because it could, you dummy,” Swamp Rabbit said.

Posted in campaign finance reform, City Paper, humor, life in the big city, mainstream media, Philadelphia | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Regarding corporate America’s rotgut (Coca-Cola)

Posted on February 12, 2014 by oddmanout215

mad as hell
I recently discussed with my friend Swamp Rabbit the sappy Coca-Cola commercial that features, as Guardian UK put it, “a multi-lingual rendition of ‘America the Beautiful’ sung by children and illustrated with a diversity of New Americana scenes…” The usual bigots and bumpkins condemned the ad because it seemed to promote multiculturalism. GOP zany Allen West was disappointed that “a company as American as Coca-Cola” didn’t do an English-only ad.

Liberals also registered indignation. As Guardian‘s Jill Filipovic noted, the aim of the ad was “to sell soda to rapidly-expanding but vulnerable populations, even if that means contributing to serious health problems, exploiting divides in class and education, and exacerbating racial inequality.” She added,

…consumers should have more affordable options, corporate advertising of unhealthy food should be regulated more tightly and Americans should be collectively enraged at our obscenely low wages and lack of a comprehensive social safety net – the things that create unhealthy, perverse incentives for consumers. It means we should cast a critical eye when soda companies fly the flag of diversity, when, in fact, their product contributes to stark racial inequalities.

Swamp Rabbit was sipping Wild Turkey from a dirty glass. He read the Guardian piece and said, “What’s this ‘should be’ and ‘cast a critical eye’? I thought she was gonna tell us how to bring down the flag-waving traitors who run the corporations that are wrecking the middle class and the poors for the sake of higher profits.”

I shook my head and said, “She’s a liberal, don’t you know? Liberals in our time like to complain about injustice, but they always stop short of advocating the sort of actions that would put an end to corporate bribery, tax-dodging and exploitation of workers.”

I reminded the rabbit that Coca-Cola and other mega-corporations are permitted to operate like quasi-autonomous entities, not bound by ordinary laws. Coke’s CEO has bitched about the company’s “very large tax burden” in the United States but, as Bud Meyers blogged:

… In actuality, Coca-Cola enjoys very low federal taxes, and pays a lower tax rate than most Americans. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, in 2011 the company’s federal tax expense was $470 million, which was only 6.5 percent of the $7.2 billion in pre-tax profits that Coca-Cola reported that year. It’s odd that Coke’s CEO would complain about taxes when the statutory corporate tax rate hadn’t been lower than what Coke paid for over 100 years.

The bigots are too stupid to understand the Coca-Cola ad was nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy. The liberals are too timid to admit nothing will change until we radically alter the rotten political system that allows multinational corporations and super-rich individuals to exist above the law, with enormous amounts of revenue stashed in offshore tax havens.

Swamp Rabbit twitched his nose and said, “Government these days ain’t nothin’ but legalized bribery. What we need is a revolution.”

Then he popped the zip top on an aluminum can and poured some Coke on his bourbon.

Footnote: I thought of the Coke commercial after reading about the publication of Dave Itzkoff’s book Mad As Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, which is largely about prophetic screenwriter Paddy Cheyevsky, who invented Howard Beale, the big screen’s most amusing enemy of corporate America.

Posted in arts, campaign finance reform, Congress, down and out, globalization, humor, mainstream media, movies, Occupy Wall Street, plutocracy, The New Depression, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Virginia Woolf almost does the Super Bowl

Posted on February 3, 2014 by oddmanout215

So dismayed by the Broncos, she didn't even file a story

Dismayed by the Broncos, she retreated to Bloomsbury without filing a story

Most years, I persuade a famous novelist to write a 500-word recap of the Super Bowl — Dostoyevski and Faulkner, among others, have donned their sportswriters’ caps to appear in this space — but this year Virginia Woolf phoned at halftime to say she was backing out, the Seahawks were up 22-zip. “Stick a fork in the Broncos, they’re done,” Virginia sniffed. “I’m boarding the next steamer back to Bloomsbury.”

I was devastated but hunkered down in the swamp shack to finish watching the game on my laptop and record my own impressions. Swamp Rabbit reluctantly continued to watch with me. Our eyes glazed over. The Seahawks ran hard, passed the ball well, intercepted and generally kicked ass. The second half was a boring brainless rout. Final score, 43-8. Peyton Manning looked like he might cry.

The rabbit started drinking early and can only remember that the guys wearing orange kept getting knocked sideways. That and the halftime show, a frantic splash of song and dance, the musical equivalent of throwing paint at a canvas.

Today he said, “I recall some little feller named Bruno Mars imitatin’ James Brown and gettin’ mobbed by a buncha half-nekked yahoos called the Red Hot Chile Peppers. Or was that just a bad dream?”

“That was the real deal,” I told him. “Those are some big-name, A-list acts, you dumb rodent.”

“I seen high school marchin’ bands was more original,” the rabbit said, reaching for the last slice of Super Bowl cake I stole at the Super Fridge before the game.

“Don’t be a snark,” I said, “The halftime show had cute kids, soldier videos, power ballads, fireworks, apple pie. What you got against those things? Remember what Virginia Woolf said: ‘You cannot find peace by avoiding life.'”

“I ain’t avoidin’ life,” the rabbit replied. “Just tryin’ to avoid football fans.”

Footnote: The only interesting musician who turned up was Bob Dylan, but that was just for a stupid-ass car commercial.

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‘Ever-so-gentle rabble-rouser’ Pete Seeger dies

Posted on January 28, 2014 by oddmanout215

seeger

I was away from the swamp, stealing potatoes at the local Super Fridge, when I heard about Pete Seeger. This will be a rough day, I thought. Swamp Rabbit is an old leftie with a soft spot for New Deal-influenced folksingers, and Seeger, 94, was the last of that breed. Sure enough, the pesky rodent was weeping next to the wood stove when I got back to the shack. He drank Wild Turkey while I put the taters on the fire. Then we surfed for obits and skimmed old books.

The Associated Press used the phrase “ever-so-gentle rabble-rouser” and found a non-musical way to sum up the difference between Seeger and the only other folksinger, pre-Bob Dylan, who would have as big an influence on popular music:

On the skin of Seeger’s banjo was the phrase, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender” — a nod to his old pal [Woody] Guthrie, who emblazoned his guitar with “This machine kills fascists.”

The record will show that Seeger was as brave and well-respected as he was peace-loving. Dylan alluded to this in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, while describing the day he was signed to Columbia Records by John Hammond:

Recently [Hammond] had brought Pete Seeger to the label. He didn’t discover Pete, though. Pete had been around for years. He’d been in the popular folk group The Weavers, but had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and had a hard time, but he never stopped working. Hammond was defiant when he spoke about Seeger, that Pete’s ancestors had come over on the Mayflower, that his relatives had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill, for Christsake. “Can you imagine those sons of bitches blacklisting him? They should be tarred and feathered.”

Seeger had been blacklisted after testifying before the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee. He had politely told the honorables to fuck off:

I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.

Then we read that Seeger “lost his cool” in 1965 because Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival and the noise drowned out Dylan’s words. It was a familiar story, gossiped about many times.

“I forgave him for that,” I said. “Dylan’s show must have been a shock to a guy who was born more than 30 years before rock ‘n’ roll.”

“Well now, Pete’s ghost must be sighin’ with relief,” the rabbit replied. “Who gives a shit who you forgive?”

We read about Seeger’s inspiring appearance at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and wondered whether Barack Obama would mention in his State of the Union address that Seeger’s life and art were exactly in sync with the social democratic policies that boosted the quality of life in mid-20th century America. Policies that have been under constant attack since Ronald Reagan took office.

“Oh sure,” the rabbit said. “Then the Democrats and Republicans is gonna hold hands and sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Hold the taters, you twit. Just pass me another bottle.”

Posted in arts, Great Depression, history, humor, mainstream media, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, pop music, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

50 years after ‘Strangelove,’ Gen. Jack Ripper on drugs

Posted on January 28, 2014 by oddmanout215

Sterling Hayden as Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper in 'Dr. Strangelove'

Sterling Hayden as Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper

This January marked the 50th anniversary of the release of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. From a New Yorker story about the mainstream critics who dismissed the movie’s storyline as implausible:

Despite public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of 1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as Soviet propaganda, there was nothing to prevent an American bomber crew or missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets. [Director Stanley] Kubrick had researched the subject for years, consulted experts, and worked closely with a former R.A.F. pilot, Peter George, on the screenplay of the film. George’s novel about the risk of accidental nuclear war, “Red Alert,” was the source for most of “Strangelove”‘s plot. Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a top official at the Department of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong. Even Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara privately worried that an accident, a mistake, or a rogue American officer could start a nuclear war…

The Cold War is over and nobody got nuked, so the chances of a nuclear catastrophe caused by a mistake or a rogue officer are slim to none, right? If you think so, you haven’t been following the recent Air Force scandal:

A US Air Force investigation into illegal drug use by officers charged with overseeing and launching nuclear missiles expanded on Wednesday when the military announced the suspension of dozens of additional officers for cheating on proficiency exams.

The cheating came to light during the investigation of the drug scandal, the Air Force said. The drug probe was first announced last Thursday.

In all, 11 Air Force officers are suspected of illegal drug use, and 34 officers have been implicated in cheating, according to the military…

Brilliant political satires do more than caricature people who wield too much power. They make it clear that a caricature, in some cases, can be the same thing as a realistic portrait.

I’m thinking of all the primary cast members in Dr. Strangelove, but especially of George C. Scott as Gen. Buck Turgidson — “Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines” — and Sterling Hayden as Brigadier Gen. Jack D. Ripper, who is convinced fluoridated water is at the heart of a Commie plot to pollute our “precious bodily fluids.” As if our home-grown coal industry isn’t perfectly capable of polluting us on its own.

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What ‘non-organic’ meant at Whole Foods

Posted on January 21, 2014 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit was complaining about the weather, a pointless and self-defeating exercise. “This here winter is like a roller coaster ride, with temps up to fifty-something one week and a blizzard the next. How we gonna eat if you can’t get out the swamp to rob no supermarkets? Ain’t nothin’ but cold cuts in this here shack, and they’s even worse than wieners.”

“Things are tough all over,” I said, trying to warm up by the wood stove. Then I grabbed the laptop and read for him the headline from a PRWatch story — “Whole Foods Agrees to Stop Selling Produce Grown in Sewage Sludge” — and some of the text:

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) broke the story that the $12.9 billion-a-year natural and organic foods retailer Whole Foods Market had a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” when it comes to “conventional” — or non-organic — produce being grown in fields spread with sewage sludge, euphemistically called “biosolids.” Certified organic produce cannot be fertilized with sewage sludge, which is the industrial and hospital waste and human excrement flushed down the drains and later — in some cases — spread on some crops.

Since this story broke, nearly 8,000 activists and PRWatch readers have sent emails to Whole Foods executives asking the company to require its suppliers to disclose this information and to label produce grown in sewage sludge so that customers can make informed decisions.

Mario Ciasulli, a semi-retired engineer and home cook living in North Carolina whom CMD profiled in December 2012, blew the whistle on Whole Foods’ don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy. As soon as he found out that shopping at Whole Foods was no protection against this potential contamination unless he could afford to buy only certified organic produce, he worked extensively to engage Whole Foods on this issue…

“You mean they was growin’ my carrots in hospital doo-doo?” Swamp Rabbit said.

I explained to him that it’s the same all over. You don’t even want to know where your food comes from unless you’re well off enough to buy ‘certified organic’ at farmers’ markets or places like Whole Foods, which is run by ultra-rich right-wing vegan John Mackey and frequented by many liberals who probably didn’t know that “non-organic” or “conventional” produce at Whole Foods often was “grown in sewage sludge.”

“Damn,” the rodent said. “Make sure you steal organic this time. And if you don’t, don’t tell me.”

Posted in economic collapse, food, humor, plutocracy, unemployment | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Why mainstream media kissed up to Christie

Posted on January 15, 2014 by oddmanout215

My backyard in the swamp after the rain

It’s been a long week in the Tinicum swamp. That crack in the roof of my shack that Swamp Rabbit fixed didn’t stay fixed very long, so I stole another bucket of epoxy and put him to work when the rain stopped. “If it ain’t the cold, it’s the rain,” the rabbit whined. Things could be worse, I told him. He could be Chris Christie, trying to patch up the hot air balloon he was hoping to sail to the White House in 2016.

Christie, the prince of paypacks, is still desperately trying to convince people he’s not the jerk behind the jerks who caused major traffic problems in Fort Lee, N.J., whose mayor refused to endorse Christie for governor in 2013.

Good luck with that. The Fort Lee fiasco has focused attention on other people to whom bad things happened after they bumped up against Christie. In fact, it seems bad things happen to most people who don’t kowtow to the gov’ner. He often physically confronts perceived enemies, including women schoolteachers who are one-third his size.

But let’s face it: A lot of people have admired and voted for Christie precisely because he is a bully, adept at deflecting accusations of greed away from his corporate masters and onto regular people, especially teachers, firefighters, and other labor union members. It’s much easier to resent the guy up the street whose income is a bit higher than yours than it is resent billionaire neo-fascists — or are they neo-feudalists? — like Charles and David Koch, who are genuinely ruining your life, but from a great distance.

And Christie got a lot of help from mainstream journalists, many of whom are instinctive ass-kissers, enthralled by the wielding of power and their proximity to those who wield it. Journalists like Joe Scarborough and Brit Hume, for example, like to gush about certain tough-talking politicians who dumb down every issue of import.

A writer at The Nation recently commented on the kid gloves treatment Christie got from most of the MSN. I read the piece to Swamp Rabbit when he came down from the roof:

It didn’t matter that [Christie] lost $400 million of federal school funding, or unilaterally canceled a plan to build a commuter train tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan and presented it falsely as a big savings for his state, or vetoed — five times —additional funding for family planning, directly causing six reproductive health centers to close. Christie has filled the place formerly occupied by John McCain: the straight-shooting Republican “maverick” (a maverick being a Republican who admits the earth is probably older than 10,000 years). It doesn’t matter what he actually did or said.

It didn’t matter, not even when Christie was accused of using “money that was intended for victims of [Hurricane] Sandy to promote himself in a series of TV ads.” It only started to matter when the Christie administration got caught in an act of retribution so mean-spirited that it wasn’t possible to justify Big Boy’s style of governance by calling him a “straight-shooter” or an old-fashioned practitioner of “hardball politics.”

There are many exceptions, of course, but what is it about people in the media — usually men — that compels them to kiss up to politicians who are inflexible and vindictive, and to equate these flaws with leadership qualities?

“I ain’t sure,” Swamp Rabbit shrugged. “Maybe Christie and them other blowhards remind them journalists of the guys they work for. Or maybe they just ain’t got no balls.”

Same thing, rabbit.

Footnote: Notice Christie always makes sure he is flanked by a squad of cops when he confronts someone. What a maverick. What a man.

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Beware the polar Gore-Tex… or is it cortex?

Posted on January 8, 2014 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit before dissipation spoiled his looks

Swamp Rabbit before dissipation spoiled his looks

It seemed I might be able to change my socks two days in a row, but then Arctic air crept in on big bear claws and pushed the swamp back into the deep freeze. Swamp Rabbit, flipping out from cabin fever, chugged Wild Turkey and ranted, convinced the new ice age had arrived via something called the solar cortex, or the polar Gore-Tex. The name kept changing, but whatever he was going on about sounded ominous.

“I’m telling you, it ain’t natural,” he shouted from next to the wood stove. “This here roller duplex gonna be the end of us.”

Noticing he’d been online, I checked the screen:

…Arctic air is normally penned in at the roof of the world by a powerful circular wind called the polar vortex, said Dim Coumou, a senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) near Berlin. When the vortex weakens, the air starts heading southwards, bringing exceptional snow and chill to middle latitudes. The weather shift is also helped by changes in a high altitude wind called the jet stream…

The phrase “polar vortex’ was all over the Internet, like a new pop star or a contagious disease. “Reminds me of you,” I said to the rabbit. “You’re sort of locked in the same loop, round and round, but then you hit the Wild Turkey and start meandering south. You’d be in Georgia by now if you weren’t trapped by the cold.”

“Ain’t no sense to it, the rodent replied. “How come the cortex is so weak, and why ain’t the jet stream doin’ its job?”

I tried to explain that scientists aren’t yet sure of exact cause and effect, only that extremes of temperature down here are becoming more common as the Arctic grows warmer. Then I told him to fetch more wood for the stove while I went outside the swamp to steal more food.

He guzzled bourbon and said, “Why bother? It’s the end of the world.”

“Then I’ll just get food for me,” I replied, opening the door of the shack.

“Git me some veggies or somethin’,” he said, after an apparent change of heart. “Just don’t bring back no more swine.”

Posted in apocalypse, climate change, down and out, fiction, globalization, humor | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Bread and water beats jail food

Posted on January 7, 2014 by oddmanout215

new swamp

Pig meat gives me bad dreams; I don’t eat it unless there’s nothing else. Philosopher and Animal Liberation author Peter Singer would tell me there is always something else, that “We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet — for the sake of hamburgers.” And hot dogs. But Singer lives at Princeton, not in Tinicum Swamp, where I make my home.

“Why didn’t you swipe soyburgers for yourself and leave the swine for me?” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit asked me today.

He’s no Singer fan and he’s still angry about having to split a pack of wieners with me on Saturday, when the temperature in these parts plunged to near zero. He was angry on Sunday, too, but the weather was better. Warm air flowed in so fast the whole swamp fogged up as the ice melted.

I woke up Sunday night — or dreamed I woke up — and saw dead people floating out of the fog toward my shack. One was my Great Aunt Nan, who used to give me candies and warn me to stop being a bad boy. This time she issued her old warning in a ghostly tone. “Bread and water. That’s all they feed you in jail.”

Not true, I thought, recalling a piece last month in Truthdig by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges about Aramark Corporation, a Philadelphia-based professional services company that supplies food for inmates at 600 jails and prisons nationwide — food that, according to Hedges, sometimes isn’t fit for your dog to eat, or maybe even your Swamp Rabbit:

…In February 2009 a Camden County, N.J., health report found that the Aramark-run kitchen in the county jail had “mice throughout kitchen and storage area.” Mouse droppings were discovered in butter. Several food items, including grits, chicken, rice and beef, were not stored at temperatures low enough to protect against contamination. Prisoners at the county jail in Santa Barbara, Calif., went on a hunger strike last summer to protest the Aramark food, and inmates at Bayside State Prison in New Jersey went on a hunger strike in October for the same reason…

I’ll stop there, in case you dear readers are about to dine. Hedges’ piece is reminiscent of passages from The Jungle and addresses some of the ways big corporations are cashing in on the fact that incarceration rates in the United States are the highest in the world.

Hedges is an unabashed foe of corporatism, so it’s no surprise he wrote a negative piece about Aramark. But I’m wondering why The Philadelphia Inquirer or some other prominent mainstream news entity hasn’t done an “objective” report on the many complaints about the kitchen facilities and jail food served up by this services giant, a Fortune 500 company that has its own high-rise office building in Philly and generates $12 billion a year in revenues.

Maybe I just answered my own question.

Footnote: See Prison Legal News for more on prison food services.

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, food, mainstream media | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Poverty gets more expensive every day

Posted on January 5, 2014 by oddmanout215

A view of Philly from my shack before the weather changed

From my shack, a view of Philly when the weather was good

Yesterday at the shack we woke to bone-chilling wind and a blanket of ice. Swamp Rabbit was huddled in a corner with a bottle from the case of Wild Turkey I stole to help him get through his post-holiday funk. I told him to fetch wood from the swamp so we don’t freeze, it would be two below zero soon.

“That booze won’t warm you for long,” I said. “I’ll find you stiff as a board tomorrow morning.”

“It won’t be my fault,” the rabbit said. “You ain’t nothin’ but an enabler, don’t ya know?”

While the rodent fetched wood, I chopped ice off the roof and surfed the Net for more weather and news and so on. I saw a letter to the Naked Capitalism guy that I read to the rabbit when he got back with some dead branches that looked like bones:

My expenses are beginning to get the better of me and month’s end is stretching beyond my dollars. Next year is looking the same. So, yesterday I was pointedly reminded how expensive it is to be poor. Instead of buying a lot when something I use is on sale, I have to buy what I have dollars for. No savings for me! And instead of buying by unit price–I’m a ferocious unit price shopper–I have to buy whatever size I have dollars for. And now I have to make more trips because I can only buy small dollars worth at a time.

“Amen to that,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I used to buy carrots at twelve bucks a carton when I worked for that magician, gettin’ pulled out of a hat three shows a day. Now I can barely afford one of them two-dollar bags that don’t hold no more’n a half-dozen carrots.”

The lying varmint never worked for a magician but I could feel his pain, especially now that our reactionary Congress is cutting food stamps and unemployment, and secessionist governors in 25 states, with help from our neo-Confederate Supreme Court, are denying Medicaid to 4.8 million people who aren’t eligible for Obamacare. I read to the rabbit from something by William Greider:

The Supremes have done quite a lot in the last fifteen years to mess up our already weakened democratic system. They stole the presidential election in 2000. They cut loose Big Money to swamp elections by destroying lawful restraints. They are trying step-by-step to restore hoary old legalisms that favor capital over labor, corporations over individuals. Shouldn’t we be talking about how to stop them?

“No, we should be talkin’ about gettin’ somethin’ to eat,” the rabbit said. “I’m too hungry to talk politics.”

I told him to get a fire going in the stove so I could unfreeze the pack of wieners I pinched from Pathmark.

“What you take me for, a heathen?” he said. “I don’t likes me no swine.”

“You’d better get used to it,” I said, “or start growing your own carrots.”

Footnote: Uh-oh, now I’ve got playing in my head Captain Beefheart’s “A Carrot Is as Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond.”

Posted in down and out, economic collapse, food, humor, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment