Let's begin with the massive protests planned for today.
Peter Dreier has details:
Walmart won't pay its employees enough to afford Thanksgiving dinner, so they're holding food drives for their employees. Seriously. It's been reported that an Oklahoma City Walmart set up bins for underpaid associates to donate canned goods to other underpaid associates.
Walmart workers have a better idea: Pay us enough to put food on the table.
On Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, tens of millions of Americans will travel to Walmart stores to look for holiday discounts on computers, toys and cellphones as well as to buy groceries and basic household items. But at more than 1,600 of Walmart's 4,000 stores, shoppers will be greeted by Walmart employees handing out leaflets and holding picket signs -- "Walmart: Stop Bullying, Stop Firing, Start Paying" and "We're Drawing a Line at the Poverty Line: $25,000/year" -- protesting the company's abusive labor practices, including poverty-level wages, stingy benefits, and irregular work schedules that make it impossible for their families to make ends meet.
Sarah Jaffe at The Week:
Thanksgiving has a particular emotional resonance for people that has helped workers in their fight. A secular holiday wrapped up in notions of American history and identity, it is a day that many people feel strongly should be spent amongst family at home.
But the reality for many low-wage retail workers is that paid holidays of any kind (or even time-and-a-half pay on holidays) are a distant dream. The United States, as Rebecca Ray, Milla Sanes, and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research detail in their report "No Vacation Nation Revisited," is the only major industrialized nation that does not guarantee paid vacation. "The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of the world is even larger," they note, "if we include legally mandated paid holidays, where the United States offers none, but most of the rest of the world's rich countries offer at least six paid holidays per year."
This means that 23 percent of Americans have no paid holidays — and most of them are low-wage or part-time workers. Workers like the ones at Kmart, Walmart, Whole Foods and Starbucks.
Much more on the day's top stories below the fold.
Josh Harkinson on how Walmart profits from corporate welfare:
I have to depend on the government mostly," says Fatmata Jabbie, a 21-year-old single mother of two who earns $8.40 an hour working at a Walmart in Alexandria, Virginia. She makes ends meet with food stamps, subsidized housing, and Medicaid. "Walmart should pay us $15 an hour and let us work full-time hours," she says. "That would change our lives. That would change our whole path. I wouldn't be dependent on government too much. I could buy clothes for my kids to wear."
The nation's largest employer, Walmart employs 1.4 million people, or 10 percent of all retail workers, and pulls in $16 billion in annual profits. Its largest stockholders—Christy, Jim, Alice, and S. Robson Walton—are the nation's wealthiest family, collectively worth $145 billion. Yet the company is notorious for paying poverty wages and using part-time schedules to avoid offering workers benefits. Last year, a report commissioned by Congressional Democrats found that each Walmart store costs taxpayers between 900,000 and $1.75 million per year because so many employees are forced to turn to government aid.
Here's a great letter to the editor in the The St. Louis-Post Dispatch
in favor of a minimum wage increase:
Currently, our country is dealing with the devastating blows of extremely disproportionate wealth distribution. Such distribution creates startling inequality and prohibits many from having economic security. Raising the minimum wage puts more money into working people’s pockets and in turn stimulates the economy. [...]
Research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that while worker productivity has steadily increased since 1968, minimum wage rates have consistently witnessed a downward trend. It is time for workers' pay to reflect the value of their work. We can no longer stand for an economy where many of its hard-working people live in poverty. As the debate continues for increasing the federal minimum wage, I encourage Missouri to join the fight for worker rights.
Jill Woodward writes about #GivingTuesday:
The concept for this day of global giving, a call-to-action for generous spirits everywhere, was launched by New York’s 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation in 2012.
It’s also part backlash and antidote to the unbridled mad dash of consumerism bracketed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Who really needs all that stuff? [...] And while many people plan their personal giving in December, as the end of the fiscal year approaches, there is tremendous value to assigning a particular day to giving back. Past #GivingTuesdays have created ever-higher levels of support for worthy causes, resulting in many new donors joining the fold. Growing a donor base is a struggle for every nonprofit and this gives them a tool for highlighting the good work they do.
It’s not so much the size of the gift, although big ones are much appreciated.
If everyone pitches in a little on #GivingTuesday, the results will have a ripple effect across our community.
Louis René Beres:
Although welcomed warmly by both retailers and Wall Street, Black Friday stands for much more than a singular annual opportunity to make money and improve the overall economy. Ironically, it also represents a tangible expression of what is very deeply wrong with this country; in essence, it is an embarrassingly recurring symptom of America's most widely overlooked pathology. This underlying "disease," moreover, while essentially unhidden, and cheerfully conspicuous, remains substantially unacknowledged.
What, exactly, is this neglected disease? More than anything else, it is a ritually cultivated deformation of the national spirit, a continually manufactured delusion that pleasure derives from "stuff," and, as corollary, that every holiday-based accumulation of shiny gadgets offers a path to personal happiness.
On Black Friday, with its additional benefit of bargain prices, all Americans are feverishly reminded of something else. This is their country's most thoroughly revealing Thanksgiving mantra; "You are what you buy."
Switching topics, head on over and read
Joe Enriquez Henry's piece on immigration:
President Obama's executive order to grant legal status to approximately 5 million undocumented immigrants was a step in the right direction, one for which we are extremely grateful.
Children can now go to school without fear their parents will be deported, and parents can go to work without the worry of being torn apart from their family. Young people will have the chance to work legally and contribute to our nation, the only one they have known as their home.
But the work is not finished. President Obama's action allows those to stay in the country temporarily who have been in the United States for more than five years, or are parents with children born in the United States, or have children who are U.S. citizens, and are willing to register, pass a criminal background check and agree to pay taxes to apply to remain in the U.S.
There are still another estimated 6 million to 7 million undocumented immigrants who will not fall under the president's order.
On a final note, make sure to read
Bailey Miller's piece about the failure to hold Wall Street accountable:
The biggest banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup—have all recently paid multibillion-dollar fines stemming from the mortgage fraud perpetrated in the lead-up to and fallout from the crisis, but no top executives have gone to jail. Moreover, those companies copped to civil charges, but have not faced criminal prosecution. This marks a sharp departure from past banking scandals, such as the savings and loan crisis, where more than 1,000 bankers were convicted by the Justice Department through the late 1980s and early 1990s.
What’s changed in the past three decades? One clue might be the contents of a memo written by Holder in 1999, during his stint as deputy U.S. attorney general. The document, “Bringing Criminal Charges Against Corporations,” urged prosecutors to take into account “collateral consequences” when pursuing cases against companies, lest they topple and take the economy down with them. Holder also raised the possibility of deferring prosecution against corporations in an effort to spur greater cooperation and reforms—a policy, unsurprisingly, later supported by the Bush administration.