Publix Refuses To Submit To A Shakedown: 'A Penny A Pound'

The local CBS affiliate for Nashville, NewsChannel 5, was on progressive overdrive tonight...crews covering groups of 10-12 ardent Marxists, each gathered for their pet cause. After the fifth story or so, it became a bit comical...

But this one was actually a bit chilling, as it detailed the efforts of one group to shake down a supermarket chain. The truly relevant bit is in the final paragraph of the quote.

It's a protest calling attention to what some say is support of demeaning and unfair working pay for Florida tomato working.

With the help of a translator, Oscar Otzoy, one of those farm workers describes what things are like.

"It's very difficult to be a farm worker. You might work 10 to 12 hours in a day and only come home with fifty dollars," said Otzoy.

He says the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, CIW, is targeting one of the largest Southeastern Grocer Publix, whose headquarters is in Florida.

Otzoy adds with the help of his interrupter, "And we are calling on Publix and other super markets to join in these agreements to help raise farmer worker wages and eliminate the abuses that make possible the extreme of modern day slavery."

The protest is calling for stores like Publix to pay an extra one cent per pound of tomatoes purchased, with the penny going not to the farmers, but directly to the workers.

In other words, fork over a penny per pound of tomatoes sold to us (We'll make sure those oppressed workers get all of it, honest!) and we'll stop harassing you and your shoppers. Until next time, when we decide the poor cucumber pickers need a nickel a pound. There's the cherry pickers in Chile, and the meatpackers in Iowa to think about, too. And, next year, that penny per pound might not be enough, you know.

Nice little grocery business ya got here, Publix! It'd be a shame (wouldn't it, Vito) if all those plate glass windows were to be smashed, or customer's tires were slashed, or a flash mob invaded with cans of spray paint. Right, Gino? Right, Vito?

Yeah, boss, it would be a cryin' shame!! It'd be like what's going on in London. What a shame, boss, what a shame!

What a business model! Damn! Why didn't someone think of that earlier!!! Well, actually, guys like Al Capone did, to great effect. It's why Chicago is, so, well, Chicago.

Publix, for their part, and wisely so, aren't having anything to do with this.

"For us, it is a labor dispute between the growers and the pickers, so we encourage them to get together and resolve the problem, and then charge a fair price for tomatoes and we will pay a fair price," said Brenda Reid, with the regional media and communications department for Publix.

Here's the link to the Student/Farmworker Alliance. Hmmm....this stuff costs money. Where do they get it? Not from the impoverished pickers, to be sure. Hmmm....

Ms. Reid's statement is proper--it's between labor and management in that industry. The SFA's tactic of triangulating against retailers, who buy produce for their restaurants and stores, is thinly-veiled extortion. Some firms seem to have succumbed.

Three cheers for Publix, for standing tall. For doing the right thing.

Climategate, American Style

It's Saturday afternoon. OldSouth got eight holes in, before the rain moved in and the temperature dropped about fifteen degrees in as many minutes. The course's lake is still covered in thick skim of ice. It hasn't been this cold around here since 1977.

Watching the Saints disassemble the Cardinals in front of an approving crowd in New Orleans, and surfed across this article from the UK Guardian.

James Delingpole of the Guardian has been doing his homework.

It seems the activist 'scientists' have been cooking the database books over here as well!  It's easy to make the temperatures appear to rise if you systematically exclude all the temperature readings from higher elevations and northern climes. 

Just a local example:  Nashville, Tennessee sits in a large depression, ringed by mountainous terrain in all directions.  OldSouth's house sits in the pastures and woods about three hundred feet in elevation above downtown Nashville, a concrete jungle. It's almost always two or three degrees cooler here. Jackson and Memphis, in the Mississippi River Delta to the west of us, is always three to five degrees warmer.  Johnson City, on the Virginia border, in the mountains, is almost always five degrees cooler than Nashville, ten cooler than Memphis.

Easy-peasy!  Let's just ignore Johnson City and the towns around Nashville! OMG! Tennessee is going to single-handedly destroy the remaining polar bears!

Al Gore is a moron.  That's why his home state of Tennessee voted against him 57-43 in the 2000 Presidential race. It wasn't even close.  Why anyone, anywhere gives him a moment's serious attention eludes all of us here who watched him grow up.

Global warming is a fraud, cooked up by people who have figured out that taxing carbon is the greatest foolproof scam ever invented.

The quote from the Guardian worth noting:

You know what this means, don’t you? It means the ragbag of eco-loons, politicians and technocrats pushing AGW can no longer plausibly deploy their main excuse about Climategate – that it was all a little local difficulty of no great importance because the HadCrut temperature data sets were independently confirmed by those at GISS and NOAA. What this story demonstrates, as many of us suspected all along, is that not just the British temperature records but those in the US too have been hijacked by political activists. I need hardly say that this breaking scandal has been almost completely ignored by the MSM.

It Would Be Madness, If It Weren't Extortion

National Public Radio, of all outlets, shares a litigation outrage with us.

Here in this country more than half our sugar comes from beets. From a beet crop that is almost entirely genetically modified. Organic farmers and food-safety advocates are suing to keep that crop out of the ground this coming spring.

It gets more ridiculous from there. The evil 'genetically modified' beet is resistant to Roundup(an approved and widely used herbicide), which allows for lower cost and higher yields. How completely evil!


The report details how a small group of organic growers hopes to prevent the planting of the entire crop via litigation.  Of course, until the defendants come up with a payoff that will mollify the plaintiffs' shocked consciences.

I think it's called the 'GoAway Number'; that magic number that makes plaintiffs take their money and  go away.

The environmental movement has become a literal racket, in which every industry, every development for energy, industry, mining or agriculture becomes a target for litigation.  And the subsequent GoAway Number.

Avacado farmers in California were devastated by a judge ruling that smelt upstream mattered more than their farms.

A badly needed by-pass around Nashville is years overdue and over budget, and congestion in Nashville grows, delayed by a bogus lawsuit over 1000-year-old Indian grave sites.  The judge asked one question: Can any of the plaintiffs prove any descendant relation to any of the bones under discussion? Answer: No. A settlement was then reached, a GoAway number was decided upon, and the road remains uncompleted these years later.

The unemployment rate in this county, where the terminus of that road is located, is well north of 10%.

The industrial parks set aside in anticipation of its completion feature wide tracts of weeds.

It would be madness, if it weren't extortion.