Cross-posted from
Free Exchange on Campus.
Give credit where credit is due. After urging the President to re-authorize the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott recently sent a letter to Congress stating “Wal-Mart is the largest private employer of African-Americans and Hispanics and we, therefore, have a particular interest in this issue[…]. [W]e believe it is important to move forward expeditiously and enact the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.”
But while Wal-Mart may show a commitment democracy in this respect, the world’s larges retailer fails to demonstrate what their CEO calls a “sensitivity to the social needs of all Americans” Most recently, Wal-Mart opposed real democracy in action when the (democratically-elected) Chicago City Council
passed a “big box initiative,” which will “require big-box retailers [such as Wal-Mart] to pay a ‘living wage ’” by 2010. Citizens are demanding real choices within their community, not just “paper or plastic.” Wal-Mart
keeps claiming they just can’t afford to pay their workers these wages.
But Wal-Mart isn’t the only one
talking about “democracy” and helping out minorities and the less-fortunate and then
walking away when it comes to real investment. The Bush administration and this Congress are always talking up higher education and how important it is to “
get the most out of our national investment in higher education.” And yet now we find out that, Congress is devising a plan to gut federal funding for vital “programs like Gear Up, Perkins Loans and Upward Bound, one of the TRIO programs for low-income students.”
This latest assault on higher education comes from a few conservative Republicans in Congress who are
proposing legislation that would create what are called “sunset commissions.” These commissions “would recommend, and in some cases decide, which federal programs deserve to live or die.” While reigning in federal spending may sound like practical idea, the proposed sunset commissions are fundamentally flawed. In fact, the harshest of the pieces of legislation, “Abolishment of Obsolete Agencies and Federal Sunset Act of 2005 (H.R. 3282),” “call[s] for the elimination of every federal program every 12 years unless Congress went out of its way to formally renew the program. In other words, these secret councils would “duplicate” the job of Congress, only they would be unaccountable and would hand over even more power to the executive branch of government.
So essentially what we have here are two more examples of the Right talking up positive values (democracy, fiscal responsibility), when in reality they are attempting to pull the rug out from under the feet of ordinary Americans. But given the Right’s propensity for lying about their promotion of “
academic freedom,” this doublespeak should be expected.