The Dow of Cheez Whiz

The insurance giant AIG was one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Now that AIG has crashed and burned as part of the financial meltdown, a company needed to be chosen to take its place.

Let’s raise a frosty glass of Kool-Aid to Kraft Foods, newest member of the Dow.

The Dow Jones Industrial average is the most widely reported gauge of stock market activity, the one that news broadcasts and newspaper headlines typically trumpet. Many people are surprised that it consists of only 30 companies, given that the stock market as a whole consists of thousands.

Still, those 30 companies are widely accepted as accurately reflecting the market because they are dominant across a broad spectrum of the US economy.

Food companies are not new to the Dow. In fact, Coca-Cola and McDonalds are also part of the current mix. (Proctor and Gamble is as well, though the food part of their business is small; Folgers coffee, for example.) The original Dow Jones Average, created in 1896 with 12 companies, included food corporations. There was the American Sugar Company (now Amstar Holdings) and the American Cotton Oil Company (which eventually emulsified into mayonnaise company Best Foods, which ultimately congealed into Unilever.)

Here’s a surprise: Kraft Foods actually already was part of the Dow for a while up until last year. It’s just that they were hiding within the Altria Group (you know…Altria Group…the fancy new name for what had been the Phillip Morris Tobacco Company.) Kraft Foods had been bought up by the Phillip Morris back in 1988, which then baked it together with other food companies it had acquired, like General Foods and Nabisco.

Altria got rid of Kraft back in 2007, making it an independent company again (I guess they figured pushing both cigarettes AND Velveeta on their customers made the mortality levels too high for the bottom line), and Altria itself was taken out of the Dow mix earlier this year.

Are you following all this? Maybe you should go have a few Oreos to get your sugar up and increase your concentration. I’ll wait…

OK, so anyway, Kraft Foods is now part of the bellwether US stock market index. Since Kraft has only been an independent company again for less than two years, it’s a little hard to get a bead on what issues they are spending their million dollars per quarter lobbying money on. Their lobbyists work on import safety, cloned food labeling and on renewable fuels (i.e., the cost of grain), but it isn’t clear from what I’ve seen so far what positions they take on the issues. Incidentally, one of their chief Senate lobbyists is Abigail Blunt, wife of House Republican Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Whatever their lobbying aims, the basic truth is that most of Kraft’s products are poor substitutes for real food, and that their advertising extols us to eat bad things.

But hey, they are part of the Dow now, so let’s all suck it up if we want to see the headlines able to report that the Dow is going up. A healthy Kraft contributes to a healthy Dow, so make sure you eat plenty of Oreos, Chips Ahoy and Chicken in a Biskit. Have an Oscar Mayer bologna sandwich slathered with Miracle Whip and Velveeta. Wash it down with Tang, Kool-Aid and Crystal Light. This Thanksgiving, stuff your turkey with Stove-Top and slather Cool Whip on your pumpkin pie.

Your nation is depending on you.

Previously posted on La Vida Locavore

Some Straight Talk for John "POW" McCain

(Originally posted on DailyKos)

Congratulations, John McCain. You have managed to turn an act of strength and bravery 40 years ago into an emblem of your shame and cowardice today.

There are thousands of soldiers who have suffered as POWs, but you don't hear them trying to hide behind their suffering to avoid taking responsibility for a mistake. You don't hear them claiming that their experience entitles them to being hired for a job.

Even more than that, there are literally millions of Americans who have suffered some great pain or trauma or loss at some point in their lives, but you don't hear them whining that their experience entitles them to a free pass, or using their suffering to try and game the system to get their hands on something they want. No, most people have more courage and decency than that.

Maybe you'd like to take a look at the POW Network's Biography Pages, Senator McCain. There you can find the life stories of thousands of former POWs. Read a few. Read a few dozen. Read a few thousand.

There you will find lives of quiet courage, stories of people who have managed to make it through their lives with varying degrees of success despite the traumatic experience of their past. What you will NOT find is story after story of how they used their POW experience to be given a job or a hand-out. You won't find stories of how they whined repeatedly "I was a POW' in order to escape responsibility for things they said or did.

Or perhaps you would like to take a look at the website of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. There you can learn about soldiers who have struggled to make it. There are an estimated 200,000 Vets living on the streets on any given night, 400,000 who are homeless at some point during any given year.

47% of those Vets are from your war, Senator McCain. The Vietnam War.

Though you just love to tell us repeatedly how much you suffered 40 years ago, the fact is you have lived an elite life of wealth and privilege since that time. You want for nothing, John McCain, except of course your hunger for power. You dumped your first wife (who had gone through her own years of physical and psychological pain) and married into wealth, you have had the benefit of ample money and patronage to further your political career. In contrast to those hundreds of thousands of homeless Vets, you have so many fine homes that you cannot even keep track of them.

And what have you done to help those hundreds of thousands of homeless Vets? Well, you voted AGAINST providing $20 million to Department of Veterans Affairs for health care facilities. You were one of only 13 Senators to vote AGAINST providing $430,000,000 to the Department of Veterans Affairs for outpatient care and treatment. You voted AGAINST increasing Veterans' medical care funding by $1.5 billion.

Yes, you got yours, Senator McCain, but you have repeatedly voted against helping your fellow veterans, many of whom I expect were POWs, to get a leg up.

And now you have the unmitigated gall to whine, both through surrogates and from your own lips, that your misstatements and your mistakes should be overlooked because you were a POW. You dare to incessantly wave the banner of your 40 year old POW story as reason that you should be given entree into the office of President of the United States.

Forgive me if I don't buy it.

Every single speaker in the Republican National Convention repeated at length your POW story. Every video recounted it. And you yourself in your acceptance speech wallowed in it once again. You and your surrogates have used your POW experience from 40 years ago to let you avoid any accountability for everything from infidelity to cheating at the Saddleback church forum to not knowing how many homes you own.

It is shameful enough that you trivialize your experience 40 years ago in the service of your lust for power today. But it is even worse how your trivializing the POW experience demeans the experience of the thousands of others who suffered through similar experiences, and the thousands more who suffer post-traumatic stress from their war experiences. Those hundreds of thousands of people manage to get through life without constantly calling attention to what they went through, just in order to gain some advantage.

And this goes beyond military experience, Senator McCain. There are millions of people who have suffered through terrible periods of physical and/or psychological trauma.

There are people who have been in horrible accidents in which they lost limbs or mobility or, from which they suffer life-long physical pain, from which they required years of physical therapy to recover.

There are people who have been the victims of rape, abuse or incest, inflicting psychological pain which they carry around in secret suffering for years.

There are people who have lost loved ones to sudden and unexpected death, who have had to carry on raising their family through their grief and economic loss.

There are people who have, often through no fault of their own, gone through periods of economic hardship, lost their livelihoods or homes, and spent time living on the street.

There are millions upon millions of such stories to be told among the American people, John McCain. But most Americans manage to shoulder their burdens, to move on with their lives, to live with quiet courage and dignity despite whatever times of tragedy have befallen them in the past.

They do NOT, 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years later, rehash their old wounds in order to gain advantage or avoid responsibility. By your actions, Senator McCain, you have also demeaned the experience of these millions of Americans.

You have said in the past, Senator McCain, that you would never use your POW experience for political gain. Obviously that is no longer true.

Some people call you a liar because you have gone back on your word, but I don't think that quite gets to the heart of it.

The truth is, I think that you are a prisoner today to a much greater extent than you ever were a prisoner in Vietnam 40 years ago. You are a prisoner of your political ambition, and more importantly, of the political ambition of your advisers and handlers. You have gone back on your word about not wanting to use your POW experience for political gain, you have gone back on most of your policy positions in order to pander to the right wing of the Republican Party, you have gone back on your motto 'Country First' by appointing an unqualified vice presidential candidate for purely political reasons.

Yes, John McCain, today you are a prisoner. But unlike that time 40 years ago, you are not a captive due to fateful circumstances. This time you are captive due to your own poor judgment. 40 years ago, you may have responded with bravery and determination to your captivity. Today, you have shown yourself to be weak and a coward. You have caved in to those who control you, you have ratted out your beliefs and the good of the country, you have betrayed and belittled those who have borne the circumstances of their lives with quiet courage.

You are unfit for command.

Enough of your shameless whining. Enough hiding behind your experiences of 40 years ago. Enough demeaning your fellow soldiers and your fellow citizens.

Enough.

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The Price of Coffee

I’ve read that a lot of people are upset about the recent 12% price hikes on Folgers, Yuban and Maxwell House coffees. I was feeling sympathetic until I read that the new average price for these major brands is only $2.57 for a 13 ounce can.

Holy Roast! I had no idea coffee was so cheap! No wonder people settle for those mediocre mass-produced vacuum-packed tin cans of brown dust instead of quality coffee.

Coffee was perhaps my first habitual premium purchase. I’ve been buying whole bean coffee and grinding it myself since I first started living on my own thirty years ago.

Funny thing is, it never was necessarily a better-tasting cup of coffee I was after, though I think I generally get it (the few times I’ve tasted these national brands of coffee, they struck me as lacking depth, watery with a faint aftertaste of cardboard). I’ve never been overly fussy about what water or coffeemaker I use, and I’ve certainly managed to brew some pretty shitty pots of coffee over the years even with fresh-ground premium beans (just ask Mrs. DebtorsPrison).

Rather, it’s the connection to the essence and history of coffee that has driven me to pay usually between six and fifteen dollars per pound for coffee, even during the leanest financial periods of my life. I love knowing that this particular pound of beans I’m drinking on any given day comes from Kenya, Peru, Columbia, or Sumatra…and very often from a very geographically specific collective of farmers within that country. Sometimes I feel that sense of connection so strongly that just pouring out the last dregs of a cup into the sink brings a sense of regret, aghast at how casually I can discard the product of millennia of horticulture and the careful labors of the proud people working some organic shade-grown finca in Costa Rica.

At first it may seem silly that I pay premium prices for coffee as much for the intangible vibe as for the superior taste. However, when you take a look at the websites of the major coffee brands, you see that they too market themselves on lifestyle rather than taste. At least I get genuine good feelings and flavor. Canned coffee drinkers get phony ad agency touchy-feeliness and a lousy cup.

Maxwell House promises to “brighten up your morning or energize gatherings with family and friends. Folgers claims to be “the best part of wakin’ up”. Yeah, and don’t droppin’ your ‘g’ when you’re talkin’ go makin’ ya feel all warm and fuzzy? Yuban goes haiku in describing how a cup of their brew will enhance your existence: “It's the moment before the sun rises...A sweet melody tickling your ear. It's a stroke of brilliance from an artist's brush...The clarity of a breathtaking view. It's the essence of serenity, the essence of perfection. It's Yuban, the essence of coffee.” None of these websites seem to talk very much about how the stuff actually tastes.

I also like knowing that by seeking out the Fair Trade label, my coffee-buying habits help ensure that at least some coffee growers throughout the world make a living wage, and, even better, earn a premium for using organic and ecologically sustainable growing techniques. Growers for the mass-produced coffees are trapped in a cycle of poverty and debt, laboring in what have been called “sweatshops of the field.” It’s nice to know my morning coffee has in some tiny way contributed to global economic justice, helping coffee growers in the Third World to escape their own debtors prison.

In my travels over the years, I’ve visited many of the impoverished countries that grow the world’s finest coffee. Sad to say, it’s damn hard to find a good cup in any of them. The good beans are reserved almost exclusively for export to the wealthy nations. Instead of serving an exemplary cup of their own world class coffee, your average restaurant in these countries give you one of the world’s worst: a cup of boiled water and a jar of Nescafe.

Nescafe, a division of Swiss multinational Nestle, has an ad campaign, “Open Up,” shot in countries around the world “to celebrate the role that coffee plays in people’s lives. Just think what greater role it might play if they didn’t pay poverty prices to growers and then turn around and foist their loathsome bastardization of coffee on the countries which produce the world’s finest beans.

A Modest Proposal: Rendition for the Bankrupt

The bankruptcy bill is progressing in Congress, and looks to be on the verge of final passage. Although I have never had to declare bankruptcy, I am certainly vulnerable, given my position as a debtor and a paycheck-to-paycheck person. It has been interesting to watch our honorable representatives in Congress portraying people like me as the lowest form of cheaters and thieves.

According to the pontificators of Congress, banks graciously provide the poor and middle class with credit cards out of the goodness of their hearts, wanting only to offer a little convenience to ease their lives, wanting only to trust them…and what do people do? They go out and spend like crazy, live the high life until the monthly minimum payments start to cramp their high-rolling lifestyle, and then they swindle those poor trusting banks out of their money. O, the injustice! No wonder these poor banks and credit card companies have to spend millions in campaign contributions just to try and get a fair shake.

Our reps in Congress don’t want to hear any excuses. All that stuff about how a third of personal bankruptcies are suffered by families who are already impoverished under federal standards? Balderdash! Or that Harvard study that found that nearly half of personal bankruptcies are the result of illness or medical bills? Nonsense! Those other studies that show divorced women are 300% more likely to end up in bankruptcy than single or married women due to reduced income, loss of health insurance and increased childcare costs? Piffle and twaddle! The study showing that persistent discrimination in mortgage lending is a major factor in Black and Latino homeowners being 500% more likely to end up in bankruptcy court than white homeowners? Give me a break!

It’s obvious to our honorable representatives in Congress that these lowlifes are gaming the system. They don’t want to hear any phony excuses about job loss, divorce or tumors. If card companies are kind enough to flood your mailbox with dozens of pre-approved credit applications each year, then it’s your responsibility to contribute to increasing the $30 billion in profit they made last year. And if you’re ever late with a payment, aren’t the card companies thoughtful enough to give you a little reminder in the form of penalty interest rates of 20-30%? Of course. But do you heed these warnings? No! You have the audacity to be driven even deeper into debt.

What, do these credit card deadbeats think it’s still the 1960s and 1970s, when the average family spent only 56% of its income on fixed expenses like housing, insurance, childcare and transportation, when people dealt with unexpected disruptions to their income by drawing on savings or sending a spouse out to get a second income? Well, welcome to the new millennium, people! Nowadays, fixed expenses eat up 74% of the average family’s income, both spouses already are working to make ends meet, and as for savings…well, since the credit card companies in the past 20 years have pushed to put plastic in the hands of everyone whether they had the income to manage it or not, savings in the United States has zeroed out and household debt has skyrocketed. Hey, babycakes, if you didn’t manage to get rich in the United States during the 80s and 90s, that’s your fault.

The plight of the poor credit card companies is so heartbreaking that I don’t think the bankruptcy bill goes far enough. Financial ruin is too good for these deadbeats. I think we should take a page from the Pentagon and the CIA: rendition. That’s right. When the military and intelligence services need to be able to say with a straight face that the United States doesn’t torture people, they use ‘rendition’ to outsource the torture of detainees to countries where they don’t have any pesky laws to hamstring the hamstringing.

So lets put an end to bankruptcy as an option for the lower and middle classes (the rich, of course, should still be able to conceal their assets and avoid their responsibilities—they’ve earned that right). Instead, let’s ship these deadbeats off to countries where they’ll get what they deserve. Surely some countries must still have debtor prisons. Or we can send them to where they’ll have their hands chopped off for being thieves, or forced to live in a cardboard shanty in some sprawling slum, or have their limbs deformed so as to make a better living as a beggar.

C’mon, Congress. You can do it. Cleanse America of these deadbeats who think that being impoverished and facing financial ruin means they can put something over on the government or big business. It’s not like you ever have to worry about their campaign contributions…

I've Heard of Investing in Silicon Valley, But...

Here’s another reason why income over a couple hundred grand should be subject to a 90% tax:

According to a Reuters news report, former stripper Tawny Peaks is auctioning off one of her 69HH breast implants on www.ebay.com. No, you don’t get to remove it yourself. She already had them removed six years ago when she decided to retire and become a soccer mom to her three kids (I’m resisting the obvious soccer ball jokes here). The implants were just gathering dust in her closet until she had the brainstorm to auction one of them off (she’s keeping the other one for sentimental reasons).

The auction ends on Saturday, and as I write this on Thursday evening, there are already dozens of bids, and the price is up to $16,766!!

OK, Tawny is going to autograph it, and there is some historical jurisprudencial value given its involvment in a1998 lawsuit wherein a patron of the strip club where she worked claimed he had suffered whiplash when she swung it and its twin in his face, but still….$16, 766?!

Yes, it’s funny, but it also really angers me. Some people have just too damn much money and too damn little sense. If you’ve got twenty thousand bucks in disposable income lying around, do something good with it. Help your friends, donate it to a worthy cause, even just save it for your retirement. Hell, give it to me…

I don’t even want to imagine the depraved acts this dude has planned for his $16,000 ex-stripper’s used Frankentit. But guess what? He is only an extreme example what seems to be an entire subculture.

When I did a “breast implant” Ebay search to find the particular auction mentioned in the news report, imagine my surprise to find that there are a lot of them going under the gavel. None of them have the heft nor the notoriety of Tawny’s, so they’re only pulling in bids up to fifty dollars.

Says the description for one: “smooth 450cc silicone breast implant. intact and in mint condition. NOT for human or animal insertion. Makes excellent paper weight or novelty.” Oh no…no animal insertions, please.

One other auction at least touts their 300cc model as having more practical uses: “You can stick it in the freezer and it acts like an ice pack or you can use it as a wrist rest for your computer mouse, it also makes a great frisbee as long as someone besides your doggie is there to catch it. Also can be heated and used on sore areas.” Sure, and maybe it’ll even be covered by your medical insurance.

If you want to blow your college tuition, here's the direct link to Tawny's auction, but remember, you only have until Saturday, March 6, 2:32pm Pacific Standard Time.

And Baby Makes Me

I see from yesterday’s New York Times that Fairchild Publications will be launching a new magazine for “affluent parents who want sophisticated things for their children.” It will be called Cookie, which to me is quite apropos in that it conjures up images of just the sort of bratty, over-indulged cookie-demanding spawn that affluent, self-absorbed, status-obsessed parents tend to raise.

Its editorial goal will be to “bring you the best—and only the best—of everything you want for bringing up baby.” You can read the word “best” as most expensive or prestigious. Mary Berner, president of Fairchild, makes no effort to hide the fact that this magazine has no reason to exist except as an advertising vehicle for luxury parenting gear: “There’s a lot of product out there that is looking for a sophisticated audience.” She further explains that makers of high-end children’s fashion and accessories don’t like advertising in the existing mass-market parenting magazines—readership of those rags are evidently too unsophisticated, not to mention income-challenged, to appreciate real luxury. Until now, they have been forced to try and reach their affluent target audience by advertising in publications like Vanity Fair, which hasn’t been too effective, since most VF readers are more interested in Leonardo DiCaprio’s love life or the latest scandalous legal trial than they are the in the well-being of their children. But now there will be a magazine specifically tailored for their advertisements.

Editor Pilar Guzman calls the magazine a “mom treat” to help busy but picky women make the best choices (translation: women who want the best for their children as long as they can buy it and not have to be bothered researching or thinking too much or being too involved in the decision, and as long as other parents can tell at a glance how expensive it is so they’ll know that you are a good parent). But if Fairchild thinks it will be just moms reading Cookie, then I suspect they are ignoring a big part of their audience.

Dads are hot for status parenting gear too, we see from an article in The Wall Street Journal on February 24: “Dad’s New Wheels are on the Stroller.” It seems strollers are overtaking sports cars in the wheeled virility-enhancing department. Testosterone-drunk dads are roaring down sidewalks and through shopping malls pushing their Sport Utility Ironman strollers from Bob Trailer, Inc.. Yep, pushing your baby in one of these $300 babies, with 16 inch composite polymer wheels, fine-tune tracking adjustment and 3-inch suspension system will “make curbs, uneven sidewalks, supermarket aisles and unpaved trails a breeze to navigate.” Nobody will dare call you ‘Mr. Mom’ when you’re behind the wheels of one of these.

Cookie. Look for it on your newsstands in November.