Black Friday starts on Thursday now

Black Friday....

Rampant, unrestrained, consumerism.  The world watches the darkest side of capitalism run amok.  No wonder they hate us.

Why do people still camp in front of stores for days just to get last year's TV marked down 50% from the 80% markup 2 months earlier?

Have you not heard of Amazon?

By the Way, In case you weren't aware the "Black" in Black Friday has nothing to do with how dark it is outside when the store opens. 

Nor does it have anything to do with the darker side of human nature although you'd be excused if you've ever made the mistake of participating in the madness.

There was a time, supposedly, that retailers counted on the holiday shopping season to bring their books into positive numbers aka "being in the black."

Which assumes the rest of the year they're operating at a loss. 

Which may be true but gross sales have less to do with it than the perverse trickle down economics of corporate structures that reward CEO's with multi-million dollar bonuses.  

Shed no tears for a corporate empire built on the standard of indentured servitude and slave wages.  

I find nothing more distasteful than the want ads for a "seasonal" worker with the lure of  some meager discount off merchandise they can't afford.

No wait..

I find something even more distasteful than that...

Stores open on THANKSGIVING!

What the living hell is wrong with you?  I'm not just talking about the stores either.  Why they hell does anyone think it's OK to force people to leave their families just so you can buy some more crap?

Black Friday is bad enough but now we can't even let the pumpkin pie settle before it's off to the races!  

What's the point of a holiday if everybody has to go to work?  

OK, not "everybody"  just those poor unfortunate souls forced into indentured servitude by the likes of Kohls and Best Buy.

Here's a list of the worst offenders. 

• JCPenny stores open at 3 p.m.
• Old Navy is scheduled to open at 4 p.m.
• Best Buy, Macy's, Toys'R'Us and Bonton will open their doors at 5 p.m. 
• Walmart, Target, Kohl's, Dick's, Modell's and Sears will all open at 6 p.m. 

They blame everything from Amazon.com to Obama for it but the real reason is bald-faced greed.  

They'll claim in an age of online stores that they must do this to survive.  By extension they'll claim to support the economy by providing jobs to all those "seasonal" workers to meet the "demand."  

You probably saw this coming but here it is anyway....

Boycott them.  All of them without exception and anyone else that thinks it's OK to perpetuate this outrage.  Oh and before you get on the high horse about all those jobs they're providing.  Know that most of those "seasonal jobs" don't contribute to the economy when people  have to supplement their wages with food banks and government assistance.

It's even worse for the "regular" employees many of which are working 39 hour "part time" schedules.  They're on Food Stamps too.

Talk about corporate welfare.  

Wanna get all biblical about it?  

Fine.  Since the Thanksgiving tradition usually involves somebody spouting bible verses before gorging themselves try this one out...

Matthew 25:46

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

You say you live in a "Christian Nation?"  

Then start acting like it.

Thoughts on all the recent violence. Terrorism or otherwise

Nice France

Baton Rouge Louisiana

Dallas Texas

Terrorism, Racial Inequality, Fear.

I wish I had some profound insights to share but I don't.  I'm just a normal guy trying to make his way in the world.  So aren't we all.  

I'm sure you've felt some of the same frustrations as the perpetrators of these horrendous crimes but you dare not express them lest you be labeled a radical sympathizer.

Is Western society far too enamored with money and power?  Does it elevate the inconsequential above social responsibility?

Of course it does.  

Do we judge others based on what we know or the rhetoric we find most convenient to our own bias.

Do the people we trust with our safety view us as their wards or potential adversaries?  Sadly your complexion has an effect on that judgement.

Too  many labels: Black, White, terrorist, racist, capitalist, rich , poor, smart, dumb.

We become prisoners of our cultural indoctrination.  Threaten the construct at  your own peril.  The wrongs of the world are caused by the other guy.  The one that doesn't look like us, doesn't pray to the same god, doesn't see the world the way you do.

It stokes a fire of frustration that becomes a blinding rage.

I'm no better than you.  I have my own biases and prejudices and I confess I don't know as much about the world as I should.  

What I do know is that the more you try to control the world the looser your grip on it becomes.  

When you create a culture of denial your reap what you sow.  When you disenfranchise others for your own benefit civil discourse becomes impossible.  


This is how Dallas, Baton Rouge, Nice and Paris happened.  This is also how 911 happened.  

I shed no tears for Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein or Micah Johnson.  I see them as bloody opportunists seizing the message of the disenfranchised for their own ends.

It's what politicians do just without the guns and bombs.

When your message is one of exclusion and your world view narrow and unyielding you create an incubator for terrorism and violence. 

Yes, the perpetrators are guilty of their own crimes but we have to take some responsibility for the environment that created them.  

There's always a catalyst, a spark, something that lights the fire.  Ignorance and indifference only fans the flames.  

Even Adolf Hitler didn't rise alone like some biblical Anti-Christ as some would have you believe.  He too was an opportunist taking advantage of the disenfranchised rage of a country on the verge of collapse.  

We're far too content with the superficial.  We want a bad guy to blame so we don't have to take any responsibility for creating him.

Worse, the world we live in thrives on the superficial.  Social media, 24 hour news cycles, news delivered by "personalities" without even the suggestion of objectivity.  

The message is controlled, massaged and pre-packaged.  We're spoon fed copious amounts of useless information.

We think activism is best accomplished by a Tweet or Facebook like. 

As though a click will end hunger, oppression, and economic disparity.

People are not being heard unless they make it into the news cycle and then only the most radical.  Is it any wonder with such low information that we think every Arab is a terrorist, Every Black man a criminal, Every Latino an illegal immigrant.

We caused this.  We created this environment and it will continue unless we acknowledge our complicity in it.  

They say we should create the world we want to see.  Creation requires knowledge.  Unfortunately, what we consider knowledge is often little more than packaged diatribe.  

The way to fix it?  

Ask the uncomfortable questions.  Challenge your mental status quo and see if there isn't a whole world you've been missing.

You can't escape the experiences your life has shown you but you can escape the ignorance.

Amazon isn't alone, this is how we work now

If you've been in the workforce for the past decade or so you may have noticed subtle changes.  Sure it takes hard work and sacrifice to get to the top but does it feel like all that effort has left you just spinning your wheels?

It's no secret that we're all working harder and getting less for it.  Less pay, less benefits and less free time.  The old adage was that work was its own reward but the guy who came up with that didn't have a mortgage or a dwindling 401K to worry about.

He also had his weekends...

Consequently, it's no surprise that we find today's workplace increasingly demands more than just a job well done, it demands a lifestyle commitment.

As in your job is your life.  

So what? That's work and that's how it's always been.

Except it hasn't...

Where the baby boomers may have had a reasonable expectation of a shiny pot of gold at the end of their career rainbow those that came after found themselves without a pot to...well you know...

Without falling into the trap of every succeeding generation blaming its predecessor, the point is that the endgame has changed.

While we hear a lot of lip service about work/life balance and the importance of family it seems such things are at odds with expectations of the average worker in today's corporate culture.

So is it any surprise that when the NewYork Times peeled back the curtain of Amazon's corporate culture they found more in common with the Kremlin than KMart.

Horrific stories like...

"A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals." NYTimes

Or...

"Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away laborers as they fell." NYTimes

If these were but a few isolated incidents they could be excused but it appears that rather than the exception, they're the rule...

"At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.)" NYTimes

None of this shakes the Wall Street Glitterati though...

"I envision all investors saying 'Great,'" (Jim) Cramer said Monday. "Do I want to work at amazon? No. If you want to play your money with companies that only treat their employees well and do everything right, it's harder than you think to find." CNBC

Which has to be the most stunning display of cognitive dissonance (one of my favorite phrases) since Bernie Madoff uttered this 2007 quote, 

"It's virtually impossible to violate rules in today's regulatory environment"

InformationWeek

Of course Wall street loves this stuff.  We all know that nothing will raise a share price faster than pulling the rug out from under workaday America.  So it was with Amazon the following Monday after the New York Times expose'.  Amazon's share price was effectively unchanged.

Which is strange because for all the conservative admonitions about self reliance and the glories of capitalism Wall Street heaps praise upon companies that have effectively adopted management based on communism.

Hypocritical.

That any company can be celebrated for a institutionalized policy of devaluing people should be cause for outrage.  But there's that cognitive dissonance again.  So long as Wall street gets its money nobody really cares how it got there or who gets  hurt.

Think it's OK to throw a little Chairman Mao in with your capitalism?  Consider how relatively backward communist nations were before they embraced some form of capitalistic markets.  China wasn't known for anything but making cheap knockoffs of American goods.  The Soviet Union couldn't make a decent car and Cuba might as well have thrown out the calendars after 1962.

Creativity, innovation and progress are not born out of repression and abuse.  These days, however, no matter where you work you will suffer it in some measure.

Your choices are to literally be a "Wage Slave" or strike out on your own.  Of course if whatever shingle you hang happens to threaten one of those places you choose NOT to work for, expect to be crushed. 

Ask Barnes and Noble how that feels...

Let's bring back the America we were sold.  The one where hard work was rewarded and CEO's didn't look to Chairman Mao for guidance.  Let's get the Labor Department to actually do something other than print lunchroom posters and spit out manufactured statistics for the crystal ball prognosticators on CNBC.

How far have we really progressed over the past two generations when wages remain stagnant, women are still underpaid and companies blatantly abuse their workforce without consequence? 

We need real progress, not just some dumb commercial of waving wheat fields complete with proclamations of America's greatness on Bloomberg.

There's only one way to do it, make them fail and to hell with what Wall Street thinks.  There are other places to buy crap that aren't Amazon.com, other retailers that don't have "Walmart" over their doors and other phones that don't have an Apple Logo on them.