Hard Times in Walmartistan

The only thing more amazing than Walmart holding a Thanksgiving food drive for its indigent employees is the fact that they're even allowing one to be held at all.  Because according to one Walmart propaganda flack,"we provide good jobs and unparalleled opportunities for our associates!"

These matchless opportunities include an average hourly wage of $8.80, even after many years of toiling away at the giant retailer. Other opportunities include the ability to get food stamp assistance and Medicaid on the taxpayer dime, while the Walton family continues to amass its own unparalleled wealth. You've heard all the disgusting stats by now: the six Walton billionaires possess as much wealth as the bottom 42% of all Americans combined. They're so rich that they craft their own legislation at both the state and federal levels in order to avoid paying taxes on any of it. Their tax liability is actually in the minus category, given all the corporate welfare they rake in.

So naturally, the Thanksgiving season is an unparalleled opportunity for poor workers to experience the joy of spreading the penury. The Waltons themselves are not believed to be participating.

The Thanksgiving food drive is necessary because the average food stamp recipient is now losing a week's worth of meals due to recent cutbacks in the SNAP program. This means the average Walmart employee is probably feeling hunger pangs right this very minute, having just spent her entire month's SNAP allotment. Store execs are probably worried they'll be fainting at the registers, the thumps of falling human bodies muting the merry ka-chings in the checkout lines. And if pickings are slim this week, they'll be nonexistent next week, when Norman Rockwell legend has it that every family in America will gather together at their bountiful tables.

And for those less fortunate, not to worry: rich people and celebrities will jump into the fray for photo-ops of themselves "giving back" to poor people at Thanksgiving soup kitchens. Assuming they're not working the Turkey Day Walmart shift.

You'll never see a Walton even pretending to love the poor. They've made their careers on cheapness and hatred for working people. The clan's patriarch, Sam Walton, made paying less than minimum wage his business model when he first started the chain.

Last spring, when Walmart experienced less-than-stellar sales because even their own employees can't afford to buy their crap any more, their execs came up with a novel idea. Why not enlist volunteer shoppers to deliver packages to their internet  customers? No pay, of course -- just a voucher for discounts at some later date. The idea never got off the ground. Apparently there were liability issues, since volunteers were expected to use their own cars.

And speaking of cars and liability.... when heiress Alice Walton struck and killed a farmer's wife many years ago with her Porsche, she never offered the survivors any compensation beyond what her insurance paid, plus $2,500 for funeral expenses. She was also never charged, despite being allegedly drunk. You can read Alice's whole sordid history here.

Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board is reportedly planning to sue Walmart for retaliating against workers who spoke out or walked out for being forced  to work last Thanksgiving. Negotiations for a settlement are ongoing.

There's been quite an uproar in the media recently over Walmart's plans to start its Black Friday sales even earlier this year, on Thanksgiving Eve itself. But as CJR's Ryan Chittum points out, what they're missing is that Walmart has always been open on Thanksgiving, tearing workers away from their family dinners. The only day they close is Christmas. For the time being anyway.

Always the purveyor of worker oppression and cheap imports. Always.
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Hellzapoppin?

With visions of stagnant swamps and bubble economies dancing in my head after reading Paul Krugman's column, I wonder if this morning's news is indicative of the next toxic carbuncle fixing to pop any minute now, spreading its poison all over the globe:

In early trading, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index crossed the 1,800-point mark for the first time, and the Dow Jones industrial average surpassed 16,000 points for the first time. By midmorning, the S.&P. was flat, at 1,798.46 points; the Dow was up 0.3 percent, at 16,003.86; and the Nasdaq composite was off 0.1 percent, at 3,981.85 points.

The stimulus will keep jazzing the "folks" at the very tippy top. The rest of us keep looking skyward for all those golden drops to shower us with beneficence, and we wait in vain.

 With intervention from the Fed seen keeping interest rates near zero for the foreseeable future, equities are expected to continue to attract yield-seeking investors even after the Fed begins to slow down its monthly asset purchases. More clues to the Fed are expected with the release of the Federal Open Market Committee’s meeting minutes on Wednesday.

(snip) 

“Interest rates are not going to go anywhere for the next year and a half or two,” he (Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital in New York)  said. “As we approach 1,800 on the S.&P., that’s going to see some resistance,” he added, but noted that “all the ingredients are there for the market to go higher.”

And higher and higher and higher.... till what? They don't tell us. All they tell us is that SONY sold a million X-boxes in the first 24 hours they were on sale in the USA. As long as there are still people who can afford overpriced electronic gizmos, everything's hunky-dory. Luxury for the few, austerity for the many. Bubble bubble for them, toil and trouble for us. And they never see it coming. And when it comes, the  plutocrats appoint themselves as the only experts able to "fix" what their greed wrought by inflicting even more pain and extracting even more blood and treasure from the body politic so as to "grow" the economy.

And all this ties in so pleasantly with the news that Obama Treasury Sec. Timothy Geithner is becoming president of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, even though he has no experience in actual banking. Scuttlebutt has it that Geithner was hired purely for his name value. His role, according to the New York Times, will be to act as a human magnet for all that hoarded stimulus money just hanging around doing diddly-squat while it's being kept from actually doing the greatest good for the greatest number. OK, so I'm paraphrasing. The VIPs themselves are much more circumspect:

While Mr. Geithner has been given the lofty title of president, several private equity executives questioned whether he would be much more than a prominent name who would help Warburg Pincus open doors on the fund-raising side, especially with foreign investors like sovereign wealth funds.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Anyway, here's my comment on Krugman's depressing piece, specifically about the "easy money" of the continuing backdoor bailout of Wall Street:

If easy money will be with us for a very long time, it sure isn't landing in the right place: the pockets of real Americans. None of that monthly $80 billion of corporate welfare known as quantitative easing ever trickled down.

Wealth disparity is now so extreme that a former Fed official named Andrew Huszar just publicly apologized for Q.E. in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The richest 400 Americans have the same combined wealth of the bottom 150 million, or half the population. Yet they even begrudge us the crumbs of extended unemployment insurance. a living wage, and decent SNAP benefits for hungry kids.

So -- how about just writing monthly checks to every American to help end the stagnation and kick-start the job-creating cycle? Send the Q.E. where it will do some good. Memo to Janet Yellen: Pump it up, cure the slump X 330 million. Citigroup need not apply.

Better hurry up, because change is in the air. Revolutions start in dribs and drabs. Wage slaves are walking out of Walmart and fast food gulags. Teachers are marching with immigrants on the streets of Chicago to protest the neoliberal takeover of schools and infrastructure. When United (sic -- should be U.S.) Airways kicked a blind man off a plane last week because of an "unruly" guide dog, every single passenger walked off the flight in solidarity.

“When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” -- Frantz Fanon.

There's No Cure For Stupid

What a way to sell the idea of health insurance to the young people of America. Automatically assume that all 20-somethings are either sluts, drunks, painkiller addicts, sexual predators, exhibitionists, or all of the above. Not to mention dumber than dirt. Not to mention cartoonish.  These ads for Obamacare are currently running (online only, thank god) in Colorado:

 

So here's the problem. Even if these attractive dissipated models existed in the real world, they'd  never in a million years be able to navigate the website, let alone click on their computers.... let alone remember if they have a computer. I think that if I were a 20-something and looked at these ads, I'd be insulted enough to go without insurance, just out of spite.

 

The subliminal message to what O-Care marketers call the "Young Invincibles" is that their wild and crazy lifestyles make them prime candidates for those middle-of-the-night E.R. visits. Getting your stomach pumped out costs money, people. (To be fair, one of the ads is aimed at mountain bikers, who presumably aren't drunk when they break their numerous bones.) 

 

And needless to say, this ad campaign is already pure gold for the right wing. It's free premium gasoline ready for the pouring on the anti-Obamacare flames. Fox News will now likely announce that the president wants to turn all our pure young folks into hedonistic freaks. Obama is hooking girls on free birth control and urging them to have lots and lots of sex! And drink lots and lots of Shotskis! (that's when kids go to a party and drink shots off a ski. In case you didn't know. I didn't, until Urban Dictionary enlightened me.)

 

Ross Douthat, resident 20-something fogey at the New York Times, is probably writing it up for his Sunday column even as we speak. Remember all the fun he had with Obama's get-out-the-female vote "Life of Julia" and how she scored those evil contraceptives before milking the State for Medicare? Poor responsible Julia pales in comparison with this latest cast of characters.

 

I truly regret that I didn't sign up for Obama's conference call* with supporters Monday night. Because I would like to ask him what the hell his P.R. people were thinking. Makes me wonder if he even cares whether Obamacare goes down the tubes, especially since the ads were brought to the attention of HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius at that Senate hearing. Any deniability on the part of the White House at this point is simply not plausible.

 

GOP Senators, phony deficit hawks all, were mainly concerned that the ads are taxpayer-funded or government issue. They're not. My first thought was that it was an Onion parody. It's not. Like many other aspects of Obamacare, the publicity has all been neoliberally contracted out. Funnily enough, nobody seems to want to take credit for the Colorado murketing campaign, called doyougotinsurance.com.

 

They don't got no courage, I guess.

 

 

*Update 11/19: Silly me. It was not, as advertised, a Q&A at all. But it did have its moments of humor, apparently. Such as, when the Prez told listeners he wanted to "cut through the noise" he couldn't, because the call was a nightmare of white noise and buffering, buffering, buffering. But his handlers said 200,000 people did attempt to listen in, and that's all that counts in the grand scheme of things... his numbers.

 

 

Doing the DOO

Establishment Dems, no longer quaking and quivering before the Republicans' Keep Your Plan bill, were making the rounds of the Sunday shows hurling their own DOO (Defense Of Obamacare) at the naysayers.

It was not easy. Martha Raddatz of ABC-Disney wanted to talk about Kirsten Gillibrand's presidential plans, and Kirsten Gillibrand wanted to talk about her trip to the E.R. with her asthmatic son. Raddatz was all about Obama's suffering numbers instead of actual suffering people. Gillibrand wanted to talk about poor moms with sick kids. Martha Raddatz is a rich mom with insured kids, so the two women effectively canceled each other out worse than those cancellation notices from the criminal insurance cartel. 

Nancy Pelosi was trying, too:

"This is never going to be easy," Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, told NBC's Meet The Press. "What matters is what happens at the kitchen table of the American people and how they will have more affordability, more accessibility, better-quality care, prevention, wellness, a healthier nation."

Nancy meant well, I'm sure. But it's too bad that she failed to mention that what is really happening around American kitchen tables is that there isn't enough food on them, seriously cutting into that wellness thing.  Oh, SNAP. Nancy also failed to mention that she's open to compromise on cutting food stamp benefits even further. 

DOO, in the hands of the corporate media, is all about the fortunes of the fortunate, and who can come up with the best analogies about how 47 million uninsured Americans are personally affecting Obama's legacy. 

Scandal erupted last week when the New York Times' Michael Shear called the botched rollout of the ACA website "Obama's Katrina." DOO-gooders such as Joan Walsh sprang into action. Because when poor people died from neglected infrastructure post-Katrina, Bush flew above the misery in Air Force One and openly did not care. When 47,000 poor people continue to die every year because the ACA was written by the criminal insurance cartel and the best parts (like expanded Medicaid) delayed until 2014 so as not to endanger Obama's re-election chances.... that's different. Obama cares (pun, ha-ha) as well as apologizes. In athletic terms, no less. And then he immediately hops on Air Force One to tell rich people they have to pay for the politicians to do their bidding.

Meanwhile, the DOO debate continues to be framed in terms of the political personalities involved. I've heard it called Obama's Watergate, Obama's Lewinsky, and Obama's Bay of Pigs. If anyone has called it Obama's Waterloo, I missed it. But I'm sure it's out there.... right along with 47 million uninsured people too afraid and too broke to go see a doctor. 

What Goes Around....

Uh-oh. You knew this was gonna happen sooner rather than later. Drones are going rogue. One of America's own just attacked the same great ship of state that launched it:

The Navy says an aerial target drone malfunctioned and struck a guided missile cruiser during training off Southern California, causing two minor injuries.

Lt. Lenaya Rotklein of the U.S. Third Fleet said the accident on the USS Chancellorsville happened Saturday afternoon while the ship was testing its combat weapons system off Point Mugu.

The AP reports that two crew members suffered minor burns from the drone strike, but did not specify whether the injuries were caused by the force of impact, or by actual weapons. The drone in question reportedly was being used to test radar. There is no word yet on the fate of the drone.

Meanwhile, it turns out there really is such a thing as a boomerang drone. It's called the Phantom Sentinel, and it's so tiny that it can't be detected by the human eye. So, I doubt that the rogue drone in question was of this type, unless the two sailors injured had the corneas of their human eyes burned by humanitarian strikes of surgical precision.

"You'll Shoot Your Eye Out, Kid!  Ho. Ho. Ho."

The Smell of Desperate Emails in the Morning

I guess the MoveOn folks didn't get very far with their email appeal the other day. When even Gail Collins and Ana Marie Cox abandon their usual playful wingnut-bashing and compare The One to an abusive boyfriend with the lame apologies, the prez finds himself forced back in wooing mode in order to salvage what little credibility he still has left.

This missive in my spam folder is so pathetic that I feel guilty parsing it. Oh, screw it:

Karen --

I want to cut through the media doing its job for a change and afflicting my comfort noise and talk with you directly about where I'm we're headed in the fight for my political life change.

That's why I'm getting on the phone with OFA supporters this Monday, November 18th.

Will you join me? My people need to crunch my numbers and measure how many folks are still susceptible to my charm offensive.

I have just over three years left as president -- and there's a lot left on my doing you to-do list. Like passing the TPP without letting you see it, cutting Social Security and calling it shared sacrifice, continuing my war on whistleblowers and journalists, and collecting information on every man, woman and child in this country. 
That's why I want you to listen to me to talk with you. You're the ones putting in the time and effort to prop up an empty suit achieve real progress, and shilling fighting to make the neoliberal agenda Americans unknowingly voted for last fall a reality. And sleazy pol that I am, I have to pretend I'm on your side while doing the bidding of Wall Street and the multinationals and the military industrial complex.

I know we all care about my legacy what the 1% we can get done together these next few years, so let's talk about how to make (sh)it happen and then I'll have my people gauge my support and put out a press release on my new-found populism.

Make sure you join Monday's call:

http://my.barackobama.com/Join-the-Call-on-Monday

Thanks -- I can't wait to catch you and all your phone calls in my net up.

Barack (when I need something, we're on a chummy first-name basis. When I am dictating something, I am The President to you bunch of assholes.)

P.S. -- It's been a while since I've been forced out of self-interest able to do something like this -- I hope you can join the call and be an unquestioning soldier in the Army of Barack.


So, whadda ya say, Sardonickists? Are you in?

The Ghost Bill

I'll give President Obama credit where it's due. By ordering the restoration of the cancelled health policies of a couple million Americans suffering from the sticker shock of, say, having to pay for somebody else's pregnancy when they themselves are post-menopausal, he's inadvertently displaying the deep sickness of the for-profit health care system itself. 

And I have to admit, watching Big Insurance Maven Karen Ignagni squirming in the bind that the predatory insurers now find themselves in, over a law that they themselves dictated to Max Baucus for their own sole profit, does evoke the old schadenfreude.

The restoration is just the latest example of the gradual chipping away at Obamacare a little more here, a little more there, until all that's left is a pool full of sick people. As any predator worth his salt will tell you, fresh young healthy meat is preferable to the diseased rejects of the herd.

There's a bill coming up for a vote in Congress today that would permanently restore the hodge-podge of cheap crappy insurance policies as well as those whose premiums are going up in order to comply with such things as pregnancy and mental health care.

But there's another another bill being denied a vote, despite the fact that it has almost 50 co-sponsors.  It's been floating around since 2011, as a matter of fact. It's called H.R. 676. Since it would end Obama's crisis of confidence in just seven short pages, and since it enjoys the bipartisan support of more than 80% of the American people, you'd think it would be welcomed with open arms. It starts out this way:

101.

Eligibility and registration

(a)

In general

All individuals residing in the United States (including any territory of the United States) are covered under the Medicare For All Program entitling them to a universal, best quality standard of care. Each such individual shall receive a card with a unique number in the mail. An individual’s Social Security number shall not be used for purposes of registration under this section.

(b)

Registration

Individuals and families shall receive a Medicare For All Program Card in the mail, after filling out a Medicare For All Program application form at a health care provider. Such application form shall be no more than 2 pages long.

(c)

Presumption

Individuals who present themselves for covered services from a participating provider shall be presumed to be eligible for benefits under this Act, but shall complete an application for benefits in order to receive a Medicare For All Program Card and have payment made for such benefits.   
 

The bill goes on to explain that Medicare for All covers preventive care, mental health, podiatry, dental care, nutritional counseling, emergency care, vision care, palliative care, medical equipment and prescription drugs. There will be no deductibles or co-pays.... no bronze, silver, gold or platinum plans to perpetuate the class system (a world in which Dick Cheney gets a new heart, but you won't, because you don't have the right health insurance or enough money in the bank.)

 

And since Medicare for All is non-profit, it would save the taxpayers $592 billion in the first year of operation alone. Everyone would pay according to ability. So what's not to love?

 

Hint: the richest of the rich, those who own and operate the government of the United States, do not give one crap over whether other people live or die. The greatest good for the greatest number does not apply in the Land of the Free. It's the dogma of I've Got Mine.

 

Just ask Dick Cheney, out plugging his new book with the chilling title of "Heart." Gwen Ifill of PBS did sort of ask him about his own good fortune of an organ transplant, given that 45 million of his fellow citizens lack insurance, and an estimated 47,000 people a year die because of it. He is definitely worried about this critical situation:

 

The thing I worry is that, in the rush to Obamacare and the problems that are arising with the program and the Web site and so forth, that there's a real danger here that we will do serious damage to what is the world's best health care system. And I really believe it is.

For example, things such as the device tax, there's provision in the new bill for -- the new law for medical devices to be taxed. That raises serious questions about the ability to continue the pace of innovation and, in effect, to save my life with stents, implantable defibrillators, left ventricular assist device, and so forth.

 

So, all righty then, we got the selfishness part out of the way. Cheney and his cohort have droit de seigneur when it comes to health care. What is wrong with you people, he fumes, for not realizing that a caste system exists in American medical care?

Well, the care I got in terms of the procedures and the medications and so forth is available to anybody who is in the system.

So I didn't get anything extraordinary there. What happened to me, because, as vice president, obviously, the country has an interest in the health and capability of the president and vice president, that's why there's a thing called the White House medical unit, just like Secret Service protection -- it's a part -- it goes along with the job, but it's not a perk.

It's something that the country has an interest to seeing to it that we keep the president and vice president as healthy as possible.

The rest of you peasants are on your own. Either stay sick, or grab your pitchforks and torches.