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![]() Just Above Sunset
April 11, 2004 - Last night I dreamed I saw Joe Hill...
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Last night I dreamed I saw Joe Hill? No,
not really. Many months ago in these
pages I had the occasion to make some comments on Wal-Mart. See September 1, 2003 Odds and Ends where you will find this: Wal-Mart Stores is seeking to bypass a hostile Inglewood City Council and take its plans for a
giant new store directly to voters. And this is pretty clever
on Wal-Mart's part. No hearings, no studies on the impact to the environment
or even on traffic. Forbidden by popular petition! Cool. LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Voters in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood on Tuesday rejected by a
2-1 margin a ballot measure that would have allowed Wal-Mart to build a sprawling shopping center in the heart of their town. Well, this doesn’t cover all you’d
see on the locals news shows. Rick Brown in Atlanta commented
– First, it's interesting that "the people" supported
their elected representatives in some crass, commercial attempt to bypass the process.
Second, it's interesting that a driving force of the vote would be that Wal-Mart is non-union! Who'da thunk that this would inspire so many of the public! (Then again, maybe I've lost touch, having
lived in the deep south for 24 years.) Union stuff? The key "Joe Hill" factor here was the four-month-long grocery workers' strike. Everyone understood that this was only secondarily about wages - it was really about heath benefits. Our emergency rooms are flooded with the uninsured, and people now see these aren't just scruffy illegal aliens speaking in odd languages, but regular folks who don't have coverage, or very little. And everyone knows Tenet is trying to sell off twenty-seven hospitals in California - the "charity cases" are bankrupting them (well, so is the fraud and other malfeasance charges that have them shedding executives and trotting off to court every few weeks). Metropolitan Hospital near me closed its emergency room this week. Can't survive the costs. Northridge is closing its adolescent psychiatric unit - no one can pay - all the psychotic kids don't have any coverage much, even the Anglos. So, folks see unions as the key to keeping whatever meager health benefits they do have now. And the businesses see Wal-Mart as a model and threat - as these Arkansas folks cover only catastrophic costs and hardly anything else day to day. Kroger and Safeway and the other grocery conglomerates argue they had to go the same route or go out of business. Yes, folks who say we should adopt the Canadian model are still called communists. Or French. Government funded universal health care is still seen out here as pure evil. But the businesses are washing their hands of any responsibility. "Personal Responsibility" is their mantra now. And the grocery workers' union settled for much less than they wanted - crappy benefits that will be phased out over time. They're bitter. That bitterness had a lot to do with this vote. Folks see Wal-Mart as the wave of the future, and they're punishing them. They don't like the future they see. And the press was not good. The Los Angeles Times won its major Pulitzers this week for their series on how Wal-Mart operates. The car critic who won the Pulitzer for his cleverness was a minor thing. Curiously the Los Angeles Times did publish
someone from the other side of the issue a day or two after the vote. In an opinion piece Jay Nordlinger of the National Review said many things, but his key point is here: Wal-Mart is gloriously, unashamedly, star-spangledly American. I hope it's not too McCarthyite to suggest that those
who despise Wal-Mart are the very ones who may not be so crazy about the United States tout court. |
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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