The price of a (small) spruce is up to hundreds? Balsam besides. So I pine away. Eva Gabor of Green Acres didn’t have to worry about this, because I think she played the stock market well. Because of this doing, had plenty of dough. So she didn’t have to raise one herself.
To the point: Price gouging is a gift that keeps on giving, galore and they gotcha and just keep grabbing more, or keeping you from doing the same. Harris had that nagging woe natilly nailed, with her platform that had few planks because why, price of wood is so high and she was being outspent. But going back to gouging, just how can this all be? And how is it playing out in the fact that it’s much tougher to load up under the tree, or get one straight and tall, much less buy it to start with? The star on top might fade, and lights flicker away.
— Is BOGO a Christmas term? Is Two Minutes To Midnight an Xmas jingle? These are a pair of last minute holiday gift ideas that as such are beyond what’s become the usual buy $100 worth, and get $25, or even just $20: (1) At the Dairy Queen, Hudson branch only, half-off on gift certificates in virtually any domination, if you want to increase your winter chill with some ice cream. Nothing says and sells seasons like a Blizzard. (2) At Kwik Trip, a total of two BOGO tickets for Bucky Badger to their own Holiday Face-Off college hockey tournament down in Milwaukee, at the Fiserv Forum.
Or, you can just get brand-name cigs, and a two-pack and not solely in hip-hop, for $2 off, but you have to be a member of the loyalty club, so sign up! Oh yeah, the special is at Joe’s Mart on the south end of downtown Hudson, across from the DQ by the way, and let it be thus known that despite the name, I’m not a member of the ownership team and have no vested or otherwise proprietary interest in their relatively new venture. —
The need just keeps on getting greater, for those marginally valued these days who are on the margin, right in time for the holidays and the season of give-that-killer-gift as one-upmanship concerning your affluent family, and Thank God and Goodness my very own family is beyond forgiving. They have put-up for years with my cheap White Elephant-turned-slate-gray — almost like the before-burnt color of coal that reasonably should be put in my stocking? — vague attempts at Xmas presents, all done in the name of it’s the thought that counts. But maybe if you burn that coal to a cinder — isn’t that kinda what the grinch did? — it becomes a bit whiter, to save the holiday.
Backing up to describe the now-more-than-ever-need, when money for gifts is needed, even to be done by the needy. That nary-the-poor-price makeup note attached to the holiday card only goes so far. And I’m sure there are those who truly cannot scrounge up a White Elephant gift or dish to pass.
I recall seeing some pretty good looking, surplus furniture being set out for free on the lawn of The Phipps Center For The Arts, and it was all snapped up before nightfall. And that occurrence was in summer.
Food pantries and various other distribution places are seeing greater and greater numbers of clients, judging from a quick survey of such entities in the area. In my apartment building, the rate at which extra produce and dry goods that’s donated by residents so their neighbors can partake has stepped up in pace month by month. Same day as placed out, it’s often taken, and people are being less and less picky. This is time-of-month dependent, as for when people get their benefit checks, or these days direct deposits — there are no more actual food stamps, just plastic swipe cards that these days hey you never know, might have a chip incumbent or included or embedded or incurred — but even that benchmark on hang-tight-until-The-First-Of-The-Month is going by the wayside. Back to the people in my apartment complex and its gathering and food table station, who will settle for cans of free generic black beans becomes a barometer. Green beans maybe not as much so. And so many more people have to resort to going on the Greyhound bus, another barometer, or maybe can’t even afford the ticket.
The Haves among the Have Nots are doing quite well, thank you, and this is shown by the fact that while some of these people are placing old (easy) chairs out on the curb for free, some are just chucking out ones that some people would take, in the dumpster, sometimes more than one at once. (I myself have picked up from the curb a usable table, and also what looked like a wooden version of an Xmas Red Ryder to stack on top, to work as an overflow food pantry, and love the two-inch-wide strips on either side of it for stuffing stuff that kept encumbering my cabinet space, like counting up cake mixes.)
All this taps at something that the Democrats should have hammered home more often: Their candidate for the highest office in the land had said, on occasion, that she would go after, like she did in her day as DA, those charging ungodly high prices. She did not say just how she would minimize price gouging, as it was called, But that would resonate, you would think, with those whining about rises in grocery prices.
But how did grocery prices skyrocket, well beyond the factor of inflation? I don’t think it is your typical grocer, or farmer, making those extra bucks, and there of course is always the middle-man. But as I now shoot oddly from the hip, unlike the accuracy of Old School Matt Dillon As Marshal, look as you needed to do, and still must, past just Big Pharma. Go also with your wrath to Big Corp — and Big Insurance and Big Legal — as in the very-large-scale producers of things like those tractors and all kinds of wagons, and lots of other implements that plow the fields, and make products like fertilizers and seed and pesticides, (and these are being rounded up these days), and the list could go on forever. And don’t forget the crazy prices of real estate, as in the land to plant on. All these things drive up the cost to produce food, and it’s the big corporations who mass produce them, then sell them, at whatever the market will bear. And if you want to try to get insurance in a fire-ravaged area, good luck in its adjusting.
These factors are going to be there no matter who is in office, and that’s the case too with all the blow-up-everything wars across the world, and natural disasters that mess with their farmers getting food on your table. And with global warming and the havoc it has reeked with what-we’re-finally-now-seeing-as-delicate ecosystems, growing conditions are impaired. Even right here in Wisconsin we have seen the records fall, or close to it, in categories such as drought and flooding. Yes, both of them, in the same years.
Top that off with massive tariffs that will mean the extra cost has to be picked up by someone, and that’s you oh Joe Consumer, and things are not going to get better soon.
What we really need to do is go after That Sticky Circumstance Of The Stock Market. No amount of dividend or shares gaining greater value is going to be enough to satisfy the typical holder of stock in what, corporations! The more they get, the more they want, and feeding this machine becomes more important than ethical behavior. Even the dough paid out to greedy CEOs, large amounts of it seen in massive market holdings of their own stock, pales by comparison with these numbers. (I’ll check out actual numbers, to see just how bad this teller impact is, in a subsequent post.)
Until then, check out the song by get-this, British-based-band Dire Straits, called Industrial Disease, becoming his country’s fall from grace as a machining powerhouse. They have seen the problem since (shortly after?) the ’70s. The song tanked in the US, but was killer on the UK music charts, as they were ahead of us in this game, in recognizing the problem, and seeing things as global before it was a buzz word.
Also, in recent times being a CEO is not a walk in the park, and many are quietly or not so much so leaving their sky-high posts and coming down to earth. But too late, they have become a tangible symbol for corporate greed, as nobody is worth that much money — although a former co-worker, this back in the ’80s, got mad at me for saying such, as her father was a big-shot and with every penny!?! I refer to multiple verses in the Judas Priest song named Breaking The Law, and others of the like from this working class band from an industrial area, cramming a lot of thought into a tune that weighs in at just over two minutes long. So when that health corporation head exec was shot to death when out for a walk recently, does that violent act really surprise us? It shouldn’t.
Victim of Changes, sings the priest in a comparison I make. Without warning, somethings dawning.
Expanding on all this was a conversation, as speaking with others later reiterated, with whom else? Mom. This alleged crime should shock people, but in what way … Killing is not justified and anyway he did not have any direct dealings with the insurer, just a blanket – or I don’t have a blanket anymore since I gave mine to another now homeless person – grudge against need-to-be-very-much-all things corporate. This is where I differ from mom: Could the shooter have been narrowing it down to the health industry, and all that it is. But what if he got massively got screwed by some middle-man or broker to that company, with all its arms? Or has a friend or relative to which that has happened. (Should someone like him thus vent anger even if he is not impacted in an immediate way, if like say myself, be it thrust out against a family member who is in the financial department, but not heading it, of a health care insurer?) Then the next news clip, where someone set on fire and killed a woman who was sleeping on a subway train. Will this criminal matter, by comparison, be subject to the “here today, gone from tomorrow’s news cycle” scenario? Because she apparently was homeless. I dare to compare. And as far as the idea that we revere some people but dismiss others because of the manner in which they die, see the System of a Down song Chop Suey.