The Lockout

I have a bag of Crystal Sugar powdered sugar in my cabinet as we speak. I need it for icing a king cake more than anything else. Who knows, my granulated sugar may also be Crystal Sugar, but I don't have the original bag it was in. Anyway, to be honest, when I buy my sugar, I usually just buy the cheapest one.

In some ways, you'd think I would care a lot about sugar. After all, a ton of it is produced and refined in Thibodaux, and the American Sugar Cane League is based in Thibodaux. I grew up with the smell of bagasse as one of the primary smells I associate with home along with magnolias, burning sugar cane, and some blooming flower (the name of which I actually still don't know, but I associate it with caterpillars).... Oftentimes I just don't see Domino sugar or Dixie Crystals in the store, and I don't end up supporting my home state because I'm not going out to support it by finding it elsewhere.

So, I'm thinking about sugar today because of the news on the current lockout at American Crystal Sugar in North Dakota, which has been earning record profits and yet, claims it can't pay its employees more. Ridiculous. And the government allows them to hire replacement workers as long as the lockout isn't for "unfair labor practices," which seems like arbitrary terminology to me since whether you can prove it or not, a lockout usually has something to do with labor unions and the company refusing to bargain with the union despite the rhetoric the company uses saying that they are indeed trying to bargain.

In the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign ramping up and the amazing disconnect between words and actions that town hall meetings and debates display rampantly combined with the lack of any real connection between these candidates' supposed values and real decisions, it is interesting to me that the more comfortable we are as a nation residing in a constant state of false meaning, the more we see it deployed in the service of the greedy and the privileged. And sadly, the more we see those people getting away with it.