Author: Tom Sullivan

What kind of people are they?
by Tom Sullivan

Walmart is a store my wife refuses to set foot in. We have that luxury. Then again, there are plenty of Walmarts in rural areas heavily frequented by poorer shoppers who don’t. Then again, Walmart does not seem to have learned what Henry Ford knew: unless you actually pay your employees a decent salary, they won’t be able to buy your products. Walmart’s (and others’) answer is to cheapen everything, customers and employees included. Can’t afford to shop elsewhere? Tough luck.

Since 2000, Public Eye has staged a counter-event to the World Economic Forum to highlight bad corporate actors. Walmart is in their sights again:

Walmart workers in 10 countries joined a global day of action on Wednesday to demand better wages and treatment for employees, as a public interest group nominated the retailer for a Lifetime Award as “worst corporation in the world”.

Organizers with the group OUR Walmart estimated that about 300 protesters would march on Walmart’s headquarters in India and block the gate. Another 200 people were expected to protest at the company’s headquarters in Mexico City. Workers in Argentina, Brazil and Canada were also expected to participate.

Public Eye has nominated Walmart for “worst corporation in the world.” They will have company:

In 2005, Walmart received a Public Eye award in the labor category for “lack of respect for human and labor rights along its supply chain in places such as Lesotho, Kenya, and Thailand”. This year, Public Eye will give a lifetime achievement award to one of its previous winners. Goldman Sachs and Chevron are also among those nominated. Consumers can submit their votes over the next two months.

In an op-ed awhile back, I explored how Sam Walton, the pickup-driving, underdog owner of a small, American-flag-draped chain of five-and-dime stores from Bentonville, AR, went from being Everyman Sam to selling cheap, plastic crap from China as the downtown-killing Prince of Darkness. How many stores did that take? Can you be too successful? How big is too big?

The best I could figure it was when he took his company public. In privately held or closely held companies, one man (or woman) with a vision is its guiding light. He/she has as much of himself/herself invested as money. How the company comports itself is a direct reflection of its founder’s character, and those with any moral compass take the reputation of their firm personally. But once the company goes public, once it is sold to nameless, faceless absentee-landlord investors, that connection is broken. It’s no longer personal. The visionary loses control, the soul and any morality he/she brought to the company is lost, and like a great white shark, its eyes go black and dead. All that remains is appetite and instinct.

Like Walmart, the thing that’s wrong with business today is not the corporation per se, but the disconnected, amoral nature of the public corporate “person”. Writing about megabanks, Matt Taibbi puts it more bluntly:

… what we’ve found out in the last years is that these Too-Big-To-Fail megabanks like Goldman no longer see the margin in being truly trustworthy. The game now is about getting paid as much as possible and as quickly as possible, and if your client doesn’t like the way you managed his money, well, fuck him – let him try to find someone else on the market to deal him straight.

The Public Eye protest in Miami was mostly rained out, but a few people showed up nevertheless:

“I’m standing with protesters all over the world today to send a message to Walmart and the Waltons that we need better pay,” said Emily Wells, one of the protesters. Wells makes $9.50 an hour and relies on food stamps to make ends meet. “As the richest family in America and one of the richest in the world, we all know the Waltons can afford to pay $15 an hour to the workers that make them richer every day.”

Maybe. But that’s not the new business model.

If corporations are people it’s legitimate to ask, what kind of people are they?

Not gonna go there with Uber

by Tom Sullivan

We’ll spare you the easy Uber jokes and get right to it. The ridesharing service is not having a good week after a couple of Buzzfeed articles hit social media. It seems Uber executives might like to surveil both customers and critics. The WaPo has this:

The controversy stemmed from remarks by Uber Senior Vice President Emil Michael on Friday night as he spoke of his desire to spend $1 million to dig up information on “your personal lives, your families,” referring to journalists who write critically about the company, according to a report published Monday night by Buzzfeed. The same story said a different Uber executive once had examined the private travel records of a Buzzfeed reporter during an e-mail exchange about an article without seeking permission to access the data.

That combination of vindictiveness and willingness to tap into user information provoked outrage Tuesday on social-media sites, spawning the hashtag “#ubergate” on Twitter. Critics recounted a series of Uber privacy missteps, including a 2012 blog post in which a company official analyzed anonymous ridership data in Washington and several other cities in an attempt to determine the frequency of overnight sexual liaisons by customers — which Uber dubbed “Rides of Glory.”

Our daily interaction with tech companies means “we have never been more extortable,” according Chris Hoofnagle, a UC Berkeley law professor specializing in online privacy.

In an earlier Buzzfeed article, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick made it seem Obamacare was an enabler for services such as his. Jonathan Chait writes:

This weekend, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick appeared at a dinner in New York and, in a few words, fatally undercut the premise of the Republican Party’s economic philosophy. Kalanick told reporters that Obamacare had been a crucial element in his firm’s success. “It’s huge,” he said, according to BuzzFeed. “The democratization of those types of benefits allow people to have more flexible ways to make a living. They don’t have to be working for The Man.”

The destructive power of this blunt statement works in two ways. The first, of course, is that it rebuts the Republican indictment of Obamacare, opposition to which is a matter of holy writ within the party. Of all the grounds for Republican hatred of Obamacare, the most deeply held is the belief that it amounts to onerous regulation that holds back capitalistic dynamism. That belief is not only foundational on the right, but nebulous enough that, even as conservative predictions about Obamacare’s cost and functionality obviously fail, the deeper suspicion that it is invisibly rotting away the foundations of capitalism can linger without any real evidence.

Anyway, that’s management’s pitch, if not the Republicans’, but no cause for celebration. How is that benign-sounding “sharing economy” working for Uber’s independent contractors (the company prefers partner-drivers)? “It’s like owning my own business; I love it,” says one. Except that’s a lie drivers feel they must tell or be “deactivated” for low customer ratings:

Gabriele Lopez, an LA Uber driver, also lies. “We just sit there and smile, and tell everyone that the job’s awesome, because that’s what they want to hear,” said Lopez, who’s been driving for UberX, the company’s low-end car service, since it launched last summer.

In fact, if you ask Uber drivers off the clock what they think of the company, it often gets ugly fast. “Uber’s like an exploiting pimp,” said Arman, an Uber driver in LA who asked me to withhold his last name out of fear of retribution. “Uber takes 20 percent of my earnings, and they treat me like shit — they cut prices whenever they want. They can deactivate me whenever they feel like it, and if I complain, they tell me to fuck off.”

A sweet bunch. Uber recently hired Obama campaign guru, David Plouffe, “king of dishing out liberal kool-aid,” to help with marketing. In another race to the bottom, it seems everyone from left to right is being played by this democratized, naked capitalism. It’s a heads we win, tails you lose business model. Just the way they like it.

My well doesn’t want your fracking waste water
by Tom Sullivan

Fracking continues to gain in unpopularity. During the recent election, candidates and campaigners told me one sure way to flip voters from the opposition — especially rural voters — was to inform them the Republican supported fracking.

There’s trouble at t’drill in Bakersfield, CA. “Errors were made.” (video at KNTV link):

State officials allowed oil and gas companies to pump nearly three billion gallons of waste water into underground aquifers that could have been used for drinking water or irrigation.

Those aquifers are supposed to be off-limits to that kind of activity, protected by the EPA.

Nah. Never happen where you live, right?

“This is something that is going to slowly contaminate everything we know around here,” said fourth- generation Kern County almond grower Tom Frantz, who lives down the road from several of the injection wells in question.

According to state records, as many as 40 water supply wells, including domestic drinking wells, are located within one mile of a single well that’s been injecting into non-exempt aquifers.

Kern County community organizer Juan Flores told reporters, “No one from this community will drink from the water from out of their well. The people are worried. They’re scared.”

But there’s nothing to see here, little people:

The trade association that represents many of California’s oil and gas companies says the water-injection is a “paperwork issue.” In a statement issued to NBC Bay Area, Western States Petroleum Association spokesman Tupper Hull said “there has never been a bona vide claim or evidence presented that the paperwork confusion resulted in any contamination of drinking supplies near the disputed injection wells.”

However, state officials tested 8 water supply wells within a one-mile radius of some of those wells.
Four water samples came back with higher than allowable levels of nitrate, arsenic, and thallium.
Those same chemicals are used by the oil and gas industry in the hydraulic fracturing process and can be found in oil recovery waste-water.

“We are still comparing the testing of what was the injection water to what is the tested water that came out of these wells to find out if they were background levels or whether that’s the result of oil and gas operation, but so far it’s looking like it’s background,” said James Marshall from the California Department of Conservation.

Marshall acknowledged that those chemicals could have come from oil extraction, and not necessarily wastewater disposal.

I know, right? What a relief.

Another responsible shooting
by Tom Sullivan

A 13-year-old teen attending a soccer tournament in Raleigh, NC died in his hotel room, in his bed Friday night:

Nathan Andrew Clark was staying in the Comfort Suites hotel while he participated in the Capital Area Soccer League tournament.

At approximately 11 p.m., a woman who was in the room with him called 911, saying that she “had no idea” what happened to the teen, only that he was bleeding profusely from a bump on the back of his head.

Clark was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police quickly determined that Clark had been shot, and located Randall Louis Vater, who was in a nearby room and in possession of firearms. They said that Vater accidentally discharged his weapon, and that the round traveled through the wall and into Clark’s room, where it fatally struck him.

Vater has a long history with law enforcement, having served time in prison on charges ranging from violating a restraining order to communicating threats to hit-and-run. He was in police custody as recently as October 25, according to Department of Public Safety records.

Police charged Vater with “involuntary manslaughter and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.”

Nothing left to say.

A cold Civil War
by Tom Sullivan

In a sort-of chance encounter last night, we ended up having dinner in a small town with the pastor of a non denominational church.

He said he had decided it was not his job to change people. But he felt it was his duty to educate people that the world is changing around them and that it is their challenge to come to terms with it. One of the subtexts to the conversation was the political culture clash between conservative country dwellers and more left-leaning city dwellers. (Red America and Blue America, if you will.)

It seems his small town is becoming increasingly modern. It sits just on the edge of an area flush with tech jobs that sees 50,000 new residents each year. Another of those “21st century communities” is planned, bringing thousands of tech workers to the once sleepy, southern town. If projections are correct, the town will double in size. Rich developers will get richer and locals will make money. All well and good until prices skyrocket.

Conservative natives are restless.

In-migration sets up a kind of cold Civil War between newcomers and families with local roots. New growth tends to overwhelm the local culture and folkways. For conservatives already threatened by demographic changes and immigration, in-migration can be just as threatening. They’re all for development until the Ausländers they invited actually move in with their foreign ways and foreign politics.

Sure, we wanted their business. But we didn’t want them, you know, in our business.

We see the same dynamic where we live, only our in-migration is driven more by tourism and retirement. Newcomers arrive from the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Left Coast bringing their money and yankee political sensibilities with them. And their interest in local politics. The resentments are palpable enough that conservative politicians look for ways to exploit city-county animus. It’s their go-to political strategy.

This clip by comedian Hari Kondabolu has it just about right. Be careful what you ask for.

“I don’t get all the anti-immigrant sentiment in this country. Because this is a country that says this is the greatest country in the world. We’re the best. We’re number one. Then we get upset when people actually show up. But when you advertise something … sometimes people buy it. That’s how it works.” – Indian-American comedian Hari Kondabolu

What’s your land doing under our toll road?

by Tom Sullivan

Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? Sadly, there’s no hooker with a heart of gold to melt the cold hearts of corporate raiders stripping America for parts. (Where’s Julia Roberts when you really need her?) But some people are, however, finally seeing the vultures for who they really are. Take the Trans-Texas Corridor, for example [emphasis mine]:

The TTC, a proposed 4,000-mile toll road, rail and utility project, died a death of a thousand cuts in 2010. First proposed as a much-needed infrastructure investment, the well-intentioned project grew into a monstrosity of politically connected contractors, private property concerns and conspiracy theories. The biggest blow to TTC was statewide opposition to granting Spanish-owned developer Cintra a 50-year, multibillion-dollar deal to control and collect tolls on a concrete corridor bisecting the very heart of Texas. The plan even proposed turning over to Cintra land seized by eminent domain, where the company could franchize roadside amenities like hotels and rest stops to supplement its collected fees.

This degree of private control over infrastructure raised the spectre of a highway built more to benefit contractors than Texas communities. The toll road could bypass towns and exits could be designed to feed contractor-owned fast food joints instead of local restaurants.

Kelo v. City of New London. How quickly we forget.

Now, I’m sure you could find Texans in 2003 who missed the joke in asking what our oil was doing under Iraq’s sand. It feels a little different, doesn’t it, when a foreign conglomerate asks Texans what their land is doing under its proposed toll road?

But that’s not what the article in the Houston Chronicle is really about. It’s about net neutrality and another kind of toll road. Here come the free marketeers again, for whom “competition” is just another gimmicky buzzword used to dazzle the rubes:

These companies also want to prohibit cities from building their own online freeways that could compete with private cyber toll roads. Texans didn’t tolerate a toll road system that would have discouraged cities from building competing public roads and shut out Cintra. But roads can be more obvious than wires.

Nineteen states – including Texas – already have succumbed to telecom lobbying and erected restrictive legal roadblocks that prevent communities from building and running their own broadband networks. In fact, San Antonio sits atop a publicly owned, superfast fiber optic network, but state law prohibits the city from selling access. It is as if the city built a road, but it could be traveled only by city-owned vehicles and everyone else was forced to take a private toll road.

With the limited options in broadband carriers there’s “more monopoly than market.” Yet both of Texas’ free-enterprizin’ senators, Cruz and Cornyn, and Governor Goodhair (Don’t you miss Molly?) back the telecoms and oppose net neutrality.

BTW: Cintra is the same firm North Carolina just signed a 50-year contract with – at Senator-elect Thom Tillis’ urging – to build toll lanes north of Charlotte. Two other Cintra toll projects in San Antonio and Indiana failed recently, potentially leaving taxpayers holding the bag. But who’s counting?

Hannity will have a conniption
by Tom Sullivan

That right-wing bugaboo, political correctness, can actually enhance creativity, says Dr. Jack Goncalo, associate professor of organizational behaviors at Cornell. He took hundreds of test subjects, broke them into small groups, and asked some at random to be “politically correct” or “polite.”

All were then asked to spend 10 minutes brainstorming business ideas. Creativity was measured by counting the number of ideas generated and by coding them for novelty.

Contrary to the widely held notion that being politically correct has a generally stifling effect, the results showed that a politically correct norm actually boosted the creative output of mixed-sex groups …

Although political correctness has often been associated with lowered expectations and a censor of behavior, the new culture actually provides a foundation upon which demographically heterogeneous work groups can freely exchange creative ideas, Goncalo said.

Setting boundaries and norms for behavior reduces uncertainty and made men and women more comfortable sharing creative ideas. The effects were reversed in same-sex groups where behavioral expectations are presumably more defined. The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman writes that PC norms apply peer pressure to prevent people from behaving badly who otherwise might:

Mainly, it’s not that there are things you can’t say. It’s that there are things you can’t say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.

To something Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity might say, to pick two at random. And they we can’t have that:

Whether a given norm is too restrictive is up for debate, but there’s little sense in the idea that modern culture is uniquely objectionable simply because there are some things people feel they shouldn’t say, because that’s how norms work. The only alternative to living by norms, to adapt Goncalo’s point, would be total social anarchy – which I’m assuming isn’t a prospect your average conservative PC-fighter would relish.

And it’s increasingly widely recognized that an anarchical approach isn’t much use when it comes to creativity, which thrives on constraints. “Blue-sky thinking”, with its total lack of limits, provides nothing to push against and nowhere to get a grip; worse, it leaves people more vulnerable to all sorts of psychological phenomena – like groupthink or bigotry or taking certain ideas more seriously because they’re repeated more frequently – that get in the way of actual good ideas.

Good, profitable ideas, one presumes. Only commies hate those, right?

The Other is marrying

by Tom Sullivan

It seems marriage equality is still on the move, scoring victories Wednesday in Kansas and South Carolina:

Gay marriage advocates won another two victories on Wednesday as the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Kansas to become the 33rd U.S. state where same-sex couples can wed and a federal judge struck down South Carolina’s ban.

The high court declined a request from Kansas officials to block U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Crabtree’s Nov. 4 ruling that struck down the state’s gay marriage ban as a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

And, by the way, a hearing on marriage equality Wednesday in Mississippi. From Aaron Sarver at Campaign for Southern Equality just last night:

After 6 hours in federal court today, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves concluded the hearing in Campaign for Southern Equality v. Bryant by stating he would rule “as soon as possible” in the case.

We’re hopeful that a ruling striking down Mississippi’s ban on same-sex marriage will indeed come soon.

All this rush of inclusion has a darker counterpoint. JT Eberhard writes at the WWJTDo blog about the reaction to a letter in the local paper:

The Unitarian Universalist church in my hometown of Mountain Home, Arkansas recently published a letter in the local paper letting the community know that they welcome everyone at their church regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation.

The reaction? The church had its windows shot out one night and were left this note:

The Arkansas Times blog has a bit more. Still, a Facebook commenter asked what “True Southerners” meant. “True” is a verbal tick among the hard right, as in “true facts” and “true locals.” Adding “true” distinguishes any manifestation of the wicked, deceitful Other – THEM – from the authentic, trustworthy US. The note-writer, for example, is likely a true Christian.

Long ago, a friend who had served in the army quipped, “Do you know why all American military gear is marked U.S.?”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why?” I asked as he grinned.

“So you know who to shoot: anyone who’s not US.”

[h/t Dave Neiwert]

A gated democracy
by Tom Sullivan

The Worst Voter Turnout in 72 Years the New York Times declares this morning, condemning continued efforts to suppress turnout among poor, minority and younger voters. They don’t even bother to add qualifiers anymore when calling out Republicans for voter suppression.

Sean McElwee at Huffington Post runs down some preliminary analysis of new voting restrictions. Photo ID laws, eliminating same-day registration, and felon disenfranchisement were contributing factors in the low turnout.

More than 600,000 in Texas could not vote this year because they lacked the newly required documents. How many tried and were turned away? The nonpartisan Election Protection Voter help line received over 2,000 calls in Texas, according to the Brennan Center’s director of its Democracy Program, Wendy Weiser. A federal judge had determined that the Texas law was purposely designed to suppress minority votes.

As Ari Berman wrote last week, “Since Republican legislatures across the country implemented new voting restrictions after 2010 and the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, it’s become easier to buy an election and harder to vote in one.”

Speaking of both, AOL is leaving the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), joining other tech firms in the latest exodus [Emphasis mine]:

In the space of two weeks in September, Google, Yahoo, and Yelp announced they had already left or were in the process of leaving ALEC, an exodus that began when Google Chairman Eric Schmidt charged that the group was “just literally lying” about climate change. Facebook also said it was “not likely” to renew its membership with ALEC next year.

Shortly after, Occidental Petroleum, the fourth-largest oil and natural-gas company in the U.S., also said it would separate from ALEC.

And just last week, SAP, a German-based software company with regional offices in the U.S., announced it would “immediately disassociate itself from ALEC.” A company representative for SAP cited ALEC’s conservative stance on climate change as well as its historic positions on gun control and voter rights. Earlier in the year, Microsoft, too, said it would leave ALEC.

On Election Day here in western North Carolina, voters turned out Republican state Rep. Tim Moffitt, an ALEC board member. Statewide, however, another ALEC board member, state Rep. Thom Tills, R-Mecklenburg, got elected to the U.S. Senate. After Republicans gained control of the state legislature, Tillis, Moffitt, and other allies immediately set about implementing an ALEC agenda to voucherize schools, privatize public infrastructure and utilities, weaken cities (blue votes), and of course, to restrict voting.

Because oligarchs worldwide, including those in the world’s most unequal developed country, have never been comfortable sharing power with their lessers. Democracy will never be tolerable until they can make it a gated democracy.

Cutting in on Rush’s action
by Tom Sullivan

Somebody’s got his declining ratings in a wad. Rush Limbaugh is threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:

The legal threat is the result of DCCC fundraising appeals sent out in the wake of Limbaugh’s on-air comments about a new policy at Ohio State University that instructs students to get verbal consent before having sex. The DCCC highlighted one particular sentence from his commentary — “How many of you guys . . . have learned that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it?” — saying it was tantamount to condoning sexual assault.

Limbaugh says the DCCC took the comment out of context and twisted it in its fundraising appeals. “We love opinions, but this crossed a very bright line,” said Limbaugh’s spokesman, Brian Glicklich, in an interview. “They lied about his words. They quoted something specific and out of context, and it is a lie.”

Uh, that’s Limbaugh’s business model, pal. Is Rush suing for defamation or patent infringement?