Frustrated with politics? Flex your wallet!

[modest mouse]

Voting is crucial. Its as simple as making your vox heard. Its difficult int he current system with primaries unfortunatly drowning out so many worthy candidates. But... if you dont vote you cannot complain, at all.

However, there is another way, more powerful in many regards, to make your vox heard.

Be aware of where you spend your money and on what items. You support the policies, business practices, and growth of every business you support with cash. Their money, in turn, supports PAC lobbying, advertising, and often aids in determining who makes it tot eh primaries, and who moves on to actual elections.

On a more direct route, each business behaves a particular way and you futher that by spending money with them.

Each product is made somewhere and you support that country with each purchase. You support the loss of a neighbor's job, perhpas. You support child labor, perhaps. You support environmental disaster, perhaps.

Its difficult to take the time to know the details of all that is consumed in this country but an effort to ascertain the information and make informed decisons about where you throw your proverbial weight around often has more impact than a vote.

I actively boycott seceral companies and own a well made American car. There have beent imes when that has cost me financially but its beenworth it overall. There have also beentimes (I'm sure) when I could have been far more dilligent but was ina hurry or sensitive to my bottom line. But, I'm making an effort, daily.

 

[Laurel]

Absolutely.

 

[Marxist]

I only shop at Wal-Mart Supercenters. All that stuff is American made, right?

 

[Mischka]

On that note, please support local businesses. "From sea to shining sea" was not a call for a homogenous strip-mall-and-WalMarting of America. I hate seeing the exact same plague of restaurants and mall stores littering city after city.

 

[70/30]

Target gives 10% of every purchase to charity. Honda Civic Hybrid car has the exact design as the petro version and comparable power but gets 50miles per gallon-price is $20,000-22,000. I'm planning on getting one soon.

 

[70/30]

don't go to crappy movies because you are bored or you want something to talk about with friends (MiB2)

 

[sexy-girl]

well said modest i try to do it ... and i will try harder this thread is a nice reminder

 

[lavender]

 

[Cheyenne]

Target gives 10% of every purchase to charity.

That would be 1%, I'm sure. Retail doesn't have a margin that large.

 

[modest mouse]

Bump, because its important to me.

 

[pdx39]

The beast from Bentonville

I only shop at Wal-Mart Supercenters. All that stuff is American made, right?

Here is Jim Hightowers' spin on Wal-mart

Wal-Mart is now the world's biggest corporation, having passed
ExxonMobil for the top slot. It hauls off a stunning $220 billion a
year from We the People (more in revenues than the entire GDP of Israel and Ireland combined).

Wal-Mart cultivates an aw-shucks, we're-just-folks-from-Arkansas
image of neighborly small-town shopkeepers trying to sell stuff
cheaply to you and yours. Behind its soft homespun ads, however, is what one union leader calls "this devouring beast" of a corporation that ruthlessly stomps on workers, neighborhoods, competitors, and suppliers.

Despite its claim that it slashes profits to the bone in order to
deliver "Always Low Prices," Wal-Mart banks about $7 billion a year in profits, ranking it among the most profitable entities on the planet.

Of the 10 richest people in the world, five are Waltons^×the ruling family of the Wal-Mart empire. S. Robson Walton is ranked by London's "Rich List 2001" as the wealthiest human on the planet, having sacked up more than $65 billion (£45.3 billion) in personal wealth and topping Bill Gates as No. 1.

Wal-Mart and the Waltons got to the top the old-fashioned way. By roughing people up. The corporate ethos emanating from the
Bentonville headquarters dictates two guiding principles for all
managers: extract the very last penny possible from human toil, and squeeze the last dime from every supplier.

With more than one million employees (three times more than General Motors), this far-flung retailer is the country's largest private employer, and it intends to remake the image of the American workplace in its image, which is not pretty.

Yes, there is the happy-faced "greeter" who welcomes shoppers into every store, and employees (or "associates," as the company grandiosely calls them) gather just before opening each morning for a pep rally, where they are all required to join in the Wal-Mart cheer: "Gimme a `W!'" shouts the cheerleader; "W!" the dutiful employees respond. "Gimme an A!'" And so on.

Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they're held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart "full time" is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year.

Health-care benefits? Only if you've been there two years; then the plan hits you with such huge premiums that few can afford it. Only 38% of Wal-Marters are covered.

Thinking union? Get outta here! "Wal-Mart is opposed to
unionization," reads a company guidebook for supervisors. "You, as a manager, are expected to support the company's position. . . . This may mean walking a tightrope between legitimate campaigning and improper conduct."

Wal-Mart is in fact rabidly anti-union, deploying teams of union-
busters from Bentonville to any spot where there's a whisper of
organizing activity. "While unions might be appropriate for other
companies, they have no place at Wal-Mart," a spokeswoman told a Texas Observer reporter who was covering an NLRB hearing on the company's manhandling of 11 meat-cutters who worked at a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Jacksonville, Texas.

These derring-do employees were sick of working harder and longer for the same low pay. "We signed [union] cards, and all hell broke loose," says Sidney Smith, one of the Jacksonville meat-cutters who established the first-ever Wal-Mart union in the U.S., voting in February 2000 to join the United Food and Commercial Workers. Eleven days later, Wal-Mart announced that it was closing the meat-cutting departments in all of its stores and would henceforth buy prepackaged meat elsewhere.

But the repressive company didn't stop there. As the Observer
reports: "Smith was fired for theft after a manger agreed to let him buy a box of overripe bananas for 50 cents, Smith ate one banana before paying for the box, and was judged to have stolen that banana."

Wal-Mart is an unrepentant and recidivist violator of employee
rights, drawing repeated convictions, fines, and the ire of judges
from coast to coast. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has had to file more suits against the Bentonville billionaires club for cases of disability discrimination than any other corporation. A top EEOC lawyer told Business Week, "I have never seen this kind of blatant disregard for the law."

Likewise, a national class-action suit reveals an astonishing pattern of sexual discrimination at Wal-Mart (where 72% of the salespeople are women), charging that there is "a harsh, anti-woman culture in which complaints go unanswered and the women who make them are targeted for retaliation."

Workers' compensation laws, child-labor laws (1,400 violations in
Maine alone), surveillance of employees, you name it, this corporation is a repeat offender. No wonder, then, that turnover in the stores is above 50% a year, with many stores having to replace 100% of their employees each year, and some reaching as high as a 300% turnover!


Worldwide wage-depressor

Then there's China. For years, Wal-Mart saturated the airwaves with a "We Buy American" advertising campaign, but it was nothing more than a red-white-and-blue sham. All along, the vast majority of the products it sold were from cheap-labor hell-holes, especially China. In 1998, after several exposes of this sham, the company finally dropped its "patriotism" posture and by 2001 had even moved its worldwide purchasing headquarters to China. Today, it is the largest importer of Chinese-made products in the world, buying $10 billion worth of merchandise from several thousand Chinese factories.

As Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee reports, "In country after country, factories that produce for Wal-Mart are the worst," adding that the bottom-feeding labor policy of this one corporation "is actually lowering standards in China, slashing wages and benefits, imposing long mandatory-overtime shifts, while tolerating the arbitrary firing of workers who even dare to discuss factory conditions."

Wal-Mart does not want the U.S. buying public to know that its famous low prices are the product of human misery, so while it loudly proclaims that its global suppliers must comply with a
corporate "code of conduct" to treat workers decently, it strictly
prohibits the disclosure of any factory names and addresses, hoping to keep independent sources from witnessing the "code" in operation.

Kernaghan's NLC, acclaimed for its fact-packed reports on global
working conditions, found several Chinese factories that make the toys Americans buy for their children at Wal-Mart. Seventy-one percent of the toys sold in the U.S. come from China, and Wal-Mart now sells one out of five of the toys we buy.

NLC interviewed workers in China's Guangdong Province who toil in factories making popular action figures, dolls, and other toys sold at Wal-Mart. In "Toys of Misery," a shocking 58-page report that the establishment media ignored, NLC describes:

13- to 16-hour days molding, assembling, and spray-painting toys from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. or even midnight, seven days a week, with 20-hour shifts in peak season.

Even though China's minimum wage is 31 cents an hour, which doesn't begin to cover a person's basic subsistence-level needs these production workers are paid 13 cents an hour.

Workers typically live in squatter shacks, seven feet by seven feet, or jammed in company dorms, with more than a dozen sharing a cubicle costing $1.95 a week for rent. They pay about $5.50 a week for lousy food. They also must pay for their own medical treatment and are fired if they are too ill to work.

The work is literally sickening, since there's no health and safety
enforcement. Workers have constant headaches and nausea from paint- dust hanging in the air; the indoor temperature tops 100 degrees; protective clothing is a joke; repetitive stress disorders are rampant; and there's no training on the health hazards of handling the plastics, glue, paint thinners, and other solvents in which these workers are immersed every day.

As for Wal-Mart's highly vaunted "code of conduct," NLC could not
find a single worker who had ever seen or heard of it.


These factories employ mostly young women and teenage girls. Wal- Mart, renowned for knowing every detail of its global business operations and for calculating every penny of a product's cost, knows what goes on inside these places. Yet, when confronted with these facts, corporate honchos claim ignorance and wash their hands of the exploitation: "There will always be people who break the law," says CEO Lee Scott. "It is an issue of human greed among a few people."

Those "few people" include him, other top managers, and the Walton billionaires. Each of them not only knows about their company's exploitation, but willingly prospers from a corporate culture that demands it. "Get costs down" is Wal-Mart's mantra and modus operandi, and that translates into a crusade to stamp down the folks who produce its goods and services, shamelessly building its low-price strategy and profits on their backs.


The Wal-Mart gospel

Worse, Wal-Mart is on a messianic mission to extend its exploitative ethos to the entire business world. More than 65,000 companies supply the retailer with the stuff on its shelves, and it constantly hammers each supplier about cutting their production costs deeper and deeper in order to get cheaper wholesale prices. Some companies have to open their books so Bentonville executives can red-pencil what CEO Scott terms "unnecessary costs."

Of course, among the unnecessaries to him are the use of union labor and producing goods in America, and Scott is unabashed about pointing in the direction of China or other places for abysmally low production costs. He doesn't even have to say "Move to China". His purchasing executives demand such an impossible lowball price from suppliers that they can only meet it if they follow Wal-Mart's labor example. With its dominance over its own 1.2 million workers and 65,000 suppliers, plus its alliances with ruthless labor abusers abroad, this one company is the world's most powerful private force for lowering labor standards and stifling the middle-class aspirations of workers everywhere.

Using its sheer size, market clout, access to capital, and massive
advertising budget, the company also is squeezing out competitors and forcing its remaining rivals to adopt its price-is-everything approach.

Even the big boys like Toys R Us and Kroger are daunted by the
company's brutish power, saying they're compelled to slash wages and search the globe for sweatshop suppliers in order to compete in the downward race to match Wal-Mart's prices.

How high of a price are we willing to pay for Wal-Mart's "low-price" model? This outfit operates with an avarice, arrogance, and ambition that would make Enron blush. It hits a town or city neighborhood like a retailing neutron bomb, sucking out the economic vitality and all of the local character. And Wal-Mart's stores now have more kill-power than ever, with its Supercenters averaging 200,000 square feet, the size of more than four football fields under one roof! These things land splat on top of any community's sense of itself and devour local business.

By slashing its retail prices way below cost when it enters a
community, Wal-Mart can crush our groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores, and other retailers, then raise its prices once it has mono-poly control over the market.

But, say apologists for these Big-Box megastores, at least they're
creating jobs. Wrong. By crushing local businesses, this giant
eliminates three decent jobs for every two Wal-Mart jobs that it
creates, and a store full of part-time, poorly paid employees hardly builds the family wealth necessary to sustain a community's middle-class living standard.

Indeed, Wal-Mart operates as a massive wealth extractor. Instead of profits staying in town to be reinvested locally, the money is hauled off to Bentonville, either to be used as capital for conquering yet another town or simply to be stashed in the family vaults (the Waltons, by the way, just bought the biggest bank in Arkansas).


It's our world

Why should we accept this? Is it our country, our communities, our economic destinies, or theirs? Wal-Mart's radical remaking of our labor standards and our local economies is occurring mostly without our knowledge or consent. Poof, there goes another local business.
Poof, there goes our middle-class wages. Poof, there goes another factory to China. No one voted for this . . . but there it is. While corporate ideologues might huffily assert that customers vote with their dollars, it's an election without a campaign, conveniently ignoring that the public's "vote" might change if we knew the real cost of Wal-Mart's "cheap" goods, and if we actually had a chance to vote.

Much to the corporation's consternation, more and more communities are learning about this voracious powerhouse, and there's a rising civic rebellion against it. Tremendous victories have already been won as citizens from Maine to Arizona, from the Puget Sound to the Gulf of Mexico, have organized locally and even statewide to thwart the expansionist march of the Wal-Mart juggernaut.

Wal-Mart is huge, but it can be brought to heel by an aroused and organized citizenry willing to confront it in their communities, the workplace, the marketplace, the classrooms, the pulpits, the
legislatures, and the voting booths. Just as the Founders rose up
against the mighty British trading companies, so we can reassert our people's sovereignty and our democratic principles over the
autocratic ambitions of mighty Wal-Mart.

 

[naudiz]

Damn, that's depressing.

I wholeheartedly agree, modest mouse. I'm careful about where I buy things, and from whom. I'm willing to spend the extra money for the peace of mind.

I don't want to come off as morally superior, because I'm not. We all have our causes. I do want to talk about this, though. I don't remember who mentioned supporting local businesses, but that is so important. I buy our household groceries at a marketplace that sells local organic produce and meat from local free-range farmers. There is a bakery in the marketplace as well, so I can pretty much pick up the bulk of my groceries there.

Sometimes I go rounds with Mr. N. about this, because the big stores are cheaper and he brings home the bacon, but I'd rather give more money to our local farmers than pour it into some corporation and get back something so full of chemicals it doesn't even taste like food anymore.

When we go out to restaurants, we go to locally owned places. They tend to have more character anyway. I break down a little when it comes to buying clothes, because the local shops do get really pricey, but it's still worth it, when I can afford it. The quality is usually better, too.

I'm really not trying to toot my own horn, here. We're not rich, and we still manage to do this. That's all I'm saying. It's not impossible. It's not even that hard to find out where your money is going, not in the age of the internet. It takes time, and that's the big obstacle.

Money makes the world go round. I like to know where mine ends up.

 

[seXieleXie]

Target gives 10% of every purchase to charity.

they also manufacture their clothing line in foreign sweatshops.

 

[Azwed]

Something I have been wanting to do for a while is make a list of all the companies that advertise on the 700 club. Then circulate that list and ask people to boycott those companies and their products.

After what Falwell and Robertson said right after the 9/11 incident blaming the attack on gays, lesbians and feminists I think this would be a good idea.

If the list was circulated on the board and then emailed out to various people you might make some companies stand up and take notice.

I can't do much about it right now since we only get two channels here and neither one of them carrys the 700 club. If someone would like to watch it and make a list of the advertisers that would be very cool.

 

[SINthysist]

Staying on top is hard. Companies get in trouble when the start getting into non-core operations. Eventually Walmart will no longer be the boogeyman and you will have other windmills to tilt at...

Hell. Rome Fell.

 

[modest mouse]

Mischka and naudiz,

Excellent point about local business. Keeping in mind the practices can also be applied to local businesses, deciding where to spend your moolah on the local level.




(naudiz, excellent post)

 

[modest mouse]

"Now part of the growing ClearChannel Empire."

That little ditty greeted me while surfing through radio stations at work today. What the fuck is that? Bragging about a virtual monopoly? I am supposed to listen based on pure volume of their 'empire'? It reminds me of movie ads that tout their film as the #1 film in America, even if it sucks infected ass.

Let the homogenization continue.

 

[Spinaroonie]

"Now part of the growing ClearChannel Empire."

That little ditty greeted me while surfing through radio stations at work today. What the fuck is that? Bragging about a virtual monopoly? I am supposed to listen based on pure volume of their 'empire'? It reminds me of movie ads that tout their film as the #1 film in America, even if it sucks infected ass.

Let the homogenization continue.

Clear channel owns 86,000 stations in the US alone. (I didn't even know there were that many). Internet used to be the answer, until the DMCA came along and decided that the RIAA should get money retroactively for every song for every person that listened (Since you can track that on the internet, but not the radio). This has killed off almost internet radio. This may kill off many college radio stations (most of them only broadcast 12 hrs a day, using the other 12 for net broadcast.)

I do not eat at McDonalds. They destroy the cultures of other cities (2000 parisian cafes closed within 5 years of the first french McDonalds). Towns of less than thirty thousand have McDonalds, and in many casses more than one.

Now that I've learned that Chipotle (Basically the food I dream in class about) is owned by McDonalds I have a really bad moral delimma coming up the next time I want to reward myself.

 

[Ishmael]

Re: The beast from Bentonville

Here is Jim Hightowers' spin on Wal-mart

<snip>

So, what he's saying is that WM's gross profit margin is 3.1%. Can't call that gouging now, can we?

They provide goods that the consumer obvioulsy wants. I really don't think that John and Mary Lunchbucket really give a shit about WalMarts PR machine. They're just looking for the best value they can find for their hard earned dollar.

That being said, I agree with MM's philosophy. ONe should pay attention to who and what they're supporting. And where there is an equality of value/service, why not give the money to the company that represents your views?

But where there is a clear difference in the price of the same value/service, one makes their decision based on value recieved. After all, the amount that American business donates to charity is a drop in the bucket compared to private donations. 9 billion a year vs 220 Billion a year.

You are much better off in the long run buying the best value and writing a check to the charity of your choice. But I still agree with MM if there is parity of value.

Ishmael