Tuesday, June 24, 2008

there goes another one...

damn, one week after my old elementary school burned down comes the news that my old employer us sugar is selling its thousands of acres of sugar cane fields to the federal/state consortium that is restoring the everglades; a worthwhile project if the corps of engineers can pull off the restoration of the region from lake okeechobee south through the glades and into the keys...that remains to be seen, in the meantime i will still mourn the loss of one of the largest agricultural producers in the nation, along with 1700 jobs and the certain death of several small towns whose only industry is "uncle sugar"...

just another icon of my youth slipping away; i went to work in the bryant mill of us sugar when i was 18 and worked there for five years...by nineteen i was making the average wage of a college graduate, and though i'm glad i moved on, many people in that region work their whole lives for a single company for good pay and benefits...those jobs will be gone and they're not coming back...sad.

"David Guest, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice and a longtime foe of U.S. Sugar, gloated over the announcement. "In the old days, you didn't just beat your opponent, you also ate them," he said. "Today, we're eating U.S. Sugar.""

any wonder i hate most lawyers and treehuggers?...eat this, you cold, heartless, smarmy, self-righteous bastard...

jtc

2 comments:

Earl said...

Well, we can start buying sugar from Cuba now Fidel is gone. But don't you think it strange with waters rising in Global Warming scenarios that any of Florida will survive the sea?

Anonymous said...

"Today, we're eating U.S. Sugar."

He won, he doesn't have to be a dick about it.