DOJ Reports Show that the REAL Cause of Michael Brown's Death was Citizen Apathy

The two DOJ reports on the epic fuckery going on within the Ferguson, Missouri, criminal justice system ought to send a chill up the spine of every American, not just because of the blatant racism of the city police department but because of what the whole shitty situation says about the state of so-called American democracy. It's hard to know where begin with this hideous story. We could start with the fact that a part time municipal judge who apparently routinely jailed people for being late paying small municipal fines was paid over $56,000 a year for holding exactly TWELVE annual circuit court sessions--at a robust taxpayer funded hourly rate of $1,500. Oh, and that same asshole judge also owes the federal government $170,000 in back taxes. Motherfucker's got some gonads on him, I'll say that.

Even more appalling was the fact that from 2012-2014, 93% of all arrests made by the Ferguson PD were of black people. Additionally, two Ferguson cops and the county clerk have lost their jobs for sending racist e-mails, which is amazing given that the asshole police chief said that he would not fire Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown (Wilson resigned after the grand jury failed to indict him). E-mailing is worse than killing--that's the message here, I guess. And even before the DOJ reports were released, one of the Wilson grand jurors attempted to sue the county prosecutor for his mishandling the presenting of the case, and it was further reported that the prosecutor knowingly allowed one of the witnesses to lie to the grand jury.

So given all of the above, particularly the appallingly racist arrest record of the Ferguson PD, the key question is: how did all of this happen in a community in which as of the 2010 census more than two-thirds of the citizenry are black? Because, my friends, just as I stated in a much different context in my recent post about Hillary Clinton's e-mails, most American voters simply do not give a shit about the rampant abuse, fraud and corruption going on at all levels of their god damned government.

How else does a town that is overwhelmingly black end up with a nearly all white police department, and a racist one at that? How else does all the other corruption and petty bullshit that was going on in Ferguson happen for years on end with nothing being done about it? How else do the city officials get so fucking arrogant as to not only engage in these practices but then to order the jackbooted thuggery we saw being employed against the citizenry when it finally, many years too late, erupted into protest last year? I'll tell you how:

Voter turnout in the most recent mayoral election was approximately 12%. The Mayor ran unopposed.

The sad fact is that everyone in that town, black and white, protestor or not, should take a moment and reflect upon their own culpability at electing the shitheads who created the climate in which the Michael Brown shooting became inevitable. Darren Wilson pulled the trigger. He got away with the killing by claiming he feared for his safety. But by his own admission he was hassling Brown and his friend for the "crime" of walking in the street instead of on the sidewalk, and though we'll never know Brown's side of the story it seems likely HE reacted as the resident of city in which the police were viewed by most as an occupying army but the adult citizenry were to damn apathetic to do anything about it until after he was killed.

But don't get too cocky even though you may not live in Ferguson. It is exceedingly likely that your dismal 2016 presidential choice will be between the twin oligarchs Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. And THAT is the collective result of more that three decades of the vast majority of Americans being so ill informed that they--Republican, Democrat or even independent--have been making increasingly shitty choices, degrading the electoral system at the national level to the point where realistically there is no longer any more choice than there was for mayor of Ferguson last time around.

This does not mean that I advocate participating in sham election like the 2016 presidential contest other than to maybe cast a third party protest vote. But at the very least people ought to pay attention to what is going on at the local level, because the people who have control over your local government have the most direct control over your day-to-day life. Had literally just a few hundred voters in Ferguson lined up behind a reformist candidate for mayor last time around, Michael Brown might still be alive today.

So RIP Michael Brown. Sadly, it took your violent and completely avoidable death to wake up your friends and neighbors and get them to demand that things finally change in Ferguson, Missouri. What it would take to do the same on the national level I can't even begin to imagine.


Bonus: "I don't wanna be no mothafuckin 'accident'"

Briggs & Stratton Laying Off Another 210 Employees (Missouri)

I last posted about Briggs & Stratton back on January 27th when the company closed a Tennessee plant. This time it is Missouri's turn to feel the pain, as reported by a local television station:

The Briggs and Stratton Corporation announced layoffs Thursday at its Poplar Bluff plant.

The company says effective April 12, 2012 approximately 210 employees will lose their jobs.

The Poplar Bluff facility manufactures small engines for the worldwide outdoor power equipment industry.

And just like in that last announcement, the company doesn't mince words on the real state of the economy:

"The economic environment and levels of consumer spending on outdoor power equipment continues to be challenging particularly in Europe, " said Dave DeBaets-Vice President North American Operations. "We will adjust production schedules to better align with decreased market demand. Although the decisions are difficult, evaluation of our manufacturing footprint is an ongoing process as we consider productivity and efficiency gains along with the changes in the markets we serve."

The Poplar Bluff plant also saw layoffs in 2011 in which 202 employees were laid off in October.

At least one worker appears to "get it," even if her statement is a little garbled:

Sue Sinclair is a 13 year employee and is not among the laid off workers. She expressed concerns for her co-workers and the city of Poplar Bluff as a whole.

"I hope it's because of the economy," said Sue Sinclair. "If people aren't bringing in money they can't be buying lawn mowers, and leaf blowers. I can understand that for sure and hope it turns around quick because it could hurt really bad."

Sadly, Ms. Sinclair, but it's going to hurt very bad.


Bonus: "This trickle down theory...has left all these pockets empty"

Casa Gallardo To 200 Missouri Employees: GTFO, We're Shutting Down

I think it was around last year at this time, before I started blogging here at TDS, that the Perkins restaurant chain shut down a bunch of its locations so abruptly that the wait staff actually had to kick some of the customers out in the middle of their meals. Well, here comes a story from KSDK.com of another chain shutting down locations almost as abruptly:

More than 200 Casa Gallardo employees are in shock after going to work Thursday only to learn it was their last day. All four restaurants in our area closed abruptly.

More than 200 people left work stunned. Employees of Casa Gallardo restaurants were told by corporate officials the restaurants would be closing for good, just minutes before the shutdown.

"They told us to call last call for alcohol and to tell our customers we were shutting down forever," said former employee Jessica Nickel.

That's how Nickel found out she was losing her job as a bartender with Casa Gallardo.

Thursday evening corporate officials from parent company "Real Mex Restaurants" flew in from California to shutdown the locations. Two hundred employees and 16 managers are now out of work.

Nickel has been at the Bridgeton location for about a month, and is three months pregnant.

"It was hard. A lot of us were crying, so, it was definitely difficult," she said.

Corporate officials say the decision to close the restaurants came about one week ago. Workers weren't informed until around 5 p.m. Thursday, just minutes before closing early.

Stay classy, assholes. And maybe someday it will be you escorted out of your comfy corporate offices with no fucking warning. At least, I hope so.


Bonus: "That's the way that it goes...when you're down here with the rest of us"

Hanes Buys Missouri Factory, Then Plans to Move it to Mexico

image: Hanes is going to have order new tee-shirt labels

Globalization strikes again:

Barely a year after purchasing a manufacturing plant from a competitor, clothing maker Hanes is set to close down the facility, leaving many in the town scrambling for work at a time when jobs in small towns can be hard to come by.

Hanes Brands, which – at least for now – is based out of Lenexa, Kansas, bought the facility from Gear for Sports in August of 2010. Workers at the plant made sports-related clothing like college football t-shirts and other items. Cecilia Harper just started at the plant four months ago after being out of work for two years.

“I think it’s going to be impossible (to find a new job). I mean it took me this long to find this job. What’s it going to take and how am I going to live?” said Harper.

Chillicothe Mayor Chuck Haney says that he believes that the handwriting was on the wall for the plant the moment Hanes purchased the plant.

“It was like a bomb shell had been dropped on us,” said Haney. “That’s exactly the fact, that there was plans the day they announced the sale, the next day they began work to get ready to move this plant to Mexico.”

Haney says that the jobs at the Chillicothe plant paid between $8 and $12 an hour, much more than in Mexico.

Consider for a moment the implications for American workers if a job that only pays the pitiful sum of eight bucks an hour is subject to being moved overseas so the company can make more money. For all of his blather about his make-work, boondoggle jobs bill, why isn't President Hopey-Changey speaking up about practices like this? Oh that's right, because he is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America. How silly of me.

The most telling quote in this article came at the end:

“How can I be self-sufficient if I have no income?” said Harper, who says that the American middle class is extinct. “I don’t think there will be a middle class. That’s what i feel. I feel there are going to be rich people and poor people and that’s just the way it’s going to be.”

Well, it might not have to be that way, Ms. Harper, if the non-rich would unite and angrily demand that this type of garbage be stopped. But they won't because far too many of them are either distracted by the corporate media machine or have actively been paid off by the ownership class to do their bidding.

I actually have a great idea for a teevee show. Give me an hour on MSNBC every night and I'd do a talk show where each episode I would highlight a corporate abuse like this one and then get the corporate flacks and the politician-apologists on there and skewer them. Doesn't that sound like it would be a ratings monster, given how so many people are feeling the pain of layoffs and foreclosures these days? Too bad it will never happen. Not because I'm a blogger nobody, but because the corporations that control the media would never let me within a mile of their studios.

What a sad state of affairs in modern day America.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch CEO: "Great News...We're Bankrupt!"

image: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch celebrates mindless consumerism even as it teeters on the brink of bankruptcy.

You can't explain this:

It's been speculated for months. And today it finally happened. Lee Enterprises, the Iowa-based publisher that took on a massive amount of debt in 2005 to purchase the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has filed for bankruptcy.

Below is a letter that Lee CEO Mary Junck emailed out to employees later this afternoon, informing them that bankruptcy is a "good news" -- you know, like winning Pulitzer or something.

Why have America's newspaper's fallen on such hard times? Some blame the Internet. As for me, I lay at least part of the blame on the fact that many of them are run by idiots who would write something this fucking stupid in a letter to their employees and shareholders:

Dear Lee Stockholders and Employees:

There is welcome news for all of us who have a stake in Lee. The terms are in place for the completion of a comprehensive refinancing of Lee's debt.

We have achieved agreements with an overwhelming majority of our creditors to extend our existing loan agreements on reasonable terms that preserve stockholders' ownership interests in the company with only 13% dilution.

As we previously noted as a possibility, implementation will require a favorable, voluntary, prepackaged Chapter 11 process to bind the remaining minority of non-consenting lenders to the terms of the agreements. While such a filing falls under bankruptcy laws, in our case it differs significantly from most such filings because it preserves interests of stockholders and all other parties. The process will simply provide a favorable legal framework for implementing the agreements.

The court process is expected to take 60 days or less. In the meantime and throughout the process, we expect there will be no change in our business. There will be no impact on employees, customers, vendors, contractors, contracts, company operations or corporate governance. We expect Lee stock will continue to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. I am enclosing our news release with additional details.

Although the refinancing will require Lee to pay higher interest rates, it and our strong cash flow will keep Lee on solid financial footing as we continue reshaping our company for long-term growth by expanding our digital platforms, building audiences, driving sales and improving our balance sheet.

As I hope you noticed in our most recent earnings release, Lee has continued to outperform the industry in multiple measures, most notably in digital advertising growth and audience growth. As I also hope you noted in our recent President's Awards announcements, our publishers, editors, management teams and employees throughout our company have demonstrated outstanding journalism, innovation and spirit. All of this underscores our excitement and confidence as we enter 2012.

With deep appreciation for your continuing support,

Mary Junck

Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer

Imagine working for a company and receiving a letter like that. Sure would do wonders for your morale, don'tcha think? Just how delusional do you have to be to say that you have "excitement and confidence" as you file for bankruptcy.

Taking a look above at that disgraceful cover story celebrating a past Black Friday, I think I have a pretty good idea why fewer and fewer people are willing to actually pay hard earned money for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. It must be an example of the "outstanding journalism" being practiced at the paper these days. Perhaps some real news for a change, particularly above the fold on the front cover, might make some people willing to open their wallet to pay for an old-fashioned, dead tree media source. After all, there are plenty of pandering fluff pieces available for free on teevee and the Internet to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Corporate America has become a vast cesspool for the greedy, the conscienceless and the functionally incompetent. It's just rare that you see a corporate executive with such a perfectly appropriate last name.


Bonus: this may be completely inappropriate, but I hereby dedicate this song to Lee Enterprises CEO Mary Junck

CNN FAIL – How the So-Called “Leader” in News Dropped the Ball on Covering the Joplin Tornado

Everyone now knows that around 5:30 PM CDT this past Sunday night a massive tornado struck the unfortunate town of Joplin, Missouri, causing massive devastation, taking well over 100 lives and injuring many more. It was just the latest of a series of horrifying weather-related natural disasters, from floods to wildfires to tornadoes; that have devastated the middle section of the country this year. Joplin received a particularly vicious blow when a main hospital and several fire stations were virtually destroyed by the storm, and it was immediately apparent that outside help was desperately needed as quickly as possible.

So you would have thought that CNN, which laughingly bills itself as the Worldwide Leader in News, would have been right on top of the story from the get-go. Especially since a rival network, The Weather Channel, almost immediately began broadcasting live from just outside the ruined St. John’s Hospital by virtue of having had a storm chasing team led by on air meteorologist Mike Bettes fortuitously on the scene. The images of Bettes choking with emotion while standing in the ruins chatting with dazed survivors outside the hospital complex--which looked eerily like the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City right after the 1995 bombing--should have alerted anyone who saw them that a major humanitarian crisis was occurring in real time.

So I was amazed when I switched over to CNN around 6:30 PM CST to see that they hadn’t bothered to cut into their regularly scheduled Sunday night programming and were still showing an episode of CNN Presents. Even worse was CNN HLN, the later set of initials for which used to stand for Headline News and once upon a time provided 24/7 half-hour news broadcasts—hence the name. HLN was showing an episode of Showbiz Tonight, and switching back and forth between the utterly vapid report on the antics of yet another superficial celebritard and The Weather Channel vividly brought home to me yet again, as the late Joe Bageant often pointed out, just how disconnected the holographic world of the American media has become these days from everyday reality in this country.

Not until seven o’clock did CNN rouse out of its slumber and begin to provide live coverage, by which point Bettes had been on the air for over an hour pleading for anyone and everyone to send help. Even then, CNN was reduced to having its anchor chat on the phone with a local reporter who was slowly trying to make her way to St. John’s Hospital. When she arrived near the scene after much difficulty the anchor implored her to tell him what she saw, to which I lost patience and literally yelled at the screen, “Switch over to the Weather Channel, you dumbfuck. It’s right there!” But at least by this point CNN’s main network was actually covering the story. HLN did not bother altering its regular programming at all, at least not during the couple of times I checked as the evening wore on. Showbiz Tonight was followed by something I have never watched nor ever care to watch called the Joy Behar Show.

I don't know why CNN was so slow on the uptake in recognizing the magnitude of the story, but I surmise the likely reason is budgetary cutbacks that have probably left it with a skeleton staff during slow news periods like Sunday nights. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from wasting their remaining resources sending reporters out to produce useless shit like Showbiz Tonight. Seriously, if I actually gave a damn about the antics of talentless wastes of space like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber I would turn on E! Network, thank you very much.

We will never know if CNN’s tardiness in getting its act together on this story slowed down recognition of the seriousness of the situation and hence the speed of the response among EMTs, doctors and other emergency responders outside of the immediate Joplin area. But the delay is a damning indictment of 24/7 cable “news” networks, the purpose of which first and foremost is supposed to be their ability to quickly get the word of important stories out to the public.

Had Mike Bettes and The Weather Channel crew not happened to have been lucky enough to be right on the scene of the disaster when it unfolded, who knows how long the CNN coverage might have been delayed. And this is not to completely let The Weather Channel off the hook, either. It was reported online very early on that Bettes had asked his bosses to suspend the network’s commercials as they did during their live broadcast of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, tornado aftermath last month. The network honchos obviously refused, because for the rest of the night viewers were treated to five minute chunks of real life mayhem interrupted by ads for lawn care products and antihistamine sprays. No doubt they thought the spike in ratings caused by the coverage justified showing such poor taste in the face of disaster.

This is also not to single out CNN alone for its ineptness. “News” has always been a commodity subject to the whims of the corporations who underwrite its production. In recent years, however, the negative effects of corporate sponsorship have degraded the mainstream media to the point that here we see an example of how it is no longer even any good at producing what it was always good at producing in the past—coverage of a major natural disaster. If they can’t get a story as basic as the Joplin tornado right, how do you think they are going cover those truly serious issues that really matter to us all—like resource depletion, climate change and economic collapse?

One last word before I close. At one point on Sunday night the CNN anchor reported that he was getting many tweets from viewers demanding to know what was going on with the weather that was causing all these disasters. He then blathered in typical news speak, “this is a question we’ll be asking,” rather than just stating the obvious—climate change. Because heaven forbid a ‘news’ anchor in America in this day and age would EVER be caught telling the truth on the air.