Phony Democrats Exploit Minimum Wage Hike for Cheap Political Gain

The Democrats and particularly President Barack Obama have been politicking over raising the minimum wage in a transparent attempt to attract low-income voters. While it is understood that it is difficult to exist on the meager sum provided by jobs such as Wal-Mart greeters and Whopper floppers, the opposite side of the argument is that government forced wage hikes will only result in higher prices that will be passed on to the customers. Not to appear insensitive but if working at one of America's fast food chains or an emporium of made in China products does not provide a sufficient income then find another job or join the military. Not that there are many decent jobs anymore in America since the day that rapacious corporate bosses discovered offshoring which has been like crack cocaine to them ever since. The U.S. manufacturing base has been sent packing and the only businesses that truly thrive in the USA! USA! USA! are in financial chicanery, surveillance and the police state. 

Having found a winning issue look for more Democrat demagoguery over the minimum wage. It is a nice mix along with their bogus identity politics issues, the sudden interest in domestic violence now that two big name NFL players have been outed as wife and child beaters. There have already been strikes by fast food workers in several U.S. cities to demand higher wages but it is just more of the same false hope and chump change that Obama has been peddling to the suckers since he slithered into office on a carpet of lies. It isn't like the Democrats have actually done one damned thing to address the major problems of offshoring jobs and allowing Wall Street banksters to loot with impunity and as the late George Carlin so eloquently put it in his classic rant "The American Dream":

The table is tilted folks.  The game is rigged.  And nobody seems to notice.  Nobody seems to care.  Good, honest, hard working people. Blue collar, white collar, doesn't matter what color shirt you have on.  Good honest hard working people continue... these are people of modest means... continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them.  They don't give a fuck about you.  They don't give a fuck about you.  They don't care about you.  At all.  At all.  At all.  And nobody seems to notice.  And nobody seems to care

Now the backlash is beginning as it inevitably would. Fast food and chain restaurants are beginning the process of going to automated systems which will eventually render the concept of a $15 per hour burger flipper obsolete and silly. Per a story that appeared in the Washington Post entitled "McDonald’s fresh hope to turn around slumping sales: Ordering burgers from a machine":

Battling the worst sales slump in a decade and competition from build-your-own upstarts like Chipotle and Smashburger, McDonald’s is expanding a test concept built around ordering via tablet. Just tap on a screen and watch as your burger’s toppings (and calories) pile on, then wait for an employee to bring it over. No human interaction necessary.

McDonald’s move towards dehumanization, launched as a pilot last winter and expanded across San Diego last week, is part of a larger trend of chain eateries turning tablets into your full-time restaurant buddy: equal parts menu, server and paycheck. Applebee’s, Panera Bread and even airport bars have installed tablets to allow diners to order food or booze without a wait.

Chili’s became the U.S. king of human-less ordering this summer when it installed more than 45,000 tabletop tablets nationwide. Marketing executives said the tablets can speed up service and operate like table-side billboards, encouraging impulse orders of appetizers and desserts. A spokesperson for Ziosk, which made the tablets, said guests who used them spent more money, finished quicker and paid better tips.  (The future, as one professor predicts: “Robot baristas, robot Realtors and robot sales agents.”)

While the WAPO story specifically speaks of customers being able to place their own orders (no more getting the wrong food at the drive-thru) a more seismic shift is coming. Michael Krieger of the Liberty Blitzkrieg blog recently wrote of the next iteration of the dehumanizing of fast food jobs. The piece which is entitled “360 Burgers per Hour” – Meet the Burger Flipping Robot that Could Change Fast Food Forever":

The main reason is that if employers are forced to pay these employee more, the employers in this industry are likely to move as quickly as possibly to fast-food preparing robots. This isn’t just some pie in the sky fantasy either, there’s a company called Momentum Machines that has already assembled a product that can make a burger in 10 seconds, or 360 burgers per hour.

Equally important, the entire argument of raising the minimum wage cannot be had without discussing the impact of technology. As I and many others have highlighted over the past several years, one of the most troubled segments of the U.S. economy consists of fast food workers. They simply cannot survive on the wages being paid to them by employers and need food stamps, disability and second jobs merely to make ends meet. In theory, raising the minimum wage will help these folks the most, but will it really? I think not.

As the saying goes, "be careful of what you ask for, you just may get it" and Democrat's sudden concern for a working class that they shanked in the back decades ago is nothing more than political pandering. Big businesses are rapidly adapting to implement new technology in order to eliminate the positions altogether. There are self-service checkout stands appearing in stores across the nation now. My local Wal-Mart neighborhood grocery store has them and they are great. It saves time and the upside to having to bag your own groceries is that no dumb ass is putting the potatoes in the same bag with the bread. The Wal-Mart greeters will likely be the next to be jettisoned, they are annoying and only are really needed on Black Friday to hold back the amped-up mobs of shoppers looking to score the door buster items.

Once again another great Obama idea goes up like a flaming bag of dog shit and the ones who get screwed in the end are the suckers who bought into it. But there will be plenty of jobs soon enough with the brilliant idea of funneling more arms to the Syrian rebels which will quickly end up in the hands of ISIS. The future of America is war and as such there is no greater big government employment program than bringing back the draft to provide those displaced fast food workers with new gigs.

Fire Up Those Grills and Remember that Pink Slime is Good for You

Grilling season officially opened this weekend so tire up those barbecue grills my fellow Americans, to combat soaring beef prices the noxious product Pink Slime is coming back with a vengeance. Pink Slime or as the corporations that manufacture it like to refer to it "lean finely textured beef" or "LFTB" is a filler product or food additive that amounts to basically the shit that is swept off of the slaughterhouse floor along with other trimmings and byproducts that can't be sold and then chemically treated to give it the appearance of chewed pink bubble gum.

The description on how it is manufactured taken from the Wikipedia page is as follows:

The product is used as a filler or to reduce the overall fat content of ground beef. It is produced by processing low-grade beef trimmings and other meat by-products such as cartilage, connective tissue and sinew,  which contain fat and small amounts of lean beef, and mechanically separating the lean beef from the fat through the use of a centrifuge at about 100°F (38°C). The heat liquefies the fat to help separate lean beef from fat and other by-products. The recovered beef material is processed, heated, and treated with gaseous ammonia or citric acid to kill E. coli, salmonella, and other bacteria. Gaseous ammonia in contact with the water in the meat produces ammonium hydroxide. The product is finely ground, compressed into pellets or blocks, flash frozen and then shipped for use as an additive.

Rick Jochum, a spokesperson for Beef Products Inc. (BPI) stated that the finished product is 94 to 97 percent lean beef, and has a nutritional value comparable to 90 percent lean ground beef. Furthermore, it was stated that the product's content is very high in protein, is low in fat, and contains iron, zinc and B vitamins. Jochum also said that BPI's product does not contain cow intestines or connective tissue such as tendons.  Food editor and cookbook author J.M. Hirsh described it as highly mealy with bits and studs of cartilage-like matter, and a USDA microbiologist says the product does contain connective tissue "instead of muscle" and thus it is "not meat" and is "not nutritionally equivalent" to ground beef. [Mr. Jochum can't be taken seriously considering that his paycheck rides on selling garbage like Pink Slime to the public]

Most of the product is produced and sold by BPI, Cargill Meat Solutions, and Tyson Foods. The product sold by BPI introduces the trimmings to ammonium hydroxide (a solution of ammonia in water), while the Cargill product uses citric acid instead of ammonium hydroxide.  Part of the manufacturing process at BPI includes extruding the material through long tubes that are thinner than a pencil, during which time the meat is exposed to gaseous ammonia.

Yikes! I remember the revulsion that I had after I read Eric Schlosser's book "Fast Food Nation" but this is even more disgusting than that gut-wrenching expose. Of course Cargill and Tyson - two of the massive meat production corporations that continually are looking for ways to profit off of selling increasingly lower quality product are involved. These corporations are the strongest arguments for local food production that exist and if you happen to have a good farmers market within the vicinity just avoid the corporate food behemoths altogether. You will save money and be healthier.

The return of Pink Slime is given an excellent treatment over at the libertarian financial site Zero Hedge in a piece entitled "The Solution To Record Meat Prices: The Return Of Pink Slime" that touches on some of the other aspects of the spiking cost of meat in America including - GASP - rampant inflation of the type that is hidden by the US government in that core inflation omits food and energy costs. Years of Federal Reserve money printing and the backstopping of the rigged six ways from Sunday financial markets bear a large share of the blame for Americans getting jammed again as the economy steers into the next leg down. If one pays attention to the propagandists in the state-corporate media, particularly in regards to the economy any shortcoming is always blamed on the weather anymore although in the case of beef that is at least somewhat true considering the record droughts.

I excerpt at length from the Zero Hedge piece:

A few months ago we reported that while the Fed is seeing nothing but hedonic deflation as far as the eye can see, food prices - for whatever reason but "certainly not" due to trillions in liquidity entering a close system so just blame it on the weather - were soaring to record highs. Among them was the price of beef, which in 2014 alone has soared by the most in over a decade. This led the US Department of Agriculture to warn of "sticker shock" facing home chefs on the eve of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the unofficial start of the U.S. summer grilling season.

According to the USDA, reported by Reuters, conditions in California could have "large and lasting effects on U.S. fruit, vegetable, dairy and egg prices," as the most populous U.S. state struggles through what officials are calling a catastrophic drought. Alas, the USDA had nothing to say about the Fed's unprecedented desire to reflate the US economy which is still suffering from the catastrophic depression which started nearly 7 years ago.

Link to Reuters story:  "USDA warns of sticker shock on U.S. beef as grilling season starts"

Ok we get it: soaring food prices are not only already here but are set to surge even more, especially for those who rather eat real meat than mystery meat dispensed with largesse at your favorite $0.99 fast food outlet.

So what are food processors to do facing soaring meat input costs and unwilling to suffer bottom line hits? Why, return to that old staple of unknown origin of course.

Here comes Pink Slime... again.

According to the WSJ, "finely textured beef, dubbed "pink slime" by critics, is mounting a comeback as retailers seek cheaper trimmings to include in hamburger meat and processors find new products to put it in."

Proving that popular memory lasts at best a couple of years, it was only in 2012 when sales of pink slime, processed from beef scraps left after cattle are butchered, collapsed in 2012 after a "social-media frenzy spurred by television reports raising questions about its legitimacy as a beef product. The ingredient's two largest producers, Beef Products Inc. and Cargill Inc., closed plants that made it and cut hundreds of jobs—while defending the product's quality and pointing out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture deems it safe."

What really allowed the scrapping of pink slime, however, was the broad decline in prices of non-alternative meat, as in the real deal. However, now that meat prices are soaring again (all weather mind you, nothing to do with the Fed), it is time for US consumers to eat "hedonically-cheap" "meat" once again.

Link to Wall Street Journal story "'Pink Slime' Makes Comeback as Beef Prices Spike" (behind pay wall so excerpted below)

From the WSJ:

Today, Cargill sells finely textured beef to about 400 retail, food-service and food-processing customers, more than before the 2012 controversy, though overall they now buy smaller amounts, company officials said. Production of finely textured beef at Beef Products has doubled from its low point.

The resurgence is being driven, in part, by an aversion to something many consumers and companies find even less pleasant than the pink-slime nickname: red-hot prices. Prolonged drought in the southern Great Plains has shrunk U.S. cattle supplies to historic lows. The retail price of ground beef soared 27% in the two years through April to a record $3.808 a pound,according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That means serious sticker shock for U.S. consumers preparing to fire up their barbecues for Memorial Day weekend—the traditional start to the summer grilling season. The week leading up to the Monday holiday is typically one of the biggest sales periods for ground beef, with an estimated 160 million pounds likely to be sold during that stretch this year, according to CattleFax, a Colorado-based research firm.

How much of that burger meat contains finely textured beef isn't clear. Prior to the flurry of media attention in 2012, Beef Products estimates, the ingredient was in as much as 70% of the ground beef sold in the U.S. at retail and in food service. Cargill and Beef Products decline to give a similar estimate now, but they say sales have rebounded sharply from their 2012 lows.

---

So... 100%? But at least the Fed will soon be able to claim that "food" (or byproducts rather, but who cares) prices are plunging, even as it itself announced that food prices in its cafeteria have soared by up to 33% as Zero Hedge reported yesterday.

Meanwhile, it's a feeding frenzy, pardon the pun, out there by those who know too well that Americans don't really care what they shove in their mouths as long as it i) tastes kinda meaty and ii) is cheap.

The Zero Hedge piece then gives a synopsis on the recent history of Pink Slime so check it out.

So just enjoy those burgers today and cue up the Lee Greenwood music because even if you are eating shit mixed with chemicals you can be proud to be an American because at least you know you're free.

God bless the USA, USA, USA!

QE-UPHORIA

In a move that has been reported as shocking on a level right up there with Breaking Bad's classic just aired episode Ozymandias our esteemed top central bank racketeer eschewed the long predicted "tapering" of his Quantitative Easing lunacy. In a last shot to the gut of the American economic diaspora living in tent cities from sea to shining sea Helicopter Ben Bernanke made damned sure that his precious subsidizing of the same gamblers, con artists and ivory tower dwelling grifters who destroyed the economy in 2008 would have a very Merry Christmas again this holiday season. While the usual idiots in the state-corporate media gasped it was sure as hell not a surprise to me, nor to anyone else who has been onto this ongoing hustle for years.  Chairman Ben has presided over an unprecedented transfer of wealth upwards to the looter class that he and his private Federal Reserve have always served the interests of. In pre-collapse America the usurious bastards hold all of the cards and will not be satisfied until they own absolutely everything. It is the logical extension of the “ownership society” in that at the end of the day the banksters and their Washington embedded lackeys own all of our asses.

The ongoing Quantitative Easing under Bernanke is only allowing for the continuation of the ongoing thievery until he has safely left office and handed the keys to the printing presses over to Janet Yellen or some other establishment stooge - maybe Turbotax Timmy Geithner can be brought back for an encore performance. Rest assured that Chairman Ben will be have left the Marriner S. Eccles building and will be sequestered in some gated enclave of an elitist pig pen protected by the best mercenaries that money can buy when the shit does finally hit the fan and the economy implodes for good.  Ben knows very well that he is a “made man” and has nothing to fear while  once the streets erupt with violence when the monetary system has been rendered worthless and it will take the equivalent of the proverbial wheelbarrow full of Riechmarks to buy a bag of Doritos.

And ugly it will be, consider that a good many of the citizens of this giant lemming colony don't have more than a day or so of food on hand at any given time. When the ATMs are no longer functioning watch out because the absolute last place that you want to be would be anywhere the local supermarket which will be overrun with looters within a day or so. It will take complete martial law to prevent the total disintegration of society when Bernanke's financial WMD detonates but that after all is the inevitable endgame in a number of scenarios that would seal the fascist transformation of this once great country.

In the classic 1980's Bruce Willis movie Die Hard an international group of thugs invade and take over Nakatomi Plaza, holding hostages and all under the pretense of terrorism for political reasons. The real truth is that the terrorist ploy was designed to provide cover for a massive robbery and in the end all the hostages would be marched up to the roof of the building which mined with C4 explosives would be blown up, killing all of the hostages and allowing the perpetratorss to escape to their beaches of choice where they could bask in the sun collecting interest on their plundered loot.  It is a fitting metaphor for what Bernanke, Geither, Hank Paulson, Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, Vikram 'the bandit' Pandit and a cast of tens of dozens of other sordid miscreants are in the process of successfully pulling off in America.

It is all abetted by the gross incompetence of a certain Barry H. Obama over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who has not only the ticking down time bomb of the ruined American economy on his tab but also myriad other abortions including the NSA Stasi, another war that is currently in the gestation stage and of course Obamacare. His crowning achievement is a so-called health care ‘reform’ rip-off that will one day rank in the top ten in the bunco artists hall of fame. Not only does this law allow for the insurance parasites to feed off of millions of new customers who are forced by the police state to purchase the overpriced policies but it allows already bloated and greedy corporations to begin to kick family members off of insurance plans and into the arms of the bloodsuckers. Soon it will be all employees currently covered by employer provided insurance plans who will be sold down the river into bondage with the proverbial big government gun pointed at their heads and Obama will have his finger on the trigger. Welcome to modern day American, the land of ‘f**k you, I got mine”.

There is today much hullabaloo over the Republican led House bill to defund Obamacare as a condition to not shut down the government but don't pay attention it because it is total horseshit and only more political chicanery that provides cheap fodder for the talking heads and distracts from the real problems. Both parties are in on the con because the oligarchy owns both teams lock stock and barrel. Jimmy Carter had it right when he recently lamented the demise of a functioning democracy in America but he being shunned like a leper by the rulers can just be shushed like the drunken crazy old uncle who shows up once a year to ruin Thanksgiving and vomit into the sweet potato pie. Move along, nothing to see here.

But as to the travesty of the Federal Reserve’s continuation of bailing out the bankers and rigging the markets. Bernanke’s ‘unexpected’ move to continue full Q.E. had the pigs squealing with glee as they will continue to have their criminal schemes underwritten by the taxpayer and protected by the Obama administration. According to St. Louis Federal Reserve President Fred Bullard “While I expect to see inflation rise during the coming quarters, I want to see evidence of such an increase before endorsing less accommodative policy action by the FOMC”. This statement regarding inflation is as asinine as it is dishonest. One of the primary reasons that the criminals who run the big con are continually able to base their ongoing crack-ho economic policy of buying garbage mortgage backed securities it is due to this Hitlerian whopper. What is never mentioned is that core inflation rates conveniently omit food and energy prices, exactly the two areas where Americans are getting the screws put to them the hardest by the scum that runs the system. Just take a look at what you have been paying at the grocery store since this Q.E. game began, the prices are higher and the packages smaller and it is only going to get worse because this is the "new normal".

It is hard to hold the currently configured system in anything less than utter contempt - that is unless you are one of the TV addled, low-info drones who still believes what they tell you on cable news shows. As the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson once so brilliantly put it the rulers only stand for - ".. the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.”  He was of course referring to his personal bête noire Richard M. Nixon but as we have seen with his paranoid streak, use of government agencies such as the IRS and DOJ to go after political foes and support of an all seeing surveillance state Barack Hussein Obama has left Tricky Dick in the dust.

And so it goes on, the tightening of the screws....