Face-Palm or Giggles: Seven Pieces of Debris for a Saturday

Fluffing himself up. Why would Phil Berger spend that kind of money on that kind of TV ad unless he was planning to rough up Thom Tillis in a Republican senatorial primary? Inquiring minds want to know.

"DHHS is an example of cronyism gone wild." The NC state agency named for "Health & Human Services" may soon be changing its name to "High and Unjustified Salaries." A couple of weeks ago, the issue was 20-somethings who used to work for McCrory's campaign getting jobs in DHHS in the $80 thousand range. Now it's the 20-somethings who make over $80,000 defending a crony of the husband of the department's head making over $220,000 for eight months of "consultation."

Tip of the iceberg? Those high salaries being paid cronies of the ruling elite at DHHS don't even account for other sweetheart contracts being issued there, for example, to washed-up politicos like Les Merritt, whose name seems remarkably apt in this context.

When You're In a Bubble, Everyone Looks Like a Bubble-Popper. The Guv is still being followed everywhere by protesters who don't like his policies and are beginning to really detest him personally, and under those circumstances it was bound to happen that a news reporter would get kicked off the premises where The Guv was grippin' and grinnin' at a private function designed to fluff his image.

The Guv's Flack Uses a Fake Name. No Kidding. According to Greg Flynn, "With all the fuss by Pat McCrory about Voter ID you'd think that matching real names to real people was a major priority of his, yet Kim Genardo is not the real name of his Communications Director. It's a stage name based on her mother's maiden name. It's not the name she is registered to vote under. It's not the name she uses to register her vehicle or pay her property taxes. It's not the name on her government paycheck. Now, I understand why TV personalities use stage names for privacy, but shouldn't the Communications Director for the Governor of NC use a real name?" Stuff like this helps account for the uncontrollable giggles I'm prone to this week.

In Your Face, Non-Profit-Dissing Watauga County Commissioners!

"Always Low Wages, Always." We won't be satisfied until every Walmart in the country has a flash mob like this one in Raleigh.

Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price

Don't you just love the smell of corruption in the morning?

A months-long investigation has revealed that Walmart has systematically used bribes to get what it wants in Mexico. Here's a key paragraph:

The Times’s examination reveals that Wal-Mart de Mexico was not the reluctant victim of a corrupt culture that insisted on bribes as the cost of doing business. Nor did it pay bribes merely to speed up routine approvals. Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance — public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.

When the Bentonville big-wigs of the corporation back in Arkansas found out what was happening in their Mexican subsidiary, they opened an internal investigation. When the investigation revealed the truth, the Bentonville big-wigs shut down the investigation and covered it up.

Sam Walton, With the Skin of Flint

Hat-tip: C.D. Our thanks for this piece of memory about the founder of Wal-Mart, via BoingBoing:

Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million -- a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.

Walton was furious. The mechanization of agriculture had finally reached the backwaters of the Ozark Plateau, where he was opening one store after another. The men and women who had formerly worked on small farms suddenly found themselves redundant, and he could scoop them up for a song, as little as 50 cents an hour. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues did not exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure.

Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.

Wal-Mart, Dark Over-Lords of the Universe

Hat-tip: Chris Kromm and the Institute for Southern Studies:

Rank of Wal-Mart among the largest private employers in the U.S.: 1

Rank of Wal-Mart among the world's largest retailers: 1 [source: same as above]

Profit made by Wal-Mart last year alone: $13 billion

Amount Wal-Mart earns in profit every minute: $34,880

Accumulated wealth of the Walton family that owns Wal-Mart: $158.4 billion

Rank of the Waltons among the world's richest families: 1 [source: ibid.]

Number of U.S. residents who visit Wal-Mart each week: 150 million [source: ibid.]

Number of workers Wal-Mart employs in the U.S.: 1.4 million [source: ibid.]

Percent of Wal-Mart's U.S. employees who do not have health insurance coverage through the company: 52

Average percentage of employees at large U.S. companies who are covered by company health insurance plans: 65 [source: ibid.]

Percent of Costco's employees who receive health insurance through the company: 85

Percent of their income average full-time Wal-Mart employees pay for the company's least expensive insurance plan: 20 [source: ibid.]

As of 2005, percent of Wal-Mart employees who got assistance from Medicaid, a public insurance program for the poor: 5

National average among employers: 4 percent [source: ibid.]

As of 2005, percent of Wal-Mart workers' children who were on Medicaid: 27 [source: ibid.]

National average among employers: 22 percent [source: ibid.]

Number of petition cards being distributed by a coalition of Wal-Mart workers, community leaders and activists that say, "I think Wal-mart should stop forcing taxpayers to cover its workers' health care": 50,000

Date on which a coalition of labor, environmental and community groups launched an initiative to hold Wal-Mart accountable for how it treats workers: 9/1/2009

Wal-Mart Buys In On N.C. State Government

Wal-Mart Corp., which has heretofore been content to concentrate on national politics, warning its store managers to warn its workers that Obama is the Antichrist, has evidently decided that it needs also to buy favor among a few state legislators too, just to be on the safe side.

The company's PAC has given some $54,000 so far this election cycle to N.C. politicians. A partial list:

* Hugh Holliman, D, Lexington, $1,000
* Nelson Cole, D, Reidsville, $500
* Harold Brubaker, R, Asheboro, $250
* Jerry Tillman, R, Archdale, $1,000
* Kay Hagan, D, Greensboro, $250
* Phil Berger, R, Eden, $500
* Roy Cooper, D, attorney general candidate, $1,000
* Janey Cowell, D, state treasurer candidate, $500
* Pat McCrory, R, candidate for governor, $3,500

Wal-Mart Corp. Fears the Scary Black Man

Wal-Mart, the biggest corporation in this particular universe or in any other, has been caught threatening its store managers that if they know what’s best for them, they’d better be putting pressure on their store workers to vote against Barack Obama this fall, or else workers will be unionizing and demanding better wages and – gasp! – benefits, and then Wal-Mart will be forced to start firing people, because treating employees fairly can lead to all sorts of negative consequences and is – after all – unamerican in the extreme, which is what Barack Obama and the Democrats are – unamerican and extreme – and Wal-Mart is scared – SCARED, we said – enough to order (make that ... “suggest”) that its 400 million employees nationwide better think twice about voting Democratic this fall.

Wal-Mart may even be forced to give an even larger portion of its profits to John McCain and his running mates on the Republican Party ticket.