The United States of Greedy Bastards

One has to wonder whether old Sam Walton is rolling over in his grave today given the tarnishing the brand of his legacy, Wal-Mart by his heirs, their crappy management team and ongoing dismal public relations. The bruises from the scrums in the Black Thursday/Friday moshs pit are days from healing yet the chain has become the avatar of all that has gone wrong with American capitalism in the era of greed. The internet and You Tube are chock full of tales, pictures and videos of unruly shoppers run amok and it seems like the worst are the ones that were taken in various national Wal-Mart stores. I have run across more than one in which the chronicler of the marauding hordes was the one who was ejected from the premises, cast out as a heretic while the assailants behind the bargain day bashing were allowed to stay and buy more Chinese made crap lest the greatest shopping day of 2013 suffer any diminished profits.

Black Friday has become more of a national embarrassment each year, this year finally the last lines were crossed when the the big box stores and other retailers defiled Thanksgiving Day.

I have seen many comparisons between the hordes that descended on Wal-Mart and Target and a zombie apocalypse along the lines of the AMC television series The Walking Dead and they are spot on. We are not yet to the point where there are drunken hooligans ripping the entrails out of any what stand in their way between the $98 HDTV doorbusters special at Wally World and the checkout line but there is that certain dead-eyed, relentless glare of the undead evident in many of the You Tube videos but they move much faster.

It would likely pain the dearly departed Mr. Walton to see this today in the global retailer that bears his family name. Not that Sam wasn't a union hating big businessman (I have seen few who weren't) but there was a certain type of pride that comes from building a business from scratch the traditional American way rather than in just inheriting it and trashing the brand in the name of obscene profits. Engaging in foreign bribery, hell that's just the way that we roll anymore in America and the country's largest employer is like others using the practices to grease the rails for incursions into non-domestic markets. Lying, cheating and bribery have become the tools to succeed in American business, if you really have the political juice one can likely even procure NSA surveillance information on your competitors. It used to be that unscrupulous business practices were a scarlet letter of shame but have come to merit exalted status for job destroying CEO's who then have hagiographies churned out by the state-corporate media that encourage even more to adopt that type of behavior.

In the race to the bottom line it is the American worker and economy as a whole that get trampled. Even before the implosion of the housing bubble and the worthless derivative toilet paper that it was converted to - and subsequently reflated by a 2009 change in the mark to market accounting rules and then purchased by the Federal Reserve it was the plague of offshoring jobs that was setting us all up for the big fall. While Americans spent the early part of the century cowering after the September 11, 2001 attacks and the corrupt government's ongoing demagoguery and fear mongering for political gain the looting spree began as jobs were sent to India and other countries offering fewer regulations and a cheaper workforce, it was the greatest act of labor arbitrage in history and those jobs are never coming back. The waves of downsizings, restructurings and jettisoning of 'human capital' cut a swath through the American work force and as a result drove many who once had decent jobs into low-paying, thankless retail and service jobs - a good many at Wal-Mart. I wonder how Sam would have felt about that as it used to be that when he was alive the stores not only stocked a lot more products but they were festooned in red, white and blue and "Buy American" signs but this was back when we still actually had a domestic manufacturing base.

Wal-Mart was targeted by labor protests this weekend as well over their lousy pay and dismal work conditions. They really do treat their employees like crap but I find it hard to come down on big blue smiley when many others do exactly the same and worse at least at Wal-Mart there are such heartwarming gestures to the poorly paid that some stores held food donation drives for employees. Fast food goliath McDonalds has come under some criticism for it's McResource line that offers their serfs such sage advise as returning or selling their holiday gifts for extra money, breaking their food into smaller pieces to not feel hungry and to even get advice on how to apply for food stamps from the federal government. In fact both Wal-Mart and McDonalds employees are some of the biggest recipients of government aid it really speaks volumes to how low that we have fallen when two of American's most recognized global corporations are getting such attention for all of the worst reasons.  

While I am a libertarian (although one who has progressive leanings)  I have somewhat conflicting feelings over the role of unions that with truly free markets and a real version of capitalism where the best succeed and the worst allowed to fail, so totally unlike our ongoing government's bestowing of special treatment on zombie banks and too big to fails that are an abomination in that when the entire system has failed perhaps this time the protesters have it right. In the end all that matters is the the pigs can keep eating and the Obama administration continues to fill the trough to overflowing with the endless Wall Street bailouts while giving nothing to Main Street save a corporate scam of a health insurance reform plan. Talk about loosing the vampires to feed.

With the latest wave of reports on sales including this one from Bloomberg that retailers saw a drop in sales on actual Black Friday with the turkey day openings but in an ominous sign for the greedy bastards more people are choosing to just avoid the melees altogether. Amazon online sales were well up this year as the more sane shoppers just did their shopping from home therefore avoiding being mugged under the flourescent lights. The expansion into Thanksgiving did score a hit though with the more hard core types responding positively, nothing like a post-feast rampage to work off some of those calories. It is a dead certainty that given the enthusiastic response that big blue smiley and others will open even earlier come next Thanksgiving as the corporate state continues to wage war on family tradition.

The Real War On Christmas

Christmas has been under assault for years here in America only not by those devilish forces that are so often conjured up by highly paid establishment talking heads seeking to mobilize their political bases by conjuring up as H.L. Mencken once put it "an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary". The terrible liberals were hellbent on 'taking the Christ out of Christmas' shrilly shrieked the attack dogs for the elite primarily from their Fox News studios. While the on the flip side an enormous amount time and money was wasted on some of those very liberals waging war against nativity scenes on government property. Much sound and fury expended over a stockingful of nothing that only served to poison what remains of the holiday spirit in this star spangled land of exceptionalism. What has always gone largely unsaid (most certainly by the millionaire talking heads whose jobs are to sow the seeds of disunity) is that the real war against Christmas has been waged by nothing more complicated than good old American greed and the need to exact maximum profit with no concern of the consequences.

Christmas in America is in and of itself the ultimate triumph of corporate propaganda as it is far more geared towards getting consumers out to the malls and big box stores to participate in the gross annual pagan festival of rampant consumerism that is the holiday shopping season than in celebrating any religious aspects. In America Jesus Christ was long ago banished to playing second banana to Santa Claus in a land where the ultimate holiday season currency is not frankincense and muir but Visa and Mastercard. Stress and spending overkill, maxing out the plastic and indulging the need for more bling bling and foreign made electronic gadgetry has become a seasonal ritual as the sheeple continue to contribute to their own demise, playing with their toys in steerage as the national ship of fools sets course towards the iceberg of collapse and increases speed. Big banks, already grossly subsidized by a clueless and corrupt central bank to the tune of 85 billion a month and likely more when Janet Yellen takes over the Fed are singing Joy to the World as they lavish themselves with holiday bonuses, the ill-gotten spoils from the crony capitalist winners of the class war. Christ has indeed been banished from Christmas but long before he was run out of the temple by the moneychangers. Perhaps this is a bit overly religious in nature and I am personally not a religious man but such analogies are needed for many to see the extent to which all that was once good about the holiday season has been squeezed out of it by the same greedy bastards who have strip-mined the national workforce with their plague of offshoring which is like crack cocaine to CEOs and their short term focus on profit above all.

I remember the days past when the holiday season truly was about family, togetherness, good tidings and the bonds that were once sacred in simpler times before all was hijacked by the pigs. Greed and systemic corruption have succeeded in tainting this as well, painfully made ever the more evident with spreading of the Black Friday virus into Thanksgiving Day itself like some particularly malignant form of herpes. It is a social ill though and as the simultaneously heartrending and gut wrenching reports from the front lines of retail store skirmishes continue to pour in, some sardonically amusing and others just plain tragic there is very little to be festive about as the darkest instincts of many Americans are laid bare for all to see in the age of the smartphone camera. It is the dark underbelly of the corruption of capitalism, a system that made this country great yet has been destroyed courtesy of the cheats, swindlers, liars and criminals who have rigged the game and now use the polluted government that has been purchased to ensure that it will always be that way until the day when it collapses under its own weight. Free enterprise has left the building, the same massive retailers who have this year defiled Thanksgiving with their disgusting "Door Buster" orgies of greed have broken the backs of the traditional small businessmen and women and turned the American Dream into a perverse feverish nightmare. Predictably it is all encouraged by a corrupt state-corporate media that hypes and contributes to the sense of frenzy by their seductive imagery as well as incessant advertising  just as it serves the establishment in selling ruinous and bankrupting wars.

None of it is going to end well nor should it given the relative ease that the forces of greed and corruption were able to successfully hijack this country used and the apathy and willful ignorance that allowed it to.

Door Busters: Shoppers Throw Down for Cheap Crap

Black Friday has become permanently attached to the sick American psyche to the extent that is as much a cultural rite as it is a glimpse at the now thoroughly mutated form of capitalism that exists in this country today.  Combining the needs for instant gratification, foreign manufactured electronic devices and shallowness of the current national character with the insatiable greed of retail giants seeking to hit it big on the biggest shopping day of the year at all costs the annual post-Thanksgiving melees are a window into the very soul of a collapsing empire.  This year retailers escalated their assault on basic human decency and planted their flags in the middle of Thanksgiving itself with the majority throwing open their doors to bargain hunters looking for that holy grail of a deal at 8 pm about when the annual ritual of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys game was wrapping up. That was just when the doors opened, there are normally people who begin camping out in front of their big box stores at least the day before, often braving not only assault by their fellow losers and freaks but in some parts of the country with harsh weather conditions frostbite and hypothermia.  Some I imagine imbibe of alcoholic beverages to deal with the boredom and take the edge off of the cold.

The biggest difference this year is that the traditional ugly stories began to pour in earlier than normal. I have to admit that one thing which really fascinates me is watching the You Tube videos of the in store carnage.  The glimpses of wanton savagery span the country from a Wal-Mart in Fort Worth, Texas to Knoxville, Tennessee with a pack of obese women going after the Rachel Ray cookware to this throwdown from an undisclosed Target location. The poor Target “team members” should be eligible for hazardous duty pay. I wonder how long it is going to be until some lunatic gets so pissed off over being beaten to the door buster spectacular of the day pulls out a gun and just starts shooting people. There was a shooting last night at a Romeoville, Illinois Kohl’s location, this one by local police where a shoplifter was taken out while dragging a cop from a moving vehicle. There was also a Virginia man stabbed over a parking spot dispute and a Las Vegas man was shot by a thief to steal the television he had just purchased at his local Target and pepper spray was used on a man arguing with a Wal-Mart manager over a television in New Jersey. These are but a few of the grotesque tableaus this year. Big Blue Smiley apparently is reeling from negative publicity over their stores being ground zero for a good deal of the assaults, the poster of this You Tube video was allegedly kicked out for recording it. Notably today is the day when Wal-Mart workers are set to engage in a wave of protests against the heirs of the Walton family fortune and the slave labor conditions in their chain of plantations. 

The mob scenes and early sales reports encouraged the parasitic looters on Wall Street with the markets already up this morning as the retail brutality contributed to the gambling spree further inflating the unsustainable stock bubble. I have a growing dread in the pit of my stomach that the day when the 85 billion dollar per month Federal Reserve subsidizing of the house of cards finally does collapse – which is inevitable – that the mentality that drives Black Friday will spill into the streets the day that the ATM’s no longer have cash and the debit and credit cards no longer work. The scenes from the big box retailers should scare the living hell out of anyone with the ability to think critically. It is one thing to stomp each other into pulp over a $98 HDTV doorbuster deal but it goes to the next level when the object is food. I would venture to bet that millions of Americans probably have no more than a day or two of food on hand and when the shit finally hits the fan the day that the rigged markets can no longer be preserved and the mother of all economic crashes hits not even the full might of the police state will be able to contain it.  Think of The Road Warrior only with iPads.