Walmart routinely defends its practice of paying poverty-level wages by pointing to its low prices. Sure, taxpayers end up subsidizing Walmart employees who qualify for Medicaid and food stamps, but the company’s low, low prices mean that even Walmart employees can afford those tube socks!
That assertion–that low pay is what allows Walmart to offer goods at low prices–just took a hit.
The most recent issue of Consumer Reports contains a very interesting comparison of grocery prices. Titled “Getting More from Your Store,” the article had the usual number of helpful hints; what really caught my eye, however, was the chart comparing prices for the same brand of purchases like flour, coffee, tall kitchen bags, toilet paper and similar items. The folks from Consumers compared the costs of store brands, Costco, Walmart, various regional chains and Walgreens for each item. Store brands, unsurprisingly, were cheapest overall.
Next was Costco.
Costco pays its employees roughly twice as much per hour, on average, as Walmart, and also provides health insurance. Yet Costco was cheaper than Walmart for eleven of the twelve items sampled. The totals for the “basket” of twelve items were: store brands, 49.59; Costco, 55.49, Walmart 70.52. The regional chains averaged 72.93 and Walgreens came in at a whopping 96.90.
Um…tell me again why taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart employees?
Let’s see…..Of the 2,258 peer-reviewed papers that have been published by 9,136 authors on the subject of climate change between November 2012 and December 2013, exactly one, written by a single Russian scientist, rejected the idea that climate change is caused by human activity.
But hey–what do those dorky scientists know?
An organization called the Heartland Institute has announced that its grandiose sounding 9th International Conference on Climate Change will take place at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The venue is appropriate–these are the folks who want the world to gamble on the livability of the planet going forward.
The Institute claims that “hundreds of the world’s most prominent ‘skeptics’ will converge” at the event. As one commentator noted, these “prominent” skeptics have evidently been too busy to publish peer-reviewed papers.
If these are the “world’s most prominent” skeptics, denial is amateur night.
There’s a medical officer from a Texas sheriff’s office, an architecture professor, a climate skeptic blogger named Willis Eschenbach (my personal favorite–he has a certificate in massage therapy and a B.A. in psychology). Among the (many) non-scientists speaking will be Marc Morano, a former staffer for crazy Sen. James Inhofe, and someone named Fred Singer, who has been called the “granddaddy of fake science.” Both Morano and Singer were profiled in Rolling Stone as “climate killers.”
According to the sustainability blog TriplePundit, previous versions of this conference have been funded by ExxonMobil, the Koch Brothers and the Scaife Foundation to the tune of $67 million. (Big Oil cares a lot more about its bottom line than about the world my grandchildren or yours will inhabit.)
Yep–those are the “experts.”
As TriplePundit pointed out, the problem is that millions of people don’t understand or trust science. They lack the resources to evaluate the competing claims. That creates a void, which is then filled with a PR-manufactered “controversy” funded by people with corporate or biblical axes to grind, and repeated and amplified by Fox News and its ilk.
I don’t know about you, but I believe the science. And it scares the crap out of me.
For the past three years or so, I’ve had my house cleaned once a month–an indulgence I justify to myself on the grounds that it frees up time I can use to write and teach. The woman who does the cleaning lives on a farm in Johnson County; most months, she brings her two teenagers with her. She has been utterly dependable, and has a key to the house; on “cleaning days,” I generally leave her money on the dining room table and go about my business.
Last Friday, I came home while the “crew” was still here. The teens were working, but their mom was sitting in her car in front of the house. The boy explained that his mother had had a heart attack that Monday.
I was appalled. Why on earth didn’t she postpone? Why was she driving? The son agreed. Looking concerned, he explained that she was worried about losing me (and others) as a client if she wasn’t dependable–and that he and his sister can’t drive. I went to talk to her–to reassure her that I would have been fine with a postponement, that her health should come first–and I asked her about health insurance. She had Medicaid, she said, but “that doesn’t pay the light bill or put food on the table.” She assured me that she’d “be fine.”
Tell me again about Paul Ryan’s description of the “lazy” poor, and the “substandard” work ethic nurtured by their “culture.” Tell me again about Mitt Romney’s disdain for the 47% of Americans who just want to live off the “makers.” Tell me again about those constant Fox News’ stories about people who “rip off” taxpayers and live high on that generous social safety net we provide.
How many of the self-satisfied assholes who look down their noses at the growing numbers of struggling Americans would get out of their beds three days after a heart attack and go to work?
And how can the richest country in the world justify a system in which that’s necessary?
All eyes are on the lawsuit Hobby Lobby has pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, and most of the commentary revolves around the question of a corporation’s right to disregard a law of general application if that law offends its “sincerely held” religious sensibilities.
The threshold issue is whether a corporation can have religious sensibilities, sincere or otherwise. And hidden in plain sight in that question is an enormous threat to American business. In short, if Hobby Lobby prevails, it is likely to be at the expense of limited liability–which is the whole purpose of incorporation.
As one amicus brief noted,
The essence of a corporation is its “separateness” from its shareholders. It is a distinct legal entity, with its own rights and obligations, different from the rights and obligations of its shareholders. This Court has repeatedly recognized this separateness.
Shareholders rely on the corporation’s separate existence to shield them from personal liability. When they voluntarily choose to incorporate a business, shareholders cannot then decide to ignore, either directly or indirectly, the distinct legal existence of the corporation when it serves their personal interests.
The brief goes on to point out that it is this very “separateness” between shareholders and the corporation that they own that promotes investment, innovation, job generation, and the orderly conduct of business.
Think about it. How likely would you be to buy stock in a company if you thereby ran the risk of being found personally liable for improper or negligent corporate behavior?
Several commentators have noted that Hobby Lobby is effectively asking for the best of both worlds. Its owners want to benefit from the protection against personal liability, but they don’t want to recognize that the corporation is an artificial entity not entitled to personal individual rights.
Hobby Lobby and Conestoga argue that they should be exempt from federal law because of the religious values of their controlling shareholders, while seeking to maintain the benefits of corporate separateness for all other purposes. These corporations have benefited from their separateness in countless ways and their shareholders have been insulated from actual and potential corporate liabilities since inception. Yet now they ask this Court to disregard that separateness in connection with a government regulation applicable solely to the corporate entity.
If the Court rules in favor of Hobby Lobby–if it finds that a corporation can assert a religious right to discriminate–it will be the beginning of the end of limited liability and corporate immunity for shareholders.
It’s tempting to say “it would serve them right,” but the truth is, such a result would be a body blow to business and the American economy.
There’s a reason the business community has stayed out of this litigation.
One of the consequences of publishing a blog is that people send you information–sometimes to share, sometimes requesting comment, often just to commiserate about a particularly depressing bit of news.
The other day, a friend shared a particularly offensive comment by one of our less-enlightened politicians, and asked the recurring question: what is wrong with people like that? It is a question I am totally unable to answer.
I can understand differences of opinion among people trying to solve problems (people of good will trying to improve education can argue over the school reforms most likely to achieve that goal; people all of whom genuinely want to see the economy improve may disagree on the role of government debt, etc. ), but I simply can’t fathom what drives the naysayers and haters–the people who simply oppose efforts to provide healthcare to the uninsured, or reduce poverty, or insure that citizens are treated equally. It’s one thing to argue about the wisdom of the means being chosen, it’s another thing entirely to reject the legitimacy of the effort, to insist that nothing should be done.
It’s sort of like theft and vandalism: I “get” theft—it’s unacceptable, but I can understand the thief’s motive; he wants something he doesn’t have, so he steals it. It’s comprehensible. What I can’t understand, and have never understood, is vandalism—destruction for destruction’s sake.
Right now, we have people of good will who are arguing–as people have always done–over the best way to conduct the nation’s business. Citizens can and do disagree about policy, and are often disagreeable about it, but that sort of political conflict is unavoidable. And comprehensible.
What isn’t comprehensible (at least to me) is another contemporary phenomenon–one that is different in kind from the normal political fights of the past: behavior that can appropriately be described as civic vandalism. It’s as though a significant percentage of our political class is throwing a prolonged tantrum, with no purpose other than expressing rage and preventing the rest of us from conducting the nation’s business.
It’s beyond troubling–and beyond my feeble attempts at understanding.
