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Death at Wal-Mart--True Meaning of the Holidays
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First I offered my idealistic vision of the true meaning of the holiday season. But now, like an election, the people have spoken. The actual true meaning of the holiday season is bargain shopping--take no prisoners shopping...shopping at any cost.
Now we have death at Wal-Mart and most people want to blame Wal-Mart. Those security tapes need to be reviewed. Every single person who pushed, then stepped over and stepped on the man who died needs to be charged with anything from simple assault to manslaughter. I think it is called depraved indifference. I'm sure those who were part of that mob crush feel they have been punished enough already--the store closed immediately and was closed for 8 hours. I'm sure that seemed like death row for all those bargain hunters.
As Paul Harvey would say, now you know the rest of the story. People can debate the elements of what happened, but now the spotlight is shining right into the eyes of the general public. Many will wonder what came first--Wal-Mart's drive to sell the cheapest foreign made products or the public's demand for cheap Christmas gifts. I refuse to put any blame on Wal-Mart. This is all about the public behaving like animals. This is all about the lack of respect and concern for our fellow citizens. This is all about the fact that we create our own disasters because for some odd reason, we don't know any better.
Are we going to blame the poor economy and say people were only looking for some bargain prices so their families could have a nice Christmas? Are we going to point the finger at the other person who pushed a bit harder than the rest? Once the man was down, didn't anyone notice? Did anyone stop to see how he was? Did anyone want to help him?
So now I add Christmas shopping to my list. The list of things that brings out the absolute worst in people.
1. Religion
2. Christmas shopping.
and now walmart is saying the employee was hired from a "temp agency". so that's ok walmart, the guy didn't count.
walmart is so cheap it hires "cheaper" employees than it's own employees? disgusting.
Every time I went to any WAL*MART store there were always parents beating their children. I told a few of them off. The last time I went to a WAL*MART I witness a well dressed grown man over 6 foot tall yelling at and back handing in the face a crying hungry toddler strapped into a shopping cart's seat. The child's Mother was totally clueless to her child's needs while she was 'shopping for clothes'. I gave a look to that child's Father that would stopped a tiger in it's tracks. He pulled back is hand and I stood there until he attended properly to his child's needs. He was an intelligent man but very lazy and self-centered.
The attitude of greed manifests itself in interesting ways. WAL*MART is all about the disease of greed. Their stores are toxic environments so are their parking lots.
- The world has been taught to agree with the corporate structure.
By Susan Rowe on Nov 30, 2008 6:47 AM ESTBut that doesn't mean it is correct. It's just greedy.
I'm NO fan of Bob Rubin or Clinton Adminstration's domestic economic polices. They stole money from my widowed mother. It was done in a underhanded and very sneaky way.
IMHO, Obama has made a HUGE mistake for the America people with these two....
Lawrence Henry "Larry" Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist and member of President-elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board. On November 24, 2008 he was named the next head of the White House's National Economic Council.
Summers was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan from 1982-1983. He also served as an economic adviser to the Dukakis Presidential campaign in 1988.
[...]
Summers left Harvard in 1991 and served as Chief Economist for the World Bank until 1993, when he was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs and later in the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin.
In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury. He left the Treasury in 2001 and returned to Harvard as its President. Summers served as the 27th President of Harvard University from July 2001 until June 2006.
In 2006 he was a member of the Panel of Eminent Persons which reviewed the work of The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development or UNCTAD.
Starting in 2009, he will be director of the White House National Economic Council...
----
Robert Edward Rubin (born August 29, 1938) is Director and Senior Counselor of Citigroup where he was the architect of Citigroup's strategy of taking on more risk in debt markets, which led to eventual government rescue. From November to December 2007, he served temporarily as Chairman of Citigroup. From 1999 to present, he earned $115 million in pay at Citigroup. He served as the 70th United States Secretary of the Treasury during both the first and second Clinton administrations. [...]
This is not change we can believe in. Not if Robert Rubin or his protégé, Lawrence Summers, get to call the shots on the economy in President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration. Both Clinton-era treasury secretaries deserve a great deal of the blame for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that has derailed the world economy. They both should, along with former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, perform rites of contrition and be kept at a safe distance from the leadership of our nation.
Yet Rubin and Summers are highly visible in the Obama transition team, with Summers widely touted as Obama’s pick for secretary of the treasury. New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner, who also worked in the Treasury Department under Rubin and Summers, is the other leading candidate. But it was Summers who most vehemently pushed for congressional passage of that drastic deregulation measure, the Financial Services Modernization Act, which eliminated the New Deal barriers against mergers of commercial and investment banks as well as insurance companies and stockbrokers. Standing at his side as President Bill Clinton signed the legislation, Summers heralded it as “a major step forward to the 21st century”—and what a wonderful century it’s proving to be.
It was also Summers who worked in cahoots with Enron and banking lobbyists, and who backed Republican Sen. Phil Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned any effective government regulation of the newly unleashed derivatives market. The result was not only a temporary boon to Enron, which soon collapsed under its unbridled greed, but also to the entire Wall Street financial community.
[...]
there is more HERE.
- Re-posting: This is the thrid time. DFA HQ Please stop censoring bloggers comments and posts.
By Susan Rowe on Dec 3, 2008 11:57 AM EST
- Rubin’s Detail Deficit Obama's new team is heavy with Rubinistas, but nobody's perfect—even, it turns out, Rubin.
By Susan Rowe on Nov 30, 2008 5:06 AM PST...It's all perfectly logical and explicable, except that Rubin arguably helped create the financial crisis that Obama now must fix. As Treasury secretary, Rubin pushed to allow banks to get into riskier businesses, and as a high-level official at Citigroup for the past nine years he and his colleagues at Citi have presided over the near collapse of an institution that will require a massive taxpayer bailout because it is too big to fail. Citi got $25 billion as part of the original bailout; last week it got an additional $20 billion, as well as a guarantee from the government to backstop losses it takes on $306 billion in bad assets.
"Everyone agrees we have to save Citi, so we're throwing hundreds of billions at it because it was so poorly managed, and yet there's Robert Rubin sitting right there in the middle of it and he's been looked to as a wise man," says Dean Baker, cofounder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. "It's outrageous. We're turning to the same people who made this mess in the first place."
- Rubin helped to make this mess, perhaps it's time he took some of the responsiblity of cleaning it up.
By Susan Rowe on Nov 30, 2008 5:15 AM PSTIMHO, Rubin is NO genuis. He's just a greedy opportunist. It is for us yet to see if he can manifest any genuis out of that Harvard education but I doubt it.
- The price of a College education for D.C. insiders... Do you think there could be a problem?
By Susan Rowe on Nov 30, 2008 2:23 PM PSTWhile the business world is filled with innovations that make products better and cheaper, higher education just keeps getting more expensive--vastly outpacing all increases in the cost of living.
According to data from The Chronicle of Higher Education, which tracks college costs, the 10 most expensive schools in the country, led by George Washington University in Washington, D.C., averaged a tuition rise of 52% from 1999 to 2006--nearly triple the 21% rise in the U.S. cost of living during the same period. George Washington's $37,820 tuition is 82% of the entire median annual family income of $46,326.
In Pictures: Most Expensive Colleges In America
COST OF ATTENDANCE for Harvard 2008-09
Tuition
$32,557
Health Services Fee
$1,426
Student Services Fee
$2,190
Room
$6,060
Board
$4,982
Subtotal - billed costs
$47,215
Estimated Personal Expenses
$3,035
Estimated Travel Costs
$0 - $2,400
Total billed and unbilled costs
$50,250 - $52,650
In addition, health insurance coverage is required at a cost of $1,404 unless the student is covered under the family's health plan.
Average College Prices
2008-09
But Did You Know That... Private four-year $25,143 (up 5.9 percent from last year)
Public four-year $6,585 (up 6.4 percent from last year)
About 56 percent of students enrolled at four-year colleges or universities attend institutions that charge tuition and fees of less than $9,000 per year.
- 38 percent of full-time students enrolled in public four-year colleges and universities attend institutions that charge tuition and fees between $3,000 and $6,000.
- While private four-year institutions have a much wider range of tuition and fee charges, only about 9 percent of all students attend colleges with tuition and fees totaling $33,000 or higher per year.
Public two-year $2,402 (up 4.7 percent from last year)
- 32 percent of all full-time students attend public two-year colleges.
Students will pay, on average, from $381 to $408 more than last year for this year's room and board, depending on the type of college.
The average surcharge for full-time out-of-state students at public four-year institutions is $10,867.
- More than $143 billion in financial aid is available to students and their families.
- About two-thirds of all full-time undergraduate students receive grant aid. In 2008-09, estimated aid in the form of grants and tax benefits averaged about $2,300 per student at public two-year colleges, about $3,700 at public four-year colleges, and about $10,200 per student at private four-year colleges.
In this instance, I see no wrong-doing on the part of Wal-Mart--bad planning, lack of planning, maybe, but they called local police before the store opened, but the police saw no reason to stay.
In my opinion, people are using Wal-Mart as an excuse for their depraved, animal like behavior. The shoppers killed someone, not Wal-Mart. Though it seems less and less likely anyone will be charged in this crime, I truly hope each and everyone of those people who pushed their way in and trampled a man sits in fear and worries constantly throughout the holidays that the police may come knocking on their door.
I do offer this disclaimer. 14 years ago I was employed by Wal-Mart and to this day consider Wal-Mart to be among the best companies I ever worked 4. Though much can change in 14 years, what I remember and what I base my opinion on is that Wal-Mart was extremely fair and careful in dealing with employees. I remember my shock in hearing about the class action lawsuit on behalf of female employees who were not given fair opportunity for advancement. I remember something far different. When upper level jobs were posted, managers would walk around the store, come across female employees and ask them why they had not applied for the promotion/higher lever job.
While I assume many things have changed, I also know that most employees were very happy with their jobs--I certainly was. Yet there were a few who constantly made comments about wanting to steal from the store because "Wal-Mart could afford it".
Enlightened Capitalism: Building a New Corporate Consciousness
Besides changing our perceptions of the world and how we operate within it, the buckling of the “old system” of business is rapidly restructuring the relationships between employees, companies and society. The current convergence of global market failures and changing societal expectations of corporations is creating a widespread realization that we can’t continue with “business as usual.” [...]
This debate has been going on before Ronnie Rambo. During my time, we went to 12 weeks of basic and advanced infantry training then to specialist school. I was designated a rifleman and went to VN quick. Some went to cooks or clerk schools or other non-combat schools. We always thought the soldiers did two things: blow up things and kill people. Cooking or latrine duty or office work? No way.
I thought the military did a smart thing farming non-combat, non-terchnical jobs out.
It didn't work out so well though. In VN, when I came back in the wee hours of the morning from a harrowing patrol, I could grab some coffee and hot chow. "Cookie" never slept. And if we were attacked, he could belt feed a 30 cal. with the best of them. Great guy and soldier.
The contract workers have never had a bond with the folks they are serving. The kitchens are open very strict hours, the food sucks and the pay is outrageous. It is not saving any money at all and is costing us a fortune. Their customers feel crapped on and are told to get lost.
Also, remedial labor is one way to wind down and let the adrenelin get back to normal. I always put my guys on kp or camp clean-up to get them to start bitching about me and not dwelling on the horrors we just saw.
There are various marketing strategies to cover the target market and to reach the organizational marketing goal. Therefore, the time and season are great factors in making everything possible. Consumer prices have been sliding down, fast, almost to the point of free fall for the last two months. However, as the prices of goods are dropping, the rate of unemployment is rising. The housing starts are at a fifty year low, and retail titans like Best Buy and Office Depot are sustaining losses, hard. Christmas, perennially the hub of the retail year, has thus far been unable to take the sting out of the recession. To read more on the economy and payday loans http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2008/12/15/online-shopping-soars-in-popularity-faxless-payday-loans-provide-quick-cash/
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