October/November 2003
The
Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl
Making
Sense of North Korea
Eric Sirotkin
A
Loophole So Big
Tom Engelhardt
The
Joseph Strategy
David Ehrenfeld
Thieves
in High Places
Jim Hightower
Strangely
Like War
Derrick Jensen & George Draffan
Bush's
Inferno
Pepper Trail
Their
Arms Outstretched Into The Night
Martin Prechtel
On
Slowing Down
Pride S. Wright
Living
As A Free Human Being
Alan Clements
Achieving
Balance Through Passive Movement
Kayla M. Starr, MPH
Yoga
for the Young at Heart
Susan Winter Ward
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
Thieves in High Places
By Jim Hightower
I hail from a small business family, my daddy and momma ran both a wholesale magazine operation and the Main Street News in Denison, Texas. And to paraphrase George W, I also know about small business people because “I are one,” my Saddle-Burr Productions is a small (bordering on tiny) enterprise that develops my books, radio work, newsletter, columns, speaking, and whatever other trouble I can stir up with pen and mouth.
So, in the spirit of full consumer dis-closure, I’m biased for local, independent, unique, smallish business. But there are a host of unbiased reasons for saying that we ought not let the giant chains remake our local economies. One is price. I don’t mean the price tag on the products, but the exorbitant price we pay for Wal-Mart’s “low price” model. Such companies are predators, hitting neighborhoods and towns like a neutron bomb, leaving buildings standing, but sucking out all of the economic and democratic vitality.
Wal-Mart concedes that when it comes to town, it’s out to eliminate competitors. Any store it opens can crush our local groceries, pharmacies, hardware stores, clothiers, and other retailers, not by being more efficient (and damned sure not with super service), but by slashing its prices below what it pays for the products, a tactic known as (warning: technical term approaching) “predatory pricing.”
I hear your mind whirring. With my supersensory perception, I can hear you thinking, “What’re you talking about, Hightower? Even Wal-Mart can’t sell below cost and stay in business.” No trick to it. Wal-Mart has 4,400 stores. It can lose money at the one in your area ‘til the cows come home and not hurt its company-wide bottom line one bit. But your local stores don’t have a global network of stores to subsidize them, so Wal-Mart can just sit on top of them with a losing hand—and still win. This isn’t competition, it’s mugging. And when it’s over, when the local competitors are bled to death, this Wal-Mart store’s prices rise. Then, the dollars you spend there are used to subsidize another mugging down the road.
I’m hearing you again. You’re saying, “Give me a for-instance on this predatory pricing thing, or I won’t believe that those nice friendly country people from Arkansas would do such a thing.” Right you are. Check out Wal-Mart’s gas pumps, now in the parking lots of 700 of its stores and soon to spring up like dandelions all across Wal-Martland—assuming its lobbyists can change the laws.
The company is selling gasoline at prices below what it pays to get it into the pumps … whoever’s selling the gas down the road can’t do that they don’t have the deep pockets to match a losing price.
How do I know Wal-Mart is doing this? Because several states have laws against it and, rather than comply, Wal-Mart is openly trying to repeal the laws, essentially claiming a right to kill its competitors by predatory pricing. Caught selling below cost in Florida, where it’s illegal, Wal-Mart has launched a lobbying and petition drive to make it legal. Likewise in Oklahoma, Wal-Mart was caught and has run to federal court, claiming a constitutional right to kill competition.
Well, I hear you saying, at least Wal-Mart is a job creator for our communities. Sorry, no. By crushing local businesses, this giant eliminates three decent jobs for every two poorly-paid, part-time, high-turnover Wal-Mart jobettes that it creates. It’s an extractor of community wealth, not a creator. It doesn’t buy locally. It doesn’t bank locally. It doesn’t advertise locally.
In Kirksville, Missouri, a Wal-Mart SuperCenter opened a few years ago. In short order, four clothing stores, four grocery stores, a stationary store, a fabric store, and a lawn-and-garden center were gone. And with their demise, the Kirksville Daily Express has lost major ad revenue and is struggling. Townspeople now go to Wal-Mart, or have to leave town to shop.
The SuperCenter sits there on the edge of Kirksville like a demonic tombstone sucking up local money and channeling it to Bentonville, where a portion of it can be used as capital for Wal-Mart’s assault on the next Kirksville.
By dictating a new economy for low-wage workers, Wal-Mart and its corporate disciples are not merely cutting their whole-sale prices, they’re doing something far more radical and dangerous to America’s social equilibrium: They are cutting themselves loose from America’s two-century old quest for an egalitarian society. Let me put it in real-life terms: They are abandoning the notion that the middle class is essential to America.
And since Wal-Mart is by far the biggest employer and is capable of compelling so many other major corporations to take the low-wage road, the upshot of their actions is that America itself is abandoning its middle-class pretensions and possibilities. Thanks to this shift, the fastest growing class in America is the working poor. For decades, our country’s social cohesion has been grounded in a broad agreement that full-time work will afford you a middle-class slice. The Wal-Mart model breaks that agreement its own “associates” can’t afford to buy a Ford on Wal-Mart pay.
How long do they think they can hold down so many hard-working people? Already, the rebellion is simmering within the belly of the beast. The company tries to hide it, and the media rarely probes (whatever happened to the idea of the “inquiring reporter,” anyway?) but those happy little “associates” have been hauling Wal-Mart’s corpulent hulk into court constantly. It’s the most sued corporation in the country, facing more than 5,000 actions per year (almost 14 a day—for everything ranging from disability discrimination to sex discrimination to “off-the-clock” payroll fraud!), for it is an unrepentant, recidivist criminal, routinely violating practically all employee rights and all of America’s labor laws.
All of this from a corporation banking $250 billion a year and sending a steady torrent of cash into the coffers of “Simple Sam” Walton’s five heirs, who already are billionaires.
No Sweat
Is sweatshop labor a necessary evil of the garment industry? If you talk to some U.S.-based analysts, you might be led to that conclusion. But close inspection of the economics paints a much different picture: a portrait of corporate greed, plain and simple. Let’s do the numbers.
It takes an efficient worker about two and a half minutes to produce a t-shirt. Dividing this rate of production into the going wage in various parts of the world, here’s the wage-cost of a t-shirt that you might buy at a Wal-Mart or Talbots or anywhere:
Asia: 1¢; Latin America: 4¢; Los Angeles sweatshop: 16¢; U.S minimum wage: 21¢.
Let’s go with the high figure of 21¢. That’s what a U.S. minimum-wage worker gets out of a t-shirt that you’ll pay somewhere between 10 and 20 bucks to buy. Working a year at minimum wage adds up to barely $10,000 gross pay poverty.
So here’s a question: What if that wage was doubled? Or even more? What if the workers were paid not 21¢ per shirt, but what the hey, let’s go crazy and throw in a whole extra quarter, paid 46¢ per shirt. This would mean the workers would be getting more than $20,000 a year! It’s not a fortune, but it gets you out of abject poverty—it’s a liveable level of pay. And that extra quarter, which would mean so much to the workers and their families, would have no impact at all on your and my clothing budget.
Thus was born: TeamX. It’s a new garment factory in Los Angeles, financed with an initial $1.2 million from the Hot Fudge venture capital fund of Ben Cohen. But this company is new in ways much more significant than its air-conditioned building and state-of-the-art equipment. It’s new in approach. Its mission statement declares: “TeamX seeks to change the lives of garment workers, both those that it directly employs, as well as the hundreds of thousands of other workers in this global industry [by creating] a sustainable model that can be replicated worldwide.”
How different is it from your run-of-the-mill garment business? It’s a union shop, organized by UNITE. It’s a co-op, owned by the workers themselves (five of the seven board seats are reserved for workers).
It pays a living wage, starting at $8.50 an hour, plus good health care, a pension, profit-sharing, and vacation days (“I’ve been working in clothing for 20 years, and I never had a paid holiday before this,” says Ana Acevedo, a Salvadoran immigrant and one of the founding co-op employees).
It operates on the “solidarity ratio,” which means that no executive can be paid more than eight times the pay of production workers.
There’s one way, however, in which TeamX is just like any other garment business: It’s out to make money. This is no little froufrou exercise in good works, but a profit-making enterprise that has drawn a small group of experienced managers and an exceptionally skilled and motivated workforce. TeamX cranked up its operation in March of 2002 with eight employees, a vision, a plan, and a prayer: “We aim to put the lie to the myth that it’s impossible to produce clothing at a competitive price and have a good quality of worklife,” says Cohen. “Will we succeed? All I can say is, we’ll see.”
They have. With its snappy “SweatX” brand, the company was generating a profit by the end of its first year, and it now has 55 production workers turning out a stylish, top-quality line of everything from t-shirts to fleece jackets, baseball caps to blankets, sweatshirts to fashion tops. Yes, but how can it keep up, how can it possibly compete with the morally bankrupt firms that are still using sweatshop labor? For one thing, TeamX pays its workers instead of paying celebrity endorsers (Nike is paying Tiger Woods $20 million a year for five years), for example. That’s good money that could go toward fair pay and improved conditions for its sweatshop workers. This would give Nike’s swoosh a good scrubbing, put the company in a newly-positive light with young people, create a global marketing windfall based on conscience, and eliminate any need to try hiding its corporate smarminess with costly celebrity masks. If you know anyone who knows Phil Knight, let the Nike honcho know that I’ll let him have this marketing idea for free.
In fact, it’s this “market of conscience” that TeamX is reaching out to a huge and virtually untapped market of people who’ll gladly go for any brand that can assure us, without equivocation, that it contains no sweat (not to mention blood and tears), even if the no-sweat brand costs a few pennies more. TeamX doesn’t have to sink itself with the huge weight of TV advertising, for a substantial part of the conscience market comes conveniently organized, reachable through such established networks as churches, campuses, and groups focused on environmental, women’s, racial and other issues.
Plus, unions. Oh, I hear people moan despairingly in my travels, Unions are so weak, only 13 million or so of the American population. I look at the moaners in disbelief and say, You’re whining about that? Only 13 million? Sure it ought to be more, and more people these days are thinking union, but get real that’s a lot of folks! It’s more than most religious organizations can count as members, way more than the number of corporate executives and millionaires, and more than the supposedly “powerful number” of people tuning in today to the gaseous leaf-blower of the airwaves, Rush Limbaugh. Add in their families, neighbors, and friends, and you have truly a powerful number.
Also (here’s the savvy of TeamX marketing), union members buy and wear far more t-shirts than, say, your average country club member. Go into any union hall, peek into the storeroom and closets, and you’ll find boxes upon boxes filled with T-shirts, knit shirts, sweatshirts, and others. They put their union logos and slogans on them for rallies, organizing drives, conventions or just to wear to work or around the house. It’s a real market and it’s loving SweatX.
TeamX is only one company, but a lot of good has been done in this old world by someone standing up to the B.S. of conventional wisdom and saying: That can’t be right, there has to be a better way. As this first factory succeeds, TeamX will expand to others, including an intention to open factories abroad, in the face of global garment giants who claim they “must” treat labor abysmally in order to be competitive. Competitive with whom?
With each other, all of whom are sweatshop bastards. TeamX offers some real competition.
Don’t Be An Idiot
The greatest offense against our society these days is not any one law or a particular assault on our freedoms. Rather, it is the persistent, insidious effort by those who shape our culture to reduce the American citizenry to idiots. From corporate advertisers to political sermonizers, from boards of education to the entertainment programmers, their goal is idiocy.
By “idiots,” I’m referring to more than the constant charge that we’re all a bunch of dummies. That’s just manufactured media fluff. Far from being a nation of numbskulls, people (and especially young folks) are smarter than ever. But to what end?
The original Greek word “idiotes” referred to people who might have had a high IQ, but were so self-involved that they focused exclusively on their own life and were both ignorant of and uncaring about public concerns and the common good.
Such people were the exact opposite of the Athenian democratic ideal of an active citizenry fully involved in the civic process, with everyone accepting their respon-sibilities to each other and all of humankind. This is the ideal that Jefferson and Madison built into our own nation’s founding documents, the ideal that Lincoln embraced when he spoke of striving for a “govern-ment of the people, by the people, for the people,” the ideal that Justice Louis Brandeis was expressing when he wrote that “The most important office” in our land is “that of a private citizen.”
Be an involved citizen? Forget about it, Jake. Don’t waste your time. Get a job, keep your head down, play the lottery, don’t be different, take a pill, watch “reality tv,” buy things, play it safe, live vicariously, don’t make waves, pre-pay your funeral. Oh, and on those big questions such as economic fairness, going to war, “rebalancing” that liberty/security equation, and the shrinking of democracy itself—don’t hurt your little gray cells by focusing on them, for there’s not a lot you can do about them, we know more than you do, and don’t worry … we’ll take care of you. Go about your business be a good idiot.
The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it’s conformity. Come on, America, that’s not us! Don’t let BushCo and the Kleptocrats steal our country and trivialize We The People as being nothing more substantial than passive consumers who can even be made to cower in duct-taped “safe rooms” whenever the governing authorities shout “Code Orange!” out their windows (how pathetic is that?).
America wasn’t built by conformists, but by mutineers—we’re a big, brawling, boisterous, bucking people, and now is our time!
Our democracy is being dismantled right in front of our eyes not by crazed foreign terrorists, but by our own ruling elites. This is a crucial moment when America desperately needs you and me to stand as full citizens, asserting the bold and proud radicalism of America’s democratic ideals.
You think democracy asks a lot of us—too many meetings, too much risk of getting your name on Ashcroft’s database, too much confrontation with authority? Try walking a few miles in the shoes of Aung San Suu Kyi. Burma’s military thugs would love to kill her, and the threat of this is a constant reality in her life, but for now they know that they could not withstand the popular explosion that would follow such a murder, for she’s the symbol of the people’s suppressed democratic yearnings. Held under house arrest for seven-and-a-half years, she was officially released last year, but was hounded, harassed, monitored, and followed everywhere she went in an effort to intimidate her and Burma’s other democracy activists.
Putting The “Demos” Back In Democrat
Excuse my impertinence here, but let me take a wild flyer at something a tad different from the present Democratic strategy of collecting money from corporations and hurling it at television stations, hoping to seduce politically-fickle soccer moms. What if Democrats went to the people? No, seriously! I mean really go to the people. You know, in person.
Specifically, what if the party reached out to the 67 percent of disenchanted to disgusted folks who aren’t voting? Overwhelmingly, they’re working stiffs and the poor (often both in the same person, thanks to today’s wondrous economy a twofer). That’s 121 million people who are politically homeless. Add even 10 percent of them, and the Democrats start winning every race.
What does it
take to win over such people, Hightower? You’re going to think I’ve
gone barmy beyond belief, but I’d suggest this appeal: Self-interest.
Just as Bush’s base supporters respond warmly, even lovingly to George’s
unabashed support of their interests, so might the Great Unwanted begin to
warm to politics if Democrats began to speak their language. Here’s a
short to-do-list we could offer that would strengthen America by investing
in the workaday majority:
1) A tax cut on working stiffs: remove the cap (now at $85,000) on the grossly
regressive payroll tax, reduce the percentage bite on people making less than
that, and spread the burden up to include the billionaires’ club;
2) Healthcare for all, provided by a single-payer system;
3) Free education for everyone, preschool through higher ed, modeled after
the enormously successful GI Bill;
4) Energy independence for America through a ten-year moonshot project that’ll
put Americans to work building an oil-free future based on alternative technologies
and systems;
5) Public financing of all elections, so we can get our government back from
the greedheads; and
6) [Add your favorite here].
A six-pack is plenty. Stay focused.
Well, Hightower, I see you want to move the Democrats back to the wasteland of the left. No, the need is not to move left or right, but move out into America and get on the side of the majority of people who are alternately being ignored and stomped on by the economic and political elites of our country. As Paul Wellstone used to put it: “I’m in the democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”
And when I say “move out,” I mean literally and figuratively get out of Washington. At present, progressive groups and funders direct probably 80 percent of our energy, talent, and money toward DC, putting only 20 percent into the countryside. Yet our strength is not inside the Beltway but out here, where people are doing great things and wondering why the Democratic Party isn’t with them. Reverse that ratio and start focusing on building a grassroots organization that communicates, organizes and mobilizes across America, block by block.
Politics can’t be viewed as something that involves people only in the last thirty days of an election. Rather, to be a movement capable of governing, it has to be rooted in people’s reality right where they live. In addition to a high-tech outreach, we have to get back to a high-touch politics that physically, emotionally, and soulfully connects with people’s lives 365 days a year. Yes, talk issues. But through potluck suppers, block parties, festivals, salons, and saloons.
The group now controlling the party apparatus calls itself the Democratic Leadership Council. It’s corporate-funded, has a Republican-lite agenda, and practices political minimalism. Forget the party’s base, is the DLC’s message—instead appeal to a narrow strata of conservative-tilting Soccer Moms and Office Park Dads. The strategy is to appear not to be scruffy, working-family Democrats, but to dress up as the moderate wing of the Republican party, hoping to siphon away two or three points from the GOP’s 17 percent plurality. It’s a loser, as was forcefully demonstrated in the ‘02 elections, but it’s also a cowardly strategy that’s unworthy of a party that has been known in the past as The People’s Party.
Nothing’s more fun than winning, and winning in politics requires getting more people (not more money) than the other side gets. To get people, there has to be a long-term strategy of listening to them, appealing to them, enlisting them, and trusting them. As the fighting populist Fred Harris puts it: “You can’t have a mass movement without the masses.”
Gut It Up, Keep Fighting, or Get out of the way!
History and certainly the history of our country is the story of people struggling, always going uphill against the powerful to seek a little more democracy, a tad more justice, a slightly wider sliver of the economic pie. Striving for democracy is bone-wearying, agonizing, frustrating, cruel, bloody, and often deadly work.
Look at what we have in America, at the priceless opportunity that has been handed to you and me by those who’ve dared to make this struggle in past years. Very few people in today’s world, and very, very few in history, have even had the possibility of trying to create an egalitarian society ruled by the common good. Those who came before us risked all of their property, their reputations, their freedom, and their lives to push the boundaries of democracy for us.
Well you say: “Hightower, I’ve got a family to care for.” Of course, and that’s first. But stretch a little on what “care for” includes. Bettering their lives and yours is also about making a better America right in your own community. I’m not talking about quitting your day job and becoming a full-time Thomas Paine. But do what you can, where you can and especially reach out to others to be a part of a group—or two or three groups, or better yet a coalition of groups—so our individual efforts are multiplied as we try, bit by bit, to take our country and our ideals back from the elites who have stolen them. Plus, I can tell you from experience: It’s fun! In fact, joining with others in the ongoing, historic effort to realize the great possibility of America is just about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on.
Don’t wait on “heroes” or national leaders. Be your own hero—everyone can do something, everyone makes a contribution. Everyone who does any heavy lifting in the democratic cause is a hero. The important thing to know is that you are wanted. You are needed. You are important. You are not only what democracy counts on, you are what democracy is.
Thomas Paine saw in America something breathtaking, which he expressed as the opportunity to “start the world over again.” Paine and others got America off on the right foot, but our leaders have stumbled badly of late. That’s why we have to step in now. You and I have the chance to bring our great country back to the ideals that launched it, ideals that remain gently nestled in our hearts. Live your ideals.
Excerpted from Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back (Viking Press, August 2003) and printed here with permission. Jim Hightower, former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, is also author of If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates.
