Tag Archive for 'politics'

Why I Don’t Shop at Wal-Mart, reason 25,142

This should be unbelievable, but it’s totally in character for them. If there is one company in the US whose employees need to be unionized, it would be Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they’ll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies — including Wal-Mart.

In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized.

Of course, this is all due to the Employee Free Choice Act, and the article certainly makes it seem like the corporation is trying to use scare tactics against their employees to encourage them to vote Republican because, if Obama is elected they “won’t have a choice” if they unionize or not.

Despicable.

Parallels…

You may have noticed my obsession this year with 1968… It’s hard not to see parallels between 40 years ago and the present day. Harold Meyerson has an interesting article about the ‘68 Democratic primary race that points out something that is very accurate in my view…

I tell this tale, of course, not merely to remind us that the better world of which Robert Kennedy so movingly spoke died aborning 40 years ago in Los Angeles. I also tell it because I see a dynamic similar to that between the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns in the relationship between Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s equally historic campaigns, and because today’s Democrats have been given a chance — as they were not in 1968 — to come together and make the kinds of changes they have only dreamed of over the past four decades. You would think — well, hope — that after 40 years, this time they’d get it right.