wow. I ve been gone a couple of days and everyone seems to have been speaking of Wal-Mart! I m looking forward to some interesting reading when I have a chance to catch up.
I dunno, I guess I could use a little time in the bar sorting out some of this stuff but I don’t drink much unfortunately.
I really don’t see publicly provided health insurance as an end all to the problems anymore than publicly subsidized car or home insurance makes much sense. Some of the reality is that the current uninsured either don’t want insurance or are totally uninformed or irresponsible enough to get it. The problem is paying the hospitals for the care that the uninsured are given. Only a very small percentage of the formerly uninsured have attempted to sign up for ACA and many don’t even know what it is. I suspect its similar to NO after the flood where a great number of people had no idea what a checking account was or a debit card when the Red Cross came in to help. Just a whole cultural divide that ACA will not resolve.
Secondly there are huge advantages to employer provided insurance such as the ability to pool and get a far better deal than individuals would get on their own. They can then personalize the insurance to fit their particular requirements of the pool. The problem of course is portability if you choose to leave, uninsurabilty, and cost. These issues could be dealt with far easier than a nation-wide debacle we currently have with simply creating a general pool that individuals could become a part of, similar to opening the doors to tri care for all.
Personally though, you might as well save your breath on ACA. Some of us former supporters no longer believe a word coming out of the current administration and suspect the real goal was to sneak in single payer plan in the first place when this one failed. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me and all that.
You’re buying if you want a seat at the table. @wesw
Well, it’s been a couple of days so forgive me for reaching backwards some. It would be easier at “the bar” - as long as wesw is buying.
I’d not chalk our issues of late up to either greed or “the economy” (and this includes how much employers have to offer to employees, such as health care). The reasons are that greed is always a variable among people and so has a really hard time accounting for much historical variation. The economy also regularly has its booms and busts and this is no secret. It’s as old as capitalist market economies. Pointing to a bad economy is purely demand side in labor terms.
Obviously economic busts are bad for everyone, especially labor. But by lots and lots of measures the economy had more than recovered. The DOW has soared well above where it was at the point of the '08 crash, for instance, and the earnings of those at the top have recovered as well. But don’t expect normal average folks to recover - at all. Since about 1970 worker productivity in the U.S. has steadily climbed while real wages have stagnated - flat. It has been this way regardless of the numerous economic ups and downs we’ve had since 1970. U.S. workers make more and more and more per unit of time and get nothing of the extra value - regardless of boom or bust…
It is about growing labor surplus and comes from intensification of economic globalization. It constantly tips the power scale to employers. This goes to things I - well, sort of lost it about with meanjoefan (apologies for the tantrum). A ton of that global labor supply is not even slightly “willful labor.” A lot of it is displaced people. People displaced by policies that originate in wealthy industrialized nations - certainly not by their “choices.”
The mechanism is debt to the World Bank and IMF and such - debt built up in the interests of “modernizing” the poor. What it actually amounts to is that you might come home to your village one day and find out that rather than hunting and fishing and growing subsistence crops on your traditions lands, XYZ corporation has now bought that land to produce for export (agricultural, manufacturing etc.) Production for export rather than your own subsistence is required by international agencies to pay off debt. Your own livelihood? Oh - no problem - you now get to work for XYZ corporation. (Click goes the semi-automatic weapon). This is what I’m saying about structural adjustment programs and export processing zones and the like.
This is not “willful labor” or people making “choices.” This is the recipe for sweatshops where people have the “choice” to starve to death or work in the sweatshops. Calling this willful labor and choice? You might as well say the same about slavery. It is ONE of the things that the likes of WalMart (and GAP and Nike and etc. etc.) capitalize on to bring cheap prices to the POS.
The world is a big place, its true. So there are plenty of places where people who don’t need to are working under lousy conditions by “choice” - going for the Levis and Coca-Cola. But the global surplus labor force is not a matter of markets and choices. And it’s the one that has eroded the position of labor everyplace, including in the U.S. I’m not at a loss for why worker productivity has steadily climbed while real wages remain flat. And as workers everywhere sink, isn’t it nice that the bugle blows and [X]Mart shows up to the rescue everyone with low prices? Perverse.
It is NOT “free” people and the operation of “free” enterprise. It is global capital run amok. It is impossible with markets or proprietary capitalism. It is only made possible by corporate capitalism.
Yes, @cigroller. The price of junk at Walmart, et al is cheap and those who support Walmart want to be certain that everyone knows it. But they want you and I and all who are not suffering in poverty to ignore that the cost of rent and utilities and gasoline and car repairs has grown beyond the reach of millions already and will continue to leave millions more in poverty until the rules are changed.
Using the Dow as a marker for the country’s economic condition would be similar to basing zero to 60 time as the determinant for buying a car.
"Using the Dow as a marker for the country’s economic condition would be similar to basing zero to 60 time as the determinant for buying a car. "
That point (along with the one about corporate profits) was really more about saying that large businesses have recovered just fine. In a “real” market if business recovers, then workers recover. The fact that it’s the same old story for 40 years is telling.
But @Rod_Knox, I don’t need to tell you. You get it.
So, @cigroller, you are sufficiently myopic that your mantra is “sweatshops are bad…so shut down sweatshops, to help the workers?”
That puts you far to the extreme of even the most radical labor unions in the US. The “wobblies” (IWW) were extremists, desired overthrow of the capitalist system and advocated “sabotage” in labor actions–and even they had sense enough not to firebomb the millworks (generally)…just the sort of bologna you suggest absent the arson.
Shutting down a sweathshop “for the benefit of the workers” is the most offensive sort of patronizing–if they could do better than sweatshop work, wouldn’t they be doing it already? Or are only first-world petty bourgeois such as yourself sufficiently smart to anaylize options and choose the best?
In virtually every case, opposing a person (drug user, prostitute, psychiatric patient, laborer)…by a third party, “for their own good” is the worst sort of Orwellian mindlove coersion, because the scoundrel hides behind a smiling face. I have been and continue to be active in the fight against third-party coersion of all kinds.
Up until now, I tend to categorize the sort of neb-nosed busybodies that practice third-party coersion as “well-intentioned fools.” I’m growing inclined to omit the first part of that categorization in your case, @cigroller, if you persist in your personal attacks here.
"So, @cigroller, you are sufficiently myopic that your mantra is “sweatshops are bad…so shut down sweatshops, to help the workers?”
Show me where I said it and then we’ll talk about that.
All I want is for people to get off the notion that all is well because it’s all about “choice,” Sweatshop factories are not “saving” poor people from their own poverty. It’s not about choice, and the creation of the poverty and the sweatshops are married to each other. The original urban working classes who populated the first mass produced textile mills were not crowded into cities with no other livelihood by choice. They were thrown off their traditional lands by the enclosure movement. Today’s sweatshop proletariat - variations admitted- are frequently the same. Choice theory is a disease visited upon us by the economists who constantly want to deny raw economic power.
If all you can read in my comments are “personal attacks” then, I’ll ask you, respectfully, to go back to the beginning of the thread and read what I have said since the beginning. I was in this thread before you popped in with rejection of benevolence and appeal to choice. After all that had been said up to then, your comments struck me as very odd and - admittedly - narrow. We’ve both been around here a while, and I really don’t want to attack you. It’s true that your comment got under my skin and I got cranky and my apologies about that (again).
My last comment was not at all meant to be any personal attack. It was meant to clarify that the roots of dirt cheap labor on the planet are poorly understood by choice theories. All the way at the beginning, I was basically saying that the use of market logics (choice being the core) to interpret the global political economy is basically inappropriate to the reality of today’s political economy.
Okay, you’re right that a cooling off is a good idea. I eagerly admit I am an extremist re: benevolent coersion by a third party, especially if the third party fails the “mile in moccasins” test. I belive the majority of the time, most have the best of intentions…but I also think that many sweatshop protests–especially with first-world labor prominent–have an unstated ulterior motive. I also believe the data I’ve seen that the short-term outcomes (of affected workers) tends to decline when ever a sweatshop factory closes.
Actually, I confess to being interested in the modern-day IWW and probably would join if put to a vote! Somehow the thought of a labor union that clings to worldwide solidarity, abolishment of the wage system, and unionizing strippers warms my heart. At least I’d know they’d fight for me! (I figure I’m enough of an adult to leave all the “wave that red flag high!” crud at the union hall…)
I’ve been either saying or implying all along that intentions don’t matter. You know what they say about the “road to hell.” I think that the intentions of those who built the Bretton Woods stuff were - sort of - good intentions. It’s just that they produced a mess (because they were mostly economists and led by economists). You take take whole global territories that haven’t been geared toward participation in capital markets and just impose it. In terms of economic theory it will eventually bring Levis and Coca-Cola (and sometimes it does). But in terms of reality, it brings starving farmers, corrupt military dictatorships and the like.
On the matter of sweatshop protests, most of the stuff I am more familiar with is about protests of the policies that lead to the sweatshops - protesting things like the World Bank’s activities and policies. The mantra that goes “shut down the sweatshops” is more like - “if people are going to come to work, pay them a decent living wage even if you can get away with less.” I get what you are saying (and even what your econ prof was saying - misguided as he was being economist - HAHA). Asking to shut down sweatshops is taking away what little they have to begin with. But more to the point is to ask how the situations came to be, and to say that if globalization is going to force people to enter the global market-place (when they had no interest of doing it before), don’t exploit them just because there are 100 people for every 1 sh - y job.
But that’s a “moral” thing and you can’t win moral debates. There’s no reason one can’t just say “well, I take what I can and give nothin’ back.” At that point you become vigilant of imbalances of power. The founding fathers knew this, and that is why the corporate form of business organization was frowned upon. It allows the piling up of power. And come to think of it, that is where I started out in this whole thread. People will be selfish and greedy and exploit other people if they can - so you might as well try to have a system were we limit powers. Why we obsess about that in the polity but not in the economy, I can’t understand. X-Mart IS King George.
Sometimes the only choice,is no choice at all-Kevin
I do shop at Wal-Mart but there are certain things I would never consider buying there. These include tools, electronics, or anything else I want buy and have last. Anything with a model number specific to Wal-Mart is also something to be avoided. This includes everything from computers, lawn equipment, TVs, tires, among many other items. Yes, I looked at tires there once and realized that they have similar model numbers but different ratings than what you get at a tire store. I work on computers and am always complaining about the quality and performance of their offerings. It seems they are made to be as cheap and low performing as possible. I am currently working on one with an AMD APU CPU and it is a joke. There is nothing that can be upgraded on the thing and I mean NOTHING. The performance is dreadful the motherboard is a tiny little thing that runs on a laptop power supply of only 65 watts. It is a desktop computer but might as well be a laptop. This thing is slow and made to be cheap. There is no regards for performance or quality. So many products sold at this store are simply price point products where they main reason for people to purchase them is that they are the cheapest ones in town. The problem is that everything else is not taken into consideration so you basically just get junk.
There seems to be a tendency for those who have a considerable amount of accumlated net worth to feel that they are among the “owners” of the country. And as “owners” they feel they have the right to hold all the trump cards. Therefore, the deck is stacked against those who work and live pay check to pay check.
Cwatkin, you’re forgetting one thing. For many of us, the cheap “junk” we get at WM meets our needs perfectly fine. If I can buy something that meets my needs for $300, why should I pay $1500 or more for something that does all sorts of things that I don’t care about?
I just bought some Michelin wiper blades, some Land o lakes margarine, and some Cracker Jacks from WM. No ‘mom & pop’ shops around here that sell that stuff. I don’t worry about Safeway vs. WM.
Oh, and the ‘mom & pop’ gas station I worked for as a teenager got caught for paying us below minimum wage…
“I just bought some Michelin wiper blades, some Land o lakes margarine, and some Cracker Jacks from WM. No ‘mom & pop’ shops around here that sell that stuff.”
Oh, of course! Now I get it. WalMart has lots of cheap stuff all under one roof and so it’s convenient and thrifty. Thanks for clearing that up. I didn’t get that part before.
Thanks for completely missing the point. When the alternative is some other national chain, I see no difference buying the name brand items at WM.
@mountainbike Correct! There is a Walmart down the treet and they have the best frozen orange juice (their house brand) at the best price. We buy small batteries, common plumbing parts, windshield washer antifreeze, plastic tote and storage bins, fireplace “logs”, coat hangers, etc.
When it comes to hardware, Home Depot tends to have nearly everything I need at very good prices. Recently a Lowes moved in but they cannot compete, except for some unique items that are hard to find elsewhere.
My wife will not grocery shop at WM since she cannot get all what she needs and would have to go elswhere for the rest.
Not to argue, but I’ll give you the plastic hangers. I would question where the orange juice comes from. I’m sure south of the border, not Florida. I’ve found Menards is much better for batteries and totes if you want any quantity at all. They just don’t sell large packs of batteries for detector battery change time. Plumbing parts? Maybe a wax ring and a plunger but not copper fittings, pvc, faucet parts and so on. You can’t buy anything but a plastic toilet seat there and the cost is not much less than the wooden versions at Menards. And why would you lug jugs of washer fluid 300 yards from the store to the car when you can stop outside an auto parts store and walk a few feet? Don’t know about the fireplace logs, I use gas.
I dunno, if I’ve got a list of stuff to get, I can just make a few stops at the Hardware store, drug store, auto parts store, farm store, and grocery store and spread the money around. I like a bit more quality and selection. Not sure whats going on but they seem to be limiting their inventory. Often there will be empty shelves or hooks that haven’t been restocked. I thought their JIT system automatically determined what items went on the trucks for restocking. Also noticed large ads for “associates” for all shifts and all departments. Might be feeling the strain a little.
Now 2:00 am and you need something that the grocery store doesn’t have, is a different story.
The hardware store, the drug store, the auto parts store, the farm store, and the grocery store, … do you know where their products come from? My wild guess is that most of what you bought wasn’t made in the U.S. Do they pay their employees good salaries with benefits? My guess is that the kid behind the counter is making minimum wage with no benefits.
And at 2:00am it’s okay to buy something made by someone in poverty in a third world country but not at 5:00pm? Personally, I don’t do things at 2:00am that would violate my principles at 5:00pm.
It’s easy to blame the 500 pound gorilla in the retail industry for all the world’s ills. And I’ll support your right to do so. But the world is a much more complicated place than that.