Mike Yates writes:
I know. I drink a lot!). However, the discussion about boycotts has been interesting. Chuck , I hope you did not take the comment personally in any event.
----------------
Don't apologize--it's unseemly (but thanks anyway). I don't take these things personally. Writing is writing--I put it out and take the hits, good, bad, and ugly. Somebody should have checked my spelling--it's coq au vin, not coc'au vin--product of phonetics movement in the forties.
But your right about the damned state liquor stores--Iowa, Penn (by county?), Utah, Oregon, and on and on. Pure barbarism. Also, I forgot we had to make a special trip to some stupid warehouse type store.
Also the evolution was good, going into boycotts, commodities, union approved foods (a list of sugar, salt, fat, and preservatives--the basic food groups, right?--a more toxic list I can't imagine). But how can you tell which lettuce was picked by union workers and which wasn't (urine samples?). And chickens? Jesus, those things look like pure intoxicated exploitation right out of the plastic wrap. I am still waiting to find somebody's finger in the giblets. I did stop eating Rath pork products (long ago) when their strike and close out blew away a whole town (anybody remember that one?).
In fact the Seventies boycott movements and their awareness of unions set the stage to 'see' the same problems internationally as the same corporations moved out of the US labor market to get at more docile (read oppressed) and cheaper labor pools outside the US. So, I still support the idea and the practice of perhaps economically meaningless boycotts, because the process of raising these boycotts brings awareness of the corporate world flight to the bottom of the global labor barrel--computer programmers from India and Pakistan indeed, and Evil Bill Approved too, on the pretext of no local skills available--really?
Anyway, hopefully somebody will rip me a new asshole on the thread about identity politics and commodification--there has to be great swaths of fundamental error in that one too--maybe my naive belief in the potential of a politically sophisticated, but otherwise common people taking power to determine the course of their own lives?
Chuck Grimes