The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein
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<—-This Guy: Hans von Spakovsky
A former Bush administration official, Hans von Spakovsky, has done more than anyone to promulgate the myth widespread voter fraud of the sort that could be prevented by voter I.D. laws and other restrictive measures that would also discourage the poor and minorities from voting. Jane Mayer reports on the Heritage Foundation fellow’s dark electoral arts for the New Yorker.
[Photo credit: Wikipedia.]
[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]
Koch Industries has become a byword for outsized corporate campaign contributions and right wing activism. As Mike Elk reports for In These Times, the politicking doesn’t stop at the workplace door. Forty-five thousand employees of Georgia Pacific, a Koch subsidiary, received a mailer listing Koch’s slate of endorsed candidates, starting with Mitt Romney.
Corporate campaign spending is often justified as free speech. Unfortunately, Georgia Pacific does not extend the same consideration to its employees, even in their off hours. According to the company’s draconian new social media policy, which is currently the subject of an NLRB complaint, workers can be fired if they post anything that might reflect badly on Georgia Pacific. Some Georgia Pacific workers in Oregon posed for a photo with a Democratic state senate candidate outside their union hall, with a Georgia Pacific sign in the background. The candidate’s name did not appear in the Koch mailer. Now they’re worried they’ll be fired under the new social media policy if the image finds its way online.
Elk shared a 2011 Sidney Award for an investigation of the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Looks like the unpaid internship scam has gone global. Electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn admits that it discovered underage “interns” working in its factory:
BEIJING (AP) — Electronics manufacturer Foxconn said Tuesday it found underage interns as young as 14 working at one of its factories in China. Foxconn Technology Group said the interns were found by a company investigation at its factory in the eastern city of Yantai and were sent back to their schools. China’s minimum legal working age is 16. Foxconn, owned by Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., is best known as the manufacturer of Apple Inc.’s iPhone but said the Yantai factory had no connection with its work for Apple.
The labor rights group China Labor Watch said in a statement that Foxconn was remiss for not verifying the ages of its interns.
Local authorities have long been accused of colluding with Foxconn to steer cheap labor to the factories. The fact that the underage interns came in through a “vocational program” run by a local school adds weight to these suspicions.
Mitt Romney acts as if his 15 years at Bain Capital give him free market cred, but as David Stockman points out in Newsweek, Bain’s business model was corporate welfare:
Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.
[…]
Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.
Romney’s business was leveraged buyouts. These buyouts don’t create wealth, they exploit a rigged system where speculators can borrow money cheaply and reap the capital gains at low tax rates. They pick the taxpayer’s pocket while siphoning the assets of failing businesses to the 1%.
As Andrew Sullivan notes, “Mitt Romney is as much a creature of the corporate welfare state as anyone out of their luck is a creature of the actual welfare state.”
[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]
Striking workers at Walmart have upped the ante, threatening to disrupt Black Friday sales with leafleting and flash mobs, Josh Eidelson reports
One day after Walmart employees in twelve states launched a major strike, today workers issued an ultimatum to the retail giant: Stop retaliating against workers trying to organize, or the year’s most important shopping day, the Friday after Thanksgiving, will see the biggest disruptions yet. The announcement comes as 200 workers – some of them currently striking – have converged in the Walmart’s Bentonville, Arkansas hometown outside the company’s annual investors meeting. It offers a new potential challenge to Walmart, and a new test for OUR Walmart, the labor-backed organization that’s pulled off the first two multi-store U.S. strikes in Walmart history. [Salon]
The Black Friday ultimatum is an innovative tactic by a weaker adversary against a much stronger opponent. The strikers, who are not represented by a union, are threatening not only to disrupt one of the most lucrative days of Walmart’s year, but to draw negative publicity during an event that has become a tradition integral to Walmart’s brand.
[Photo credit: Inside a Walmart, by Tobin Black.]
Sasha Chavkin, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, and Ronnie Greene of the Center for Public Integrity for Mystery in the Fields, a multi-part investigation into an international public health crisis.
A new kind of kidney disease is and killing thousands of people on multiple continents. The victims are primarily young men, typically farm workers who toil in extreme heat. They are sugarcane cutters in Central America, rice farmers in India, and coconut harvesters in Sri Lanka. They are the breadwinners of their families. When fathers die of the disease, their teen sons are forced into the fields, only to succumb themselves within a few years.
Nobody knows what causes the disease, dubbed CKDu for “chronic kidney disease of unidentified origin,” but its incidence has tripled since the 1990s. Experts suspect that a deadly combination of pesticides and dehydration are to blame, but powerful agribusiness interests are pushing hard to discredit that explanation.
Read my interview with Sasha Chavkin in The Backstory.
[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]
Walmart workers in several stores walked off the job in protest today. This is the first multi-store strike in the retailer’s 50-year history:
Today, for the first time in Walmart’s fifty-year history, workers at multiple stores are out on strike. Minutes ago, dozens of workers at Southern California stores launched a one-day work stoppage in protest of alleged retaliation against their attempts to organize. In a few hours, they’ll join supporters for a mass rally outside a Pico Rivera, CA store. This is the latest – and most dramatic – of the recent escalations in the decades-long struggle between organized labor and the largest private employer in the world.
“I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m scared…” Pico Rivera Walmart employee Evelin Cruz told Salon yesterday about her decision to join today’s strike. “But I think the time has come, so they take notice that these associates are tired of all the issues in the stores, all the management retaliating against you.” Rivera, a department manager, said her store is chronically understaffed: “They expect the work to be done, without having the people to do the job.” [Salon]
As Josh Eidelson of Salon explains, this is a risky move because the workers do not yet belong to a union. Even so, federal labor law protects the right of non-union workers to walk off the job to protest the conditions of their employment. The workers can’t be fired for striking. What’s less clear is whether the company could bring in scabs to replace the if the strike continues.
Eidelson interviewed historian Nelson Lichtenstein, the author of a book on unions and Walmart, and a past winner of the Hillman Foundation’s Sol Stetin Award. Lichtenstein predicts that, if the strike gains momentum, the company will be constrained more by PR concerns than by the letter of the labor law.
Today’s action is organized by OUR Walmart, an employee organization supported by the United Food and Commercial Workers.
[Photo credit: A demonstration against Walmart’s labor practices taken earlier this month, peoplesworld, Creative Commons.]
