"They've got a brand new facility down at Guantanamo. We spent a lot of money to build it. They're very well treated down there.
They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got
everything they could possible want." -- Vice President (and National Travel Agent) Dick Cheney, in a June 23 CNN interview

The United States is proud to announce our newest lifestyle community, The Villas at Guantanamo Bay. Situated along the turquoise coastline of southern Cuba, this tropical paradise offers an exhilarating escape from the terrors of everyday life. Here, you'll enjoy glorious privacy, far from family, friends, human rights organizations or legal counsel.

The Villas at Guantanamo Bay experience begins with lodging in our spanking new condominiums. Every detail of your sleek concrete and steel mesh habitat is designed to help us pay close attention to your every need. You'll love the little touches that make your home unique, from the brightly colored complimentary jumpsuits to the Koran placed in every bathroom.

Our spa has received global recognition for the services it offers. Our experienced masseurs will give your body a working over that will have your senses singing. You might also want to try our unique commode hydro-therapy facials, after which you can have your body slathered with the finest cleaning products and our special blend of all-natural body fluids. Later, sit back and relax as one of our hospitality specialists offers you the lit end of one of those famous Cuban cigars.

Our fitness center is outfitted with the finest equipment, and your personal trainer can run you through a sequence of exercises your body won't be able to resist. For a change of pace, you might choose to take part in the soccer matches we arrange during visits by Congressional delegations.

If it's entertainment you’re after, we offer endless possibilities. Some might choose to have their minds pushed to new limits in one of the daily discussion groups led by our trained facilitators, while others simply might prefer to squeal to the antics of our trained dogs. For those with more sophisticated tastes, our specialty hostesses offer exotic dances certain to provoke that special response.

Nighttime offers a whole new range of delights. Our Padded Cell Disco has a state of the art light show that will dazzle your senses as your body throbs to the beat of our powerful sound system. There’s so much fun to be had that you won't want to sleep…we'll make sure of that!

And yes, you heard right! All meals and beverages are are part of the deal, including our incredible all-you-can-eat pork barbeque blowout!

Please note that at this time the Villas at Guantanamo Bay does not accept pets, children or wives. We also regret that, due to circumstances we are trying to control, we no longer offer photographic keepsakes of your visit.

Perhaps you've heard that this fabulous opportunity is only available to terrorists, but we have great news! You don't need any connection to terrorism at all! Simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you too can be swept into this tropical adventure of a lifetime.

Once you've experienced the Villas at Guantanamo, you'll never leave. That's our guarantee!

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.

Ruminating on Organic Milk

Every penny we spend has multiple and often contradictory real-world repercussions, and it can make you crazy trying to sort out whether your buying habits are screwing up the world or helping to make it a better place.

It was milk that got me thinking the other day. There was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about local organic dairy farmers. They work hard to adhere to strict organic guidelines requiring cows to graze on open organic pasture. The official organic guidelines, however, are not so strict: large corporate dairies in the western states get away with calling their milk ‘organic’ just by giving their herd organic feed, even though the cows live a miserable life, penned up in close quarters and rarely if ever actually put to pasture. The local farmers see this as cheating, and as damaging the reputation of the organic label for milk.

Funny thing is, the DebtorsPrison household probably buys less milk than ordinary households. Although Mrs. DebtorsPrison has a glass now and then, I can’t drink the stuff straight—don’t like the taste or texture and it makes me gag. I do use it on the cold cereal I breakfast on a few times each week, use it in cooking, have some hot chocolate occasionally. So far, I have not paid the premium price for organic milk.

Still, I try and take these things into consideration in everything I buy. I do most of my food shopping at Whole Foods Supermarket. It costs somewhat more, but I like knowing that I am minimizing the amount of chemically-enhanced fake food I put into my body, and I like that my buying habits show these ‘Foodenstein’ multinationals that I reject their products.

The milk I buy at Whole Foods is not organic, but it is at least free of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormones (rBGH). Now, the corporate food industry is spending plenty of bucks to convince you that this stuff is harmless—see, for example, the Milk is Milk website put up by the agribusiness-funded Center for Global Food Issues (there’s even a blog!), but don’t you believe it. The European Union bans the import of US meat containing rBGH, given the ample evidence that it is not only highly carcinogenic, but that due to the environmental contamination produced by industrial farming, low levels of rBGH show up in our drinking water and may be a factor in both the increasing early onset of puberty in girls and in the slowly falling sperm level counts in men.

Whole Foods does offer organic milk, but it costs about twice as much as the non-organic stuff, which so far has kept me from buying it. As much as I’d love to buy only the best and the purest, the sad fact is in DebtorsPrison America, shitty food often costs less, and when you have low income and large debts, you have to choose your battles carefully. But perhaps organic milk is one more modest step I can take.

And even there you have to make choices. Is there really a difference between organic milk from cows grazed in open pasture versus penned cows fed organic grain? Here’s the scoop according to Organic Valley Farms: grass-fed, open-pastured cows are healthier, the farming practices are more environmentally sustainable, and the milk is healthier too, richer in such heart-healthy and cancer-fighting compounds as Vitamin E, Beta-Carotene, Omega-3 fats and Conjugated Linoleic Acid (sounds awful, but it’s all good for you).

So maybe the extra buck or two per week for pasture-fed organic milk is a worthwhile addition to my rage-against-the-machine shopping basket. As I said at the outset: every penny we spend has real-world repercussions.

I'm Back to Blogging

I’m back to the blog, and happy to be here. I’ve missed it.

DebtorsPrison started about two years ago, when we had $23,000 in credit card debt. We still have some debt, around $9,000, your basic average US household credit card debt. Of course, we are luckier than a lot of those average debtors, since ours is locked in at 2% special deal interest rates. Things could be a lot worse.

Of course, DebtorsPrison was never really about the debt per se. This blog was more about the social, political and economic forces that make debt so easy a trap to fall into in the United States. The opening entry of this blog two years ago can still serve for its reintroduction today:

I used to think that responsible behavior like paying your bills on time was the
key to earning good credit. I now realize that what brings you the
whopping high credit limits is irresponsibility, the willingness to surrender
your good judgment to the lure of desire.

I love my credit and am
grateful that it has allowed me to build a happy life for my wife and me, to own
a home, to have traveled to over thirty countries, and to own a hell of a lot of
stuff. Nevertheless, for all the freedom my credit has brought me, the
accumulated debt brings a powerful burden of worry. Even worse, now serves
to constrain my freedom. I have entered a type of debtors’
prison.

This weblog, DebtorsPrison, intends to examine this
peculiar consumer society of ours. Life with easy credit and abundant choice can
be very sweet indeed. And yet we are also living in a kind of madness,
continually tempted and urged to do things which are not necessarily good for
ourselves, for society or for the planet, things we might not have done if we
had the constraints of tight money and fewer choices.

I don’t
intend simply to rant and blame society, corporations, the government or the
media. That would be too easy. It’s true that my politics are
generally left-leaning, pro-conservation, suspicious of big capitalism, and
generally appalled by much of the mindless consumption I see around me.
Nevertheless, it is also true that despite my political beliefs, my good
intentions and my low wages, I too have been lured into the debtors’ prison.

I’m sure there are plenty of out-dated news and broken links in the the old posts and archives, and I’ll be cleaning them out from time to time. A few of my favorite essays from the past will still be linked to in the column on the left. But now it is forward, into the renewed, interest-compounded DebtorsPrison…