Small Villains

Lord knows I’m not one to judge another person’s behavior – unless that person is a receiver on my fantasy football team who shall remain nameless* – but here are a couple of nasty little stories of human shenanigans that I found particularly depressing at the start of this holiday season.

Ho-ho-ho!

Scrooge, Inc.

This heartwarming Forbes piece describes how a Wal-Mart in Ohio is holding a Thanksgiving Charity Food Drive for its own employees. On one level, this is commendable, showing how Wal-Mart “associates” care for each other, which is kind of nice in this selfish and increasingly isolated world of ours. On the other, it underscores the fact that the multi-billion-dollar corporation doesn’t pay most of its employees a living wage. In fact, Wal-Mart was rated the worst-paying company in America in 2012.

In other words, the single mom who stocks the stuffing for your feast can’t afford her own holiday meal. “It’s Mac ‘n’ Cheeze again, kids. Happy Thanksgiving!” If that doesn’t chill the cockles of your heart, think of it this way: many dudes who work at Wal-Mart are paid so little that they qualify and receive public assistance, which means that your tax dollars are subsidizing Wal-Mart’s starvation wages. Say, did I mention that Wal-Mart had a net income of $17 billion dollars last year?

Kind of makes you hope that the Wal-Mart CEO is visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve. And that instead of teaching him an important lesson about Christmas they drag him off to hell where he’s tortured for a million years by a horde of underpaid, non-unionized demons wearing happy-face buttons.

Enjoy your huge-ass holiday bonus, you cretin.

Just Kidding

Here’s an article from the HuffPost web site – which as you know is this blog’s go-to sources for celebrity nipple slips – describing how Trey Radel was busted for misdemeanor cocaine possession in Washington DC.

Big deal, huh? We all agree that America’s War on Drugs is excessive and stupid and totally out of hand and destroys entire generations of poor people and stuff, right, serving mainly to enrich our grotesquely bloated law-enforcement-prison-industrial complex? So why single out one unlucky bastard who was caught with a smallish amount of coke, for special mockage?

Heck. I forget to tell you that Trey Radel is a Florida Congressman who recently voted to subject poor people on food stamps to drug tests.

So if you’re poor and hungry and recently, I dunno, smoked a joint or huffed on a crack pipe, you don’t dare to go for food stamps because you risk being arrested on drug charges**. That may not sound unreasonable to some, but of course your kids don’t get to eat either. Oops.

Well, too bad. The little freeloaders should have thought of that before choosing such crappy parents. Seriously. Are there no workhouses?

Meanwhile, legislators have repeatedly voted down amendments to their nasty food stamp drug laws that would subject the legislators themselves to the same drug tests that they want to hit poor people with. I guess we now know why.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington says that Trey Radel’s cocaine possession charge, a misdemeanor, carries a statutory maximum of 6 months in prison and a fine of $1,000. Meanwhile, children denied food are subject to chronic hunger and malnourishment.

Bonus question: how can you possibly vote to punish poor people for behavior that you yourself engage in?

Fuck that guy.

Thanks to my lovely wife for bringing this horrid story to my attention.

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*You’re dead to me, AJ Green, hear me? DEAD!

**And you cannot afford the sharp Washington attorneys available to Radel, so you’re screwed.