Intellectual Curiousity

Skimped
But the very essence of the Wal-Mart system is to employ thousands upon thousands of workers through contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, who are compelled by Wal-Mart’s market power and its demand for low prices to cut corners and skimp on safety. And because Wal-Mart isn’t the employer of record for these workers, the company can disavow responsibility for their conditions of work.

This system isn’t reserved just for workers in faraway lands: Tens of thousands of American workers labor under similar arrangements. Many are employed at little more than the minimum wage in the massive warehouses in the inland exurbs of Los Angeles, where Wal-Mart’s imports from Asia are trucked from the city’s harbor to be sorted and packaged and put on the trucks and trains that take them to Wal-Mart stores for a thousand miles around. (Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, 11/27/2012)

No one has to work for Wal Mart. No company has to do business with Wal Mart. No one has to shop at Wal Mart. And yet, notwithstanding the horrendous atrocities that Wal Mart purportedly commits on a daily basis, millions work, do business with and shop there. Progressives like Meyerson who demonize Wal Mart have never been to a Wal Mart and seen the masses of poor people who are saving money or the multitude of people who are gratefully working there. 


Clouds Got In The Way
President Obama came to the defense of Susan E. Rice, his embattled ambassador to the United Nations, on Wednesday even as she came under fire from another Republican senator and saw her prospects for becoming secretary of state further clouded. (NYT, 11/28/2012)

There is growing speculation in conservative circles that Obama is using this situation to damage Republicans. How? By supporting Rice in the face of Republican opposition, he actually combines and continues two key elements of his re-election campaign: the "Republican War on Women" and the "Republicans are racist" libel. The perpetual campaign indeed.