East of Eden

By Don Henry Ford Jr., on February 4th, 2014 It’s early. The rain sounds louder than it actually is on the tin roof of our home. But the noise was enough to startle me out of slumber and into the cold. A worker left a battery charger connected to a manure spreader truck and I feared water might ruin the charger. So off I went. Now I’m awake. If you happen to be reading this on my personal blog, the formatting may be fucked up. I am warned that my browser is no longer supported. Meaning whatever I was sold some three years ago is now obsolete. WTF? I guess I need to buy the latest (complete with the newest and best version of NSA spyware, I assume). We finished pecan harvest last week, apparently just in time. Early on I received a dollar a pound for native pecans. Each subsequent week the price fell. The last I sold fetched seventy cents. The buyer told me he was doing me a favor at this price. It would be less today. Considering this was a short crop nationwide, supply and demand of product apparently has less to do with the price farmers receive than supply and demand of dollars buyers are willing to risk. When I say buyers, I’m not talking about the ultimate consumer. They pay high prices. I’m talking about the ever-dwindling number of brokers that accumulate the crop and have unique access to the market, denied the rest by unnecessary regulation (when’s the last time you heard of someone getting sick by eating a pecan), or more importantly, the inability to get financing. Fear dominates nowadays. It’s for that reason we continue to have deflation, in spite of continual, unabated liquidity injections by the Fed on the order of 85 billion per month. Except when it’s actually more. More, by the way than bush’s TARP bailout that was so loudly decried by the public, each and every month. All that money goes to shore up the piles of bad debt big banks fail to acknowledge, keeping the ultra-wealthy, ultra-wealthy. The trickle down ain’t trickling. People out here in the real world, producing integral goods and services, continue to struggle, while elite financial entities thrive. I recently saw a post on Facebook: Africa is not poor; its resources are being exploited. It’s not so different in the modern South or the Mid-West. While liberal intellectuals often belittle these states, talking about federal assistance they receive and their concurrent poor state of affairs, they fail to acknowledge that the reason these states are poor in the first place is that they get fucked out of resources by people who sit on their asses and do nothing. Take note that well-meaning but propagandized citizens of these states, denied good educations and job opportunities, disproportionately get to go bleed in our imperial wars as well. Farm and energy subsidies aren’t offered so much to protect farmers as they are to insure cheap food and fuel. The real beneficiaries are consumer states. And of course, those corporations that sell them finished goods. All three of them (so maybe it’s twenty. It ain’t you and it ain’t me). Steinbeck once wrote a book called East of Eden. What was once considered unacceptable by a God-fearing Christian nation has become the American way: Wave the flag, fuck em out of their goods and labor, put em in jail or kill em if they don’t like it. Praise Jesus! The world is ours for the taking. Sorry. This shit overflows and has to come out, now and again.