Bourbon philanthropy is bad, actually

Earlier this month, Whiskey Raiders’ Cynthia Mersten reported that Sazerac Company had raised $1 million for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in just two weeks by raffling off $20,000-worth of a specialty Blanton’s variety and a VIP visit to its Buffalo Trace Distillery in Kentucky. “You did a good thing, Blanton’s Bourbon fans,” she wrote.

It’s a nice sentiment! But at the risk of going all “fuck them kids,” I shall now take the other side of that argument.

About a year ago, I floated a modest proposal to tax the ever-loving shit out of “taters,” a pejorative term for the chudly schmucks whose obsessive bourbon fetishization has made it impossible to simply go to a liquor store and buy a bottle of Buffalo Trace. Or whatever. I pitched the idea to Aaron Goldfarb, VinePair writer-at-large and author of the just-released Dusty Booze, who told me at the time (emphasis mine throughout):

Taters, ballers… whatever you call the Types of Guy ruining the American market for mid-shelf bourbon, my point is they have too much discretionary income, and we should confiscate it for the common weal. Given the transparent scams these liquor-addled goobers stumble into in hopes of scoring Blanton’s below MSRP, it’d be for the best, really.1 Charitable, even.

To return to charity as such, the item about the recent Blanton’s raffle reminded me of this line from Goldfarb’s November 2023 piece about the rise of whiskey-based fundraising/philanthropy, which has bored its way deep into my cortex and stayed there ever since:

Listen. As a matter of editorial sensibility and political ideology, Fingers is generally sympathetic to left-of-center ideas like restoring the regulatory state, building more public transit, and subsidizing neighborhood bars. But you don’t have to be a campus Marxist to read the banal horrors between the lines here.

“PappyFundMe”—as Goldfarb shorthanded such privatized, one-off whiskey welfare—is often celebrated by its practitioners as an expression of community generosity, and in a very literal sense, that’s what it is. But in a much more important sense, it’s a symptom of a revenue-starved state that can barely function. Taters collectively throwing a million dollars at a charity Blanton’s giveaway, or ballers spending six figures annually (!) on whiskey they never intend to drink, are symptoms of that same problem.

The United States has the resources to fund medical research, natural-disaster response, food security, and every other strand of a New Deal-style social safety net. We’ve done, and can do, all those things and more at a scale and efficacy that the most benevolent taters could never even begin to match. That we no longer do is a function of a deliberate, decades-long, and brutally successful campaign by the agents of American capital—by which I mean Fountainhead-humping UChicago shock-doctors and their zealous disciples in the lift-kit bourgeoisie—to privatize gains and socialize costs. That same propaganda battle helped entrench the military-industrial complex, villainize unions, and sell obscene tax cuts to a body politic on the hook for the pointless wars, suppressed wages, and artificial austerity that logically follow.

Well-intentioned taters aren’t to blame for these problems, but nor are they meaningful solution to them. Not to put too fine a point on it here, but partially funding a children’s hospital with a Blanton’s raffle less a feel-good story about “whiskey mania” than an indictment of the economic system that requires children’s hospitals to raise funds from whiskey maniacs in the first place. To the extent that the former distracts from the latter, bourbon philanthropy is bad, actually.

But good news! We have a much better tool for this sort of thing than the occasional Blanton’s giveaway. It’s called taxation, and many countries—including this one, at various points in history—have found ways to wield it to materially improve its citizens’ lives. Unfortunately for the whiskey ballers, progressive tax reform probably means fewer Rolexes; if taters are anywhere near as pathetic as Goldfarb contends, it probably means bigger returns, honestly. Regardless, I know how to sell it to both camps—let’s rebrand the Internal Revenue Service as Uncle Sam Van Winkle, and watch the money roll in.

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There have been some very good posts about “Piano Man” lately, huh? If you see a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about, please send me that good post via email or Instagram DM.

🪧 It’s a Molson Coors beer boycott

ABI Strikewatch 2024 is over, but the Teamster picket is very much on at Molson Coors’ Fort Worth brewery. Local 997, which reps some 420 workers at the plant, called a strike in mid-February; nearly a month later, it’s still on, and the union is now calling on the American drinking public to boycott MC brands like Miller Lite, Coors Light, and Topo Chico.2 The boycott was first reported by Zoe Licata at Brewbound. Last night, the international announced its pugnacious, press-ready president Sean O’Brien will head to Texas to headline a rally near MC’s plant.

This is a major escalation that will stress-test the Teamster picket in a big way. Remember, MC downplayed the potential impact of a strike before Local 997 walked off the job last month, then quickly moved to end-around striking workers by backfilling them with salaried employees from other facilities. At the time, I wondered in the Weekender whether the union could “make this sort of strikebreaking unpalatable to the American drinking public.” Now, it’s trying to do exactly that.3 

MC’s spokesperson Adam Collins issued a statement to Brewbound claiming the firm—which announced a multibillion-dollar stock buyback in October 2023, and according to Collins himself in a February 2024 statement “delivered six years of profit growth” that year— “remain[s] committed to doing what’s right for everyone and reaching a fair agreement in Fort Worth.” He called the boycott “disappointing,” and says the macrobrewer has “offered highly competitive wages and benefits off an already strong base;” the Teamsters say MC’s last offer included a raise of just $0.99/hour. I wonder who’s more disappointed. Impossible to say, really.

In addition to the boycott call, Local 997 has begun stalling trucks entering the Fort Worth campus for 90 seconds each, according to a report earlier this week by the local NBC affiliate. (They’d been blocking the trucks for five minutes apiece; a judge ruled Tuesday that the tactic was kosher, but had to be pared back to 1.5min.) NBC 5’s Tahera Rahman reported that even the 90-second stops had resulted in “cars piled up on Freeway [I-35] behind stalled trucks, even in non-peak hours.”

The boycott’s efficacy one way or the other will take time to tease out, but I think this traffic tactic will show us just how much local support there is for the Teamsters’ MC strike pretty quickly. As Luke O’Neil, author of the essential Welcome to Hell World newsletter, recently pointed out, collective actions that impede traffic “are always going to be condemned in the harshest terms by the right,” but they also tend to draw “concerned handwringing about proper tactics from centrists and squishy liberals,” too. It’s where rubber meets road (ahem) on all this for the American drinking public. Channeling your ire at bumper-to-bumper traffic at a faceless multibillion-dollar corporation instead of the lowly Teamsters picketing it—no matter how righteous the cause—requires patience, comprehension, and solidarity. It’s a much taller ask than simply not drinking Coors Light to respect a picket line.

📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately

Don’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.) Also sorry for the screenshot. Apparently Instagram embeds are also broken on the platform I use to publish Fingers. Thank you to our billionaire website oligarchs for destroying the internet’s basic functionality in pursuit of infinite profit!