Reclaim Democracy!

Archives for March 2005

Don’t Blame Wal-Mart

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By Robert Reich
Published by the New York Times, February 28, 2005

Bowing to intense pressure from neighborhood and labor groups, a real estate developer has just given up plans to include a Wal-Mart store in a mall in Queens, thereby blocking Wal-Mart’s plan to open its first store in New York City. In the eyes of Wal-Mart’s detractors, the Arkansas-based chain embodies the worst kind of economic exploitation: it pays its 1.2 million American workers an average of only $9.68 an hour, doesn’t provide most of them with health insurance, keeps out unions, has a checkered history on labor law and turns main streets into ghost towns by sucking business away from small retailers.

But isn’t Wal-Mart really being punished for our sins? After all, it’s not as if Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, and his successors created the world’s largest retailer by putting a gun to our heads and forcing us to shop there.

Instead, Wal-Mart has lured customers with low prices. “We expect our suppliers to drive the costs out of the supply chain,” a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart said. “It’s good for us and good for them.”

Wal-Mart may have perfected this technique, but you can find it almost everywhere these days. Corporations are in fierce competition to get and keep customers, so they pass the bulk of their cost cuts through to consumers as lower prices. Products are manufactured in China at a fraction of the cost of making them here, and American consumers get great deals. Back-office work, along with computer programming and data crunching, is “offshored” to India, so our dollars go even further.

Meanwhile, many of us pressure companies to give us even better bargains. I look on the Internet to find the lowest price I can and buy airline tickets, books, merchandise from just about anywhere with a click of a mouse. Don’t you?

The fact is, today’s economy offers us a Faustian bargain: it can give consumers deals largely because it hammers workers and communities.

We can blame big corporations, but we’re mostly making this bargain with ourselves. The easier it is for us to get great deals, the stronger the downward pressure on wages and benefits. Last year, the real wages of hourly workers, who make up about 80 percent of the work force, actually dropped for the first time in more than a decade; hourly workers’ health and pension benefits are in free fall. The easier it is for us to find better professional services, the harder professionals have to hustle to attract and keep clients. The more efficiently we can summon products from anywhere on the globe, the more stress we put on our own communities.

But you and I aren’t just consumers. We’re also workers and citizens. How do we strike the right balance? To claim that people shouldn’t have access to Wal-Mart or to cut-rate airfares or services from India or to Internet shopping, because these somehow reduce their quality of life, is paternalistic tripe. No one is a better judge of what people want than they themselves.

The problem is, the choices we make in the market don’t fully reflect our values as workers or as citizens. I didn’t want our community bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., to close (as it did last fall) yet I still bought lots of books from Amazon.com. In addition, we may not see the larger bargain when our own job or community isn’t directly at stake. I don’t like what’s happening to airline workers, but I still try for the cheapest fare I can get.

The only way for the workers or citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and regulations that make our purchases a social choice as well as a personal one. A requirement that companies with more than 50 employees offer their workers affordable health insurance, for example, might increase slightly the price of their goods and services. My inner consumer won’t like that very much, but the worker in me thinks it a fair price to pay. Same with an increase in the minimum wage or a change in labor laws making it easier for employees to organize and negotiate better terms.

I wouldn’t go so far as to re-regulate the airline industry or hobble free trade with China and India – that would cost me as a consumer far too much – but I’d like the government to offer wage insurance to ease the pain of sudden losses of pay. And I’d support labor standards that make trade agreements a bit more fair.

These provisions might end up costing me some money, but the citizen in me thinks they are worth the price. You might think differently, but as a nation we aren’t even having this sort of discussion. Instead, our debates about economic change take place between two warring camps: those who want the best consumer deals, and those who want to preserve jobs and communities much as they are. Instead of finding ways to soften the blows, compensate the losers or slow the pace of change – so the consumers in us can enjoy lower prices and better products without wreaking too much damage on us in our role as workers and citizens – we go to battle.

I don’t know if Wal-Mart will ever make it into New York City. I do know that New Yorkers, like most other Americans, want the great deals that can be had in a rapidly globalizing high-tech economy. Yet the prices on sales tags don’t reflect the full prices we have to pay as workers and citizens. A sensible public debate would focus on how to make that total price as low as possible.

Robert B. Reich was the U.S. secretary of labor from 1993 to 1997.

© 2005 New York Times

Ballot Initiatives Hijacked by Corporations

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By Jeffrey Kaplan and Jeff Milchen 
March 7, 2004

Think of corporate influence peddlers and you might envision distant figures working the halls of Congress and state capitols. But more and more, they roam city halls, municipal offices and even local shopping malls attempting to snuff the growing trend of communities setting limits on corporate activities. Regardless of location, the goal of the corporate lawyers and lobbyists remains the same: to use the enormous wealth of their employers to get what they want. And they’re willing to seize the initiative — the ballot initiative, theoretically the purest form of democracy — to accomplish their goals.

California evidenced this trend on March 2 elections, when several communities faced corporate attempts to spend their way to victory on ballot initiatives.

Wal-Mart — the world’s largest corporation and soon to become the nation’s largest corporate investor in political candidates for federal offices — wasn’t pleased with a decision last year by officials in Contra Costa County (east of San Francisco Bay). The County recently joined a growing number of communities nationwide to pass laws limiting the size of enormous new “supercenters” that sell groceries as well as general merchandise. Wal-Mart used company funds to hire a corps of signature gatherers and placed an initiative on the ballot to rescind the law. In a slap in the face to its workers, Wal-Mart paid these political operatives $10 per hour — $2 more than its typical store employees. Wal-Mart’s million-dollar public relations campaign tripled spending by opponents and persuaded voters to overturn the ordinance (the company was aided by the poor construction of the law).

But big money doesn’t win every time. On the same day, voters rejected attempts by CropLife America and Pacific Lumber to translate their economic power into political victories.

CropLife, a political creation of corporations such as Monsanto, Dow and DuPont, funded a failed campaign to defeat a Mendocino County citizen initiative that would ban growing genetically manipulated crops or animals within the county. Winning 57% of votes cast, Measure H made Mendocino the first county in the nation to pass such a ban despite the industry opponents spending more than $600,000 – a county record that exceeded $54 in expenditure for each “no” vote.

Meanwhile, just north of Mendocino, executives at Pacific Lumber Company (a division of giant Maxxam Inc.) were upset with Humboldt County district attorney Paul Gallegos, who sued Pacific last year for allegedly lying about plans to log giant redwoods trees on steep slopes. Gallegos filed the suit after the logging caused extensive flooding and damage to local farmland. Pacific spent about $250,000 to run a ballot initiative to oust Gallegos from his job, but failed decisively. Even political opponents of the district attorney balked at allowing a transnational corporation to terminate a fraud case by eliminating its accuser.

But Pacific isn’t done yet — it’s emulating Nike’s failed 2003 attempt to claim a constitutional right to lie. The company has filed a countersuit claiming an obscure anti-trust provision – the “Noerr-Penington Doctrine” — effectively gives corporations the legal right to lie to government officials.

Though money doesn’t necessarily buy a win, we should question why corporations are permitted to use corporate funds to influence any democratic processes in the first place. Despite occasional setbacks, corporations have steadily seized more power over our laws and public institutions, thanks to decades of systematic efforts that have reshaped the law to fit corporate agendas rather than citizens’ interests.

Back in 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a telling memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He asserted that big business should seek power through “careful long-range planning and implementation” and that power “must be used aggressively and with determination, without embarrassment.” Powell specified that “The judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”

A month later Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the United States Supreme Court. Powell went on to write the opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that created a First Amendment “right” for corporations to influence ballot initiatives and other political campaigns. As one writer commented at the time in the American Bar Association Journal, the Court had constructed a “monster, like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation” that was likely to trample over democracy. The Bellottidecision is one major reason why corporations now dominate national politics and why companies like Wal-Mart can impose the will of corporate executives on communities around the country.

Undermining democracy can be lucrative for corporations but costly for the rest of us. In the case of Wal-Mart, its legendary low wages don’t impact only workers — many employees end up requiring public assistance despite having jobs, while better-paying competitors are driven out of business. According to a recent University of Southern California study, the spread of Wal-Mart supercenters in southern California could result in $1.4 billion in wage and benefit losses annually.

Citizens still win a few battles against corporate interests. But winning the larger struggle — one to determine whether it’s citizens or corporations that will control the future of our communities and country — will depend on changing the rules of engagement.

As Contra Costa county Supervisor Jon Gioia stated, it’s about local citizens having the right to make the laws in their own communities, “not Wal-Mart executives in Bentonville, Arkansas .”

Milchen directs ReclaimDemocracy.org. Kaplan is an organizer of the group’s San Francisco bay area chapter (email: JLKaplan”@”concentric.net to learn more) We soon will begin gathering support for a constitutional amendment to revoke corporate claims to Bill of Rights protections. 

Editor’s note: Unknown to us at the time of publication, another California community, San Marcos (near San Diego) overturned a city council decision via referendum, negating the approval of second a Wal-Mart in the city.