I’ve been a journalist—well-paid, paid, low-paid and unpaid—for most of my life. One of the books I’m reading right now is Ta-Nehisi Coates Between The World And Me in which, in addition to his insights on race, he talks about his own development as a writer and journalist. From Barbara Ehrenreich perspective the Coates who began writing at the end of the last century would find embarking on his present career today much more difficult.

Ehrenreich, in In America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty writes:

This is the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals who can’t muster up expenses to even start on the articles, photo-essays and videos they want to do, much less find an outlet to cover the costs of doing them. You can’t, say, hop on a plane to cover a police shooting in your hometown if you don’t have a credit card.

I remember in 1982, when I was a junior in the Magazine Journalism program at Ohio University, we had a guest lecturer talking about job opportunities. When she dropped the bomb—that starting salaries in Ohio for journalists were around $12,000 a year—I could see my fellow students get that wuuuut? look. Even in 1982, that was a poverty wage. I think a lot of students changed majors that day. I was committed and stuck out the program, landing a full-time job 10 months as an assistant editor at Aftermarket Business. During those 10 months I freelanced for more than a dozen publications to pay the rent.

I never got rich, but I paid the bills and felt comfortable. I never, however, wrote about what I thought were truly important topics. In my 20s I had wanted to follow in the footsteps of Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. I doing a bit of that now with my blogs, but there’s no money coming in. I have a day job, tutoring, that allows me the freedom to write what I want, but this has become more of a hobby than a cause. That’s depressing.

Ehrenreich concludes:

In a highly polarized society like our own, the wealthy have a special stake in keeping honest journalism about class and inequality alive. Burying an aching social problem does not solve it. The rich and their philanthropies need to step up and support struggling journalists and the slender projects that try to keep them going. As a self-proclaimed member of the 0.01% warned other members of his class last year: “If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us.”

As long as Walmart continues to sell really, really cheap plastic crap from China there will be no pitchforks or tumbrels.

I sincerely wish that Ehrenreich conclusion was valid, but, sadly, I don’t think the wealthy (other than Nick Hanauer and a very tiny few others) see any advantage in supporting journalists writing about class and inequality.

This is what you get when you watch Comedy Central:

This is what you get when you watch Faux Snooze:

The entire world was revolted by the genocide of 26 million Jewish people by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in World War II. It was called “The Holocaust.”

Since 1973, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, America has done Hitler and the Nazi butchers proud: 56 million unborn innocents Continue Reading »

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap from China. On The Writing On The Wal—the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar—I continue my singular work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

BENTONVILE BRACES FOR WALMART LAYOFFS… Everyone has known that the announced additional $1 billion in employee costs to be incurred by Walmart in the coming months would not be paid out of profits and shareholder value. Instead, Walmart has… Keep reading…

WHY IS AMAZON WORTH MORE THAN WALMART…? That’s a good question in my book. To me this question would be like an 18th century investor pondering the question of whether his money would be better placed with a Spanish slave trader or a… Keep reading…

ABOUT THAT TULSA WALMART… Certainly the mystery, comedy, conspiracy theories and flat-out paranoia surrounding the sudden closing of five Walmarts for plumbing problems back April is the weirdest Walmart story I’ve ever written about. Only the Jade… Keep reading…

WALMART AND JOHN CRAWFORD III… Tuesday, 5 August, will mark the first anniversary of the murder of John Crawford III for shopping-while-black in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton. While Crawford’s death was far from the… Keep reading…

JET CHASING AMAZON (AND WALMART)… Back on 21 July I noted the entrance of Jet in the online brawl that is Walmart and Amazon. While media are focused on Amazon, Walmart is the business elephant in the fight. My sense is that Amazon and Jet are… Keep reading…

WALMART’S GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS… Last Wednesday I added an In Other Walmart News link to the headline Wal-Mart Warns Its Suppliers Over Labeling Laws. As reported by Paul Ziobro for the Wall Street Journal, the news seemed fairly banal…Keep reading…

WHAT INCOME INEQUALITY LOOKS LIKE… Earlier this morning I wrote: What the Koch brothers really want, what most people in the same league as the Koch brothers always want, are more game tokens. That is what life is to the sociopaths, a vast,… Keep reading…

WALMART’S SALES-TAX CON SETTLED… I first wrote about Walmart’s policy of calculating sales tax refunds based on the tax rate at the store where a return is made and not the tax rate at the store where the sale is made back in 2009. I recognize that on… Keep reading…

Previously on Walmart Wednesday…

What happens when a reporter becomes the tool of what he’s reporting?

He finds ways to lie by omission.

Steve Litt at the Plain Dealer is an example of this phony journalism. If you’ll stay with me I’ll explain to your satisfaction, I believe.

With his Public Square task pretty much completed, Litt’s project now is early passage of a cigarette tax to keep funding the arts. The tax is already in existence to 2017. Proponents however, fear voters—sick of adding and keeping taxes for sports teams, private developers and “arts” institutions—have worked their talents to get Cuyahoga County Commissioners to place a levy a year early.

(The difference between the old three-member County Commission and the reformed one is it has more pliable members now).

Litt’s latest tract regales big contributors to the Arts and Culture Action Committee, the body pushing the tax. They have plenty of pelf to play.

He tells us that:

The Cleveland Foundation gave $150,000 to the cause.

The Cleveland Museum of Art gave $145,000.

Playhouse Square Foundation anted up with $100,000.

Community Partnership for Arts & Culture chipped in $25,000.

LAND Studio gave $15,000.

Now, an honest reporter would balance the story.

Litt, the Piped Piper for elites, has difficulty.

He tries. But not hard enough. He writes, “No organized opposition to the tax has yet emerged, although several opponents who spoke at hearings Continue Reading »

And I know now that I was right. But it takes a lot of telling to make a city know when it is doing wrong. However, that was what I was there for. When it didn’t seem to help, I would go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I knew it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before together. When my fellow-workers smiled, I used to remind them of the Israelites that marched seven times around Jericho and blew their horns before the walls fell.

“Well, you go ahead and blow yours,” they said; “you have the faith.”

And I did, and the walls did fall, though it took nearly twice seven years. But they came down, as the walls of ignorance and indifference must every time, if you blow hard enough and long enough, with faith in your cause and in your fellow-man. It is just a question of endurance. If you keep it up, they can’t. —Jacob Riis, 1849-1914

How do we find the strength, the will, to strike twice, let alone to strike 101 times?

What the Koch brothers really want, what most people in the same league as the Koch brothers always want, are more game tokens. That is what life is to the sociopaths, a vast, nearly exclusive game designed to give meaning and worth to people whose lives are meaningless without the pile of tokens.

Writing in Koch Political Machine Focuses on “Freedom” to Pollute and Pay Less Taxes for The//Intercept Lee Fang ledes”

Billionaire conservative activist Charles Koch on Sunday likened his political efforts to the struggles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass, saying that “we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.”

We know this because Politico and the Washington Post were allowed to attend Charles and David Koch’s fundraiser at a southern California luxury resort over the weekend, in exchange for a promise from the reporters that they would help keep the names of donors secret.

They may as well have promised to keep what the donors are actually paying for secret as well.

The two media organizations dutifully reprinted Koch’s claim that his political network is focused on reforming the criminal justice system, reducing irresponsible government spending and even “helping the lower class.”

The reality of the Koch political agenda is wildly different.

I would have said criminally different, but I’ll take wildly, for now.

Jon Stewart opines…

If I lived in Traverse City I would patronize Brilliant Books. Retailers, or any service provider, that makes an effort to honestly deal with customers is a business deserving of patronage and word-of-mouth support. What has Brilliant books done that is so laudable? They admitted that their customers had been played.

In US bookshop offering refunds for Go Set a Watchman, Alison Flood writes:

A US independent bookshop is offering refunds to its Go Set a Watchman customers, claiming that the work should be viewed as an “academic insight” into Harper Lee’s development as an author, rather than as a “nice summer novel”.

Brilliant Books in Traverse City, Michigan, has said that its “dozens” of customers for Go Set a Watchman are owed “refunds and apologies” over the way the novel has been presented. “It is disappointing and frankly shameful to see our noble industry parade and celebrate this as ‘Harper Lee’s New Novel’,” the bookseller writes on its website. “This is pure exploitation of both literary fans and a beloved American classic (which we hope has not been irrevocably tainted). We therefore encourage you to view Go Set a Watchman with intellectual curiosity and careful consideration; a rough beginning for a classic, but only that.”

Brilliant Books compares the novel to Stephen Hero, James Joyce’s original draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Hero was initially rejected, and Joyce reworked it into the classic Portrait,” said the bookseller. “Hero was eventually released as an academic piece for scholars and fans – not as a new Joyce novel. We would have been delighted to see Go Set a Watchman receive a similar fate.”

I would add the reprinting of Dan Brown’s first two books, along with Margaret Mitchell’s Lost Laysen, to this category of publications.

I am more than willing to accept that the President’s decision to take real action regarding Global Warming/Climate Change is a matter of Obama Don’t Care. Seriously, I’m OK with that. Just knowing that all the Koch-Brothers sycophants are gnawing on skulls would be sufficient, but bitch slapping the carbon industry is a real win for humanity.

Dan Roberts, in Obama unveils sweeping cuts to power plant emissions: ‘We have to get going’ for The Guardian writes:

Six years after first promising to “roll back the spectre of a warming planet”, Barack Obama finally committed the US to unprecedented action against climate change on Monday, with sweeping new curbs on carbon emissions from power plants that are equivalent to taking 70% of American cars off the road.

The culmination of his long-fought battle against coal industry lobbyists and climate change sceptics in Congress was greeted with jubilation by many environmentalists who described the tougher-than-expected regulations as a “game-changer”.

Describing it as “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against climate change”, Obama warned it was almost too late: pointing out that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have already fallen in the first 15 years of this century.

Hundreds of businesses including eBay and Nestlé back federal rules to cut emissions and encourage a switch away from coal to renewable energy

“Climate change is no longer about protecting the world for our children and grandchildren, it is about the reality that we are living with right now,” said Obama in a speech announcing the plan. “We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.”

Will this work? Maybe. I hope so.

When I was a budding radical in high school—I thought I was a revolutionary in my own pathetic teen agey way—I had an American flag hanging in my bedroom with 48 stars. I told my friends that I had the flag there because Alabama and Mississippi didn’t recognize The United States Constitution. I hope that I’ve matured a bit, but watching John Oliver still gets a rise from me because we need a British comedian to tell us how messed up we are.

I would be willing to make a compromise on full citizenship for residents of the District of Columbia. How about this: voters residing in The District of Columbia shall enjoy all the rights and privileges of a citizen of the United States of America with the exception of those laws which a three-fourths majority of the legislatures of the several states deem to interfere with the operation of the Federal government as those laws equally apply to all other citizens of the United States.

In other words, what’s good for a citizen of Ohio, is good for a citizen of D.C.

From left: Cleveland Indians owner Paul Dolan, Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and the Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert

You may recently have paid your local property taxes.

Some privileged people, however, didn’t.

In fact, the three wealthiest guys around here didn’t.

Jimmy “Cheats” Haslam doesn’t have to pay a penny of taxes on the Browns stadium. It’s worth $276-million. (For enterprising reporters here’s the parcel number 101-02-014).

Dan “Thuggish” Gilbert doesn’t have to pay a penny of taxes on Quicken Arena. It’s worth $113-million. (For reporters here’s the parcel number 101-28-040).

Dan “Cables” Dolan doesn’t have to pay a penny of taxes on Progressive Field. It’s worth $176-million. (For enterprising reporters here’s the parcel number 101-33-002).

That totals $565 MILLION in property value.

Year after year as normal property owners pay their taxes, the scofflaws don’t pay a damned penny.

Screw the city, they say. More importantly, screw the schools.

They dodge paying anything to the Cleveland schools since all these facilities are located within the City of Cleveland.

What do these figures mean? What do they mean especially to the Cleveland school system? What do they mean to Cleveland children?

And why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?

What would the tax collection be if all three sports facilities paid their fair taxes?

If they paid the taxes (on 35 percent of the above assessed values) here is what the bill should be as of the latest Count recorded values:

The $276-million Browns stadium—with a tax rate of 101. per 1,000 of value (rounded down)—would pay an annual tax of $9.6 million per year. The Cleveland schools lose $5.76 million of that amount each year.

The $176-million Progressive field would pay taxes of $6.2 million a year and the Cleveland schools would get $3.72 million of that annually.

The $113 million Quicken Arena would pay taxes of $3.9 million a year and the Cleveland schools lose $2.4 million of that sum annually.

So the three sports facilities – all tax exempted – are valued totally at $565-million and assessed for tax purposes at $197-million (35 percent of appraised value).

The financially struggling Cleveland schools (since all three facilities are in Cleveland and tax free) lose EVERY YEAR almost $12 million in tax revenue.

Add that up year after year and the taxes lost become tens of millions of dollars.

No wonder Michael Powell, a New York Times sports reporter, wrote a piece recently that was headlined, Depleting Cleveland, Despite Billions. It also said, “Franchise owners dip into the public’s purse for facility upkeep, straining a city.”

And he didn’t even talk about the free tax scheme that involves tens of millions more.

“This straitened city has already pumped $800 million into its sports stadiums,” Powell wrote. He added that in the next 20 years taxpayers will provide $262-million more for improvements.

I think he’s going to prove low on those figures.

I know he’s going to prove low. Because they always want more and our so-called leaders never say “NO!”

By Roldo Bartimole…

In writing about Senator Bernie Sanders, William Greider shares insight in Bernie Sanders Explains Why You Should Care About What’s Happening to Greece for The Nation:

Here’s the secret of Bernie’s politics. He is relentlessly, stubbornly substantive—grounded in the guts and mechanics of governing. He is not given to cheap rhetoric or sleazy hits on opponents. In the House, he was admired for his ability to build left-right coalitions on issues that really were not ideological. In the Senate, he and John McCain wrote the VA reform legislation. Lots of members of Congress, left and right, have similar qualities but they don’t get great press because most political reporters think politics is only about elections, government is boring.

Mano Singham wrote on Thursday about car alarms and how thieves take advantage of the fact that alarms are so ubiquitous, so boring, that no one pays attention when thieves actually steal a car. Politicians take advantage of how boring governing is to steal much more from us all.

Greider concludes:

As he often does, Sanders took the subject to a higher plane. It is not just Greece’s problem, Bernie explained, and not just Europe’s. The global economy is now burdened with an international financial system that allows or encourages reckless actors to exploit weaker nations and redistribute wealth and income to the top. Bernie offered no details but he wants fundamental reform of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, a new Bretton Woods agreement that would end the unregulated flows of international capital that are so destabilizing.

“The system is rigged for the wealthy,” Sanders said. “The 85 richest people in the world own more wealth than the bottom half of the people. I hope this conference will start a serious discussion of about how to change the international financial rules to expand economic opportunity and reduce income inequality and poverty. The global economy has simply failed when so few have so much and so many have so little.”

He does sound like a socialist, doesn’t he?

When 85 people are richer than 3,000,000,000, then sounding like a socialist is the least of humanity’s problems.

That I began writing this post more than a month ago is telling. I know that I will feel much better when I have finished writing this—just as I feel better after I have mowed the lawn—but yet I have allowed this to worry me like a splinter embedded in a finger. Procrastination is an Albatross, and like Coleridge’s Mariner, I feel all at sea when I place that noose around my neck.

Oliver Burkeman writing in Make the most of your guilt for The Guardian offers some perspective

Unless you’re a better person than me—and I reluctantly concede such people may exist—there are probably several things on your to-do list, or on your mind, that you feel guilty about not having got around to yet. This kind of low-level, everyday guilt poses a puzzle. It arises, obviously, because of a gap between what you believe you should have done and what you’ve actually done; were we perfectly rational creatures, feeling that negative emotion would motivate us to close the gap. In the real world, though, the easiest way not to feel the guilt is often just to focus on something else. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… procrastination! Perhaps you’re already acquainted?

To avoid the unpleasant guilt, you avoid the guilt-triggering task. That triggers more guilt, thus more avoidance, and so on. You’re overdue, for example, to write to a faraway friend, but you put it off, because you want to give the task the attention it deserves. Then the guilt-avoidance cycle kicks in. Before you know it, a month’s gone by, and someone you especially wanted to contact is getting the silent treatment—not despite but because of how important you felt it was to get in touch. In the technical language of psychology, this is really sodding annoying.

Burkeman, as is his wont, found one solution:

Naturally, then, I was intrigued a few weeks back when the New York-based creative consultant Nick Jehlen wrote of his firm’s experiences with a weekly Guilt Hour, dedicated specifically to those nagging, uncompleted jobs. “Every Wednesday at 10am, we sit together and look at our task lists [and] identify the one thing we feel most guilty about not having done yet,” he explained. “Then we go around the table and name our One Guilty Task, and commit to spending the rest of Guilt Hour working on it.” Done collectively, I suspect, there’s a cathartic group-therapy aspect to this. Even as a solo worker, though, I can report—based on my own recent experiments—that Guilt Hour is remarkably effective.

I’ll begin my own experiment this Sunday at noon.

The only votes that I’ve cast for a president of the United States of America that I can still feel pride in was my vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980. Here’s why: 35 years after leaving office, President Carter is still fighting for the country he served in war and peace.

[Unlimited money in politics] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congressmembers. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over…

Only one candidate declared for the 2016 agrees with President Carter: Bernie Sanders.

I helped make history last evening, joining more than 100,000 Americans in all 50 states to begin the grassroots organizing process. There was a more than 60-year age-spread in the room and we shared a lot of stories. While the gathering was overwhelmingly positive, hints of concern popped up in different moments, mostly on issues surrounding money and electability following an expected deluge of trumped up negative attack ads.

So, the news this morning that a CNN poll that found candidate Bernie Sanders beating Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Donald trump in a general election.

Zaid Jilani, writing in Latest National Poll Shows Bernie Sanders Beating Scott Walker, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush for Alternet reports:

Of all the arguments the Democratic establishment has thrown out against Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, perhaps the most recurring one revolves around electability. “Sure, you agree with him,” they argue, “but he can’t win.”

A just released CNN poll finds Sanders out-polling all of the GOP’s major candidates, though pretty much tied with Jeb Bush. Here’s how Sanders stacks up:

SANDERS: 48%
BUSH: 47%

SANDERS: 48%
WALKER: 42%

SANDERS: 59%
TRUMP: 38%

If you limit the poll sample to just registered voters, Bush defeats Sanders by a single point. Either way, this credible poll suggests that Sanders is not just some pie-in-the-sky general election candidate. His more uphill battle may be the primary. But even there, he has some strengths. Polling out last week shows he’s the only candidate from either side who has a net favorability rating.

We are going to help Bernie prove to the Koch Brothers, and all the other hyper-entitled Billionaire Class, that their stolen money doesn’t solve all their problems.

I wrote on Tuesday that the latest move by the Boy Scouts of America national organization was nothing but a legal-team-inspired exercise in butt covering. Brad Hoylman, writing in The Boy Scouts won’t discriminate against gay men — but their affiliates will for The Guardian agrees:

Segregation is at its most insidious when it is justified under the pretext of official progress. If Jim Crow-era “separate but equal” racial segregation and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the failed military policy banning LGBT soldiers from serving openly, taught America anything, it’s that.

The decision this week by the Boy Scouts of America to end the ban on some gay adult leaders sets the same trap. The move was cheered as evidence that Scouting is finally catching up to growing popular support for LGBT rights, similar to the Supreme Court’s watershed decision this summer guaranteeing same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.

Closer examination leads to a different conclusion. According to Robert Gates, the former US defense secretary and current president of the Boy Scouts, gay men are now officially permitted to be adult leaders, foreclosing the preposterous scenario of a gay Eagle Scout required to turn in his scouting badge upon reaching the age of majority. But under the new policy, local sponsoring organizations, like churches or synagogues, retain the authority to determine whether gay men are fit to serve as scout leaders.

In effect, Gates is outsourcing decades of discrimination by Scouting to local chapters, which apparently have been given the green light to continue to discriminate against gay adult leaders. If Gates was attempting to appease local religious sponsors with the new policy, he failed. Already, the Mormon Church is signaling it may break from Scouting altogether and create its own youth organization.

I think the time has come for Scouting to come to an end.

Grassroots are cracking apart generations of petrified American politics to allow sunshine into the dark corners created by billions of dollars heaped up by the tiniest of minorities. I was hopeful last evening when I attended this meeting. I am even more so now.

How does it feel to make history? Only weeks into Bernie’s campaign, a movement has risen up to take this country back from the billionaire class. It’s exploding in all 50 states, blue and red, in big cities and small towns.

When they write history books about this, you will be able to say, “I was there.” Your friends can be there too, if you forward this email to them—no matter where in the country they live.

What you’re looking at is over 3,146 events, with more than 75,000 RSVPs! This level of organizing and participation is completely unprecedented; nothing like this has ever existed at this early stage of a presidential campaign–—period.

Our opponents have the billionaires on their side, but we have the people—if you bring them. Do that by forwarding this email to your friends so that they can see all the events in their area and be a part of this historic moment. Or click here to share with them on social media.

We’re all looking forward to this incredible nationwide party and Organizing Kickoff. We’ll hear from Bernie via live video, we’ll share our stories, have fun getting to know each other and begin organizing to win this election.
Many events have filled up. But there are still open spaces in just about every city and town because so many amazing supporters have been posting new events right up until today.

Don’t leave your friends out—forward this to anyone you think should meet Bernie.

See you Wednesday! It is an honor to participate alongside of you in this movement.

I’m headed to Seven Hills.

Now is the time to go to work…