Here Come the Retail Hogs
Here Come the Retail Hogs
I hope the hospital takes Kohl's cash!
President Business Deals stood in the Rose Garden yesterday and accused Barack Obama of crimes.
A sitting American president accusing his predecessor would have been worthy of wall-to-wall coverage during any other time in American politics. We were the Golden Generation lucky that our parents banged in time for us to live in what will (please God) be America’s darkest hour of the 21st century.
Obama, like every president before him in my lifetime, committed a plethora of crimes and expanded presidential power that Trump now enjoys.
But nobody has ever accused Trump of being a law scholar, so this elementary playground logic bomb is what we got in no small part due to Hillary Clinton being more unlikable than an obnoxious fake billionaire criminal who lives in a golden New York City apartment and was most famous for firing people live in primetime on network television:
Deals’ supporters see him as the apex of American machismo, which makes sense since soon thereafter he stormed away from the podium after being accosted with fair questions from two women smarter than him. Hey, even Superman had his Kryptonite.
Don’t gloss over that threat of “in a few weeks,” either. Attorney General William Barr has proven he sees his job as the president’s personal defense attorney (Bobby Kennedy, eat your heart out).
The strategy to re-elect Deals in 2020 is simple: Suppress the Democratic vote by any means necessary and blame all his failures on the Chinese and America’s first Kenyan gay Muslim president.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who was cured of polio through socialized medicine as a child only to grow into a soulless turtle who spent his entire career attacking denying that coverage to other people, knows the supporters of Deals live in a different universe and he can make up some shit when the facts have him cornered like the rabid dog he is.
Obama literally left a (nice) 69-page playbook on how to deal with a potential pandemic. Unfortunately to replace him we elected a lifelong racist who needs “killer graphics” to read any sentence that doesn’t involve him or the enrichment of his family.
Deals has spent his entire presidency fighting to keep his taxes from the public, and more importantly, investigators. His plan from the beginning was to use loose interpretations of arcane laws to drag the process out for as long as possible.
With nine months left in his first term, the Supreme Court will begin oral arguments today on two cases that will decide if we ever get to see Trump’s taxes and *checks notes* if the president is above the law.
Maybe this is controversial but I believe any motherfucker of any political persuasion should have to release their taxes if only to prove they’re insusceptible to financial leverage from foreign governments.
I also vaguely remember three separate but equal branches of government being the bedrock of American democracy that makes us superior to backwards countries ruled by untouchable despots who villainize the free press, imprison their political opponents and erode the definition of truth.
These seem like ideas that most Americans would agree with. But it’s not up to us, it’s up to nine Revolutionary War cosplayers who wear robes to work like it’s 1776 and have the final say on laws thanks to Marbury vs. Madison in 1803 in which the court bestowed that power on itself and everybody with that for the next 200+ years.
Two of those justices owe their prestigious lifelong appointment to President Business Deals which isn’t a conflict of interest for some reason.
Basically the only hope of a 5-4 decision going against Trump rides with Chief Justice John Roberts, who dipshits claim is moderate despite gutting the Voter Rights Act because he thought America solved racism (Spoiler: He was dead wrong and our democracy got set back decades.)
I was drunk and despondent on Election Night in 2016. In my defense 63 million of my countrymen had just elected a diseased game-show host to the presidency and a Republican trifecta in government.
“Well,” I tweeted, “At least now the country will see once and for all the dark vision these small-government freaks have for the country.”
The Republicans immediately pushed a $3 billion giveaway to the yachting class through Congress and then elected another Ivy League sex pest to the Supreme Court. They lost their majority in the House of Representatives in a historic blue wave in the next election that missed Ohio for reasons that are another column entirely.
And yet that didn’t prepare me for 2020, where Trump is pushing the Supreme Court to scuttle Obamacare in the middle of a pandemic that his ignorance exacerbated.
In retrospect, I should have known better. This was always the Hell we were going to find ourselves in when Ronald Reagan became the first person with dementia to be elected to the highest office in the land.
MIKE DEWINE ORDERS PARENTS BACK TO WORK
Retail stores will re-open in Ohio today because there is no higher freedom in than buying dumb shit we don’t need.
Let’s say you’re a single parent who works retail, which is not an uncommon theme. Your boss is a small business tyrant who won’t be on the front lines interacting with members of the public who can’t live without shopping.
If you don’t come back to work, that tyrant can report you to the state and have your unemployment benefits (that you may or may not have already received) stripped.
If you do come back to work, hopefully you have somebody you trust that can watch your child because the state doesn’t have an answer for that yet.
From Andrew J. Tobias of cleveland.com:
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Gov. Mike DeWine says he is not yet ready to say when he will allow childcare businesses to re-open in Ohio, postponing an announcement he previously said would be coming Monday.
DeWine shared the news Monday during his daily coronavirus briefing. He acknowledged not having childcare in place is a hardship for parents going back to work as re-opening dates have been announced for other types of Ohio businesses, including retail, hair and nail salons, bars and restaurants.
“I certainly know how important this is as we open Ohio back up, child care is an absolutely essential part of people going back to work,” DeWine said.
Hmm. Seems like working parents wouldn’t be in this predicament if DeWine truly understood that childcare is an “absolutely essential” part of going back to work considering. I suppose he sleeps better at night telling himself that.
Forcing underpaid retailer workers back to work while keeping daycare centers closed is an unimaginable cruelty that have the most drastic effect on our most vulnerable populations. It reeks of a man who has never seriously considered how his life might have been different if he weren’t born into an affluent family with a multigenerational twine business.
We’re finding out who has juice in this state and who doesn’t. Working parents get shafted. Meanwhile golf courses get closed one day and then a bunch of rich assholes call their lackeys in the government and suddenly it’s “oh that’s our bad.”
MEANWHILE, HERE’S WHO DOES HAVE THE EAR OF OUR GOVERNOR
I was blessed in life in that my addictions are to fun things like tacos, marijuana and armed robbery.
Other people aren’t as lucky. They’re addicted to droll things like a lifetime of rigorous overtraining that ironically also destroys your body.
The nice thing about exercise is you can do it for free. It’s possible to lead a healthy life without deadlifting and squatting inside Olympic cages no matter what swollen steroid bros shout at you on Youtube.
Gyms have been closed for two months in Ohio, and the exercise freaks are starting to get restless.
From Peggy Gallek of fox8.com:
The FOX 8 I-Team found one member of the committee, a gym owner from Ashland. He says he is hoping they can get the businesses open soon.
“This has been probably the worse six weeks of my life. I wake up in the middle of the night. I don’t know what the future is going to hold,” said Craig Nolletti, owner of Ashland Warehouse Gym and CrossFit 419.
He told us he reopened his gym last week and was then shut down. He said the committee met Monday.
“Our objective with the group is to give enough ideas, rules and regulations, to give the governors confidence that we can reopen safely,” Nolletti said.
He said he did not know how soon it will be before the gyms can reopen. He added that the committee is expected to meet again this week.
“I think it’s unfair we had to wait to open,” Nolletti said. “We are essentially going to be like the last people to get to open and I am not sure why because we do focus on health and cleanliness.”
Good to know a CrossFit cultist who broke the law last week is on the commission pitching the governor on how to safely open gyms. He definitely places public health above his personal profits.
70% of gym-goers can’t be bothered to wash their hands, re-rack their weights or wipe down their machines. Fewer can be trusted to do all three. People go into gyms sick all the time to “work through” a sickness.
Their ideas will probably be to put the cheapest plastic barriers between the treadmills and double the amount of hand sanitizer dispensers. Should do wonders against a disease that primarily spreads through asymptomatic carriers blowing air particles in crowded indoor spaces.
IT WOULD APPEAR YOUNGSTOWN GAMBLED AND LOST
The story of Youngstown is basically the story of America. We were an industrial titan before our elite decided the American worker overpaid and sold them down the river in exchange for cheap products produced in foreign lands with fewer nuisances like laws dictating a minimum wage and banning child labor.
A crop of self-dealing politicians rode the economic fallout to power by promising a certain segment of the population that those golden days are right around the corner if the voters have the sense to elect them:
If the politician is elected, they immediately set out to earn some headlines with the word “jobs” in them that they can wave around as fulfillment of their promise.
In the case of Trump, he just made some shit up after the Chevy Cruze plant closed in Lordstown, Ohio:
Local politicians don’t have the power to be able to say the sky is green and have voters believe them. Their natural inclination is “get rich now or die trying” which leads them to make beneficial short-sighted moves at the long-term expense of the community they ostensibly serve.
Youngstown is not unique in the Midwest for wanting to stop the population loss that has drained the local tax base over the last 40 years. Unfortunately like a lot of towns their solution was electing politicians who believed in tax abatements.
Perhaps no better deal encompasses the error in their thinking than the Chill-Can. What the hell is the Chill-Can, you ask? Good question! Youngstown leveraged its economic future and bulldozed residents’ homes for a plant that was supposed to bring 250 jobs to the city to produce a product that was about to take the world by storm.
That was three years ago. As best I can tell, their greatest achievement was recruiting a hot woman to pitch their product in a 15-second commercial that aired during a Browns preseason game watched by approximately 15,000 people with an average BAC of .34.
From Dan O’Brien of propublica.com:
For Youngstown, the deal was just the latest in a long line of fizzled developments, underscoring how officials have gambled with economic development dollars in hopes of reviving the city. Between 1991 and 2017, the city awarded millions of dollars in property tax breaks to 94 projects that pledged new jobs, according to data provided by the city. Yet half of those projects failed to deliver on their promises, an investigation by The Business Journal and ProPublica has found. One in four projects reported zero net job creation.
“To have 50% falling short and half of those with goose eggs in the jobs column — that’s worse than average, for sure,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a national nonprofit that advocates for accountability in economic development. The noncompliance rate for similar projects across the country is around 30%, he said.
Under these so-called enterprise zone agreements, delinquent companies can face penalties, including repayment of taxes and the termination of incentives. But in Youngstown, they rarely do. Officials have canceled 25 agreements over the past three decades, usually the result of the business closing, relocating or failing to move forward with a project. Records indicate that the city sought back taxes from an errant firm on just one occasion, although it’s unclear if authorities ever collected; city officials did not respond to questions on the matter. As a result, dozens of private businesses have profited from public subsidies in a city that can scarcely afford them.
Besides being yet another reason why you need to pay attention to local politics, this is also what happened to my hometown of Marion, the City of Kings. I listen to stories from old-time Marionaires about the 1960s when manufacturing was booming and it sounds like something out of The Jetsons.
Our local leaders never envisioned a world without American manufacturing muscle. But then the tycoons of industry decided they wanted a bigger piece of the pie. By the time NAFTA rolled around, it was already too late. The robust wages of unionized factory labor moved out and opiates moved in.
This is how capitalism has worked for my people in Ohio since my mom moved us to this foreign land in 1992: Capitalists move into a city and pay local workers the lowest wages possible while extrapolating the accrued wealth and dumping industrial pollution into communities until it becomes 1% more profitable to move somewhere else and then like a vampire they hold a bidding war for tax abatements to find the next gullible city council who will invite them across the threshold of their rapidly depreciating homes by gleefully sacrificing the quality of their schools and infrastructure in exchange for headlines about jobs which may or may not ever materialize!
When you’re Big Business in America, they let you do it. You don’t even have to wait to kiss them.
IS THERE ANY GOOD NEWS?
(Shoutout to you if you read this far and also know the baller in the graphic above.)
Good news, everybody! All it took was a once-in-a-lifetime plague to produce the best air quality of our lifetimes.
From Stephanie Grindley of wtrf.com:
WHEELING, W.Va. (WTRF) — Throughout the world air is said to be in top condition due to the slow of industry, but right here in the Ohio Valley, the air is the best it’s ever been, according to the EPA.
“Right now, we have some of the best air quality that anyone alive has probably ever experienced,” says West Liberty University ecology professor James Wood.
I’ll try to remember to enjoy my last breaths of the least polluted air my lungs have ever breathed before a gang of privatized EMTs stuff me in an ambulance that I can’t afford and I’m whisked away to the nearest hospital that for a sewer creature like me might as well be a dumpster behind Arby’s labeled with “bankruptcy court” in graffiti.
THOSE WMDs. Why Youngstown pinned its revival on a self-chilling beverage can.. Warren G. Harding was America’s horniest president… Confessions of a misfit on the dog show circuit… The no-brainer meals that chefs make when they’re too tired to cook… What Shakespeare wrote about the plague.