Values? That is When Wal-Mart Uses Layers of Foreign Contractors To Evade Responsibility

Values? That is When Wal-Mart Uses Layers of Foreign Contractors To Evade Responsibility

Bangladesh is half a world away from Bentonville, the Arkansas city where Wal-Mart is headquartered. This week, Wal-Mart surely wishes it were farther away than that.

Over the weekend, a horrific fire swept through a Bangladesh clothing factory, killing more than 100 workers, many of whose bodies were burnt so badly that they could not be identified. In its gruesome particulars — locked doors, no emergency exits, workers leaping to their deaths — the blaze seems a ghastly centennial reenactment of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, when 146 workers similarly jumped to their deaths or were incinerated after they found the exit doors were locked.

The signal difference between the two fires is location. The Triangle building was located directly off New York’s Washington Square. Thousands watched the appalling spectacle of young workers leaping to the sidewalks 10 stories down; reporters and photographers were quickly on the scene. It’s not likely, however, that the Bangladesh disaster was witnessed by anyone from either the United States or Europe — the two markets for which the clothes made inside that factory were destined. For that, at least, Wal-Mart should consider itself fortunate.

The Bangladesh factory supplied clothing to a range of retailers, and officials who have toured the site said they found clothing with a Faded Glory label — a Wal-Mart brand. Wal-Mart says that the factory, which had received at least one bad report for its fire-safety provisions, was no longer authorized to make its clothing but one of the suppliers in the company’s very long supply chain had subcontracted the work there “in direct violation of our policies.”

If this were an isolated incident of Wal-Mart denying responsibility for the conditions under which the people who make and move its products labor, then the Bangladeshi disaster wouldn’t reflect quite so badly on the company. But the very essence of the Wal-Mart system is to employ thousands upon thousands of workers through contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, who are compelled by Wal-Mart’s market power and its demand for low prices to cut corners and skimp on safety. And because Wal-Mart isn’t the employer of record for these workers, the company can disavow responsibility for their conditions of work.

This system isn’t reserved just for workers in faraway lands: Tens of thousands of American workers labor under similar arrangements. Many are employed at little more than the minimum wage in the massive warehouses in the inland exurbs of Los Angeles, where Wal-Mart’s imports from Asia are trucked from the city’s harbor to be sorted and packaged and put on the trucks and trains that take them to Wal-Mart stores for a thousand miles around.

The warehouses are run by logistics companies with which Wal-Mart contracts, and most of the workers are employed by some of the 200-plus temporary employment companies that have sprung up in the area — even though many of the workers have worked in the same warehouses for close to a decade. Last year, the California Department of Industrial Relations, suspecting that many of these workers were being cheated, charged one logistics company that runs a warehouse for Wal-Mart with failing to provide its employees with pay stubs and other information on their pay rates. Wal-Mart itself was not cited. That’s the beauty of its chain of deniability.

A small band of these warehouse workers has been demonstrating for the past couple of months to bring attention to the bizarrely contingent nature of their employment and the abuses that flow from it. Their numbers were augmented Friday byactual Wal-Mart employees in stores around the nation, calling attention to the everyday low wages and absence of benefits that the vast majority of the company’s 1.4 million U.S. employees receive.

Other discount retailers — notably Costco and Trader Joe’s — pay their workers far more, train them more extensively, have much lower rates of turnover and much higher rates of sales per employee, according to a Harvard Business Review article by Zeynep Ton of the MIT Sloan School of Management. Costco is a very profitable business, but Wal-Mart maintains an even higher profit margin, which it achieves by underpaying its employees.

If Wal-Mart brought half their foreign contractor work back to America and paid employees at factories and at retail stores a living wage, they would still make billions in profits. What they are doing is doing their best to redistribute the fruits of labor to themselves and other wealthy investors. The radical anti-American conservative movement knows that this is the best way to weaken the economic and political will of the average American and make a lot of money doing it.

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There is nothing more harmful for the middle class than Republican Members of the House in districts that have been gerrymandered so that caricatures like Michele Bachmann (R-Homophobia) only fear in life is a primary challenge from an even more ridiculous Republican.

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The Bizarre Attacks on Susan Rice by The Radical Anti-American Conservative Movement

SINCE THE Senate is solely responsible for the confirmation of Cabinet officers, it’s not often that members of the House of Representatives jump into a debate about the nomination of a secretary of state — particularly before there has been a nomination. That’s one of the reasons a letter sent to President Obama this week by 97 House Republicans, challenging his potential choice of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for the State Department job, is remarkable.

Another is blatant disregard of established facts. Drawn up by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), the letter alleges that “Ambassador Rice is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public” about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. But as congressional testimony has established, Ms. Rice’s comments on several Sunday television talk shows on Sept. 16 were based on talking points drawn up by the intelligence community. She was acting as an administration spokeswoman; there was nothing either incompetent or deliberately misleading about the way she presented the information she was given.

Though the Benghazi attack involved clear failures of U.S. security, Republicans have concentrated on a dubious subsidiary issue: the alleged failure of the administration to publicly recognize quickly enough that the incident was “a terrorist attack.” In fact, Mr. Obama has acknowledged that “the information may not have always been right the first time.” But if there was a White House conspiracy to cover up the truth, Republicans have yet to produce any evidence of it — much less a connection to Ms. Rice, who had no involvement with the Benghazi attack other than those television appearances.

Nor was her account of what happened as far off the mark as Republicans claim. Though investigations are not complete, what has emerged so far suggests that the attack was staged by local jihadists, not ordered by the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. Officials believe that it was inspired in part by demonstrations that took place that day in Cairo. That is not so far from Ms. Rice’s explanation that “this began as a spontaneous .?.?. response to what transpired in Cairo.” Republicans claim that Ms. Rice “propagated a falsehood” that the attacks were connected to an anti-Islam YouTube video. How then to explain the contemporaneous reports from Western news organizations quoting people at the burning consulate saying that they were angry about the video?

The oddity of the Republican response to what happened in Benghazi is partly this focus on half-baked conspiracy theories rather than on the real evidence of failures by the State Department, Pentagon and CIA in protecting the Benghazi mission. What’s even stranger is the singling out of Ms. Rice, a Rhodes scholar and seasoned policymaker who, whatever her failings, is no one’s fool.

Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy. You’d think that before launching their broadside, members of Congress would have taken care not to propagate any falsehoods of their own.

In addition to their multitude of sins against America and enlightened thought, we can add willful illiteracy to the list. And that is giving them some benefit of a doubt, since the other possibility is they really are as idiotic as they sound.

Republicans Hate American Workers and Think Freedom Means The Right To Treat Them Like Wage Slaves

Republicans Hate American Workers and Think Freedom Means The Right To Treat Them Like Wage Slaves

Getting tired of eating at Chick-Fil-A every day to express your hatred of liberals? Well, now you have a couple more options. You can chow down at Applebee's, where the CEO of their New York franchises went on TV to declare that he won't be doing more hiring because of the costs Obamacare would impose. Or you can head over to Papa John's, whose CEO, John Schnatter, has said that Obamacare could add as much as—brace yourself—10 cents to the cost of a pizza, and since obviously customers would never tolerate such price gouging, he'll just have to cut back employees' hours.

In our new era of corporate political activism, we're goin to be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing. So let's make sure we all understand exactly what it is these chieftains are complaining about: They don't want to give their employees health insurance. That's it. They'd prefer to talk about "regulation" in some general sense, so you might get the impression that Obamacare is making them needlessly remodel their bathrooms or something, but the provision in question mandates that health coverage be offered in any company that has over 50 employees.

And there's something else to keep in mind: Nearly all companies with over 50 employees already offer health coverage to their employees, even though this provision of Obamacare doesn't take effect until January 2014. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 98 percent of companies with over 200 employees offer coverage, as do 94 percent of companies with between 50 and 199 employees. That means when you see some CEO come out and decry the costs of Obamacare, the person you're looking at is one of the jerks, the guy who treats his employees like crap and is angry that the law is going to force him to be a little more humane.

There's a strong argument to be made that we should decouple health insurance from employment altogether. Making people depend on their employers for their health care is an artifact of history (unions began demanding health benefits during World War II, when they couldn't negotiate for pay increases because the government had instituted a wage freeze), not something that came about because it was a particularly rational way to get people insured. But as long as we're sticking with a largely employer-based system, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I'd be more than happy to pay an extra 10 cents for my pizza if it meant knowing that the workers who made it are insured.

No one lives forever. Between the time you start your working lifee and the time you die, Conservatives think it is a fun game to cheat workers out of their fair share of wages and benefits, so that Republicans can win the game. What game? The creepiest most greedy slug who dies with the most toys wins. When you start hearing that simple fact on broadcast media, that will be the day the media became fair and not conservative.

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The Mind-blowing Hypocrisy of John McCain(R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC): WMD Lie is Good, Repeating Intelligence is Bad

The Mind-blowing Hypocrisy of John McCain(R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC): WMD Lie is Good, Repeating Intelligence is Bad

Hypocrisy alert: John McCain supported Condoleeza Rice who misled the public on WMD, causing thousands to die, but now attacks Susan Rice.

Remember when Condoleezza Rice misled the public about Iraq’s WMDs and over 4,000 Americans died? John McCain doesn’t seem to. McCain is trying to sell the idea that Susan Rice appearing on TV to tell the American people what the intelligence community had ascertained about Libya on September 18 was wrong. She should have chosen not to speak on the subject without more certainty, he and Lindsay Graham claim.

Yet, Susan Rice’s statement made it clear that things were not certain. Here, once again, is her statement to the media on September 18 (emphasis mine):

RICE: Well, first of all, Chris, we are obviously investigating this very closely. The FBI has a lead in this investigation. The information, the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack… Obviously, we will wait for the results of the investigation and we don’t want to jump to conclusions before then. But I do think it’s important for the American people to know our best current assessment.

Later, when the intelligence community updated their information, we learned that perhaps things didn’t go down as they first thought. Here’s a shocker for Republicans: Now there are reports saying that it might have had something to do with the video after all. The lesson here is that it takes time to gather the information. The Obama administration wanted to give the public the information it had on that date in September, and they continued to update us as they learned more. You can’t know what you don’t know yet. This is not hard to understand.

What is hard to understand is that as National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice made a public case for the Iraq war based on what was misleading information. John McCain later supported her confirmation as Secretary of State in 2005 and said that anyone who questioned her integrity did so for political reasons. McCain lectured, “We can disagree on policy and we disagree on a lot of things, but I think it is very clear that Condoleezza Rice is a person of integrity. And yes, I see this, some lingering bitterness over a very tough campaign.” Oh, do tell, Senator.

Back in 2002, Bush officials made the rounds on TV to claim that Iraq was accumulating high-strength aluminum tubes. Condoleezza Rice said the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.” Rice told CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

 Conservatives cannot make up their minds. They want to portray President Obama - head of the administration that finally caught Bin laden, as incompetent, yet they also want everyone to think he has super powers that allow him to see through mountains and walls 10,000 miles away.

Jerome Corsi's final straw

Back in April, after ABC News quoted Jerome Corsi as an authority in an article on so-called "birth tourism," Media Matters' Todd Gregory pointed out how low ABC had sunk:

    Jerome Corsi is the guy who co-wrote Unfit for Command, a book so infamously inaccurate that it helped spawn the term "swiftboating" as a description of a political smear campaign.

    That alone should tell you everything you need to know about Corsi, but there are so many other reasons he's not a credible figure. There's the birtherism. The appearance on a "pro-White" radio show. The bigoted comments on Free Republic. The promotion of laughable conspiracy theories about global government and the "North American Union." The failed Obama smear book.

What has Corsi done since? Well, there's this:

Yeah, that's Corsi at the WorldNetDaily Convention last weekend, saying President Obama has engaged in "identity theft" because he has "stolen the identity of a natural born citizen" by "using someone else's Social Security number."

He also called for Obama to "renounce Lucifer." Seriously.

 Who knows, it is possible that Corsi is evil incarnate. What other kind of being would regulate so much evil and still claim to have American values.