Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

Six employees at a seafood restaurant in Houston were fired this week after skipping work to take part in a pro-immigration march. In Detroit, 21 immigrants lost their jobs as meat cutters after attending a similar protest last month.
*
*
*
Pedro Ortega, 30, was fired along with nine co-workers from an automotive parts factory in a suburb south of Chicago after attending a March 10 immigration march that drew more than 100,000 people.

Click here for link.

Insurance Required Of All Residents, but Funding Isn’t Final

But, even amid the pomp, the bloom on Massachusetts’s first-of-its-kind policy was wearing off. Some observers have charged that the plan promises a huge array of low-cost, state-subsidized health-insurance policies for the uninsured to buy — but provides few details about how this will be done.

Specifically, the bill leaves much of the detailed work of creating these policies, including setting premiums, co-payments and the required state subsidies, to a “Connector” agency now being created.

That has left state officials with only a rough guess as to how much the system will cost — perhaps $600 million — and how much government will have available to pay. The money is supposed to be drawn from funds that are now used to pay for free care for the uninsured, a total estimated by the state at $1 billion.

Alan Sager, a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, said this week that this kind of financial estimation isn’t good enough for a project with such high stakes.

Click here for link.

“For Pete’s sake, if you can’t trust your Supreme Court justice more than that, get a life,” he said.

Click here for link.

A fourth retired general pulicly called for Rumsfeld’s resignation today. Maj. Gen. John Batiste who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, told CNN, “I believe we need a fresh start in the Pentagon. We need a leader who understands teamwork, a leader who knows how to build teams, a leader that does it without intimidation.” Batiste commented, “You know, it speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defense.

Now, a new group has appeared on the internet, West Point Graduates Against The War. The group states:

Instilled by the Cadet Honor System with a fundamental, longstanding respect for truth, we graduates of the United States Military Academy believe that honor is a basic attribute of character. That we are no longer cadets is irrelevant. We stand appalled by the deceitful behavior of the government of the United States and, in particular, its widely known malefactors. Lying, cheating, stealing, delivering evasive statements and quibbling not only has demeaned these deceivers and the United States of America, but has placed vast numbers of innocent people in deadly peril. We will not serve the lies.

The war in Iraq was launched illegally. It has since killed tens of thousands of innocents, causing incalculable damage to Iraq and the Iraqi people, as well as the reputation of the United States of America. We will not serve the lies.

When we West Point graduates took our commissioning oath of office one past June morning, we swore to protect our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The deceitful connivances of the current administration have resulted in a war catastrophic to our nation’s interests: politically, economically, militarily, and morally. We now stand to protect our nation from these deceivers. We will not serve their lies.

We seek justice for all victims of this illegal war, both servicemen and servicewomen, and the citizens of Iraq.

To our purpose we invoke the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence whereby we too “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, & our sacred Honor.”

On top of this military recruiters were chased away form a job fair Tuesday morning at UC Santa Cruz after a raucous crowd of student protesters blocked an entrance to the building where the Army and National Guard had set up information tables. Members of Students Against War, who organized the counter-recruiting protest, loudly chanted “Don’t come back. Don’t come back” as the recruiters left the hilltop campus, escorted by several university police officers.

The administration’s lies are coming back to haunt it among all who hold to a code of honor and value, irregardless of whether they are left, right or center.

The Megamarket’s Savings Don’t Come Cheap

It’s just a big old sack of dog food, for crying out loud, but Charles Fishman can hardly restrain himself: “Fifty pounds for $13.82! That’s amazing!” the author of “The Wal-Mart Effect” bursts out. “That’s less than 30 cents a pound!”
*
*
*
We think we know all about Wal-Mart. But we don’t.

It’s a fantastic American success story, built on entrepreneurial genius and hard work, whose rock-bottom prices are a boon to the nation’s working families. Or it’s a soulless corporate empire that decimates small-town shopping districts, pays its workers poverty wages and restricts their access to decent health care.

Or maybe both: The two versions aren’t contradictory, after all.
*
*
*
His wife, an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, suggested a different approach. Couldn’t he write more broadly about the benefits and costs of being a Wal-Mart supplier? How much does being in a “partnership” with a store so big that 100 million Americans shop there every week put you under Bentonville’s thumb?
*
*
*
Fishman’s article wasn’t easy to report. No one at Wal-Mart would talk to him, and suppliers were terrified by the very idea. Wal-Mart is “our biggest customer by far,” a Dial executive told him. “We have a great relationship. That’s all I can say. Are we done now?”

The article — based mainly on conversations with people who used to do business with Wal-Mart — got more response than anything Fast Company had ever done, Fishman says. A significant percentage came from businesspeople hungry for advice on working with the world’s biggest retailer. “I could have opened my own little ‘How to Deal With Wal-Mart’ consulting firm,” he jokes.
*
*
*
Fishman, meanwhile, has been tempering his running commentary on Wal-Mart prices with observations about how those prices are achieved.
*
*
*
Yet much of what Fishman highlights on the Wal-Mart Tour has more troubling implications.

Take the L.R. Nelson lawn sprinklers, which used to be made in Peoria, Ill., before Wal-Mart pressured Nelson to make them in China instead. Before the move, one laid-off Peoria worker told the reporter, Chinese managers were “walking around the plant and videotaping us working. That was horrible, horrendous. Right in our faces. They are taking our jobs.”

Take the fresh salmon we find in the seafood section for $5.84 a pound (it cost a buck less when Fishman was writing his book). “What exactly did Wal-Mart have to do to get salmon so cheaply?” Fishman wrote, then answered his own question by noting that the Chilean fish farms from which it buys are environmental disaster areas that deposit “a layer of toxic sludge” — made up of salmon feces and excess fish food — on the ocean floor.
*
*
*
Last year, Akther joined 14 other workers from Bangladesh, China, Swaziland, Indonesia and Nigeria to sue Wal-Mart, arguing that its suppliers’ actions are the company’s responsibility. Wal-Mart has argued, in response, that it has a code of conduct for its suppliers and a worldwide inspection program to enforce it. Fishman’s analysis of this program led him to conclude that Wal-Mart’s inspections, however well-meaning, are not tough, frequent or independent enough to prevent abuse.

But lost manufacturing jobs, environmental damage and sweatshops are only part of the cost of “always low prices.” The Wal-Mart effect can be more subtle as well. To make this point, Fishman walks me over to the lawn mower display to consider a product that’s not there.

That would be the Snapper mower, a high-end brand whose management decided a few years back that it couldn’t afford to continue dealing with Wal-Mart. The reason? Meeting Wal-Mart’s incessant demands for lower prices would put the company in what Fishman describes as a “death spiral” of “collapsing profitability, offshore manufacturing and the gradual but irresistible corrosion of the very qualities for which Snapper was known.”

Almost no one turns down Wal-Mart. The sales volume it offers is simply too enticing. But “once you get hooked on the volume,” as the CEO of Snapper’s parent company once explained, “it’s like getting hooked on cocaine.”

Click here for link.