Crash of 12.

Call out the marines. Get the cops down here. Somebody plugged our money hole... and this could be a problem.

Yeah, I know ... all good things come to an end, right? We were just starting to get traction as the next big-box store. Our theme is that of an abandoned mill... all of our stores look like abandoned mills. (Note: we only have one store, and it's in an abandoned mill.) We have a mascot, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and a jokey spokes vegetable, the mansized tuber, who we were thinking would wheel his way through quirky television commercials, speaking in a British... no, Aussie accent. Perhaps German accent. We haven't worked out that part yet. He would show up in board rooms and on cruise ships ... at least the ones that don't tip over or catch on fire.

And hell, with the help of our marketing advisor, Noname, on loan from the A and R representative at our corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, we even had an expansion plan on the board, with a big map and hexagonal icons representing new store locations in Boise, Idaho, Keokuk, Iowa, Redmond, Washington, and about a thousand other locations. Big Green was even planning to go global, with outlets in Spain, Qatar, Estonia, Sri Lanka (of course), and down under somewhere (or something). It was a bold, ambitious plan ... one that made our militant cartoon neighbor, Gung-Ho, fairly salivate with envy. All of the lands HE wanted to conquer, spread out invitingly before him on a topographical map. Oh, the envy!

But... that was then, this is ... OWW! (Forgive me. Marvin just rolled over my right foot.) One day this past week, the free consumer goods, once so plentiful, simply stopped flying out of that hole in the floor Mitch Macaphee burned with Trevor James Constable's Orgone Generating Machine. (I know... that's a little hard to parse. Just look back a few weeks, you'll get it.) We just sold the last programmable toaster yesterday. All out of custom! Even worse, the hole emitted a parting gift of sorts - namely, a bill of lading for everything that had flown out over the past three weeks. And it's considerable. I didn't know a number could have that many zeroes behind it. (A google-plex, perhaps?)

So there you have it. The once mighty Green-mart empire, brought low by an interloper on the other side of this wretched globe. Curses! (Ahem.... hurt my throat, there.)

Getoutistan.

The first question I asked myself when I heard about the Koran burning incident in Afghanistan was, how could anyone make this mistake? What were the circumstances of the burning? For chrissake, everyone knows what the consequences of such an act are likely to be. When that crackpot preacher in Florida was ostentatiously threatening to burn the Muslim holy book, diplomats, generals, political leaders, clergy ... people all across the country and around the world were applying pressure on him not to do this. It is deeply inflammatory - this is widely known.

My second thought was, this is not simply about burning Korans. This incident followed ten years of war and all the evils that are contained within that fact. It occurred during a stretch of weeks in which we saw cell-phone video of American soldiers laughing and joking as they pissed on the corpses of Afghans; our military personnel adopting an SS-type insignia for one of their units; our Defense Department persisting in its robotic Drone war on both sides of the Pakistani border. Now Afghans are turning their guns on our people. Is anyone really surprised?

Here's the problem: we just cannot see this issue clearly. Even on liberal MSNBC, it becomes a question of those ungrateful Afghans, railing against their funders and protectors from the U.S. It is portrayed as a component of Karzai's corruption, a favorite meme of the mainstream political culture, leaving aside the inconvenient fact that he was planted in the country by the Bush administration, had been an exile Afghan fixer for fossil fuel industry prior to his tenure as head of a severely ailing country. We need to get past this idea that they owe us something. The Afghans owe us nothing. We screwed them severely during the years of the Soviet war, back in the 1980s. We screwed them afterwards, leaving them to an internecine struggle that tore what was left of the country apart. Then came 9/11, which we laid at their door, though the cave-dwelling Bin Laden was only the head of an al Qaeda snake that coiled from Saudi Arabia to Germany to Florida and beyond.

Bin Laden is dead. He wasn't even in Afghanistan. He was safe and dry in Pakistan, laughing at our folly. What the hell are we still doing there?

luv u,

jp

Lock, stock, and barrel.

Is that the time? Right - time to close up for the day. It's 4:20 in the afternoon and I've been slaving away for nearly half an hour. Shut it down.

Woe is he who must labor in vain. I don't know what that means, but whatever... your friends in Big Green are proprietors for the nonce. That means we have proprietary interests, perhaps for the first time in our lives. And you know what they say... as soon as you get a stake in the world, it's all over. Kiss your altruism goodbye, my little scaly friend. Forget your deeply held values - this is cash, Jimmy-boy, cold hard cash! To hell with all that other stuff. All we care about is pushing product out the door at a tidy profit.

What products? Hey.... whatever comes flying out of that hole to China. Mitch Macaphee burned a tunnel through the earth so clean, it doesn't even whistle when it spins (and it should). Now it's like one of those air-tube delivery systems in an old department store. On the other end, probably just outside the gates of a Foxcon plant, somebody's dropping consumer items into a hole ... and they come flying out of the opening in our forge room floor moments later. It's a tunnel to the bank, my friend.

Okay, so... on our marketing advisor Noname's recommendation, we opened a storefront in the Mill that we're calling, "GREENMART". People come in with plastic shopping carts they borrow from the supermarket up the street and load up on cheap swag built by slave labor - an all-American pastime if ever there was one. (And there was one.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been working the cash register, so to speak. Actually... there is no cash register. Marvin just does the calculations using his own processor unit, then spits out a receipt. He even takes major credit cards, which is news to me. (If I'd known that during our last tour, I would never have hocked my Bean Boots for that hoagie back on Neptune.)

Yes, I know... this is like selling stuff that fell off the back of a truck. Where's the outrage? Ask Bob Dole.

Moral hazard, part II.

Know what I hate? Well, I'm going to tell you. It's when people intrude upon your deepest personal life, and then when you object, they accuse you of denying their right to - I don't know - have everything exactly their way, I guess. That's how I see the hyper-religious crowd who have been complaining about the mandate in the Affordable Care Act requiring employer-provided health insurance to cover contraception. Obama carved out an exception that should satisfy anyone - one that goes way beyond any necessary relief from what's required, in my view. And still they are crowing about it, comparing it to religious persecution, even Nazi-ism in the more extreme cases.

The latest round has been in state legislatures from Georgia to New Hampshire, where the crackpot tea-party majority has proposed a "conscience" exception so broad it practically guarantees legal challenge. (These are the freaks who insisted, bizarrely, that all legislation be rooted in the Magna Carta, even though few of them have ever read the document in its entirety. Next, they'll demand all proposed laws draw on neolithic cave paintings.) Then there are the fetal "personhood" statute and vaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia, scaled back in the face of massive protests by women in that divided state. This ... from the party that was all about jobs, jobs, jobs during the 2010 election. See what happens when you trust them?

It should surprise no one that Republicans used the economy as a trojan horse to conceal their deeply unpopular, highly regressive right-wing social agenda. It was, after all, GOP-driven policies (aided, of course, by watery Democrats) that blew a massive hole in the federal budget back in 2001, expanding it in subsequent years with undeclared wars and unwarranted tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country. Those tax cuts were supposed to have expired by now, but as every politician knows, that ain't gonna' happen ... because no one has the spine to allow it. Meanwhile, we all pay the price. My city in upstate New York is starved for funds largely because the Feds are starving the States, and the States are passing the cuts along to municipalities. That and inaction on health and retirement reform (not privatization, but the kind that would work) is resulting in massive tax hikes at the local level - close to 20% for the coming fiscal year. This just to spare the Romneys of the world a return to the favorable income tax rates of the 1990s, when they gained plenty enough wealth, thank you very much.

The Republicans have nothing to offer on the economy. And unless we push them, neither will the Democrats.

luv u,

jp

Hold it.

There's a valuable resource for you. And right here under our noses. We're rich, I tell you, rich. It's like finding a whole bag full of doubloons. Or perhaps triploons.

What am I talking about? What indeed. I'll tell you, friend(s), we've been squatting in this abandoned hammer mill for more than ten years. You know what squatting that long does to your quadriceps? Seriously, we've been occupying the Cheney Hammer Mill before the Occupy movement ever put on its first pair of short pants. Not for any principle, you understand, other than that of having a roof over our heads. A penniless band, Big Green was in those days. Ah, but no more. Fortune has smiled upon us, once again.

So often these things happen by accident. Someone tinkering with something, blowing some time, and next thing you know, whoosh! Well, that's what happens when you live with a mad scientist, anyway. For weeks, Mitch Macaphee has been tinkering with that orgone generating machine Trevor James Constable left behind some years back. He hooked it into one of his little ion generators and - as I said earlier - WHOOSH! Fortunate that no one was standing in front of the machine's array at that moment. The thing was pointing down at the floor of the forge room and, well, suddenly there was a clean, round hole in the fire-brick floor.

Now, I tend toward curiosity, I must admit. But I, like you, have seen Crack In The Earth, so there was no way I was going down that hole. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) wasn't having any of it either. (I've been volunteering him for way too many duties just lately.) I tried to get the mansized tuber to check it out, but no luck. Fortunately, there was no need to send anyone down there. They just started popping out of the hole. What did? Boxes. Boxes of goods from China. Valuable goods, just popping out of the hole. We're rich, I tell you, RICH. Forget everything you know about value-chain management and global enterprise logistics. We've got a hole to where stuff is made. People drop the stuff in on the other end, and it comes out here. End of story.

Okay, so... we're working on the sales component right now. Stay tuned. And while you're tuned, check out the latest episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, the February edition. Two new songs by Rick Perry. Another extra by us. Corporate underwriting spots tried and botched. Something for everybody. Yeeha.

Rick's sugar daddy.

Santorum surges to the front. For many, I'm sure, that is proof positive of the existence of God. For others, it is worrying evidence of the other dude. Astounding, though, how culture war issues have come to the fore so abruptly. Elections are never about what you think they're going to be about, are they? 2008 was supposed to be about Iraq, but it ended up being the financial crisis and the economic meltdown. This one is supposed to be about the economy, but for chrissake... the GOP guy who's been talking incessantly about the economy for the past four years just can't get past first base. Now it's looking more and more like the election will be fought over, well... birth control.

Then there's the billionaire problem. It seems that every major candidate has his sugar daddy. For Gingrich it was Adelson, the reactionary casino magnate. For Romney, it's himself (of course). And for Santorum, it's Foster Friess, last name pronounced "freeze". That's right: the person behind Rick Santorum, presidential candidate, is Mr. "Freeze". Time to pick up the bat phone, commissioner. This time, Mr. "Freeze" has a plan that just might work. After all, Santorum was nobody, absolutely nobody before the right-wing, hyper Christian billionaire started sluicing money in Super-PAC support of his flagging campaign. Then, hey-presto! Front runner status, with no campaign headquarters, bare-bones staff, and little organization. Just like many of the previous front-runners. Sense a pattern?

Funny thing about Mr. Friess. He appears to share his candidate's aversion to birth control. He quipped this past week that back in the day, birth control for women amounted to an aspirin - holding the aspirin between their knees. What day was that? The fifteenth century? (No, wait... they didn't have aspirin then. Perhaps it was a sheep's bladder.) I've heard of reactionary, but this is ridiculous. The fact that the guy would consider this "joke" amusing in the context of what has been an open assault by conservatives on the very notion of contraception speaks to the level of retrograde fanaticism we are witnessing. Who better to carry the standard for this than Rick Santorum, Mr. Man-On-Dog himself ... the guy who equates gay marriage with polygamy, bestiality, etc. Contraception is "not okay" in his book, so it shouldn't be in ours, right? Ask Mr. Freeze.

What's sadder: That the GOP pack is being led, perhaps temporarily, by a bigot funded by a cartoon villain/billionaire? Or that there are still those who see Mitt Romney as the Bruce Wayne/Batman who will save us?

luv u,

jp

Last ditch.

This isn't a pillow, man. This is a freaking anvil. You got this from the forge room, didn't you? What do you think I am, some kind of machine?

Yeah, I know - I should expect this sort of thing, living in an abandoned hammer mill. Remnants from the forge room, repurposed for bedding materials. Such are the times we live in. Big Green, like many indie bands, lives pretty close to the margin, my friends. We don't have the resources for all of those extras bands like The Decemberists and Black Flag can afford. God, no... we just make do with what we've got. In these hard times, our fans expect this much at least: that we should be every bit as miserable as they are. And friends, we don't disappoint.

That said, I do wish Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would use a little sense in straightening up my living space. Admittedly, his mind has been elsewhere. I think our new marketing advisor, Noname - a minion from our corporate label Loathsome Prick Records - has been reprogramming him when no one's looking. Beyond her ken? I don't think so. Marvin's not that complicated. He's running a 486 processor, for chrissake. If he went to Harvard for seven years, he might end up with as much brains as your $10 wristwatch. Even an art history major like Noname can reprogram his ass, no problem.

Right, so... first she got Marvin all ironic. Now she's working on getting us to do, well, more interesting things. Stuff that will make the news, you know? Like, I don't know - setting the mill on fire, or drinking to excess and lying in a ditch in the middle of town, or hijacking a weather balloon and dropping tins of condemned sardines on the Washington monument, or.... well, you get the idea. You can see the headlines now: Big Green Makes Last Ditch Effort For Big Time. Or perhaps BAND BETS FARM ON MAJOR MELTDOWN. Or perhaps not. Sometimes I wonder if Noname is really that well checked out on this stuff.

Hey, we just do what we're told, right? When was that ever the case?