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Dear Puffin,
It should come as no surprise that I don’t much care for anyone in the GOP field and this includes Herman Cain. He’s like a malicious version of Ross Perot, with none of Perot’s charm. So I have a certain base-line level of disgust with Herman Cain to start with, but there have been two spikes recently which have caused me to absolutely despise him. The first was this little number, reported by The American Prospect.
Cain’s speech Friday afternoon was a barnstormer. His loudest applause, a standing ovation, came when he noted his upbringing under Jim Crow, but he told the crowd that he’s never been upset with the treatment of blacks in America. “I have achieved all of my American dreams and then some, because of the great nation, United States of America,” Cain said. “What’s there to be angry about?” he asked.
Here’s the more official version from the transcript:
One of the questions that I get asked sometimes running for president of the United States: Mr. Cain, didn’t you grow up in the civil rights movement?
Yes, I did, in Atlanta, Georgia — raised in Atlanta, Georgia, during the ’50s, the ’60s, before the civil rights movement, during the civil rights movement. I was around when they signed the civil rights movement (sic) of 1964, when they signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This nation has made it through the Civil War. This nation has made it through the struggle we had with slavery, Jim Crow laws, civil rights.
A reporter asked me just yesterday: Well, aren’t you angry — (laughter) — about how America has treated you?
I said: Sir, you don’t get it. (Laughter.) I have achieved all of my American dreams and then some — (cheers, applause) — because of the great nation United States of America. (Cheers, applause.) What’s there to be angry about? Angry? (Applause continues.)
Translation: Herman Cain made a lot of money, therefore people no longer need to be angry about Jim Crow. Um. OK, nationalism and patriotism are all well and good, but this takes flag-waving American exceptionalism to a whole new and awful extreme. This is the race-relations version of that disgusting old GOP chestnut “well I lucked out, why didn’t you?” which is just another way of casting the poor as undeserving. After all, if they deserved to be rich, they would be! Herman Cain hasn’t felt discriminated against, apparently, so why should you? Hear that, black America? Jim Crow wasn’t that bad. And anyway, the elected government of the United States of America may have enacted generations of legislation victimizing black Americans, but America (an amorphous entity made up of fireworks and apple pie) made Herman Cain’s American dreams come true.
It’s like he’s saying no harm no foul. Which is laughable, not to say benighted and revisionist, because he’s apparently forgotten or chosen to ignore the generations of black (and Asian, and Latino, and native American, etc) Americans whose American dreams did not come true because of Jim Crow, and the mountains of other legislation that either directly discriminated against or failed to protect the rights and privileges of American citizens. And he’s apparently forgotten or chosen to ignore the fact that Jim Crow type laws were written explicitly to prevent minorities from participating in the American dream.
No one is saying that Herman Cain, or indeed anyone, needs to be carrying a chip on their shoulder about stuff that happened 40, 50, 60 years ago. How people interact with their own ethnicity ought to be entirely their own business. Of course it isn’t, but it oughta be, and to that end I will not unleash the extensive commentary I had written earlier about how Herman Cain is a dipshit for so obviously attempting to erase his ethnicity in order to hang with the good old boys of the GOP. And yet, at the same time, he’ll use the “Niggerhead” situation as a way to score off Rick Perry, which is not to say that Perry doesn’t deserve it.
The weirdest thing about this is that the GOP was recently called out on their relationship to black history in America. And do you know who did it? Michael Steele. His response to the “Niggerhead” story was this eminently reasonable and well constructed comment:
STEELE: We cannot be lackadaisical about these issues. We cannot be insensitive in that regard and say well just paint over it, because it still is a reminder of what’s beneath the paint. And I think again that’s what irks a lot of African-Americans and a lot of minorities when it comes to how the Republican Party and sometimes its individual candidates respond to these types of things.
Michael Steele has become a voice of reason. Michael Steele has become a voice of reason!! Aughhhhh!
But as far as Cain’s ridiculous run for the presidency goes, this video is actually just as disturbing.
No, knowing the name of the president of Uzbekistan is not going to create a single job. But it is YOUR job as president, Mr Cain. Being proud of your ignorance of foreign policy may go over well with the tea party, who like to pretend that the economy is the only thing going on in the whole wide world, but it just lost you the neo-conservative vote. And also, hopefully probably, the GOP nomination. Also, how is knowing the leaders of “insignificant” central asian states irrelevant to national security? I’m sure plenty of people thought Afghanistan was irrelevant before 2001. But it wasn’t.
Also, it is probably worth remembering that foreign policy is one of the few arenas for which the president really is directly responsible. Jobs bills, the economy, civil rights at home, all this issues are decided between the president and the legislature. But the formulation and execution of foreign policy is one of the few jobs that falls directly into the purview of the president. Matt Yglesias makes an especially good point:
The contrast with someone like Al Franken is, to me, telling. A comedian running for Senate naturally faces some voter skepticism even if, like Franken, he’s been politically engaged and active for years. So Franken clearly went out of his way during and after his campaign to show that he’s well-briefed and well-versed in the issues. He had a higher bar to cross than your average candidate, so he did the work to clear it. Cain, trying to leap from ex-CEO of third-rate pizza chain to president of the United States, doesn’t think he needs to do anything.
In summation Puffin: Ugh. I am thoroughly cheesed off with these clowns. And Herman Cain is Asshole of the Day.
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin,
As you know, it is killing me that I can’t be at the Occupy Wall St protests. And it’s especially horrible and ironic that the reason I can’t go is that I can’t get time off from my corporate slavery job to attend. But them’s the breaks, as my overlord boss tells me. But fortunately for me I have friends like Jason, an old classmate from Columbia, who managed to get himself down to the protests and has sent us a report from the field.
HOW TO TALK ABOUT OCCUPY WALL STREET
by Jason Fitzgerald
Note: This essay is also published on the Huffington Post’s Off the Bus series here, under a different title.
One of the most well-rehearsed axioms of the Occupy Wall Street event is that “the media does not know how to talk about it,” and, as a result, is talking about it to as minimal an extent as is possible. Fortunately for the occupation’s supporters, their presence is getting harder and harder to ignore. And so the media’s problem is slowly but steadily becoming the nation’s problem. When I joined in the Solidarity March today along with fellow students from Columbia, NYU, CUNY, and SUNY, not to mention an impressive number of labor organizations, I was approached by two different broadcast journalists for interviews. The first identified himself as “Kuwaiti television,” and the second identified herself as “from CUNY.” Each newscaster thrust a microphone in my face and asked the same question, “Why are you here?” I could not escape the feeling that they were speaking for the entire country, maybe the world, and that somehow, if the answer to the question could be “discovered,” all the cameras would pack up and go home, relieved not to have to be in downtown Manhattan anymore.
We must begin by acknowledging that the first fundamental fact of Occupy Wall Street is that it has no message. It is not a localized policy march, like a march for same-sex marriage equality or for a university living wage or for a political candidate. Occupy Wall Street is unlike any of these protest-type gatherings for the simple reason that it cannot be talked about in familiar terms. The “meaning” of the occupation will emerge over time, both by the intellectuals and journalists who are already trying to explain the event’s “goals,” and by history itself, which will measure the occupation by the way it concludes. I think it is worth considering, though, that the present incommensurability of the occupation, the fact that it cannot be explained away by being made to stand in for a “message” or a “platform,” is its greatest asset, and the marker of its significance.
I answered the question, “Why are you here?,” not by citing the degree of inequity between wealthy and non-wealthy Americans (the problem of the so-called “99%”), nor the oligarchy manifesto known as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, nor the bank and corporate bailouts, nor the refusal by any major Western state to take environmental climate change seriously, nor the decades of imperialist inefficacies of the IMF. What I tried to say—and what I am attempting to say better here—is that I came because by being physically present at Occupy Wall Street, I could increase, however marginally, the likelihood that more people would look in my direction.
If Occupy Wall Street is to be permitted any meaning at all, it is as deixis. Deixis takes place when a rhetorician points to something (figuratively or actually) without giving it a name (“here” and “that one there” are deictic terms). A deictic gesture changes the direction of attention, so that what it points away from is as significant as what it points toward. Occupy Wall Street, in other words, is not occupying anything. It is pointing toward and pointing away. It is pointing toward corporate power, through corporate power’s most transparent metonym, the short seven blocks north of Exchange Place that connect Broadway and the East River. And Occupy Wall Street is pointing away from Washington D.C., from the Senate, from the House of Representatives, from Barack Obama, from Rick Perry and Chris Christie, from filibusters, from debt ceilings, from “supercongresses,” from election polls, from Americans for Prosperity, from Karl Rove, from George Soros, from campaign ads, from everything that “the media”—particularly the socially engaged media like CNN, Fox, and MSNBC—understands to be “politics.” Occupy Wall Street turns away from these items and says: That is sideshow.
What is real? The flow of capital, the source of money and the direction in which it travels, who is paying for what, and how they are getting their money in the first place. Equally real are the consequences of these conditions on the lived experiences of the world’s citizens. No matter what the individual protestors’ “interests” and “demands” might be—and I insist that it is not to the occupation’s discredit that many protestors could not honestly and coherently answer “Why are you here?”—the occupation’s message could not be simpler: LOOK!
It is because Occupy Wall Street is, at least right now, nothing more than an act of deixis, and because that content-less gesture has grown in size and strength without any major institution willing it to, that it is significant. Regardless of what legacy Occupy Wall Street leaves behind, its existence matters in the world-historical sense. It is the genuine expression of a real deficiency at the constitutional level of our socio-political system that not only cannot be solved by structures currently in place, it cannot even be understood in those structure’s terms.
The day we—as individuals and as participants in a media apparatus—learn how to talk about Occupy Wall Street is the day Occupy Wall Street’s first and only “demand” will be met. That is the day when we learn how to talk about the world economy as something other than a given state of affairs, to be “managed” by policy decisions and morally sound corporate leaders. It is time to ask the question, “What are the obligations of a state to its people?” It is time we stop pretending that those obligations are not being met because of a surplus of legislators and corporate executives who are “greedy” or “ideological” or “political” or “evil.” It is time we ask the only real question worth asking of Occupy Wall Street—why is this happening? What are the political and socio-economic conditions of our country failing to achieve such that an increasingly large number of people feel they must go to the streets without solutions, without leadership, without message and point to a set of buildings that are themselves not the problem, filled with people who are working for a living and are also, as individuals, not the problem? And how will that be fixed?
… … … … … … … … …
I think he’s on to something Puffin.
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin,
It seems I was either way ahead of the curve or slightly psychic when I did my own personal resurrection of Arrested Development a few weeks ago. There is a bone fide rumor going around, started by no less than the Boston Herald, that Arrested Development is being brought back for a “limited” season. This is in addition to the movie, which I guess/hope/pray is really happening. Someone on Twitter says that the “limited run tv series would allow exposition for what each character has done for past 5 yrs then movie screenplay can jump right in.” And you know, it’s on Twitter so it must be true. The New Yorker’s official Twitter seems to be confirming.
Will Arnett and Jason Bateman are confirming as well.
If this isn’t true then it may be the greatest troll of all time. Tomorrow’s tweet will be from the New Yorker: “We’ve made a huge mistake…..”
Let’s hope this is real Puffin
Love
MacGuffin, who just blue herself
Dear Puffin,
Much has happened since I last posted. I have finished a 400 mile move, which will hopefully be my last for a very long time. I’m positively sick of moving every damn year. The Pats lost to the Bills in one of the strangest games I’ve ever been unable to watch. And the Red Sox were eliminated in a particularly humiliating and historically accurate way. I’ve had one of my teeth rebuilt. And I’ve finally gotten a job. With whom, you ask, hoping that I’m finally living up to my potential, as my 3rd grade teacher used to say, and fulfilling my dream as a policy advocate for the ACLU. But no Puffin. I must disappoint you. I’m working at an unnamed national chain bookstore. For minimum wage. With no benefits.
More later Puffin. I have to go to day 2 of indoctrination. And I have to go buy pants.
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin,
I hope everyone has seen this wonderful video of New Jersey governor Chris Christie defending his appointment of Sohail Mohammed to the Superior Court of Passiac County.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to see someone like Christie speaking out about this bullshit Sharia hysteria. And I think Sohail Hohammed sounds like a perfectly lovely judge and I’m sure he will be a great benefit to the legal community in the state of New Jersey.
But there is something in the reporting of this case that freaks me out, and it is this: everyone, Christie included, keeps reminding us that the Muslims Mohammed defended after 9/11 weren’t terrorists. They were the wrongly arrested ones who were proved innocent and it was totes all a big mistake, guys. Jeffrey Goldberg put it this way:
Sohail Mohammed represented, while in private practice, Muslims who had been detained by the FBI after the Sept. 11 attacks. None of the men was ever charged with anything related to terrorism.
Here’s the thing for me: I don’t give a highly colored damn whether they were guilty or innocent because everyone gets a defense lawyer in this country. EVERYONE. Even the guilty ones. I don’t care if Sohail Mohammed represented and defended terrorists, because he is a lawyer and that is his job, and they had a right to his services. Timothy McVeigh got a defense lawyer. Jeffrey Dahmer got a defense lawyer. And what is more, they had a constitutional right to a defense lawyer, and they had the right to demand that that lawyer do his very best to defend them. As a prominent litigator in the great state of New Jersey I expect Sohail Mohammed to defend his clients well, and to bring all his expertise to the defense of any person, guilty or innocent, that he is asked to represent. Everyone gets a defense lawyer, in order to ensure that no one is ever convicted without the prosecution fully and completely proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt, even in cases that seem open and shut. It is better for Casey Antony to go free than for us to corrupt the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof in order to convict her.
I am really uncomfortable with the underlying assumption that this is all ok because the people he defended weren’t terrorists after all. Note that the Goldberg quote “while in private practice” serves to neatly remind everyone that he wasn’t defending them on behalf of the government. It was something he did in his private practice which is his business and not official at all.
Basically what this is saying to me is that Sohail Mohammed would have been considered unfit for this appointment if those men he defended actually had been terrorists. And that is WRONG. This sets a seriously scary precedent, as far as I can see. If the media has gotten so out of control that defending a guilty party can jeopardize a public servant’s career to this degree, then I think we have a serious problem. Because you know what will happen? No lawyer will risk themselves to defend accused terrorists and you know what will happen then? Terrorists won’t get fair trials. And that actually WILL destroy America, more effectively than any bomb.
So Chris Christie gets a gold star, but I’m still not thrilled.
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin,
I would like to take this opportunity to introduce my fianceè, the love of my life, the inspiration for 80% of my worst ideas, Richard Handl. Richard and I planned to be wed next month, but his pending incarceration in Sweden put a hitch in our plans. We also considered eloping, like Pete and Haylea (congrats you two!!), but the opportunity to throw a depression-era hobo themed wedding (seriously, follow that link, it’s mind blowing) was just too good to pass up. Sadly, of course, we have had to postpone the development of our nuclear family due to Richard’s arrest:
(08-03) 08:33 PDT STOCKHOLM, (AP) –
A Swedish man who was arrested after trying to split atoms in his kitchen said Wednesday he was only doing it as a hobby.
Richard Handl told The Associated Press that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorized possession of nuclear material.
The 31-year-old Handl said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.
Only later did he realize it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden’s Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police.
“I have always been interested in physics and chemistry,” Handl said, adding he just wanted to “see if it’s possible to split atoms at home.”
The police raid took place in late July, but police have refused to comment. If convicted, Handl could face fines or up to two years in prison.
Although he says police didn’t detect dangerous levels of radiation in his apartment, he now acknowledges the project wasn’t such a good idea.
“From now on, I will stick to the theory,” he said. (Via.)
The story doesn’t mention his motives, but I finally feel comfortable revealing the true story. In a desperate bid to pay for our $60,000 hobo wedding, Richard attempted to create fissionable material in the kitchen. And you know the worst part? He ruined my Kitchen-Aid mixer.
It’s really too bad the hobo wedding kids didn’t also decide to stick to theory. I mean seriously, look at this:
On Memorial Day weekend 2011, my groom and I joined hands, entwined bootlaces and shared a single bean in matrimony at what very well may be the first hobo-themed wedding. We invited our friends and family to share in our happiest of days, wear their shabbiest, drink moonshine, eat their fill of BBQ and pie, dance to a live jug band and howl at the moon.
We got to work researching the Depression era and hobo culture. As we prepared to make everything for our wedding, we collected feed sack dresses and old work boots, antique hand-stitched quilts and jug band instruments. After reading that the word “hobo” may be a syllabic abbreviation of “homeward bound,” we fell in love with the notion!
Dear, if you fell in love with the notion then your research is probably incomplete.
Things I see here: an overabundance of well fed, clean, healthy people. Things I don’t see here: crushing poverty, a total lack of healthcare, grinding struggles against social injustice. Starvation. Lice. Bedbugs.
One of the comments on the Etsy blog kind of struck me: “What a memorable wedding for you two and all that attended I am sure… so very creative and oh so comfortable!! very best wishes for many years of happiness.” Yes…. comfortable. I’m sure that’s why hobos dressed the way they did. It was all about comfort. Sure. I do have to say though, what a god awful way to start your marriage. Any time anyone asks these two about their wedding the conversation will go something like this:
“So what was your wedding like?”
“Well, we threw a Depression era hobo themed shindig….”
“Oh that’s…. unique”
“Yeah, it was actually really pretty, but we spent the first month of our marriage at the center of an internet firestorm. In retrospect it maybe wasn’t a good idea”
While I think these two were pretty insensitive and unintentionally offensive, I do wish them the best in life. I hope you two are happy together, I actually do.
Obviously, though, these kids never heard the William Shatner and Joe Jackson cover of Pulp’s Common People.
She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge,
she studied sculpture at Saint Martin’s College,
that’s where I,
caught her eye.
She told me that her Dad was loaded,
I said “In that case I’ll have a rum and coca-cola.”
She said “Fine.”
and in thirty seconds time she said,“I want to live like common people,
I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people,
I want to sleep with common people,
like you.”Well what else could I do -
I said “I’ll see what I can do.”
I took her to a supermarket,
I don’t know why but I had to start it somewhere,
so it started there.
I said pretend you’ve got no money,
she just laughed and said,
“Oh you’re so funny.”
I said “yeah?
Well I can’t see anyone else smiling in here.
Are you sure you want to live like common people,
you want to see whatever common people see,
you want to sleep with common people,
like me.”But she didn’t understand,
she just smiled and held my hand.
Rent a flat above a shop,
cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
pretend you never went to school.
But still you’ll never get it right,
cos when you’re laid in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all.You’ll never live like common people,
you’ll never do what common people do,
you’ll never fail like common people,
you’ll never watch your life slide out of view,
and dance and drink and screw,
because there’s nothing else to do.Sing along with the common people,
sing along and it might just get you through,
laugh along with the common people,
laugh along even though they’re laughing at you,
and the stupid things that you do.
Because you think that poor is cool.Like a dog lying in a corner,
they’ll bite you and never warn you.
Look out.
They’ll tear your insides out.‘Cause Everybody hates a tourist,
especially one who thinks
it’s all such a laugh.
Yeah, and the chip stains’ grease
will come out in the bath.
You will never understand
how it feels to live your life
with no meaning or control
and with nowhere left to go.
You’re amazed that they exist
and they burn so bright,
while you can only wonder why.
You’ll still be my best man, right Puffin?
Love
MacGuffin
PS: Wish me luck everyone, round one of big scary dental surgery starts at 3pm. If anyone sees me making a run for it please apprehend me and return me, kicking and screaming, to the dentist’s office.
MacGuffin,
It seems I’ve found my way back to this side of the globe. You’ll be relieved to learn that my time was well spent. What did I find upon my return home? More talk of defecits! What I find particularly troubling is this stalemate over a “debt ceiling.” Whenever I run into such trouble, I simply apply for another AmEx Black under an ex-wife’s name. They’re usually so embarrassed by our failed nuptials that they don’t press charges before I’ve paid for my next vacation. However, I can imagine that the US is not so fortunate in its negotiations.
What I find particularly troubling is the fight over the Bush era tax cuts. While, you know my position is a strict return to the levels of Eisenhower, I acquiesce that those may not be the levels everyone finds appropriate. However, these recent cuts, which take our tax rates to the lowest in imagined history, are particularly offensive to me. Ms Maddow, on her lovely blog, has described the problem quite eloquently.
So, what do these colors represent? The dark blue at the bottom shows our deficit over the next 8 years which will come from our current spending level. The giant brown pile in the middle (ok, not terribly brown, but the visual is important) represent the monies spent to cover the tax breaks enacted under Bush. Those tax breaks were given not as a reward for being so successful in the modern economy but in order to stimulate job growth. It’s important to remember that much of the spending that was agreed to (medicare, social security, etc.) were not created in the time since those tax cuts were enacted. They were prior commitments that the government recognized would have to be paid for.
There are a myriad of charts and graphs showing exactly how few jobs were created in the meantime. Jobs that not merely should have made up for that revenue but were morally obliged to do so, but I like this one.
In the last 10 years we’ve lost 18% of the jobs which we went into the 2000s with. 18%. But what does this graph really show? Jobs are created not when taxes are low. If they did the 1950s and 2000s would be reversed. Thanks to Greg Smith for the picture.
Again, I’m sorry for my lax attitude in writing. But I hope this proves useful at your next dinner party.
-Puffin
Dear Puffin,
Rupert Murdoch is sort of an obvious candidate for asshole of the day/month/year at any given time. There is rarely a moment when the guy isn’t doing something I find disgusting, immoral, or downright douchy. And with the phone hacking scandal, he’s been even more douchetastic than usual. But this editorial cartoon which ran in today’s London Times is…. well, horrendous.
I think The Atlantic’s headline pretty much summed it up: Murdoch’s Times Would Like to Change the Subject. I think they’ve made that very clear!
The real kicker for me is the words they have put in the mouth of that little drawing of a starving child. “I’ve had a belly-full of phone hacking.” GEDDIT?? It’s funny cause he hasn’t had a belly full of anything in a long long time. You can tell because he’s so obviously starving! Hahaha! Isn’t that just so fucking funny?!?!
And admittedly, while the context makes this really despicable, it makes a good point. We do need to pay more attention to the crisis in Somalia, and the international media has been over focussing on Murdoch. There is, after all, nothing the media likes to cover more than itself.
But Rupert, that crisis does not exist so that you may divert global scrutiny away from your sordid and damaging crimes. The Somalian people’s suffering is not a PR strategy for your fucking media empire, and to treat it as such is fucking disgraceful. It sure is convenient that all those millions of people are starving so that you have a humanitarian crisis to point to. Of course, you aren’t pointing to it for its own sake, or because you really think it should be covered. You only care about the famine because PR-wise it’s better for the world to be focussed on starving babies than on investigations into your crimes. This might be the most insincere thing I have ever seen.
As Mediate put it:
There are several methods of dealing with a much-publicized scandal, some less advisable than others. Issuing a public apology for mistakes or poor judgment? Pretty much always a good idea. Holding individuals responsible for their roles and dealing with them accordingly? Usually works out pretty well. Publishing a tacky, potentially offensive cartoon making light of serious allegations AND life-threatening poverty? Oddly enough, that rarely ever works.
It sure isn’t working here.
Rupert Murdoch, and whoever decided to run this cartoon, are assholes.
Love
MacGuffin
See the gallery of past Assholes here
Dear Puffin
I recently read an excerpt from Barry Estabrook’s new book, Tomatoland. And now I’m going to excerpt the excerpt because I think everyone should actually read this:
According to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless fresh tomatoes in 2009—our second most popular vegetable behind lettuce. We buy winter tomatoes, but that doesn’t mean we like them. In survey after survey, fresh tomatoes fall at or near the bottom in rankings of consumer satisfaction. No one will ever be able to duplicate the flavor of garden-grown fruits and vegetables at the supermarket, but there’s a reason you don’t hear consumers bemoaning the taste of supermarket cabbages, onions, or potatoes. Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida.
Especially this bit:
Perhaps our taste buds are trying to send us a message. Today’s industrial tomatoes are as bereft of nutrition as they are of flavor. According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.
Although Florida’s sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. To get a successful crop, they pump the sand full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness’s arsenal.
Workers are exposed to these chemicals on a daily basis. The toll includes eye and respiratory ailments, exposure to known carcinogens, and babies born with horrendous birth defects. Not all the chemicals stay behind in the fields once the tomatoes are harvested. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found residues of 35 pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarkets.
An industrial tomato grower has no control over what he spends on fuel, fertilizer (which requires enormous quantities of natural gas in its manufacture), and pesticides, but he can control what he pays the men and women who plant, tend, and harvest his crops. This has put a steady downward pressure on the earnings of tomato workers. Those cheap tomatoes that fill produce sections 365 days a year, year in and year out, come at a tremendous human cost. Although there have been recent improvements, a person picking tomatoes receives the same basic rate of pay he received 30 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, a harvester’s wages have actually dropped by half over the same period. Florida tomato workers, mostly Hispanic migrants, toil without union protection and get neither overtime, benefits, nor medical insurance. They are denied basic legal rights that virtually all other laborers enjoy. Lacking their own vehicles, they have to live near the fields, often paying rural slumlords exorbitant rents to be crammed with 10 or a dozen other farmworkers in moldering trailers with neither heat nor air conditioning and which would be condemned outright in any other American jurisdiction.
Paid on a “piece” basis for every bushel-sized basket they gather, tomato pickers are lucky to earn 70 dollars on a good day. But good days are few. Workers can arrive at a field at the appointed time and wait for hours while fog clears or dew dries. If it rains, they don’t pick. If a field ripens more slowly than expected, too bad. And if there is a freeze as there was in 2010, weeks can go by without work and without a penny of income. Unable to pay rent, pickers slept in encampments in the woods. The owners had crop insurance and emergency government aid to offset their losses. The workers had nothing.
And extra especially this bit:
And conditions are even worse for some in Florida’s tomato industry. In the chilling words of Douglas Molloy, chief assistant United States attorney in Fort Myers, South Florida’s tomato fields are “ground zero for modern-day slavery.” Molloy is not talking about virtual slavery, or near slavery, or slaverylike conditions, but real slavery. In the last 15 years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women who had been held and forced to work against their will in the fields of Florida, and that represents only the tip of the iceberg. Most instances of slavery go unreported. Workers were “sold” to crew bosses to pay off bogus debts, beaten if they didn’t work, held in chains, pistol whipped, locked at night into shacks in chain-link enclosures patrolled by armed guards. Escapees who got caught were beaten or worse. Even though police have successfully prosecuted seven major slavery cases in the state in the last 15 years, those brought to justice were low-ranking contract field managers, themselves only one or two shaky rungs up the economic ladder from those they enslaved. The wealthy owners of the vast farms walked away scot-free. They expressed no public regrets, let alone outrage, that such conditions existed on operations they controlled. But we all share the blame. When I asked Molloy if it was safe to assume that a consumer who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store, fast food restaurant, or food-service company in the winter has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave, he corrected my choice of words. “It’s not an assumption. It is a fact.”
After months of crisscrossing Florida, speaking with growers, trade association executives, owners of tomato-packing companies, lawyers, federal prosecutors, county sheriffs, university horticulturalists, plant breeders, farmworker advocates, soup kitchen managers, field workers, field crew leaders, fair housing advocates, one U. S. senator, and one Mexican peasant who came here seeking a better life for his family only to be held for two years as a slave, I began to see that the Florida tomato industry constitutes a parallel world unto itself, a place where many of the assumptions I had taken for granted about living in the United States are turned on their heads.
In this world, slavery is tolerated, or at best ignored. Labor protections for workers predate the Great Depression. Child labor and minimum wage laws are flouted. Basic antitrust measures do not apply. The most minimal housing standards are not enforced. Spanish is the lingua franca. It has its own banking system made up of storefront paycheck-cashing outfits that charge outrageous commissions to migrants who never stay in one place long enough to open bank accounts. Pesticides, so toxic to humans and so bad for the environment that they are banned outright for most crops, are routinely sprayed on virtually every Florida tomato field, and in too many cases, sprayed directly on workers, despite federally mandated periods when fields are supposed to remain empty after chemical application. All of this is happening in plain view, but out of sight, only a half-hour’s drive from one of the wealthiest areas in the United States with its estate homes, beachfront condominiums, and gated golf communities. Meanwhile, tomatoes, once one of the most alluring fruits in our culinary repertoire, have become hard green balls that can easily survive a fall onto an interstate highway. Gassed to an appealing red, they inspire gastronomic fantasies despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s a world we’ve all made, and one we can fix. Welcome to Tomatoland.
How did I not know about this?????
Love
MacGuffin
Dear Puffin
As you know, Congresswoman Debbie Schultz and I are totally BFFs. We go shopping on Rodeo Drive and have pedicures and recreational abortions every couple of weeks. And this kind of thing is the reason I love her:
Debbie Wesserman Schultz, new chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, drew a battle line in Washington when she accused the Republicans of “waging war on women”. From here.
But the best part is the fucking hilarious response this provoked from Rep. Kristi Noem
“The Republican agenda is indeed pro-woman. It is pro-woman because it is pro-small business, pro-entrepreneur, pro-family and pro-economic growth.”
As far as I can tell, the logic here is “we are pro-women because we are pro-jobs, as you can see by our total failure to discuss jobs because we are too busy waging war on women, which proves that we are pro-women”. I’m sorry, you have just failed to convince me. She isn’t quite deserving of the Asshole of the Day hat, just some general scorn. I’ll let Miranda take care of it. 
An alternative thought about the economy: “Suppose we enacted a modest fiscal stimulus program specifically designed for maximum job creation. My personal favorite is a tax credit for firms that add to their payrolls, but there are other options. And suppose we combined that with a serious plan for reducing future deficits—and enacted the whole package now. Then we could, in a sense, have our cake and eat it, too.
A package like that is not fantasy. I believe that a bipartisan group of economists, if given the authority, free of political interference, would design some version of it. But that’s not how budget decisions are, or should be, made. And as long as one political party clings to the idea that government spending kills jobs, it’s hard to see how we extricate ourselves from this mess,” - Alan Blinder, WSJ.
Anyway Puffin, I must fly. I have real-life meetings all day today.
Love
MacGuffin
