The Proposed Oregon Beer Tax Will Kill Us All!!!

If you live in Oregon, like to drink good beer, and don't want to pay $6 a pint for said beer, you're going to want to listen up...

Chances are you've got your ear close enough to the ground to have already heard about OR HB 2461, which was recently introduced into the Oregon legislature. The bill, as written, would increase the excise tax on beer from $2.60 per barrel to $49.61 per barrel. That's an increase of 1900% and, according to Laurelwood's Mike De Kalb by way of KGW, would likely raise the average price of a pint of microbrew to $6.00. Now, if we had a nationalized single-payer health care system, well-funded schools, healthy labor unions, a reasonably well-regulated financial industry and an economy that wasn't burrowing its way toward the center of the Earth, that might be a fair price for a pint. But as it stands, not one of those scenarios is the case. In addition to placing an undue burden on consumers, this tax increase will have a very adverse effect on craft brewers, especially ironic in a state which has garnered a reputation for its small-scale, artisanal producers and independent local businesses. We are simply going to have to take action to stop this bill, which essentially amounts to a sales tax on beer (and as we all know, sales taxes are inherently regressive and impact most those who are least able to bear them). A couple of things that we all need to do:

The first is to sign this petition. Then, we need to contact our respective state senators and representatives and tell them, in tactful but not uncertain terms, how we feel about this. You can find yours here.

That is all. Happy Wednesday, and Cheers!

Hey, Ann... Why the Long Face?

It would seem that the horsey, skeletal right wing bile factory (and probable Andy Kaufmann alter-ego) called Ann Coulter has had its jaw broken and wired shut... Dreams do come true, after all! No comment from either Bob Zmuda or Tony Clifton at this time...

Enjoy the Ride Back Down, Boys!

That there is Theodore Roosevelt IV, managing director of Lehman Brothers. Or should I say, former managing director...

In what has to be a contender for the best blog post ever, courtesy of sorryimissedyourparty.com, the vacuous foiblery of Wall Street is laid bare by way of its own imagery. The schadenfreude of this is just priceless. The best thing about it is imagining each and every one of these half-witted frat boys in their ill-fitting Men's Warehouse suits desperately scrambling to find work at their local Starbucks.

I'll have a venti half-caf skim white chocolate mocha with 2% foam, Teddy. And hop to it, boy, I have a job to get to!

Turns Out, I Don't Hate Poets After All...

I should probably apologize in advance, as you're not really gonna find a whole lot of meat in this post, until the end, but bear with me here for a bit, folks. I need to vent my spleen.

You may have noticed that the Dow Index closed at below 8600 today, from a high of somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 earlier this year. That's a drop of more than a third. After the crash of 1929, it took months, if not years, for the stock market to lose that much of its value. Nowadays it's happening in a matter of weeks. Days, actually... The fallout of all this, aside from the foreclosure nightmare of course, is that nobody can get any credit right now (including employers - yours, perhaps - who rely on short term loans to make payroll), or that none of our retirement accounts will be worth anything for a good long while. I could go on, but I'll spare you. This is scary stuff, and one of the questions that's rattling around in my head right now is "What the hell have these people done to us?" And by "these people," of course, I mean the Reagan Revolution, Republicans and Democrats alike, and its bastard neo-con spawn: the deregulators, the Friedmanites, the free market evangelists...

Then again, maybe there's another way of looking at this. Maybe, as Pogo said, we have seen the enemy and he is us. While we should have been paying attention, we instead did what we were told. We studied hard. We paid our taxes. We obeyed the law and we even sent our kids off to war. And we consumed. In short, we closed our eyes and put our faith in the system. We ignored the warnings of our poets, our philosophers, our rabble-rousers, and put our collective nose to the grindstone, all for the privilege of having the rug pulled out from under us yet again. And truth be told, we've earned it. You would think we'd know better by now. And yet there are still people out there who plan to vote for McCain and Palin, despite the best efforts of Tina Fey! Not that Obama and Biden are in any position to help us now, even if they wanted to... But at least we've still got Andrei Codrescu.

I've been thinking recently that it might not be a bad idea to acquire some skills in say, the blacksmithing arts. Or the coopering trade. Or cobblery. This afternoon Codrescu put these thoughts of mine into some very amusing, if not necessarily reassuring, words. Worth a listen for sure. Funny how our poets have a way of reminding us, now and again, just why it is that they're relevant...

"We should all hang our heads in shame for letting America come to this..."

I'm paraphrasing a bit there, but such were the words of Bill Moyers on a recent broadcast, in regards to, oh, I don't know, pick your pet catastrophe... Today, he might apply that sentiment to the Bush administration's pledge of $250,000 of aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Burma. Let's see... Up to a million left homeless (never mind the 100,000 dead)... $250,000... That works out to (calculating furiously), twenty five gleaming American cents per person! Can't you just see those terrified, confused and desperate cyclone victims wetting their pants in anticipation? Doesn't it just warm your heart to imagine them wondering, "Which American state will be on the backside of MY quarter???" Perhaps the resulting quarter trading craze will spur their economy into an upswing and empower the Burmese to take back their country and set themselves on the road to democratic self determination... It's an exciting time to be alive!

To be fair, that does go a bit further in Burma than it does here in the Pacific Northwest, where a quarter won't buy anyone much of their old life back once the lahars start flowing, but doesn't this seem just a bit... miserly? Shameful? Or INSULTING??? Yes, I think that's the word I was looking for. Although I suppose it's more or less on par with the Feds' response to Hurricane Katrina...

But enough with my self-righteous indignation, already. In other news, I've recently run across several food-related articles that I think are worth passing along. For those of you not familiar with the skulking evil that is Monsanto, a recent Vanity Fair article will shed light on some pretty scary stuff that your tax dollars, via federal farm subsidies, are being poured into. But wait, don't jump out of the nearest open window just yet... There was a great piece in last month's Harper's by Nathanael Johnson about raw (unpasteurized) milk, called The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized. I've recently started looking around for raw milk sources here in Oregon, for cheesemaking purposes, but there's arguably a good case to be made for just drinking the stuff on a regular basis (also worth reading is Nina Planck's defense of whole milk). Interesting stuff. Finally, in case you missed it (as did I - always a day late and a dollar short), over at The New York Times, Sunday before last, Michael Pollan wrote a compelling argument for tearing out the lawn and starting a garden. More than just an advocation of growing food, however, it was a meditation on overcoming the psychological effects of living in the culture of hopelessness fostered by a highly specialized society such as ours. Pollan invokes the agrarian philosophy of Wendell Berry in admonishing us for wondering what good any of our actions will do (we've been chasing that one around since time immemorial, haven't we?) and calls upon us to just get out there and do something, anything, big or small. Be the change you want to see in the world, as Ghandi put it. This piece, at once frightening and inspiring, shows Pollan bringing his A game. Well worth a look!