A letter I’ve submitted to our local newspaper, plus a complementary cartoon I made.
“The butler, in the library, with the lead pipe!” Sound familiar?
Most of us remember playing the game Clue. That game is about solving a crime that has already occurred. I’m going to reverse that and urge you to thwart a crime that’s still in progress: destruction of the USPS.
Who’s behind the crime? Ultimately, the wealthy puppeteers who pull politicians’ strings, either directly through lobbying and campaign “contributions,” or indirectly through organizations like ALEC and “dark money” propaganda. (ALEC is The American Legislative Exchange Council. Look it up!)
What’s their motivation? Partly it’s ideology, of course, to make government small enough that Grover Norquist can drown it in his bathtub. And their motivation is also to destroy one of our nation’s strongest remaining unions. And to remove a powerful competitor so as to benefit private carriers.
Who’s holding the weapon that — unless the American public assert themselves — will eventually prove fatal to the USPS? Congresspersons, mostly Republican congresspersons.
Where’s the crime occurring? In board rooms, in retreats where the 1% gather at luxury resorts for pep talks and planning, in congressional cloak rooms and offices, and in the writing and broadcasting of the cloistered “Beltway” media.
What’s the weapon? Legislation. For example, Congress has forced the USPS to fund the retirement benefits of its employees for 75 years in advance. They’ve also forced the postal service to break even every year–unlike any other government agency. And remember. The USPS is self-supporting. They receive no subsidy from U.S. tax payers. Zero. Nada.
Congress requires the agency to provide service to every corner of our nation, no matter how remote (and consequently unprofitable), while at the same time refusing them the authority to control their own rates or to diversify and add new services.
Think about this. Right now you can send a letter from Key West to Wasillla for just 46 cents. If you’re willing to pay more, you can also send a letter via FedEx or UPS. But you know what? If you send that letter to a remote area, then it’ll be delivered by the USPS!
The USPS isn’t being destroyed by email or the internet. It isn’t being destroyed by its inability to compete. (It’s not allowed to compete on equal terms.) It’s not being destroyed by obsolescence or failure to innovate. It’s being destroyed, deliberately, by congressional ideologues and pawns of the 1%.
Last weekend, 125 garment workers died in Bangladesh in a horrific factory fire that tore through the Tazreen Fashion factory. Accounts of the conditions at the factory, and in the fire, should conjure up a certain amount of deja vu for anyone familiar with the history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which occurred over 100 years ago; the fire started in late evening, and moved quickly through a building with inadequate safety controls. Workers struggled to leave, finding locked doors and no emergency exits, which left them trapped inside the factory to burn to death. Meanwhile, fire crews struggled to get to the site, with limited access making it difficult to respond promptly.
Two news reports yesterday shed new light on Walmart’s relationship to the Bangladesh factory where at least 112 workers died in a November 24 fire. One shows Walmart’s role in defeating a proposal for retail corporations to pay for safety improvements; the other shows that multiple Walmart suppliers used the factory this year.
“Walmart’s efforts to evade accountability make a mockery of its pretensions to be committed to protecting the rights of workers in its supply chain,” said Scott Nova, the executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, in an e-mail to The Nation. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment late last night.
In a Wednesday morning article, Bloomberg News reported an April 2011 meeting in Dhaka, Bangladesh, at which major retail corporations considered a proposed agreement under which they would pay more so that their suppliers could make safety improvements. Ineke Zeldenrust of the Amsterdam-based NGO Clean Clothes Campaign told Bloomberg that Walmart’s director of ethical sourcing, Sridevi Kalavakolanu, said at the meeting that Walmart would not agree to pay the higher cost.
Bloomberg reporters Renee Dudley and Arun Devnath also revealed a document written by Kalavakolanu and a Gap official, which was included in the meeting’s minutes, which stated, “Specifically to the issue of any corrections on electrical and fire safety, we are talking about 4,500 factories, and in most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories. It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.”
…
“No company,” Nova [Scott Nova, the executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium] told The Nation, “that is unwilling to pay [factories] enough to make it possible for them to operate safely can claim to be interested in any way in the rights or safety of workers.”
The Times article, also published Wednesday, revealed that at least three supplier companies were using the Tazreen factory during the past year to provide apparel for Walmart and its subsidiary Sam’s Club. According to Greenhouse, the documents “include an internal production report from mid-September showing that 5 of the factory’s 14 production lines were devoted to making apparel for Walmart.” Another Bloomberg article by Dudley yesterday reported that at least five Walmart suppliers used the Tazreen factory.
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Wal-Mart’s Response
“Walmart has been advocating for improved fire safety with the Bangladeshi government, with industry groups and with suppliers. We have been actively developing and implementing proactive programs to raise fire safety awareness and increase fire prevention. We firmly believe factory owners must meet our Standards for Suppliers and we recognize the cost of meeting those standards will be part of the cost of the goods we buy.”
My response to all the above
When you see this …
… remember the high cost powerless dirt-poor sweatshop workers in tens of thousands of “Tazreens” are paying so that you can profit. In this instance and others, the cost of their lives.
Wal-Mart heirs worth as much as bottom 41.5% of American families
July 18, 2012|By Tiffany Hsu
The Walton family, heirs to the founders of the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. superchain, are worth nearly as much as the bottom half of American households combined.
The Waltons’ value — $89.5 billion in 2010 – is equal to the worth of the 41.5% of families at the lower end of the income ladder, according to an analysis by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. That comes out to 48.8 million households.
Remember the Minneapolis-St. Paul bridge collapse? Hear about the collapse of the Paulsboro bridge? Ready for lots more such failures of our infrastructure? From Think Progress:
A bridge in Paulsboro, New Jersey collapsed Friday morning, derailing a train carrying highly flammable and carcinogenic vinyl chloride into Mantua Creek. The most recent reports say at least 28 people are having trouble breathing from the spill’s vapors and residents are being evacuated. Local schools are in lockdown.
This is the second time in four years that this bridge has collapsed. In 2009, the bridge buckled and plunged several coal cars into the creek. The bridge has certainly weathered a lot of wear and tear since it was built in 1873.
…
Even if the Mantua Creek bridge is successfully repaired after this latest disaster, there are thousands of similar “time bomb” bridges around the country ready to collapse at any moment. The average American bridge is now 43 years old — and a 2008 Department of Transportation survey determined that 72,868 are “structurally deficient,” while 89,024 are “functionally obsolete.”
Despite the urgency of this crisis, US spending on infrastructure is projected to fall short by $139 billion or more over the next decade. Meanwhile, Republicans have pushed for a devastating cut of $871 billion in infrastructure investment.
Better organized labor means better conditions for labor — union members and non-members alike. Better pay for workers means a stronger middle class and more money going into the U.S. economy instead of into offshore tax shelters, where it’s invested in overseas jobs.
The job creators in our society are the people who buy things and services.
The job destroyers in our society are people like Bain and Schnatter.
Bosses Gone Berserk
Jim Hightower
Then there’s Papa John’s, the billion-dollar-a-year fast food giant. John Schnatter, the company’s CEO and founding “papa,” had warned this summer that he’d jack-up the consumer price of the chain’s pizza if Obama won, because he wasn’t going to eat the cost of assuring health coverage for employees.
Post-election, however, Schnatter decided not to slap his customers, but to smack Papa John’s workers instead, by cutting their hours to part-time so he doesn’t have to pay for their health coverage. “That’s what you do,” Schnatter snapped, “you pass on costs.”
Yeah, that’s what bosses like you do — and what an exemplary way for the millionaire boss to boost the productivity, loyalty, and morale of those who do the actual work that make customers want to buy Papa John’s pizza — or not.
