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.

WEEKLY WALMART ROUNDUP… When Walmart announced plans to raise the wages of about 40 percent of the company’s workers on 19 February, the number of stories about the Bentonvile Behemoth exploded and I found myself unable to read… Keep reading…

WHY NOW? IF NOT NOW, WHEN? Fortune magazine writer Rick Wartzman compares trying to understand why Walmart decided to raise wages—a move that I know caused heads to explode on Wall Street—to the way Kremlinologist (an amateur role I… Keep reading…

SPREADING THE GOAT ENTRAILS… Everyone, myself included, is reading the tea leaves on Walmart’s decision to raise base pay for half-a-million workers. Bloomberg Business reporter Dashiell Bennett thinks a better economy and a… Keep reading…

WALMART DOESN’T JUST GET TO SAY SO… A standard is not a standard simply because the world’s largest pusher of cheap plastic crap from China says so, and given the Bentonvile Behemoth’s issues with monitoring vendors’ standards involving health… Keep reading…

LONG BEFORE WALMART CAME TO INDIA… Walmart is not the first multi-national corporation to envision world domination. Nearly a quarter millennium before Walmart landed on the shores of India to exploit the more than a billion customers…, Keep reading…

RELEVANT TO THE COMPANY’S BUSINESS…? Kathleen McLaughlin, president of the Walmart Foundation, told students at the University of Arkansas that the role of big business is to serve society by using its own… Keep reading…

WHEN GOOD PEOPLE ABANDON SHIP… After listening to Diane Rehm’s discussion on Friday, I had a new thought—for me, at least—about why Walmart decided to raise wages. For the past eight years, as a result of The Great Recession, Walmart… Keep reading…

DID OURWALMART SCORE A VICTORY…? Did OURWalmart bring the Bentonvile Behemoth around to raising employee wages? No. While the union organization certainly played a role, I think other factors, out of the control of the group, played much larger… Keep reading…

REPURPOSING ONE MORE VACANT WALMART… I have no idea how many abandoned Walmarts there are around the country, but I’m betting that most, like building in Cleveland Heights where I used to live, still sit empty behind the cracked and… Keep reading…

WE DO GET WHAT WE PAY FOR, EVERYDAY… So far, based solely on my own reading, Lisa Ray comes closer than the competition to recognizing that Walmart’s pay raise is a result of the Great Recession that allowed the Bentonvile Behemoth to see what… Keep reading…

PRESIDENT FRANK UNDERWOOD ON WALMART… Episode 8 of the third season of House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey as fictional President of the United States Frank Underwood, was written long before the Bentonvile Behemoth decided to trickle down… Keep reading…

WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO POSSIBLY SAY…? Well, Fortune did have this question: Why this sweet-looking horse is a major headache for Wal-Mart? and this from Business Insider: Wal-Mart is reportedly furious over this hilarious website and wants to shut… Keep reading…

UPDATE: GREENWASHING MEME SPREADING… Last Friday I noted Grist’s takedown of Walmart’s latest attempt to greenwash products with a faux environmental Sustainability Leaders label. This week the story is gathering legs: Wal-Mart recently… Keep reading…

WILL NORMA RAE’S GRANDKIDS GET JOBS…? In 1979, Sally Fields played the real-life textile worker and union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton in the movie Norma Rae. Sutton died in 2009. Fields, a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, won the Oscar for… Keep reading…

Previously on Walmart Wednesday…

e

Have Cleveland’s real leaders run a poll on Mayor Frank Jackson popularity (or unpopularity) or are they just naturally nervous these days.

In the Sunday Plain Dealer there was the most unusual op-ed page piece I can remember in 50 years working or watching the city’s newspaper on standing.

Leadership of Jackson shows recall efforts are wrong, said the headline.

It had 45 authors. Or signers. It was an unpaid ad. By those who could afford to pay for their propaganda. Ten of the 45 (as of 2013) are present members of the Greater Cleveland Partnership. No surprise there.

The names of many are familiar.

They are the names of those who have benefited greatly not only during Jackson’s reign but through Mayors Michael White and George Voinovich, leaders of very special patrons of the rich and richer. (Mayor Jane Campbell was simply an unnoticed blip.)

That’s 35 years of getting exactly what you want if you are rich and have power.

Why would you want to give it up?

And who are these ingrates that want to spoil the spoils takers? The recall brigade.

Some little known ingrates. And even some are black at that.

They want to upset the spoils cart.

So, we had signatories of note. Of course, there was Paul Dolan, Continue Reading »

The Guardian is embarking on a major series of articles on the climate crisis and how humanity can solve it. I have a long history with climate change, but, I fear I may have fallen into the trap of paying insufficient attention to a vital threat in favor of the myriad urgent trivialities filling my plate each day.

I denied climate change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening, sure. Not like Donald Trump and the Tea Partiers going on about how the continued existence of winter proves it’s all a hoax. But I stayed pretty hazy on the details and only skimmed most of the news stories, especially the really scary ones. I told myself the science was too complicated and that the environmentalists were dealing with it. And I continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong with the shiny card in my wallet attesting to my “elite” frequent flyer status.

A great many of us engage in this kind of climate change denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or we look but then turn it into a joke (“more signs of the Apocalypse!”). Which is another way of looking away. Or we look but tell ourselves comforting stories about how humans are clever and will come up with a technological miracle that will safely suck the carbon out of the skies or magically turn down the heat of the sun. Which, I was to discover while researching this book, is yet another way of looking away.

Or we look but try to be hyper-rational about it (“dollar for dollar it’s more efficient to focus on economic development than climate change, since wealth is the best protection from weather extremes”) – as if having a few more dollars will make much difference when your city is underwater. Or we look but tell ourselves we are too busy to care about something so distant and abstract – even though we saw the water in the subways in New York City during Superstorm Sandy, and the people on their rooftops in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and know that no one is safe, the most vulnerable least of all. And though perfectly understandable, this too is a way of looking away.

Or we look but tell ourselves that all we can do is focus on ourselves. Meditate and shop at farmers’ markets and stop driving—but forget trying to actually change the systems that are making the crisis inevitable because that’s too much “bad energy” and it will never work. And at first it may appear as if we are looking, because many of these lifestyle changes are indeed part of the solution, but we still have one eye tightly shut.

Or maybe we do look—really look—but then, inevitably, we seem to forget.

Focusing on that with is vital, is the only life-maintaining strategy possible.

If not for the Everwar, defense contractors in the United States might have to turn to the manufacture of vehicles for the Postal Service. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark)—the new Walmart senator?—understands who gets him elected (hint: not the people of Arkansas) and took steps this week to ensure the Everwar continues.

Then, instead of going to Disneyland, Cotton scurried over to an event hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association.

Now, I wonder why?

The NDIA is composed of executives from major military businesses such as Northrop Grumman, L-3 Communications, ManTech International, Boeing, Oshkosh Defense and Booz Allen Hamilton, among other firms.

Cotton strongly advocates higher defense spending and a more aggressive foreign policy. As The New Republic’s David Ramsey noted, “Pick a topic — Syria, Iran, Russia, ISIS, drones, NSA snooping—and Cotton can be found at the hawkish outer edge of the debate… During his senate campaign, he told a tele-townhall that ISIS and Mexican drug cartels joining forces to attack Arkansas was an ‘urgent problem.’”

On Iran, Cotton has issued specific calls for military intervention. In December he said Congress should consider supplying Israel with B-52s and so-called “bunker-buster” bombs—both items manufactured by NDIA member Boeing—to be used for a possible strike against Iran.

Asked if Cotton will speak about his Iran letter tomorrow, Jimmy Thomas, NDIA Director of Legislative Policy, said, “[M]ost members…talk about everything from the budget to Iran…so it’s highly likely that he may address that in his remarks.” According to Thomas, the Cotton event was scheduled in January, “but certainly we bring people to the platform that have influence directly on our issues.”

Now, why the fuck would Israel need a heavy bomber capable of a round trip of 6,000 miles without refueling?

Synopsis: politician makes public promise to resign if claims of wrongdoing found to be true; claims of wrongdoing found to be true; politician claims do-over.

In August, 2013, as evidence emerged of the active participation by New Zealand in the “Five Eyes” mass surveillance program exposed by Edward Snowden, the country’s conservative Prime Minister, John Key, vehemently denied that his government engages in such spying. He went beyond mere denials, expressly vowing to resign if it were ever proven that his government engages in mass surveillance of New Zealanders. He issued that denial, and the accompanying resignation vow, in order to re-assure the country over fears provoked by a new bill he advocated to increase the surveillance powers of that country’s spying agency, Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) – a bill that passed by one vote thanks to the Prime Minister’s guarantees that the new law would not permit mass surveillance.

[Snip…]

A series of new reports last week by New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, working with my Intercept colleague Ryan Gallagher, has added substantial proof demonstrating GCSB’s widespread use of mass surveillance. An article last week in the New Zealand Herald demonstrated that “New Zealand’s electronic surveillance agency, the GCSB, has dramatically expanded its spying operations during the years of John Key’s National Government and is automatically funnelling vast amounts of intelligence to the US National Security Agency.” Specifically, its “intelligence base at Waihopai has moved to ‘full-take collection,’ indiscriminately intercepting Asia-Pacific communications and providing them en masse to the NSA through the controversial NSA intelligence system XKeyscore, which is used to monitor emails and internet browsing habits.”

Moreover, the documents “reveal that most of the targets are not security threats to New Zealand, as has been suggested by the Government,” but “instead, the GCSB directs its spying against a surprising array of New Zealand’s friends, trading partners and close Pacific neighbours.” A second report late last week published jointly by Hager and the Intercept detailed the role played by GCSB’s Waihopai base in aiding NSA’s mass surveillance activities in the Pacific (as Hager was working with the Intercept on these stories, his house was raided by New Zealand police for 10 hours, ostensibly to find Hager’s source for a story he published that was politically damaging to Key).

That the New Zealand government engages in precisely the mass surveillance activities Key vehemently denied is now barely in dispute. Indeed, a former director of GCSB under Key, Sir Bruce Ferguson, while denying any abuse of New Zealander’s communications, now admits that the agency engages in mass surveillance.

Prime Minister John Key resigns in 3… 2… No wait…

So now that it’s proven that New Zealand does exactly that which Prime Minister Key vowed would cause him to resign if it were proven, is he preparing his resignation speech? No: that’s something a political official with a minimal amount of integrity would do. Instead – even as he now refuses to say what he has repeatedly said before: that GCSB does not engage in mass surveillance—he’s simply retracting his pledge as though it were a minor irritant, something to be casually tossed aside

Well, of course he is, no one but a fool would expect integrity from a politician.

Blogging can feel more than a little David-and-Goliathish most of the time, so reading about Oliver Hotham’s small victory has made my Tuesday. (My blogs—Have Coffee Will Write and The Writing On The Wal use WordPress software but are hosted independently.)

After a two-year legal battle, journalist Oliver Hotham and Automattic, owners of blogging service WordPress.com, have emerged victorious against an attempt to use an American copyright law to shut down criticism of a short-lived pressure group call “Straight Pride UK”.

The win, in a Californian district court, sets a rare precedent against attempts to use the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to take content offline.

The act includes a provision that requires web hosts to remove user-generated content if they are notified that it infringes a third-party’s copyright—or face being held liable for the infringement.

But these DMCA takedown notifications are often abused to force big platform holders to remove content for reasons unrelated to copyright, as Hotham learned in 2013, when he was a student journalist.

In August that year, he posted an interview on his WordPress blog with Nick Steiner, press officer for an anti-gay group called “Straight Pride UK”. In the interview, Steiner expressed his group’s support for homophobic policies enacted in Russia and a number of African nations, and praised Putin’s crackdown on LGBT rights.

But shortly after Hotham published the interview, he received a message from Straight Pride UK warning him to take down the piece within the week, or the group would use a DMCA takedown to force him to do so.

[Snip…]

Following Automattic’s legal victory against the group, activists hope that more web hosts will be emboldened to fight back against malicious takedown notices. Parker Higgins, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “Wordpress going to bat was really unusual, and this could encourage others.”

The firm was awarded $22,264 in legal fees and $1,860 for time spent working on the case, which should also go some way to encouraging others to fight similar cases, Higgins added.

But neither Automattic nor Hotham, who was awarded $960 for his work and time, have much hope of being paid the money. Since August 2013, Straight Pride UK seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth. The group’s website has been taken down, and messages to an email address that was its only point of contact are not being answered.

That is often the case with trolls…

I first wrote about Abu Ghraib back in 2005 during my Louisville: The Coffee House Tour. Now, ten years later, those in charge, those who signed off on the authorizations, those culpable in the illegal acts remain free and untouched. If the United States cannot bring our own monsters to task, how can we ever hope to demand that other nations, let alone non-national organizations, do so?

Chelsea Manning writes:

Successful intelligence gathering through interrogation and other forms of human interaction by conventional means can be – and more often than not are – very successful. But, even though interrogation by less conventional methods might get glorified in popular culture—in television dramas like Law and Order: Criminal Intent, 24 and The Closer and movies like Zero Dark Thirty—torture and the mistreatment of detainees in the custody of intelligence personnel is, was and shall continue to be unethical and morally wrong. Under US law, torture and mistreatment of detainees is also very illegal.

Even the most junior level intelligence officials know that this is, and has been, the case for decades.

Yet, despite such knowledge, in response to the horrific attacks on the US in New York, Virginia and over Pennsylvania on 9/11, the US developed and applied techniques (now public knowledge due to the recent US Senate report commonly referred to as the Senate Torture Report) that sought to inflict severe mental pain and suffering, or the threat of pain and suffering, on detainees in the custody of the CIA and portions of the Department of Defense. These programs were administered by officers acting under the color of law.

According to numerous public reports, including the Senate Torture Report, these programs were authorized at the highest levels of government, and carried out in far-flung foreign places to avoid domestic detection and to muddy the issues of custody status and jurisdiction. This clearly shows a premeditated and intentional conspiracy to knowingly violate US law, and to avoid any oversight and criminal liability.

Manning continues:

It is important to hold the officers, supervisors and, to a lesser extent, the politicians involved [emphasis mine, JH] in creating and executing these programs, accountable. To let their horrific actions go unanswered would send an awful message to the world: it is wrong to torture and mistreat people, except when those doing it have the supposed blessing of the law and with the permission of high-ranking supervisors and politicians.

Even after internal reports by inspectors general and investigation by the criminal division of the US Department of Justice – a department that had a moral, ethical and more importantly legal obligation to investigate and charge the officers involved under criminal statutes – the government declined to commit itself to criminal charges against those who either committed or authorized acts of torture.

I disagree with Manning on the point of how politicians ought to be held accountable. The men, and women, at the top are more culpable in my eyes than those in the trenches carrying out orders. Leadership must be held to the highest of standards else what are we as a nation?

I think that Srdja Popovic must be channeling Abbie Hoffman.

“So there they were, our idols, [the rock band Rimtutituki] driving round Republic Square in circles in a truck, singing,” says Popovic. “They looked more like generals than rockers. And what they were singing was stuff like: ‘There’s no brain under that helmet’ and ‘If I shoot, I won’t have time to fuck.’ Just really mocking, funny, seditious stuff. And I got it. We all got it.”

What Popovic got, although it took him some time to work through its implications, was that “resistance is possible, and that it doesn’t have to be about boring sit-ins—in fact it could be quite cool, and indeed the more fun it is, the more effective it will probably be. That even in hopeless situations, you can get people to care. And that ultimately, it had to be us. We had to do something.”

So they did. The campaign Popovic and his friends started, and the group that by 1998 it grew into, Otpor! (translation: Resistance!) inspired a mass, non-violent movement. They finally saw off the repression and horror of Milosevic, who at the end could not even make it to the final round of the elections he called in September 2000.

Since then, Popovic and his friends have been in some demand. The Centre for Applied Non-violent Action and Strategies or Canvas, an independent, five-man, Belgrade-based NGO he founded with a handful of other Otpor! members in 2003, has now advised and trained pro-democracy activists in more than 50 countries, including India, Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, Ukraine, Georgia, Palestine, Belarus, Tunisia and Egypt.

The organisation’s materials, including its handbook, Non-violent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points, have been translated into half a dozen languages and counting, and downloaded tens of thousands of times—17,000 in Iran alone. Popovic and his pals now teach classes in non-violent political and social change at some of the world’s most prestigious universities, including Harvard, New York, Columbia and UCL.

The rangy, too-cool-to-care student bass guitarist (his term) whose favourite place in London is Camden Market has mutated into a respected teacher, writer and thinker in the new but fast-growing academic field of non-violent struggle, the influence of which is felt around the world.

He has now published a highly readable book, the deftly titled Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men and Other Non-Violent Techniques to Galvanise Communities, Overthrow Dictators or Simply Change the World, combining an entertaining primer on the theory and practice of peaceful protest with a very personal account of his own involvement with it.

Flash forward from 2000 to 2008 and the Occupy Wall Street movement. What did Otpor get right that Occupy failed to grasp? I’m looking forward to reading the book and making the comparisons.

Were you hanging out in the Flats?

Did you meet a chick named Sharon?

Was Sharon happy with all the drinks you bought her?

Did she give you her phone number ending in 1466?

Sharon just played you for a fool because that number is for my throw-away.

I’ve gotten dozens of these calls and I’m really, really getting annoyed.

Throw the number away because Sharon wasn’t impressed.

I’m a helpful kind of guy and I like to say that I have an answer for any question—my response may be less than helpful such as I have no idea or a simple no—but I do have an answer. Years ago, however, I learned to bite my tongue and wait for someone to request an answer. This is not easy, but very necessary, for me, because, thinking that I might be of real help, I too easily fall victim to a group of people who have no interest any helpful answer.

Oliver Burkeman writing in This column will change your life: complainers for The Guardian notes that:

The anti-whiner crowd, I think, are really targeting the subset known as “help-rejecting complainers”: people who seek advice, then spurn it, because their real motive is to prove they’re unhelpable. They’re playing the game Eric Berne, in his 1960s bestseller, Games People Play, called “yes, but”: offer a solution, and they’ll find a reason to reject it. The right response is to refuse to play the game. Break the cycle by agreeing sympathetically. Or (and Blake does suggest this) ask: “What do you plan to do about it?” As for the other kind of complainer—the ordinary kind—you’ll probably just have to learn tolerance. Because the technical term for them is “everybody”.

Burkeman is dead on. My standard response is most likely to be, as he suggests, sympathetic, and then ask now what?

I came late to reading Bernard Cornwell’s books. Only when I was once laid up with a bad cold and was able to watch the Sharpe videos did I discover Cornwell’s work. I have since read all his historical novels (for some reason I cannot quite name, I’ve felt no desire to read his thrillers) and they are among the books I periodically re-read.

This afternoon I happened across this bit of writing advice from Cornwell:

Suppose you decide to build a better mousetrap. You would begin, surely, by taking apart the existing mousetraps to see how they worked. You must do the same with books. When I wrote Sharpe’s Eagle, never having written a book before, I began by disassembling three other books. Two were Hornblowers, and I forget which the third was, but I had enjoyed them all. So I read them again, but this time I made enormous coloured charts which showed what was happening paragraph by paragraph through the three books. How much was action? And where was the action in the overall plan of the book? How much dialogue? How much romance? How much flashback (I hate flashback)? How much background information? Where did the writer place it? I already knew what I liked in the books, and I was determined to provide more of that in my book, and I knew what I disliked, and wanted to use less of that, but the three big charts (sadly I’ve lost them) were my blueprints. It was not plagiarism, but it was imitation. I learned to start with a fairly frenetic scene, and to keep that pace going before I slowed it down to provide necessary information. I learned, if you like, the structure of a best-seller, and then I imposed that structure on what I was writing. These days I do not think about it any more (I should have done with The Winter King), but in the first three or four years those analyses were priceless.

I have done similar charts in the past, but not, I think, in the detail that Cornwell describes. I think any writer starting out would do well to follow Cornwell’s lead.

They—our politically corrupt office-holders—keep taking the pennies from the public, adding them up and giving them away. They soon become hundreds of millions of dollars.

Why do they do it?

Not for better health, not for better streets, not for better schools, not for better services but for the corrupt agenda of the city’s real leaders.

And for their frivolous fun.

And they can never think or imagine a tax that weighs more heavily upon those who have so much. Rather they pick the pockets of the poor and near poor. Pickpocket legislators.

I just totaled up the cost since the beginning of three such taxes: a sin tax, an arts tax and an added sales tax for conventions. As of the end of February.

The total of the three: $535.7 million. More than a half billion dollars taken from pockets a penny or two at a time.

Here’s the breakdown:

Sin tax for Browns stadium – $129,680,945.

Arts & Culture tax: $142,061,796.

Medical Mart sales tax: $264,127,025.

And the giving-away doesn’t end there.

Cleveland City Council this week in a 17-0 vote gave the Rock Hall induction promoters $500,000 from their cash register. (Wonder how tickets to the gala for Council and other pols will be handled.)

Why do the people of Cleveland have to pay for this party of these people? We know they can pay for their own parties.

This alone is a $16.5 billion business with many of its leading performers worth billions of dollars. (Madonna $800 million; Bono $590 million, Beyonce $440 million to give you a taste.)

Recently I wrote about how the County Commissioners meeting to Continue Reading »

A co-worker sent me this story by Katharine Zaleski for Fortune magazine.

I still am embarrassed by this memory. Five years ago I walked into an office on the twenty-fifth floor of the Manhattan headquarters of Time Inc. (which owns Fortune.) I was there to meet with Time.com’s then managing editor and pitch a partnership idea, but once I took a seat and surveyed the endless photos of her small children spread across the airy space, I decided this editor was too much of a mother to follow up on the idea.

I still went through with my proposal, but I walked out sure I would never talk to her again. She wasn’t the first and only mother whose work ethic I silently slandered. As a manager at The Huffington Post and then The Washington Post in my mid-twenties, I committed a long list of infractions against mothers or said nothing while I saw others do the same.

I secretly rolled my eyes at a mother who couldn’t make it to last minute drinks with me and my team. I questioned her “commitment” even though she arrived two hours earlier to work than me and my hungover colleagues the next day.

I didn’t disagree when another female editor said we should hurry up and fire another woman before she “got pregnant.”

I sat in a job interview where a male boss grilled a mother of three and asked her, “How in the world are you going to be able to commit to this job and all your kids at the same time?” I didn’t give her any visual encouragement when the mother – who was a top cable news producer at the time – looked at him and said, “Believe it or not, I like being away from my kids during the workday… just like you.”

I scheduled last minute meetings at 4:30pm all of the time. It didn’t dawn on me that parents might need to pick up their kids at daycare. I was obsessed with the idea of showing my commitment to the job by staying in the office “late” even though I wouldn’t start working until 10:30 am while parents would come in at 8:30 am.

For mothers in the workplace, it’s death by a thousand cuts—and sometimes it’s other women holding the knives. I didn’t realize this—or how horrible I’d been—until five years later, when I gave birth to a daughter of my own.

Forced by biology to step into the shoes of the women she had scorned, Zaleski, like Joe Pesci in The Super, finds enlightenment. The real message here for me is the people isolated from those they affect can have no idea of the evil they do. I wish her well, but I have no doubt that the people modeled on her former self remain just as clueless.

I haven’t written about events in Ferguson, Missouri, since the end of 2014, not because I lost interest, but because the story appeared to gain serious legs. I have continued to monitor the story, and the larger consequences of the murder of Michael Brown, and want to offer this update following the release of the Justice Department’s report yesterday. Juan Thompson and Ryan Devereaux writing in Feds: Ferguson Preys Viciously on Black Residents for The//Intercept report:

Police in Ferguson, Missouri have presided over a predatory system of entrenched racism, economic exploitation and constitutional rights violations stretching back several years, [Emphasis mine, JH] according to a long-awaited Department of Justice investigation released Wednesday. The scathing 102-page report paints a portrait of a vicious environment in which Ferguson’s black residents are disproportionately mired in municipal court fines — frequently resulting from dubious traffic stops — in order to generate revenue for the St. Louis suburb and routinely subjected to excessive use of force.

The report, six months in the making, confirms many of the complaints black residents raised in the wake the fatal August shooting of Michael Brown — an unarmed African American teen — by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. Brown’s killing sparked months of protest, highlighting longstanding discriminatory practices carried out by Ferguson’s majority white police force against Ferguson’s majority black population.

In a press conference Wednesday unveiling the report, Attorney General Eric Holder blamed Ferguson’s police for creating a “powder keg” that exploded when Brown was gunned down in broad daylight. In November, a grand jury declined to indict Wilson in Brown’s slaying; in a separate development Wednesday, the DOJ cleared Wilson of alleged civil rights violations in the teen’s killing.

The DOJ’s report on the Ferguson police department places responsibility for the deplorable civil rights conditions in Ferguson on department and city officials alike–some of whom federal officials documented sending racist emails denigrating the president, the first lady and black people in general.

The report took aim at five distinct areas: the Ferguson Police Department’s exploitation of citizens as a source of revenue, police practices, the municipality’s court system, racial bias and community distrust. In each area, the police department in Ferguson was found to be an abysmal failure in which interlocking abuses and perverse incentives have eroded constitutional rights.

Of those five, I actually am most disturbed by the first. When police officers monetarily profit from finding reasons to arrest those least able to defend themselves, we create a society driving not by the rule of law, but a perverse incarnation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand and raise the terrifying specter of the financially motivated Spanish Inquisition.

Yesterday’s headlines included: Fugitive ex-NSA contractor Snowden seeks to come home: lawyer; Edward Snowden Working to Return Home to US: Lawyer; Edward Snowden in talks to return to United States from Russian exile: lawyer; Edward Snowden ready to return to U.S., lawyer says; and so on and so on.

Who is this lawyer?

Yesterday, in Moscow, Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena held a press conference to promote his new book, was asked about Snowden’s case, and said exactly what has been known for almost two years: [emphasis mine, JH] “He has a desire to go back, and we are doing everything possible to make that happen.” Kucherena added that lawyers in various countries have been working on Snowden’s behalf to negotiate terms for a fair trial.

So why the breathless headlines? Glenn Greenwald continues:

Most sentient people rationally accept that the U.S. media routinely disseminates misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the most authoritative tones. But it’s nonetheless valuable to examine particularly egregious case studies to see how that works. In that spirit, let’s take yesterday’s numerous, breathless reports trumpeting the “BREAKING” news that “Edward Snowden now wants to come home!” and is “now negotiating the terms of his return!”

Ever since Snowden revealed himself to the public 20 months ago, he has repeatedly said the same exact thing when asked about his returning to the U.S.: I would love to come home, and would do so if I could get a fair trial, but right now, I can’t.

His primary rationale for this argument has long been that under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute under which he has been charged, he would be barred by U.S. courts from even raising his key defense: that the information he revealed to journalists should never have been concealed in the first place and he was thus justified in disclosing it to journalists. In other words, when U.S. political and media figures say Snowden should “man up,” come home and argue to a court that he did nothing wrong, they are deceiving the public, since they have made certain that whistleblowers charged with “espionage” are legally barred from even raising that defense.

Snowden simply wants a fair trial by his peers where he is allowed to present the best defense possible. Since that defense involves at least embarrassing, and very possibly opening to criminal charges, many in the government of the United States, no such trial is ever likely to happen.

This CNN video is particularly telling and Greenwald does a masterful job of shredding every word mouthed.

Where to start? First, Gingrich’s belief that it’s possible to “get the rest of the documents that he has not leaked” is simply adorable. Second, Gingrich is a fascinating choice for CNN to have pontificate on proper punishments given that he is the first House Speaker to ever be punished for ethics violations, for which he was fined $300,000. Third, David Petraeus was just allowed to plead guilty for leaking extremely sensitive secrets — not out of a whistleblowing desire to inform the public but simply to satisfy his mistress—and will almost certainly spend no time in jail; Gingrich, Blitzer, Ignatius and friends would never dare suggest that the General should go to prison (just as DC’s stern law-and-order advocates who demand Snowden’s imprisonment would never dare suggest the same for James Clapper for having lied to Congress).

Gringrich? Really? Why is this pathetic lying waste of human genome still talking?

The thermometer crept above 32 degrees F this afternoon and one of our local trolls crept out of from under the bridge to forage on the corn we set out for the deer herd. The pack, of course, went ape shit.

It’s been a very, VERY 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.

THERE ARE SIMPLY TOO MANY STORIES… Forty-eight hours later, the stories about Walmart’s announcement Thursday morning that the company has plans to bump up wages for some 500,000 employees are coming faster than I can read… Keep reading…

I’M DOOMED… In a tale about Lindsey Stone, I came across this passage: At Farukh’s request, Lindsey had been emailing him photographs that didn’t involve her flipping off at military cemeteries. She’d been providing biographical details, too. Her… Keep reading…

HOW TO BUY SOCIAL CLOUT… When you own a publicly traded corporation, even when you own the majority of the shares and hence control the vote, minority stockholders can cause discomfort and embarrassment. Such is the case with Walmart. In addition… Keep reading…

WAGE TIMES HOURS EQUALS PAY… Walmart has announced the intent to boost hourly wages over the next year and that is good. Walmart workers are pleased with the raise, but when the goal is a living wage the other half of the pay equation—pay=… Keep reading…

THE NEED CONTINUES TO GROW… My hope in juxtaposing the above image with stories of Walmarts good works is that whenever someone reads about Walmart’s philanthropic largesse, that they pause and remember that such gifts represent both a … Keep reading…

$10 PER HOUR IS BETTER THAN $7.25, BUT… America is obsessed with exceptionalism. We care about the biggest loser, we celebrate winning the gold, we cheer the valedictorian. Not only can we not all be winners, we can’t even all be above average. … Keep reading…

MCMILLON ON WORKERS, PEOPLE AND CRITICS… Doug McMillon is only the third man to follow founder Sam Walton—David Glass, 1988-2000; Lee Scott, 2000-2009; Mike Duke 2009-2014—as CEO of Walmart. I barely know McMillon, but one… Keep reading…

$9 AN HOUR LOOKS GOOD, FOR NOW… The first shock to the system economic has come from the announcement of increases in Walmart wages for some 40 percent of the U.S. workforce. We do all need to take a breath and remember that not… Keep reading…

A STORE THAT WALMART WILL NOT BUILD… While I have no doubt that Walmart has decided before to not build a store after purchasing the land in the past, I can’t point to a single instance myself. For all those community groups who have worked… Keep reading…

GLOBALLY, WALMART CAN BE STIFFED… If you buy a lot of limes, as I do, both for cooking and use in adult beverages, you know that the market for limes has been a bit crazy of late. So messed up that I heard one story of drug cartels hijacking… Keep reading…

THE OTHER NEUTRALITY… One of the reasons I became disillusioned with President Barack Hussein Obama was that his campaign promise to push The Employee Free Choice Act, commonly known as Card Check, forward vaporized. I haven’t heard a… Keep reading…

WALMART WORKERS’ CHILDREN TOO…? Walmart workers go begging for food for their Thanksgiving dinners while corporate philanthropy spreads money in areas likely to garner more favorable coverage. Walmart has given the Boys & Girls Club’s… Keep reading…

LILLY WHO…? Remember Lilly Ledbetter? No? Perhaps you remember The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009? Still nothing? That was the first bill new President Barack Hussein Obama signed into law on 29 January 2009. A hopeful start by a president… Keep reading…

CAN CPCFC* BE BEATEN BACK…? Sam Walton had a great idea: make his all-American stores in the American Heartland the hero of American workers by purchasing and selling the American goods they made. Now Walmart sells American flags… Keep reading…

WALMART AND THE NEXT GREAT COMPRESSION…? Nobel Prize winning Economist Paul Krugman has entered the conversation on Walmart and the proposed raises for some half-a-million of the company’s workers. Krugman applauds the decision… Keep reading…

WALMARTING OUR SOCIAL NETWORKS… I’m not sure when Walmart became a meme, yet there is no denying that for the past 30 years or so, the Bentonvile Behemoth has come to hold a place in our collective consciousness. That place, however, is… Keep reading…

FROM WCPN’S SOUND OF IDEAS… Listening to my local public radio station this morning I wished I had not been in my car. I would very much have liked to have been calling and emailing because there was much that I felt the show missed, or rushed… Keep reading…

OLYMPIA SEES, RAISES WALMART WAGE HIKE… The bill that passed the Washington state house yesterday still has to work through the state senate and the governor’s office, but I see a hopeful pattern here. If, businesses don’t flee Washington. If… Keep reading…

WEEKLY WALMART ROUNDUP… When Walmart announced plans to raise the wages of about 40 percent of the company’s workers on 19 February, the number of stories about the Bentonvile Behemoth exploded and I found myself unable to read, write… Keep reading…

Previously on Walmart Wednesday…

I think the nation should burn the painting and demand our money back.

The blues are not depression. To a person not suffering from either, the difference can be hard to distinguish, and that is part of a problem in matters of brain wellness.

This year marks the 20th birthday of a medical paper making this argument, and it’s worth dusting off, not least as an antidote to post-Olympics blues. Entitled A Proposal To Classify Happiness As A Psychiatric Disorder, it was published in the Journal Of Medical Ethics. Some have suggested its author, the psychology professor Richard Bentall, was engaging in deadpan humour, but he builds a persuasive case. Consider how psychiatrists usually define a “disorder”. It must be statistically abnormal; Bentall cites evidence that, depending on your definition, happiness is. It must involve “clusters of symptoms that occur together”, which happiness does. It’s often argued that a true disorder must interfere with the patient’s efforts to achieve their life goals. Well, overindulgence in food and alcohol is strongly associated with happiness, yet threatens people’s lives. Happiness triggers impulsive behaviour. Then there’s “depressive realism”, the (controversial) claim that depressed people have a more accurate grasp of their abilities than others. True, Bentall concedes, happiness is generally seen as positive. But that’s a value judgment, and these have no place in science: if an alcoholic enjoys her alcoholism, or a manic person his mania, do their disorders magically vanish? No. So we need a new classification. Bentall proposes some suitable jargon: “Major affective disorder, pleasant type.”

Yes, as Burkeman notes, Bentall was joking, but not in an April Fool sort of way.

Bentall’s purpose was to highlight the troublesome nature of psychiatric diagnosis – the way conditions such as schizophrenia are constructed from subjective judgments, though psychiatrists then treat them, usually with drugs, as if they were objective and clear-cut.

Much in psychiatry is more art than science. Brain wellness is too much in the eyes of the beholders and when fully trained and practiced professionals legitimately disagree on a diagnosis, we have reason to be concerned.

Second opinions indeed!