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Sunday, September 11, 2005 |
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Cutting Through the SprawlMart Bullshit To these swine, $17 million is spit in a bucket, but it makes for a great publicity buy at a time when people are finally understanding just how much of a blight they are on the aesthetic, economic, spiritual, emotional and physical health of this country. Along with McDonald's, ExxonMobil, Philip Morris, Merck, et. al. they represent the very worst that consumer capitalism has to offer, a true corporate Axis of Evil.. Getting Perspective On Wal-Mart Wal Mart is donating money to the relief effort. More than $17 million in cash to relief efforts including $15 million to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. They've also donated $3 million in product and water as well as the use of 19 vacant facilities. You can read more about their efforts on a website set up by the company, Wal-Mart Facts. For instance, you can learn that any displaced Wal-Mart associate, of which there are 34,000 can report to work at any Wal-Mart store. Further, if their homes were flooded or destroyed, associates are eligible for up to $1,000.
Now think about this. Wal-Mart's sales in for 2003 were $245 billion. Lee Scott, The CEO of Wal-Mart receives an annual paycheck of $30 million, twice what the company donated to the Bush-Clinton Katrina fund. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million associates, the largest employer in America. 34,000 displaces workers is nothing to this company. Couldn't Wal-Mart do more than put them back to work in Alaska? Couldn't Wal-Mart afford to give these workers a month or two off, with pay? It's like a cruel joke. Gross profits of $65 Billion, a net income of $10 Billion. Workers turning to the state to provide health care and other services they can't afford on a Wal-Mart paycheck. And Wal-Mart's response to their employees? We'll see you at work next week. And oh, if you're home is completely destroyed, we'll give you up to $1,000 to help with the transition. Of course, if you're home isn't flooded, if you're just locked out of your city because it's under quarantine, or all the services are down for a hundred miles, then tighten your belt, get in your car and drive. Drive far enough from the Gulf and find yourself a Wal-Mart, they're ready to put you to work. Of course you'll be sleeping in your car for a while, or an evacuee shelter. Probably a long while. But at least you'll still get your minimum wage every two weeks. It wouldn't bankrupt this company by any means to put half a billion dollars into the relief effort, including paying their displaced employees and giving them some much needed time off. --Stephen Elliott, The Huffington Post, 9/10/05
WAL-MART: THE WORKFARE COMPANYFrom "The Ten Worst Corporations of 2004" by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Multinational Monitor, December 2004 You only have to look at the cover of Wal-Mart’s 2004 Annual Report to know the company is facing trouble unlike any it has had to handle before. “It’s my Wal-Mart,” asserts the slogan on the cover of the annual report. At the bottom are these claims: “Good Jobs * Good Works * Good Citizen * Good Investment.” Missing is any reference to “Always Low Prices.” Stepped up and novel community and legal challenges confronting the company are making the mammoth retailer expend energy on repositioning its image. Hence the annual report, the major image-oriented television ads, the sponsorships on National Public Radio — listened to by few of its shoppers — and the huge surge in campaign contributions. Wal-Mart and its managers gave more than $2 million to federal candidates in the last U.S. electoral cycle, more than any oil company, and almost triple the level the company donated in the 2000 elections. The company faces a class action lawsuit on behalf of 1.6 million women workers, alleging rampant employment discrimination at Wal-Mart. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has announced plans to spend $25 million a year with the ultimate goal of unionizing Wal-Mart, the largest private U.S. employer. And the company — which has already lost more than 200 site fights — faces an even more-intensified resistance to its efforts to locate new stores, as it increasingly seeks to enter markets in more urban areas. In April, voters in the largely African-American and Latino working class town of Inglewood, California rejected a referendum that would have allowed Wal-Mart to open a Supercenter without being subject to normal municipal reviews. But while on a bit of a public relations defensive, the company remains the colossus of U.S. — and increasingly global — retailing. It registers more than a quarter trillion dollars in sales. Its revenues account for 2 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The company takes in more than one in five dollars spent nationally on food sales, and market researcher Retail Forward predicts Wal-Mart will control more than a third of food store industry sales, as well as a quarter of the drug store industry, by 2007. Wal-Mart is the largest jewelry seller in the United States, “despite the fact that the prime target market for jewelry — high-income women from 25 to 54 years — are the least likely of all consumers to shop for jewelry in discount channels,” as Unity Marketing notes. Wal-Mart is the largest outlet for sales of CDs, videos and DVDs. And on and on. For two years running, Fortune has named Wal-Mart the most admired company in America. It is arguably the defining company of the present era. The company’s business model has relied on new innovations in inventory management, focusing on ignored markets (low-income shoppers in rural areas — though this is now changing), and squeezing suppliers to lower their margins. But it has also relied centrally on undercompensating employees and externalizing costs on to society. A February 2004 report issued by Representative George Miller, D-California, encapsulated the ways that Wal-Mart squeezes and cheats its employees, among them: blocking union organizing efforts, paying employees an average $8.23 an hour (as compared to more than $10 for an average supermarket worker), allegedly extracting off-the-clock work, and providing inadequate and unaffordable healthcare packages for employees. Miller’s report’s innovation was in documenting how Wal-Mart’s low wages and inadequate benefits not only hurt workers directly, but impose costs on taxpayers. The report estimated that one 200-person Wal-Mart store may result in a cost to federal taxpayers of $420,750 per year — about $2,103 per employee. These public costs include:
“There’s no question that Wal-Mart imposes a huge, often hidden, cost on its workers, our communities and U.S. taxpayers,” Miller said. “And Wal-Mart is in the driver’s seat in the global race to the bottom, suppressing wage levels, workplace protections and labor laws.” Wal-Mart’s abuses are giving rise to countervailing efforts, but it is an open question whether the company has amassed such power that it will be able to defeat such initiatives. In California, in November, the company was able to stave off by a 51-to 49 percent margin a proposition that would have required every large and medium employer in the state to provide decent healthcare coverage for their workers, with the employer contribution set at a minimum of 80 percent of costs. Wal-Mart dumped a half million dollars into the anti-Proposition 72 campaign just a week before the vote. “As one of California’s leading employers, we care about the health of our 60,000 employees here,” said Wal-Mart spokesperson Cynthia Lin, in celebrating the defeat of Proposition 72. “That’s why we provide our employees with affordable, quality health care coverage.” “Prop. 72 was never about Wal-Mart,” she claimed. “It was about allowing businesses to operate without unreasonable government mandates, it was about the survival of small businesses and it was about consumer choice in healthcare benefits.” The biggest immediate challenge facing Wal-Mart is the class action lawsuit filed by its women workers. The women allege that Wal-Mart pays female workers less than men, promotes men faster than women and men above more competent women, and fosters a hostile work environment. A federal judge ruled in June that the case could proceed as a class action. “We strongly disagree with his decision and will seek an appeal,” says company spokesperson Mona Williams. “While we cannot comment on the specifics of the litigation, we can say we continue to evaluate our employment practices. For example, earlier this month Wal-Mart announced a new job classification and pay structure for hourly associates. This new pay plan was developed with the assistance of third party consultants and is designed to ensure internal equity and external competitiveness.” Liza Featherstone, who has chronicled the claims of the women employees in her book Selling Women Short, says women workers report “a pattern of arbitrary, very subjective decision-making by management.” They report business meetings being held at Hooter’s or strip clubs. The contradiction of a self-righteously moral company — which won’t sell racy magazines or CDs with parental advisory labels — permitting such behavior is a reflection of women employees’ powerlessness. “Unlike its female workforce,” Featherstone writes, “the women who shop at Wal-Mart can’t be ignored, and many of them have conservative values.” But while Wal-Mart is willing to bend to consumer demand on marginal issues like covering over the headlines on Cosmopolitan magazine, it is not so flexible on respect for worker rights. Nor is there any sign of a consumer rebellion on anything like the scale necessary to make the company revisit its employment policies. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman are co-authors of On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press). 11:33:16 PM  comment []
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Quote of the Day ``Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?'' --Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), to three young Katrina victims at the Reliant Park refugee shelter in Houston 11:14:18 PM comment []
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Four Degrees of Clint Eastwood: A Musing As I mentioned in an earlier post, my friend in San Francisco, Eric Fink, has a great blog titled Red Havest. This does not have a political connotation, although Eric's politics are pretty red (in the good old sense of the word, like "Red Diaper" or "Red Menace"). He did in fact name his blog after Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. Now Eric probably knows this already, but Red Harvest provided the basis for Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Yojimbo, which in turn inspired Sergio Leone's seminal A Fistful of Dollars, which propelled to stardom a little-known young American TV actor named Clint Eastwood. So you might say that Hammett is indirectly responsible for Eastwood's stardom. Okay, so it wasn't a particularly profound musing. This I the kind of shit I think about, okay? Get used to it. 9:16:26 PM comment []
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And Now For Something Completely Different: Music! Not that anyone should care, but here's what would be playing on my iPod if I had one: New Pornographers, Twin Cinema: Snap, crackle and indie pop, featuring the bewitching Neko Case. David Mead, Wherever You Are: A singer-songwriter who doesn't bitch and whine. What a concept. Old Crow Medicine Show, O.C.M.S: Dusty old folk music played by snappy young folks. Rebirth Brass Band, The Main Event: Live at the Maple Leaf: Because New Orleans ain't gonna fuckin' die. Richard Thompson, Front Parlour Ballads: Okay, so it isn't first-tier Thompson. It's still better than 95% of what's out there. Green Day, American Idiot: The greatest rock and roll band in the world produces what could very well go down as their magnum opus. It doesn't get any more magificently pissed-off than this. The Soft Boys, Underwater Moonlight: Bizarre, brilliant Britrock from deep in the underground, proof that the 80's wasn't all bad hair and synths. Blue Mountain, Roots: Appropriately titled CD by a band that uses its semi-electric jangle to cut straight to the heart of American rural music. Includes a brilliant version of "Rain and Snow". Vassar Clements, Livin' With the Blues: The late country fiddle virtuoso's final CD delves into that other Southern musical idiom with rich results. Guests include Maria Muldaur, Elvin Bishop, David Grisman and Charlie Musselwhite. Arcade Fire, Funeral: Tragic music for tragic times, this rocks with power and grace. The anthemic "Rebellion (Lies)" is the song of this and several other years. And of course, my musical Mount Rushmore. If somebody held a gun to my head and told me to pick my all-time Top Ten it would probably be, after a great deal of anguished hand-wringing and and teeth-gnashing, these: The Allman Brothers Band, Live at Fillmore East (Deluxe Edition) Beatles, Revolver Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Deja Vu Joni Mitchell, Blue Neil Young, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere The Who, Who's Next Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde Jackson Browne, Jackson Browne (aka Saturate Before Using) Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow Grateful Dead, American Beauty Oh no, wait, I forgot. . . 8:50:33 PM comment []
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Finally reading those poll numbers, eh Shrub?
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The "D'oh!" AdministrationMost people know that arrogance and stupidity is an often lethal combination. For this Homer Simpson of presidential administrations, that blend is, as my beloved French would say, de rigeur. So, of course, people die unnecessarily. In Iraq, on the Gulf Coast, everywhere. As Karl Rove might say, "c'est la vie". Emergency aid has arrived . . . in San Antonio The New York Times is out this morning with an exhaustive, detailed look at how, in the face of Hurricane Katrina, the "federal federal government failed to fulfill the pledge it made after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to face domestic threats as a unified, seamless force." It's a must-read, of course, and it's important to connect the dots in the way the Times has. That having been said, it's the smaller, more anecdotal stories of outrage that are likely to linger longer in the minds of most Americans. We reported on one last week: the one about all those firefighters FEMA requested from around the country and then assigned -- for day after day after day -- to an Atlanta hotel while people were dying in New Orleans. Today, Carlos Guerra brings us another. In his column in the San Antonio Express-News, Guerra says that Mexico responded to Katrina by sending 195 people trained in disaster medicine. They arrived Thursday with 47 vehicles, three huge field kitchens and portable emergency water treatment equipment -- enough to provide clean water and three meals a day for 7,000 people for 20 days. And the federal government has assigned them to . . . San Antonio, Tex. Guerra tried to find out why. As he points out, San Antonio has plenty of perfectly potable water, and the evacuees who have arrived in the city have been provided hot meals from the start. Why not send the Mexican specialists to a place without clean water, a place where their services might actually be needed? "Good question," a FEMA press officer told Guerra before referring him to the State Department. A State Department spokesman referred Guerra to a State Department press briefing at which another State Department spokesman said questions about the Mexican workers should be directed to any of several other government agencies, including FEMA. "Left Hand, let me introduce you to Right Hand," Guerra writes. "You should talk before you embarrass us even more." 2:01:35 PM comment []
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Attention Turd Blossom! We've (Finally) Got Your Number!Shitbag Hall of Famer Karl Rove, the Bush administration's very own Goebbels, has been highly successful in brainwashing a large percentage of the American people into believing that the poison George W. Bush has been shoving down their throats for the past four-plus years has actually been to their benefit. But I don't think even Turd Blossom can slither his way out of this one. The bombardment of televised images of United States citizens treated like Third World objects is sticking to the American mindset, while Rove's insidious "blame game" mantra seems to be sliding off that mindset as if it was made of, well, teflon. Hey T.B! In the immortal words of Dick Cheney, go fuck yourself. And just remember, even though he hasn't been making much noise these days, Pat Fitzgerald is still on the job. The nation takes to the blame gameThroughout the week, White House spokesman Scott McClellan assured the nation that it was only Democrats and troublemakers in the elite news media who delighted in playing that long-lost American sport known as the blame game. Every other American wasn't inclined to point fingers, he said, because we all know that kvetching about whether the federal government might have saved lives or eased suffering by doing more than it did, faster and more competently than it did -- well, Americans are better than that. We're not a nation of glum, hard-to-please, sad-faced, finger-pointing blame-gamers.The thing is, though, it turns out we are! A slate of new polls released in the last couple days shows that when something goes catastrophically wrong, Americans, like people everywhere else, apparently want to hold someone accountable for the mistakes. In other words, the blame game has caught on. What's more, the White House is losing. A poll by the Pew Research Center shows that 67 percent of Americans believe George W. Bush "could have done more" to aid hurricane victims. The picture is roughly the same in other surveys: A Zogby poll shows 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's hurricane response, CBS has 58 percent disapproval, Associated Press-Ipsos finds 52 percent, and Newsweek says that 40 percent of Americans think the federal government's hurricane response was "poor," while 32 percent say it was "fair." When SurveyUSA asked Americans to rate Bush's hurricane response on a scale of 1 to 10 --1 being a miserable failure, 10 being awesome -- 34 percent gave him a 1. More than half rated him a 5 or less. (But 24 percent of respondents -- call them blame-game-player-haters -- gave him a 9 or 10.) All these polls show that Bush's poor hurricane response has damaged his overall approval rating. In some polls, Bush's unpopularity is breathtaking: Newsweek shows just 38 percent approve of the job he's doing. The poll also shows that what was once seen as Bush's greatest strength -- his capacity to convince Americans that only he could keep us out of danger -- has fizzled. The magazine reports that 52 percent of Americans "say they do not trust the president 'to make the right decisions during a domestic crisis' (45 percent do). The numbers are exactly the same when the subject is trust of the president to make the right decisions during an international crisis." We could go on and on with the bad ratings -- we could tell you about the staggeringly high number of Americans who believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction, or who disapprove of everything from Bush's handling of gas prices to the war in Iraq.... But maybe that's enough blame-gaming for one Saturday afternoon. 10:58:11 AM comment []
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Another Great One Gone Last month it was Vassar Clements, last week R.L. Burnside. Now Gatemouth, the first known musician casualty of Katrina. R.I.P.
Versatile Musician Gatemouth Brown Dies - - - - - - - - - - - - By DOUG SIMPSON Associated Press Writer September 11,2005 | BATON ROUGE, La. -- Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, the singer and guitarist who built a 50-year career playing blues, country, jazz and Cajun music, died Saturday in his hometown of Orange, Texas, where he had gone to escape Hurricane Katrina. He was 81. Brown, who had been battling lung cancer and heart disease, was in ill health for the past year, said Rick Cady, his booking agent. Cady said the musician was with his family at his brother's house when he died. Brown's home in Slidell, La., a bedroom community of New Orleans, was destroyed by Katrina, Cady said. "He was completely devastated," Cady said. "I'm sure he was heartbroken, both literally and figuratively. He evacuated successfully before the hurricane hit, but I'm sure it weighed heavily on his soul." In the second half of his career, he became known as a musical jack-of-all-trades who played a half-dozen instruments and culled from jazz, country, Texas blues, and the zydeco and Cajun music of his native Louisiana. By the end of his career, Brown had more than 30 recordings and won a Grammy award in 1982. "I'm so unorthodox, a lot of people can't handle it," Brown said in a 2001 interview. Brown's versatility came partly from a childhood spent in the musical mishmash of southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas. He was born in Vinton, La., and grew up in Orange, Texas. Brown often said he learned to love music from his father, a railroad worker who sang and played fiddle in a Cajun band. Brown, who was dismissive of most of his contemporary blues players, named his father as his greatest musical influence. "If I can make my guitar sound like his fiddle, then I know I've got it right," Brown said. Cady said Brown was quick-witted, "what some would call a 'codger.'" Brown started playing fiddle by age 5. At 10, he taught himself an odd guitar picking style he used all his life, dragging his long, bony fingers over the strings. In his teens, Brown toured as a drummer with swing bands and was nicknamed "Gatemouth" for his deep voice. After a brief stint in the Army, he returned in 1945 to Texas, where he was inspired by blues guitarist T-Bone Walker. Brown's career took off in 1947 when Walker became ill and had to leave the stage at a Houston nightclub. The club owner invited Brown to sing, but Brown grabbed Walker's guitar and thrilled the crowd by tearing through "Gatemouth Boogie" -- a song he claimed to have made up on the spot. But he became frustrated by the limitations of the blues and began carving a new career by recording albums that featured jazz and country songs mixed in with the blues numbers. "He is one of the most underrated guitarists, musicians and arrangers I've ever met, an absolute prodigy," said Colin Walters, who is working on Brown's biography. "He is truly one of the most gifted musicians out there. "He never wanted to be called a bluesman, but I used to tell him that though he may not like the blues, he does the blues better than anyone," added Walters. "He inherited the legacy of great bluesmen like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, but he took what they did and made it better." In 1979, he and country guitarist Roy Clark recorded "Makin' Music," an album that included blues and country songs and a cover of the Billy Strayhorn-Duke Ellington classic "Take the A-Train." Brown recorded with Eric Clapton, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt and others, but he took a dim view of most musicians -- and blues guitarists in particular. He called B.B. King one-dimensional. He dismissed his famous Texas blues contemporaries Albert Collins and Johnny Copeland as clones of T-Bone Walker, whom many consider the father of modern Texas blues. "All those guys always tried to sound like T-Bone," Brown said. Survivors include three daughters and a son. --__ On the Net:
Salon provides breaking news articles from the Associated Press as a service to its readers, but does not edit the AP articles it publishes. © 2005 The Associated Press. 10:37:45 AM comment []
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How's It Going in Iraq, You Ask? The usual. . .
Insurgents Vanish From Stronghold in Iraq - - - - - - - - - - - - By JACOB SILBERBERG Associated Press Writer September 11,2005 | TAL AFAR, Iraq -- Insurgents melted into the countryside around Tal Afar, the militant stronghold near the Syrian border, and guns fell silent Sunday -- the second day of an offensive by 5,000 Iraqi soldiers backed by 3,500 American troops and armor. In Baghdad, the director of police training at the Interior Ministry was gunned down in front of his home in a western neighborhood as he waited for a ride to work. Maj. Gen. Adnan Abdul Rihman died on the spot, said local police commander Maj. Musa Abdul Karim. The U.S. military said a Task Force Liberty Soldier was killed in a roadside bombing before dawn Sunday while on patrol near Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad. Two soldiers were wounded. At least 1,897 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. In the southern city of Basra, Iraqi police Capt. Mushtaq Kadim said one British soldier was killed and two were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their convoy. A British military spokesman, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity, said he could only "confirm that an incident took place ... The area has been secured and an investigation is ongoing." In the Tal Afar assault, Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr reported late Saturday that 141 insurgents had been killed since the operation began. Five government soldiers died and three were wounded, he said. No Americans were killed or injured in the first day of the all-out assault, the biggest military action in months. Col. Billy J. Buckner, a U.S. military spokesman, said Iraqi and U.S. troops had captured 211 terror suspects and confiscated nine weapons caches since Aug. 26 when the joint U.S.-Iraqi force began encircling Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad. On the first day of the push into the city Saturday, troops conducted house-to-house searches and U.S. armor battered down stone walls in the narrow, winding streets of the old city. After stiff initial resistance, insurgents in the largely ethnic Turkmen city of 200,000 had vanished. Tal Afar is about 60 miles from the Syrian border in northwestern Iraq. Col. H.R. McMasters, commander of the American contingent of 3,500 U.S. troops from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, said the ancient Sarai neighborhood -- thought to be insurgent headquarters -- was nearly deserted when the fighting died down late Saturday. "The enemy decided to bail out," he said. Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari ordered the Rabiyah border crossing closed in an attempt to stanch the flow of insurgents from Syria. With the Tal Afar offensive under way after days of skirmishing on the outskirts of the city, Iraqi Defense Minister Sadoun al-Dulaimi signaled his U.S.-trained forces would not stop after this operation and vowed to move against insurgent bastions throughout the country. "We say to our people ... we are coming," he said. The offensive in Tal Afar is especially delicate because of the tangle of ethnic sensitivities in the region. About 90 percent of the city's population -- most of which fled to the countryside before the fighting began -- is Sunni Turkmen who have complained about their treatment from the Shiite-dominated government and police force put in place after the U.S. invasion in 2003. Addressing that complaint, Jabr announced Saturday that 1,000 additional police officers would be hired in Tal Afar after the offensive and that they would be chosen from the Turkmen population. The Turkmen have a vocal ally in their Turkish brethren to the north, where Turkey's government is a vital U.S. ally and has fought against its own Kurdish insurgency for decades. Tal Afar is next to land controlled by Iraqi Kurds. Turkey voiced disapproval of U.S. tactics when American forces ran insurgents out of Tal Afar a year ago. The Turkmen residents complained that Iraqi Kurds were fighting alongside the Americans. U.S. and Kurdish officials denied the allegation, but the Turkish government threatened to stop cooperating with the Americans. The siege was lifted the next day and insurgents began returning when the Americans quickly pulled out, leaving behind only a skeleton force of 500 soldiers. For those reasons, U.S. forces stood back during the new sweep through Tal Afar, allowing Iraqi forces to break down doors in the search for insurgents. The Americans followed behind, securing positions while the Iraqis advanced. Twelve hours after the offensive began, al-Jaafari said insurgents had been trying to "to isolate Tal Afar from the political process as we are preparing for the referendum on the draft constitution." Al-Dulaimi, who joined al-Jaafari at a news conference, said he expected the offensive to last three days and complained Iraq's neighbors had not done enough to stop the flow of foreign fighters. "I regret to say that instead of sending medicines to us, our Arab brothers are sending terrorists," al-Dulaimi said. The interior minister read al-Jaafari's order closing the border on Iraqi television late Saturday. The decree indefinitely shut the Rabiyah crossing to all transportation, including the railroad, except for vehicles with special permission from the Interior Ministry. The order did not affect the frontier crossing near the insurgent stronghold of Qaim or the major highway into Syria. Salon provides breaking news articles from the Associated Press as a service to its readers, but does not edit the AP articles it publishes. © 2005 The Associated Press. 10:20:32 AM comment []
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