sullust.org

PIG 05049 by Christien Meindertsma recently won the 2009 Index Award in the Play category. This book looks amazing.

From the book:

Fatty acids derived from pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent in crayons and also gives them their distinctive smell.

Its good to know that I have so much nostalgia wrapped up in pork bone fat.

A Brief Thought For Wolverines Remembrance Day

Being quite naive, I believed that Red Dawn would teach conservatives why violently occupying a foreign country would be a stupid idea. Wikipedia.

Initially, the occupiers had tried terror tactics, executing groups of civilians following every Wolverine attack, to intimidate the local population and the Wolverines into halting their attacks. However, this tactic backfires, and civilians lend increasing support to the resistance movement.

This brings to mind the time worn question: if you simplify a message to comic book form, and if you cast a magic spell over the comic book that makes every war-hungry conservative memorize it line by line, can they still miss the point? Let’s consult the same Wikipedia article.

Ironically, the operation to capture former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was named after the movie (Operation Red Dawn), as well as its targets, which were dubbed Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2. The Army captain who named the mission said that: “Operation Red Dawn was so fitting because it was a patriotic, pro-American movie.”

All signs point to yes.

Wal-mart is now advertising a new "low" rate for cashing checks of only $3.

Any such rate seems like it's too much, since the check is your money, and paying $3 for your own money is a rip-off. But, as Wal-mart points out, $3 is a lot less than many of their competitors charge for this same dubious service. Those check-cashing competitors, Wal-mart says, can charge as much as $8 per check.

Wal-mart's TV ad for this check-cashing service actually underestimates the savings this could mean for their marks customers.  A fresh-faced young couple tells us how happy they are to be using Wal-mart's $3-a-check service instead of the $8 alternative. The husband holds up a calculator and tells us this saves them about $200 a year. With both of them earning a paycheck every two weeks, that's actually more like $250 a year -- and that $50 difference would be substantial for the annual budget of a working-class couple outside the fringes of the banking system.

The same quick and dirty arithmetic also lets us easily calculate the annual cost of check-cashing for this couple even at Wal-mart prices: $150 a year.

That $150 is a poverty tax -- a fee paid by the poor because they are poor.

But then calling it a poverty tax isn't accurate. It's a poverty surcharge, not a tax. If it were a tax, then the couple in Wal-mart's ad would eventually see some kind of indirect benefit from that $150. Taxes go toward civilization -- national defense, highways, sewer systems, health care, police, food safety, clean water, fighting wildfires, developing flu vaccines, etc. And taxes are part of the social contract assented to by everyone who participates in that civilization. But this $150 poverty surcharge doesn't help to fund any of those things and it isn't part of any social contract. It simply lines the pockets of the Walton family and the rest of Wal-mart's shareholders. The poor families paying this surcharge receive no benefit -- direct or indirect. All they get in exchange is access to their own money. This $150-a-year surcharge is simply a transfer of wealth from them to much richer people, a direct, you-have-no-say transfer of at least $3 subtracted from every paycheck.

So as nice as it is that this couple is "saving" $250 a year by cashing their checks at Wal-mart instead of the even-more-exploitative competition, it'd be nicer still if they could save an additional $150 a year by not having to pay to cash their paychecks at all.

There's the rub. To cash your paycheck without paying a fee, you need a bank account, and for working-class people, a bank account costs a great deal more than $150 a year.

People who don't realize that -- who don't appreciate the enormous, steady cost of a marginal bank account -- tend to think that those...