Reclaim Democracy!

What the Rulers Don’t Understand

by

By Ben Manski – Published October 3, 2011

The protests that began in Wisconsin this year, and which now also fill the streets of Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, and this week, Washington D.C., have gotten the attention of the American political class. And how could they not? 2011 is becoming a remake of the 1999 Battle of Seattle, except this time the protests are ongoing, national and global, and the target is not just the World Trade Organization, but the entire edifice of corporate capitalism.

So the political class, rather than ignore this wave of protests, pulls a card from the past. They know we are angry, they say. They just don’t understand what we want. We speak in too many voices. According to the American Pravda, The New York Times (which tells the professional classes their truth), we are a “hodgepodge” and “confused” movement with “unclear goals” and “nowhere to go.” Why can’t we settle on a couple key demands?

What some can’t accept, they pretend not to understand . And the political class can’t accept that the common demand of the current protest wave is for democratic revolution. We want them gone. We want power.

We haven’t been secretive about our goals. The Wisconsin Wave was launched in February as a “democracy movement.” Occupy Wall Street calls for an “American Revolution.” The October2011.org occupation of Freedom Plaza in D.C. intends to “Create a New World.” Perhaps, as Thomas Paine once penned, “The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

Democracy is a simple idea. It means “the people rule.” The promise of the United States is democracy. The reality is that corporate elites rule. The contradiction between the promise and reality of America has produced a movement to make the promise the new reality.

We believe it our birthright to directly participate in power. Elections were always a poor substitute for participatory democracy. And elections delegate power from the people to a tiny elite easily browbeaten or bought off by major corporations. Most Americans intuitively know this.

And we have an alternative. A new democratic economy is growing amidst the collapse of the old one. The cooperative sector –made up of coops, credit unions, and community supported and community owned enterprises– now includes over one third of the American people. Having tasted real democracy, after having been force fed the fake formula, millions are demanding more of the real thing.

We also understand that freedom to govern requires freedom from want. The rights to housing, to an education, to health care, to child care, to a livable income, are all democratic rights. People who don’t have these necessities of life are not free to participate in power. The impoverishment of Americans is the impoverishment of America.

Students of social change learn that mass movements are most likely to emerge at times when economic conditions become intolerable. For tens of millions of Americans, those times are now. This is especially true for young people, among them the many veterans of the unending wars.

The present form of government fails to provide for the pursuit of their happiness . They see that the time has come to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new one. The political class cannot accept this, and so fails to understand it. People in the streets, from Wisconsin to Wall Street to Washington D.C. are proving that we understand it perfectly well.

Ben Manski is the Executive Director of the Liberty Tree Foundation, a national strategy center dedicated to “building a democracy movement for the U.S.A.,” and the initiator of the Wisconsin Wave protest movement.

© 2011 Ben Manski

Propaganda and the Voter ID Campaign

by

By Lorraine Minnite 
First Published September, 2011 

Editor’s Note: Orchestrated, but unfounded complaints of widespread “voter fraud’ have duped citizens of  many states into accepting needless and harmful barriers to voting. Here, Rutgers University professor Lorraine Minnite, author of “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” debunks the misinformation spread by Hans von Spakovsky, a leading perpetrator of voting fraud myths,

Propaganda is playing a crucial role in the fast-moving campaign to enact more onerous voter identification (ID) laws in the states.  I want to show how the discussions of the issue of voter photo ID exhibit some of the salient features of political propaganda to obscure the real rationale for these laws: partisan political advantage.

As an example, consider the puzzling re-emergence of a sordid tale of election shenanigans from some three decades ago.  The scene is a series of Democratic primary races, and the locale is Brooklyn, New York, circa the 1970s and early 1980s.  In a 2008 Heritage Foundation legal memo on the case and countless other reports , op-eds , blog postings, and government testimony advocating for stricter voter ID laws, Hans von Spakovsky, the controversial former Georgia GOP county leader and one-time U.S. Justice Department official, has called this story “the best-documented case of widespread and continuing voter identity or impersonation fraud” in “living memory.”  It stands as a much-cited rebuttal to the critics who reject claims of an epidemic of voter fraud as unsupported by evidence.

Von Spakovsky’s source for this story is a 1984 Brooklyn grand jury report , and his abuse of this report is striking.  He takes historical events and twists them so that they point to the wrong set of villains.  The grand jury investigated an egregious case of political corruption committed by politicians and election workers, but he says the case is about voter impersonation fraud.  The findings and recommendations of the grand jury were sensible, but von Spakovsky distorts them to promote the call for more restrictive voter ID rules.  The grand jury did not come to these conclusions.

Von Spakovsky’s Brooklyn tale plays a role in the expansive propaganda campaign promoted by Republican Party operatives to stoke the anger of the party’s rightwing base (via the code word “fraud”), and to soften up a mostly disinterested public skeptical of backward-moving restrictions on the franchise – like the requirement to show a current government-issued ID to vote.  As I’ve argued elsewhere, central to this campaign is the myth of voter fraud .

Propaganda is a communications strategy that relies on specific rhetorical devices and methods of presenting information to persuade and influence the opinions of others in order to control their actions.  Propagandists distort the truth through selective storytelling, logical fallacies, unwarranted extrapolation, and repetition of false conclusions, providing a basis for hidden political agendas and fear-mongering.  In the contemporary discussions about voter ID, what could be more misleading than to go back 27 years to obscure events in Brooklyn documented in an almost impossible to find grand jury report?  Unknowing readers could think von Spakovsky is plucking the example out of a vast trove of evidence when he’s not.

Selective Storytelling
The 1984 Brooklyn grand jury report that is the source of von Spakovsky’s 2008 Heritage Foundation memo documents the results of an investigation by the Brooklyn D.A. into a pattern of corruption by a de-throned state senator named Vander Beatty and his allies within the ranks of the Kings County Democratic Party organization.

The Grand Jury found that over a period of 14 years, a group of people committed blatant voter registration and voting fraud to defeat opponents who challenged the status quo control of electoral politics in the borough.  The struggle reflected a conflict between an established black political class, supported by an older white ethnic-dominated political machine, and a black reform movement emerging from the public school-based battles for community control in Central Brooklyn.

The fraud was flagrant and could not have been committed without the assistance of elections officials who knowingly accepted bogus registration cards, violated state laws in the handling of registration cards, and attempted to conceal forged registration documents.

The culminating event occurred when the machine-backed Beatty lost a congressional primary for retiring Shirley Chisholm’s U.S. House seat to the reformer Major Owens.  Beatty’s gang snuck into the Board of Elections, hid in a bathroom ceiling until the employees went home for the day, and then tampered with voter registration cards to manufacture the appearance of fraud on the part of the Owens campaign.  The fraudulent fraud discovered, Beatty then used the forged evidence to charge Owens with fraud and to demand that the results of the election be thrown out.  He almost got away with this scandalous ploy.

Logical Fallacies
Von Spakovsky tells a disembodied version of this story and demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the larger context that framed the corruption.  Moreover, to distract the reader from the fact that these events occurred a quarter-century ago, he ignores how rules and procedures have changed since 1984 (even in Brooklyn!).  von Spakovsky exploits the ambiguity of the word “fraud” to commit a major logical fallacy.  He claims this 27-year old story of internecine political warfare among Brooklyn Democrats presents the best-documented case of widespread and continuing voter identity or impersonation fraud that could be prevented with voter photo ID.  But since his premise is wrong, so is his conclusion.

The Grand Jury’s recommendations barely touched on voter ID.  Grand Jury members were sensitive to the danger of their report being used to justify the tightening up of access to registration and voting.  The report flatly states, “The Grand Jury is not advocating that existing electoral rights be restricted or unduly encumbered, but that safeguards be created to protect those rights from being undermined by fraud” (p. 3).

For the Grand Jury, since the main problem was document tampering, forgery, and corrupt politicians plotting conspiracies to rig elections, these safeguards largely took the form of a plea to improve administrative procedures, address under-staffing and training of Board of Elections personnel, and especially, to make changes to way the Board of Elections secured its facilities.  Von Spakovsky conveniently does not mention these recommendations, despite the fact that a discussion about the use of closed circuit televisions cameras, security mirrors, and alarm systems “to protect against illegal use of or entry into the facilities” (p. 26) takes up several pages of the report.

In addition, the grand jury called on the Governor and the State Legislature to “promptly study the problems of election fraud identified in this report…and evaluate various proposals and strike a balance between solving the problem of election fraud and continuing the recent gains in facilitating unimpeded access to the ballot box” (p. 21).  One proposal the grand jury thought worthy of study was to require identification from voters at the time of registration (which New York now does) and voting (which New York does not do).  More importantly, however, was the grand jury’s own recommendation to require identification of persons seeking admission to the Board of Elections .

Von Spakovsky commits another logical fallacy in setting up this story to justify his preference for stricter ID laws.  He argues that the reason why there is so little evidence of voter impersonation fraud (and, perhaps why we have to resort to an example from Brooklyn in the 1970s) is because, “Election officials cannot discover an impersonation if they are denied the very tool needed to detect it – an identification requirement” (p. 1).  But the ID requirement cannot both prevent fraud and make it detectable.  Advocates of government-issued photo voter ID, including von Spakovsky, have never marshaled reliable evidence of contemporary voter impersonation fraud.  If we have no evidence of voter impersonation fraud before the enactment of voter ID laws, and no evidence of voter impersonation fraud after the enactment of voter ID laws, how is it possible that voter ID laws are both preventing voter fraud and making it more detectable?  This is circular reasoning – if voter ID eliminates voter impersonation fraud, which is hard to do since there is virtually no evidence that it actually exists, how then does it make fraud detectable?

Unwarranted Extrapolation
Von Spakovsky states that, “Even though it led to no indictments, the New York investigation still serves a valuable purpose.  Most clearly, it demonstrates that voter impersonation is a real problem and one that is nearly impossible for election officials to detect given the weak tools usually at their disposal” (p. 7).

This is not correct.  A 27-year old grand jury report does not demonstrate that voter impersonation is a real problem today.  Nor does it “provide good reason to believe that [the…] conspiracy…could not have occurred if voters had been required to present photo identification when they voted” (p. 7).  Von Spakovsky incorrectly assumes that people this intent on stealing elections could be thwarted by a photo ID requirement (see this recent Washington Post article for the growing ease with which “untold thousands” of flawless fraudulent drivers licenses have flowed into the U.S. recently from a single source in China).

Von Spakovsky states that, “More recent cases provide evidence of what may be a wider problem that is very difficult to detect in jurisdictions that do not require voter identification” (p. 5).

What is that evidence?  Not much.  Von Spakovsky tells us that a college professor testified in 2006 before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that he was not able to vote once because someone else voted in his name.  The professor wasn’t able to find out why this occurred, what error was made, “and the polling place,” he said, “didn’t keep any record of it” (p. 7).  In 2007, U.S. Justice Department litigation against Noxubee, Mississippi Democratic Party leader, Ike Brown, unearthed a former deputy sheriff who said he saw Brown “outside the door of the precinct talking to a young black lady…and heard him tell her to go in there and vote, to use any name, and that no one was going to say anything” (p. 7-8).  Von Spakovsky’s third piece of evidence comes from a 2007 city council run-off election in Hoboken, New Jersey, where a homeless man living in a shelter said he was paid $10 to vote for a specific person.  No vote was actually cast because an alert election challenger suspected something fishy was afoot and physically chased the man away, calling the police who apprehended him.  Hoboken has non-partisan local elections, but the shenanigans appear to have been the product of yet another factional dispute within a local Democratic Party organization.

This is hardly evidence upon which one can erect a persuasive claim of widespread if undetectable fraud.

Fear-mongering
Von Spakovsky’s re-telling of a story about political corruption among Brooklyn Democrats of yore is peppered with references to “widespread impersonation fraud” and “a vote-fraud conspiracy that had been successfully carried out without detection for 14 years,” in which “thousands of fraudulent votes went undetected for 14 years.”  In fact, while egregious, the Brooklyn grand jury did not find that the corruption unveiled by the investigation was widespread in the way von Spakovsky implies. Their report states that the corruption was committed by “ a group of individuals…in a limited geographic area of Kings County from 1968 to 1982” (emphasis added, see p. 1-2).

No matter.  Propaganda does not hew close to the facts.  It seeks to manipulate emotion by selectively filtering and framing those facts.  It draws on myth and symbols where facts are inconvenient.  Even old Boss Tweed as a precursor to Ike Brown gets a mention in von Spakovsky’s memo.  And although “illegal aliens” never made an appearance in the Brooklyn saga, von Spakovsky throws them in as a looming threat to free elections.  He implies they are somehow eager to vote and asserts that this nefarious conduct can be thwarted with government-issued ID (“…requiring a government-issued photo ID can prevent illegal aliens from voting,” p. 8).

Repetition
Having carefully framed a story of petty political corruption from long ago as a cautionary tale of great relevance for our democracy today – and drawn the wrong conclusions – von Spakovsky distracts the reader from the big problems with his argument by repetitively asserting a link between his vastly exaggerated characterization of the problem of voter fraud and his preferred solution, restrictive voter photo ID requirements.

For example, on the first page of his Heritage Foundation memo, he lists “Talking Points,” one of which says, “Voter-ID requirements directly target in-person voting fraud.  An ID requirement would have defeated all the fraudulent practices employed by the New York vote-fraud conspiracy,” which isn’t true.

Referring to litigation that enjoined Ohio from implementing certain restrictions on voter registration drives (Project Vote v. Blackwell), he states, “Even if the court rulings were legally correct (a questionable conclusion), that is all the more reasons for a state to correct for potential fraud by requiring some form of reasonable voter ID at the polls,” (p. 7) as if states currently have no protections against potential fraud.

Two paragraphs later, von Spakovsky sums up the Brooklyn case:  “…the investigation provides good reason to believe that this 14-year-long conspiracy to submit thousands (if not tens of thousands) of fraudulent votes in New York City could not have occurred if voters had been required to present photo identification when they voted,” (p. 7) a claim that is simply unsupported by the case he presents.

Finally, on the last page of his memo, von Spakovsky makes this false claim: “In states without identification requirements, election officials have no way to prevent bogus votes from being cast by unscrupulous individuals based on fictitious voter registrations, by impersonators, or by non-citizens who are registered to vote – another growing problem.”  For the statement to be true, states that do not require ID documents also would have no rules and checks in place to guard against fraudulent registrations, not the case in any state.

Conclusion
In the age of the Internet, the expanding use of propaganda techniques in American politics is one of the most important, if overlooked, developments of the early 21 st century.  Hans von Spakovsky’s repeated reference to an obscure 27-year old Brooklyn grand jury report as the best evidence of the contemporary scourge of voter impersonation fraud is a kind of fraud itself.  Instead of evidence of fraud, he gives us evidence of the propaganda being used to distort the truth about fraud.  As good as it is, however, the propaganda about voter fraud can’t conceal everything.  The lack of concern among voter ID proponents like von Spakovsky for the likely ill effects of these new laws on the electoral participation of vulnerable citizens lacking the requisite ID  makes the ugly politics of the ongoing voter ID campaign all the more apparent.

Rutgers University professor Lorraine Minnite is the author of The Myth of Voter Fraud.

Voter ID laws are just one of  40 Ways to Disenfranchise or Suppress Voters

© 2011 Lorraine Minnite

Amazon.com Usurps Process of Direct Democracy to Perpetuate Corporate Subsidy

by

By Orson Aguilar and Michelle Romero
First Published by the San Francisco Chronicle, July 28, 2011

Editor’s Note: Amazon Corporation is the latest corporation to usurp direct democracy to serve its ends. In its quest to continue its tax evasion scheme, Amazon will be fighting against Walmart Corporation, perhaps the most frequent abuser of the process. For those interested in learning more about corporations and the ballot process, this battle will provoke us to update this recently-dormant page, which offers many background resources. For more on why exempting internet corporations from the tax-collection responsibilities storefront businesses must follow, we suggest this Business Week article from our allies at the American Independent Business Alliance.

Amazon.com, the giant Internet retailer, has decided to put an initiative on California’s ballot to try to evade having to pay the same sales taxes that other retailers pay. As the system stands, Amazon’s chance of getting its self-interested proposal on the ballot is essentially 100 percent.

Something is very wrong with this picture.

Amazon, the Internet giant that began as a bookseller and branched out into other retail, has local merchants up against a wall in part because until now it has been able to avoid collecting sales tax on purchases. That gives it an 8 percent or more price advantage over local stores. So the Legislature, faced with an ongoing budget catastrophe that has forced cuts to schools, universities, parks, care for the elderly and other vital government functions, sensibly acted to close this loophole. Now Amazon plans to buy its way onto the ballot to repeal this reasonable action.

This is just the latest example of how our ballot initiative system – designed by reformers a century ago to reduce corporate influence on state government by giving ordinary citizens the ability to make laws – has been turned upside down.

In the past year or so, we have seen oil companies try to strangle our clean energy law, insurance companies seek to evade state rate regulations, a major utility company try to block local governments from establishing public power systems, and a variety of corporate interests push to make it harder to raise taxes or fees on big companies. That said, Californians rightly value their ability to go to the ballot with their own ideas for new laws. The process can have great benefits, but it’s time to figure out how to put citizens, not special interests, back in charge of “citizen democracy.”

Right now, the system is hopelessly skewed toward moneyed interests. Because of the vast number of signatures required and the short time in which they must be gathered, most initiatives qualify largely or entirely through the use of paid signature gatherers. If you have a couple of million bucks to pay petitioners, you can get a proposal onto California’s ballot. It’s as simple as that.

This isn’t what Gov. Hiram Johnson and his fellow reformers intended when they created the initiative system. That’s why the Greenlining Institute and other organizations have begun to return the system to the ideal of citizen democracy.

Our polling and research suggest several potential reforms. Voters consistently want more reliable information on who supports and opposes initiatives. There is also interest in a formal process for reviewing and revising proposed initiatives, through either an independent citizens’ commission or perhaps the state Supreme Court. And we need to find ways to make the system accessible to true grassroots initiatives, perhaps by lowering the signature count required.

We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re convinced the system can be fixed.

Orson Aguilar is executive director and Michelle Romero is redistricting fellow of the Greenlining Institute.

© 2011 SF Chronicle

Campaigns

by

Revoking Corporate “Free Speech”

One of the core beliefs of Reclaim Democracy is that our Constitution’s Bill of Rights exists to protect the rights of living human beings and their voluntary associations exclusively. Yet since the late 1800s, federal judges have ignored the fact that corporations go unmentioned in our Constitution, and created a broad array of “corporate constitutional rights. Their arguments claim that corporations are legal “persons,” entitled to the protections of our Bill of Rights.

A decade before Citizens United v FEC launched the issue to the forefront, we established the web’s most comprehensive resource on corporate personhood to both explain, and lead to reversing, the process by which corporations seized the legal rights of human beings. This long-term struggle is a foundation of our work, and through Move To Amend, a national coalition of groups working toward this end.

In 2003, we used the Supreme Court case of Nike v. Kasky to challenge corporate “free speech” privileges and engage a national audience in rethinking such ill-gotten privileges. Now we’re building a campaign to erode and, ultimately, revoke the Supreme Court-created “right” of corporations to influence (and even run their own) ballot initiatives that dates to 1978’s First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti ruling.

We are using high-profile battles to broaden awareness of this outrageous usurpation of citizens’ power and build toward the long term goal of reversing Bellotti. Our campaign plans and many background materials are posted here. Our proposed constitutional amendments address this and other long-term goals.

Establish a Citizens’ Debate Commission

The nationally televised presidential debates are the single most influential forum for most Americans to inform their views on presidential candidates, and offer a rare opportunity to hear candidates’ ideas unedited and in context. To our national disgrace, these debates have been controlled since 1988 by a front group of the Democratic and Republican parties that lacks any public accountability — the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD).

During the 2000 election cycle, we had considerable success in raising public awareness of the illegitimacy of the CPD. That campaign led us to the necessary work of displacing the CPD with real debates that will serve democracy. In 2004, ReclaimDemocracy.org catalyzed and co-founded the Citizens’ Debate Commission (CDC), now supported by dozens of civic organizations from all over the political spectrum. Our ultimate goal of replacing the CPD with genuinely democratic debates will take some years to accomplish, but even in the first year the CDC helped force important changes that have moved the events from the sound-bite battles of recent years to more substantive debate.

See Presidential Debates Should Serve Citizens and Democracy, Not Political Parties for an overview and links to our research, writing and outside resources on the issue.

Critical Thinking Curriculum Project

ReclaimDemocracy.org has raised awareness of commercialism and corporate propaganda encroaching into every pocket of daily life. In addition to our articles, primers, and presentations, we seek to bring such awareness in classrooms — to tomorrow’s citizens. Our Critical Thinking Curriculum (no new materials currently being produced until we find a new volunteer or obtain funding for staff time) helps teachers nurture critical thinking skills in students of all ages, beginning with media literacy.

By helping our kids to learn how to determine the source of the messages they receive through a variety of media, they become savvy media users. They learn to challenge ideas presented to them through news stories, advertisements, textbooks and more.

See Branded: Corporations in Our Schools for one example of why this project is needed.

Breaking New Perspectives into the Mass Media

Our ongoing efforts to bring our message to the masses have resulted in op-eds by ReclaimDemocracy.org staff appearing in the nation’s most prominent newspapers — papers like the Washington Post, Newsday, The Chicago Tribune, La Opinion (the nation’s largest Spanish language paper) and dozens more. We continue our success in reaching our target audience through insightful writing that gets to the democratic root of the issues making headlines. Our outreach also consistently involves talk radio and occasionally televised talk shows.

Examples include: forewarning the public of the corporate agenda for commercializing public lands; re-framing the debate on campaign finance and other electoral reforms; and calling for true accountability for corporate crime and criminals.We invite you to contact us regarding adapting these articles and others for use in your local or regional media outlets

Volunteer opportunities: We always seek to work with skilled writers and researchers interested in reaching a broad audience.

Past/Ongoing Accomplishments

As Citizens United v FEC made its way to the Supreme Court, Reclaim Democracy principals teamed up with representatives of many other pro-democracy organizations to lay plans for exploiting the opportunity, win our lose, to launch corporate personhood into public awareness.

The result was Move To Amend, a nationwide coalition of grassroots organizations working toward the common goal of amending the Constitution to make clear the Constitutional rights are for living beings and that spending money to influence elections is subject to limitations needed to allow all citizens’ voices to be heard.

Before Reclaim Democracy.org was staffed, our director launched a first-of-kind model in Colorado, the Boulder Independent Business Alliance. BIBA helped locally owned, independently operated businesses to succeed, ensure continued opportunities for entrepreneurs, and strove to reverse the trend of losing such businesses to national chains.

We subsequently helped spread the successful model until, much like the Citizens’ Debate Commission, we teamed with others to help spawn the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA) to fill a role that merited a singularly-focused organization. AMIBA has since helped seed more than eighty more local alliances and maintains a vital communication network among these community-level efforts, while working to enhance national consciousness of the importance of community-based businesses.

Notably, AMIBA also is the leading grassroots business organization making clear that enshrining corporations with human rights is anti-business and anti-market. See AMIBA.net

 

Reports and Economic Impact Studies on Wal-Mart and Big Box Development

by

Since other organizations now dedicate extensive time to reviewing and collecting studies on big box development and related topics, we are no longer adding to this archive. Three excellent libraries are noted and linked at: Independent Business, Chain and “Big Box” Retail Studies.

Nov 2011 –  Food for Thought (report on projected impact on Harlem’s grocers by Borough President’s office)

April 2011 – Does Local Firm Ownership Matter? (Economic Development Quarterly). Communities with many small, locally owned businesses saw greater income growth, while absentee-owned businesses had negative impact.

Apr 2011 –  Big Box Retail and Living Wage Policies (U. Cal. Berkeley Ctr. for Labor Research and Education)

Jan 2011 –  Wal-Mart’s Economic Footprint. A literature review asembled by the Center for Community Planning and Development at Hunter College (NY)

Jan 2011 –  Superstores: How to Analyze Their Impact on Your Town is a toolkit sold by Rodino Associates

Feb 2010 –  Dominant Retailers Incentives for Product Quality (pdf) (multi-university study)

Dec 2009 –  The Impact of an Urban Wal-Mart Store on Area Businesses – by Center for Urban Research and Learning at Loyola University Chicago

June 2008 –  Save Money, Live Better: a report on Walmart’s state tax avoidance schemes. Published by Walmart Watch.

June 2008 – Has Wal-Mart Buried Mom and Pop? Study by Andrea Dean and Russell Sobel of W. Virginia U.

Dec 2007 – A Downward Push: The Impact of Wal-Mart Stores on Retail Wages and Benefits A study from U. Cal. Berkeley Labor Center (10 pp pdf)

Dec 2006 – Wal-Mart and Social Capital. Produced by the American Agricultural Economics Association (8 pp pdf).

June 2006 – Study by Economic Policy Institute Says Wal-Mart’s Claimed Savings for Customers are Greatly Exaggerated (link is to text summary).

May 2006 – Wal-Mart and Crime. A report on local impacts of stores by the anti-Wal-Mart group WakeUp Wal-Mart (29 pp pdf).

Sept 2005 – What Do We Know About Wal-Mart? Compiles latest data on the corporation’s pay, benefits and compliance with laws, and compares to other retailers. New York data highlighted. (Brennan Center for Justice, 12 pp pdf).

Sept 2005 – Wal-Mart and the Waltons: Self-Interested Philanthropy (Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, pdf).

June 2005 – NBC’s Dateline investigated conditions in overseas factories that supply Wal-Mart and other retailers in this report (transcript and video clips available).

Nov 2004 – PBS’ Frontline produced the documentary “Is Wal-Mart Good for America?” and many informative articles to accompany it.

Oct 2004 – Wal-Mart and County-Wide Poverty (16 pp. pdf) is a study produced by Penn State U.

Aug 2004 – The Hidden Cost of Wal-Mart Jobs (16 pp. pdf). This study from the U. of California, Berkeley, Labor Center adds up costs to taxpayers that result from Wal-Mart employees needing various forms of welfare. Note that the Center is unabashedly pro-union. See also this Response to Criticisms by Wal-Mart and media coverage of the report.

Jan 2004 – Supercenters and the Transformation of the Bay Area Grocery Industry: Issues, Trends, and Impacts. This study (108 pp. pdf) by the Bay Area Economic Forum has the most thorough data we’ve seen on wages, prices, and numerous other issues. Though the analysis is regional, most data is national.

Jan 2004 – “Wal-Mart Supercenters, What’s in Store for Southern California?” (45 pp. pdf) Released only with the client’s (Wal-Mart) input and approval, this uniquely rosy report is suspect due to some glaring holes, such as ignoring employee benefits in its economic calculations.

July 2001 – A PBS special, “Store Wars,” explored the battle over Wal-Mart’s entry in a small town. Accompanying online resources include a teacher’s guide for helping students evaluate the issue.

Feb 1997 – The Shils Report. This huge study from Dr. Edward Shils at U. of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has a wealth of information on big box retail impacts, predatory pricing, and much more.

Web pages from the Institute for Local Self Reliance link many other useful studies on Wal-Mart and big box retail.

See our WalMart resources page and Walmart topic page or these anti-Walmart t-shirts, stickers, and more.

Please help support this work — make a tax-deductible donation to Reclaim Democracy today!

Give a Gift to Your Local Economy

by

Holiday shopping choices make a big impact on your community

By Stacy Mitchell

Whether to patronize a chain or a locally owned business is not top of mind for many holiday shoppers, but it should be. It’s a choice that has profound implications for our economy.

If you shop at an independent toy store, such as Be Beep in Annapolis, Maryland, you will likely see products made by Beka, a small toy manufacturer in St. Paul, Minnesota.

A family-owned business, Beka has opted not to sell to chains like Target and Wal-Mart. Doing so, explains co-owner Jamie Kreisman, would require moving production to low-wage factories overseas, which would eliminate what he and his brothers most love about the business: their relationships with their employees and working hands-on with their products.

Beka is healthy, but its future depends entirely on the survival of independent toy stores. Over the last decade, Wal-Mart and Target have aggressively overtaken this sector and now capture 45 percent of U.S. toy sales.

If you buy groceries for your holiday meals at an independent grocer, like Catalano’s Market in Fresno, California, you will find lots of food produced by small-scale, local farmers, such as Paul Buxman.

A second-generation grower of peaches, Buxman nearly lost his farm selling to supermarket chains, which demand cutthroat prices and truckloads of perfect-looking, though often flavorless, fruit that only industrial farms can supply.

With bankruptcy looming, Buxman dropped the chains and forged relationships with independents like Catalano’s. He works hard to give them the best fruit and they honor this by paying a fair price and accepting the natural ebb and flow of supply.

Today, Buxman’s farm is back on track. Catalano’s is doing well too, but owner Michael Catalano worries about Fresno approving still more chain supermarkets and recently a Wal-Mart. Since 1998, the top five supermarket chains, led by Wal-Mart, have doubled their market share and now capture nearly half of all grocery spending.

Patronize an independent CD store, like Waterloo Records in Austin, and you not only support a business owned by a music aficionado, but help to ensure opportunities for new artists. Many beloved bands got their start when a few store owners fell in love with their first albums and began recommending them.

That does not happen at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and other mass merchandisers, which now account for more than half of all album sales, but stock only chart-toppers and have no room for unknowns.

Chain retailers have expanded dramatically over the last two decades. Home Depot and Lowe’s, barely a blip on the radar screen in 1986, control half of the hardware and building supply market. Barnes & Noble and Borders account for half of bookstore sales. Every sector is now dominated by a couple of chains, and Wal-Mart dominates them all, capturing one of every ten retail dollars we spend.

We assume that the chains represent economic progress, but in fact they take far more out of our economy than they contribute.

As the chains have expanded, tens of thousands of independent retailers have lost their livelihoods and laid off hundreds of thousands of employees. A study by David Neumark at UC-Irvine found that every new Wal-Mart store actually eliminates many more retail jobs than it creates.

The expansion of the chains has triggered a cascade of losses in other economic sectors. Some three million U.S. manufacturing jobs have been eliminated since 1990, in part because the chains have pressured companies, including Black & Decker and Levi’s, to slash costs by moving overseas.

The chains also return very little of what their stores take in back to the communities where they operate. A study in Maine by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that only 14 cents of a dollar spent at big-box store remains in the state’s economy.

In contrast, the study found that independent retailers spend more than half their revenue locally. They bank at local banks, hire local accountants, advertise in local media, and require many other local services that chains do not. For mid-sized and smaller cities especially, this is a vital source of economic activity and jobs that pay a middle-class income.

In exchange for all the businesses and jobs they destroy, the chains offer us employment in their stores. Wages for most of these jobs are so low that many big-box employees rely on Medicaid, food stamps, and other taxpayer-funded programs to get by.

None of this looks much like progress. In fact, what the big-box model most closely resembles are the old colonial economies of the European superpowers, which were organized, not to improve the lives of the local inhabitants, but to extract their wealth.

This holiday season, we can declare our independence and begin building a more prosperous economy by forgoing the chains and seeking out locally owned businesses.

Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and author of Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses (reviewed here ). 

This article was first written for the Beacon Broadside.

© 2007 Stacy Mitchell