It's not that the money is too delicious. It's that you get thousands of donations, and someone like this probably doesn't include a note with the $500 check saying, "Dear Sir, I am sending you this money because I am involved with a white supremacist group. Kindly, Earl."

In 2004, when I was an intern in the campaign's finance department, one of our main jobs was vetting donors. The focus was on $1000+ people IIRC, but we'd search them through Lexis Nexis to see if their name popped on crimes or major news stories and stuff like that. If we found anything we'd print it out, highlight the relevant stuff, and it would go to people who made decisions on whether the offense was potentially embarrassing enough not to take the money. I don't imagine every House and Senate campaign has the resources to devote staff time to vetting random donors.

Also I'm not sure that blurb above is right, because the Earl Holt who gave to BC04 was from Oregon and all the other Earl Holt donations are from Texas, though maybe he moved.

I'm going to send a $10 donation to every candidate with a note saying "I am sending this because of my affiliation with white supremacy and that caused me to believe in you as a candidate" and see who sends it back.

of course you can't vet every dollar given. i see a fix for that, though.

TPA gets 60 votes in the Senate

We did it

can i get a reminder of why people hate wal-mart?

Gonna be hard to keep the respective progress of the TPP & Iran nuke deals straight

Frank Grimes wrote:can i get a reminder of why people hate wal-mart?

exploitative labor practices, use their muscle to fuck over small nation suppliers

Soren wrote:

Frank Grimes wrote:can i get a reminder of why people hate wal-mart?

exploitative labor practices, use their muscle to fuck over small nation suppliers

odious wealth concentration (that's mostly on the family)

Soren wrote:

Frank Grimes wrote:can i get a reminder of why people hate wal-mart?

exploitative labor practices, use their muscle to fuck over small nation suppliers

It's big. Because they squeeze their suppliers so hard, the merchandise ends up being pretty shoddy.
I do think some of it is elitist too though--the whole "people of Wal-Mart" thing--it's sort of retail flyover country.
And I suspect their treatment of workers isn't any worse than most retailers. It's just that there are so many Wal-Mart employees, you hear things about how much medicaid for instance goes to Wal-Mart workers and you're shocked. But really, do people at say Starbucks or Target really do that much better?

Target? No. Starbucks? yes, they are actually offered insurance if htey work 20 hours and it's fairly affordable.


Walmart is by far the #1 employer putting people on benefits not named McDonalds. Target, supermarkets, etc all do it too but Walmart is so big that it gets the numbers. Most workers also receive SNAP.

I guess the really bad thing about Wal-Mart is they are really aggressively anti-union. Not just how they operate in their stores, but through their political efforts.

TenuredVulture wrote: really, do people at say Starbucks or Target really do that much better?

no, and basically WMT is just somewhat more suitably emblematic of late-stage corporate/global capitalism.

Big employers used to be steel mills and auto makers; now the biggest hawk dry (and some wet) goods, leaving the fat profits to hyper-financialized "businesses" having little in the way of employees or operations

pacino wrote:Target? No. Starbucks? yes, they are actually offered insurance if htey work 20 hours and it's fairly affordable.


Walmart is by far the #1 employer putting people on benefits not named McDonalds. Target, supermarkets, etc all do it too but Walmart is so big that it gets the numbers. Most workers also receive SNAP.

The last point is the big one, for me. These corporations refuse to pay a living wage and it's subsidized through the tax payers who are paying for their food stamps/insurance/other welfare.

Walmart is sort of like the doomsday scenario for my fellow anti big trade agreement folks. You ship away all the manufacturing jobs to countries that get paid pennies on the dollar to manufacture junk merchandise (in countries with little to no safety or environmental legislation preventing their workers) and since the stateside employees are paid so terribly they can only afford your garbage products.

Need to go back and find studies about the impact on local economies/small businesses when Walmart comes to town; I'm fairly sure Walmart just crushes all the existing businesses.

Good documentary on this: The High Cost of Low Price

I don't enjoy the WalMart shopping experience but it's a wonderful option for persons of modest means. It has driven down the cost of living and made life better for millions of Americans. No one employed at WalMart is there at gunpoint; so while a WalMart job is not your dream career, for many it is the best option, and not just in small towns with no other employers.

I'm a shiny new WalMart shareholder, too!

And of course TPA is a good thing. Refusing to participate in world commerce, or tying our own hands, is stupid on its face. It's like Delaware residents refusing to do any commerce with PA. This stuff is really Economics 101. Gun and butters.

something is econ 101, that's for sure

Soren wrote:
Need to go back and find studies about the impact on local economies/small businesses when Walmart comes to town; I'm fairly sure Walmart just crushes all the existing businesses.

I live in one of those small towns, and a local business should be able to compete with Wal-Mart if they know what they're doing. Our local hardware store runs circles around wal-mart in that regard for instance (though the fact that they close at 1 PM on Saturday sometimes means you need to buy something from Wal-Mart to finish a project).

I'd guess Amazon and on-line retailing in general are much worse for local economies than Wal-Mart.

TenuredVulture wrote:I'd guess Amazon and on-line retailing in general are much worse for local economies than Wal-Mart.

That's a great point.

Stepping back, we need to take the 50,000 foot view. Railing at WalMart (or Amazon, or Microsoft) in 2015 is little different than a buggy whip maker yelling at Ford, or the ice house foreman yelling at GE because the refrigerator was destroying his business.

That happens in progress, and we shouldn't yearn to freeze or roll back time.

TomatoPie wrote:I don't enjoy the WalMart shopping experience but it's a wonderful option for persons of modest means. It has driven down the cost of living and made life better for millions of Americans. No one employed at WalMart is there at gunpoint; so while a WalMart job is not your dream career, for many it is the best option, and not just in small towns with no other employers.

Walmart literally profits on externalizing its "true" costs to all us others whether we ever shop there or not. Doesn't that trouble your econ 101, "if you subsidize something, people will shop at more of its outlets"* libertarian heart?

Like so many things economics 101, TPA, TPP, what-you-may-call-it, is wondrous theory, and can fuck up people you know & care about in practice

*you'll no doubt recognize the corollary to your "if you tax something..." bromide