Wal-Mart is able to sell products manufactured at sweat shops in China at incredibly low prices, because it treats its employees only marginally better than the sweat shop bosses treat their slaves.

Wal-Mart has a history of vigorously opposing any attempts by its employees to form unions. The giant retailer considers unions anathema, because they don’t want to pay their employees a living wage or offer them a decent health care package.

I wasn’t surprised to read an article in The Wall Street Journal that accused the discounter of holding mandatory meetings with store managers and department supervisors to warn that if Obama wins the general election, Wal-Mart will be pressured to unionize its stores.

“Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, denied a report Friday that it had pressured employees to vote against Democrats in November because of worries that a bill the party supports would make it easier for workers to unionize.

The measure, called the Employee Free Choice Act, would allow labor organizations to unionize workplaces without secret ballot elections. It was co-sponsored by Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate, and opposed by John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.” — Quotation from MLive.Com

Whether this report is true or not, no consumer who believes in human rights should patronize Wal-Mart. I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart years ago; I may pay a few more bucks for a DVD player, but I sleep with a clear conscience.

Wal-Mart not only is a blatant union-buster, but it also bankrupts small businesses when it opens one of its huge stores. Support your local businesses by eschewing Wal-Mart and patronizing the small businesses operated by your friends and neighbors.

It’s imperative that we elect Barack Obama to the White House, it’s high time that the hardworking Wal-Mart employees enjoy the benefits of belonging to a union.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Writes: BOB HERBERT

Race is like pornography in the United States — the dirty stories and dirty pictures that everyone professes to hate but no one can resist. But I suspect that even porn addicts get their fill sometimes.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

Most of the electorate understands that the U.S. is in sorry shape, which is why more than 80 percent of poll respondents say we’re on the wrong track. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has nothing to do with any of that. The idea that his nonsense may shape the outcome of this election is both tragic and absurd…[more]

REFERENCES:

Editorial Reviews: Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

From Publishers Weekly: In this provocative, scattershot jeremiad, cultural historian Berman (The Twilight of American Culture) likens America to ancient Rome on the brink. On the geopolitical plane, he contends, the United States is a belligerent, overstretched empire, saddled with huge deficits and a hollowed-out economy, vulnerable to terrorist blowback and, worse, collapse if foreign creditors finally pull the plug.

The rot is cultural and spiritual, too: Americans are cold, alienated shopaholics immured in suburban anomie, each encased in a private bubble of iTunes and media noise and indifferent to the public good. Culprits include globalization, technology and, more fundamentally, the individualism and commercialism that is the bedrock of American identity. Because American civilization is a “package deal,” the author considers it impervious to piecemeal reform and, given Americans’ ingrained “stupidity” and willful blindness, unsalvageable.

Berman’s attempts to tie every American dysfunction to an all-encompassing sickness of soul overreaches, leading him to lump together serious issues like poverty and the Abu Ghraib outrages with trivialities like annoying cell phone yakkers or the “freedom fries” phenomenon, which he bemoans as “symbolic of an emptiness at the core.” Often stimulating and insightful in its particulars, his indictment, like the jingoism it abhors, is too sweeping and essentialist to fully capture American reality.

From Booklist: A despairing analyst of contemporary America, Berman continues criticism begun in The Twilight of American Culture (2000). One character crystallizing Berman’s thoughts is President George W. Bush, under whom, according to Berman, the U.S. is incipiently, if not actually, suffering a “presidential dictatorship,” a “de facto Christian theocratic plutocracy.” In that vein, Berman undertakes a wide-ranging condemnation of American economic and foreign policy of the past 50 years, which he believes has propelled America into disastrous decline.

That Berman inveighs against free markets and thinks the cold war was partly a dynamic of the Soviet Union acting defensively infuses this work with a solidly leftist viewpoint. In Berman’s vigorous arrangement of evidence, current events are propelling us upon an irreversibly downward trajectory toward a societal situation resembling the Dark Ages. However, Berman offers no positive ideas to reverse this perceived free fall, making his tome more of an alarm than a solution.– Gilbert Taylor

More Reviews

Popularity: 29% [?]

In a shameless bid to appeal (pander) to the “Working Class” of Indiana, Hillary Clinton made a fool of herself in a Convenience Store/Gas Station, yesterday in South Bend, Indiana.

‘Hillrod’ the “Sniper Dodging Six Shooting Working Class” girl could not figure out how to operate a Coffee Machine. She fumbled and probably mumbled multiple curses to herself. See video below.

How stupid does this woman think ordinary people are?

With 109 million dollars in the bank, she probably has never been near a convenience store vending machine in years — and it is very evident here.

How stupendous a hypocrite does one have to be?

How low does this twisted soul have to stoop, to win an election?

I wonder whether she realizes how “out of touch” she is!……Narcissist!!!

Hillary is of “old politics,”….where the bigger the lie the “more electable” a candidate becomes….so to speak!

America’s political system (which was designed by hypocrites a.k.a “The Founding Fathers”) is nothing but a “class game,” which gives rich people control and the rest a.k a. “The Working Class”…….. the shaft.

…and Hillary knows that…..the full spectrum of PoliTRICKS!

The “grand bitch” of Arkansas is in FULL Kamikaze mode!

Note on the “Founding Fathers”:

They declared: “All men are created equal” while at that very moment, I am sure each one of them had hundreds of human beings chained in their back yards and cotton fields, working as slaves?

RELATED:

1. Clinton visits South Bend gas station

2. Sen. Obama addresses supporters at Indiana University, in Bloomington, IN

Popularity: 29% [?]

After “Super-Tuesday’s” primaries and caucuses, the belligerent, anti-immigrant far-right fringe of the Republican is in “extreme” desperation. Read the full story

Popularity: 34% [?]