A Land So Fair

Boy, were they quiet about it! Consider that I’m a news junkie, that I’m from Wisconsin, and that I care I-suppose-you-could-say passionately about environmental issues. So why didn’t I know about line 61, about which the company that operates it says this:

As part of our ongoing efforts to meet North America’s needs for reliable and secure transportation of petroleum energy supplies, Enbridge is expanding the average annual capacity of Line 61 from 560,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 1.2 million bpd.

And where is that expansion? Check it out:

OK—Enbridge wants to transport over a million barrels of tar sand oil through Wisconsin every day: Is that a problem?

Regular crude oil is plenty toxic, but the tar sand oils are an environmental disaster at every level.

Let’s start with the sand that you need to fracture the oil wells: That sand has to be very fine, and Wisconsin has the fortune or misfortune to have the largest source of the rock that produces the sand in the nation. So there was a boom in production of the sand in the last decade or so, a boom four which the state’s environmental protection agency was completely unprepared.

Hmmm…or was it? According to my lights, it had been very carefully prepared indeed, and from many angles, and it was prepared to do absolutely nothing.  Why? Well, consider this quote from the Scientific American, tellingly and heart-breakingly titled “How Scott Walker Dismantled Wisconsin’s Environmental Legacy.”

Since taking office in 2011 Walker has moved to reduce the role of science in environmental policymaking and to silence discussion of controversial subjects, including climate change, by state employees. And he has presided over a series of controversial rollbacks in environmental protection, including relaxing laws governing iron mining and building on wetlands, in both cases to help specific companies avoid regulatory roadblocks. Among other policy changes, he has also loosened restrictions on phosphorus pollution in state waterways, tried to restrict wind energy development and proposed ending funding for a major renewable energy research program housed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

So now we have an explosion of sand mines, and that sand is extremely fine, making it easy for it to become airborne, and also causing silicosis, which can lead to lung cancer. And according to one source, 79 percent of air samples in frac sand sites exceed the levels of silicone established by OSHA. Right—the miners wear masks, but what do you do about little Billy, five years old and living downwind from a mine?

So the sand is bad enough, but the fracturing? Well, first of all, it requires a huge amount of water, and then produces a correspondingly huge amount of very contaminated sludge, about which nobody knows what to do, so people have been digging ponds, most of which are leaking. And as you can see in the video below, wildlife is severely affected, both by drinking it and by—in the case of birds—being coated in it.

And so what gets produced? Well, it's tar sand oil, the bulk of which is drilled in Alberta, Canada, and it's particularly nasty stuff: It can lead to things as minor as a headache to diseases as lethal as leukemia. So from a public health point of view, wouldn’t it be logical not to expose as many people as possible to the oil? Of course, but what have we done? Chosen to ship—either by rail or by pipeline—the stuff all the way across the country.

Which is precisely what Enbridge, the largest distributer of natural gas in Canada, and the operator of—in their words—“the longest crude oil and liquid hydrocarbons transportation system in the world” does.

How long is that system? Well, it goes from Superior, Wisconsin, to a refinery near Chicago, but that’s only the system in the USA (on different lines of the system, the pipelines cover 1900 miles); in Canada, the figure falls to a little over 1400 miles. So that’s 3300 miles of pipeline for both countries; that’s not bad if you’re piping water, it’s potentially disastrous if you’re piping oil.

And in fact, it was either very nearly disastrous or absolutely disastrous, depending on your point of view, when the pipeline broke on 25 July 2010 near Marshall, Michigan, and began flowing into a creek that fed into the Kalamazoo river that would later flow into Lake Michigan.

Back up five years—that’s when, according to an investigation by the National Traffic and Safety Board, Enbridge first knew that they had problems on that part of the line, but chose not to, or at least didn’t, act. Why would they do that? According to one critic-turned-whistleblower, John Bolenbaugh, it was financially a better deal to let a spill happen, and then have the insurance company pick up the tab, than it was to do routine maintenance. (As an aside, the tar sand oil is apparently especially toxic and corrosive on pipes.)

Nor was that all: Enbridge decided that the alarms were false, due to a bubble in the pipeline, so the solution? Instead of shutting down, they increased the pressure on the line, so that when finally, after 17 hours, they realized they had a leak, 81 percent of the amount spilled occurred in those 17 hours.

 That was because the boys in the monitoring station were in Edmonton, Canada, and not smelling what the boys fishing down by the river were smelling, which was very strong indeed. Oh, and they were also getting headaches….

How bad was it? The worst inland spill in the country, nor was that all, because it turns out that tar sand oil reacts differently in water than crude oil. Crude oil stays on the surface and is relatively easy to collect: We were in uncharted seas with tar sand oil. So we had to learn that tar sand oil initially stays on the surface, releases hydrocarbons such as benzene, and then sinks to the sea or river floor, and what to do with that?

Ah, for the days of American ingenuity! Because I would love to have read, as I now will love to write, “Enbridge’s expert team of haz-mat professions instantly realized and conceived a special vacuuming process (since patented) that scoured each millimeter of the river bed, collected any trace of oil or other chemicals, transferred it to custom-made tanks, which were then taken to a disaster response center, which had rockets ready in order to shoot the hazardous material into space, to incinerate the material as well as the rocket itself outside of the fragile tissue of our precious atmosphere. At Enbridge, we care!”

No, that wasn’t the sentence (run-on intended, all the better to obfuscate and lull you into passivity) that got written.  Instead, Enbridge pretty much told the EPA what they were going to do, which is why I could view in one video the fascinating spectacle of the side of the boat, the oil-drenched river, and the hand reaching down to clean up this toxic mess with…

…a paper towel!

Guys? That’s something I’d do!

Well, they got more clever as time went on. According to whistle-blower Bolenbaugh, they scooped up whatever was visible, took it to a field, dumped in out, pulled layers of burlap or canvas or whatever, put a topping of soil on that, and then seeded it. Viola! Instant meadow—just don’t dig to deep.

Or stir the riverbed too much, since, as the videos make clear, you’ll get a plume of oily who-knows-what floating down the river. So they poured in rocks, then sand, and…

This was too much for even the EPA, which ordered further dredging. It was all bad enough for the director of the NTSB, Deborah Hersman, to say that Enbridge officials acted, “like the Keystone cops.”

Unless, of course, you were the whistle-blower, who got the ax the very morning after he blew the whistle, and then started getting death threats. All of which were freaking him out enough to start putting videos of his motorcycle with two screws missing on the front tire, and his neighbor opining that those screws were designed never to come out.

Full disclosure—yes, he looks nuts. But remember that old adage that even paranoiacs have enemies? It’s all on his website: you judge.

Nor was the public unaffected, and Bolenbaugh got all of that on camera, too, and pretty compelling it is, especially if you have never seen a person having a seizure. I have, and if the video’s is an act, I hope it wins the Oscar.

Nor was it the case that you had to be sick to get Enbridge’s attention, you had to be sick in the right location, which meant that unless you had the river passing through your living room—right, I know I should edit that out, but watch the videos, and you’ll get steamed, too—well, you were probably a malingerer or hoping for a handout.

Apparently, it was all so bad that Enbridge had to buy 134 houses. The catch? Well, they got them at fire sale prices, cleaned up their mess (maybe) and then sold at a higher price. So says—of course—the whistleblower.

The videos are wrenching in part because of the constant complaint, which I find utterly true, that “they don’t care”—with the “they” being Enbridge. To which I would reply that of course they don’t care, and perhaps they shouldn’t. Why? Because corporations don’t care until it’s too expensive not to care, which is why we have regulatory bodies like the EPA and the NTSB that have enough teeth to gnash the corporation into shreds and fed it to their cubs, and then loll in the sun, looking at the bones and the carnage. Then—trust me—the corporations will care.

So it was a disaster, a disaster of over one million US gallons of extremely toxic muck spilled that got into the creek and then into the river, and almost—though who knows, maybe it did—got into Lake Michigan. Which is connected, you do remember from 5^th grade geography, to all of the other Great Lakes, and which are scenic, yes, but also provide a lot of water for however-many-millions to drink.  

One final irony: Everybody is reporting seriously that they “closed” the river, which I found curious, because I have seen rivers, including the mighty Mississippi, and it was very much my impression that a river flowed, so had someone found the faucet handle that could turn off a river? If so, not doing so was criminal negligence when we had all that flooding five or ten years ago. But no, closing a river simply meant that humans could not swim or boat or even go near it. But what about fish and wildlife? You know the answer.

A long piece, I know. But Enbridge, this Enbridge, this fair country—sorry, company—is the very company that wants to “upgrade” the pipeline so that one million barrels will pass through…. OK—I think I did the math, which was to figure out that a barrel contains 31.5 US gallons, multiply that by 1,000,000 (barrels per day), divide by 24 (hours per day) and then get the figure of 1,312, 500 (gallons per hour). And that means? That we could have a spill as bad as Michigan’s in under an hour. A spill in Wisconsin, my home state.

Remember Wisconsin?

Stay tuned!

Notes from a Radicalized Atheist

Must we?

I try to be fair, I try to be respectful, I try to remember that many of the worthwhile things that have occurred over the last couple of millennia are the result either of the church or their believers. And what, I ask myself, have we atheists ever contributed? Have we started soup kitchens, held the hand of the dying, worked with lepers? So shouldn’t I give organized religion a break?

Want the short answer?

Fuck no.

To any nonbeliever out there, it’s been a bad couple of weeks. Consider, for example, the famous Hobby Lobby case, and can I convince you, Horrified Readers, that the religious backgrounds of the five male justices had noting to do with it? That all five of the justices who voted in favor of Hobby Lobby were catholic (nope, no capitals today, dammit)—that’s a coincidence? Oh, and the other catholic on the court who voted in dissent was a woman—Sonia Sotomayor—otherwise, guess what? It would have been 6 / 3.

Did you know, Hobby Lobby—as yes, I’m addressing you personally, since that apparently is what five people in the US have decided you are—what kind of a crowd you were going against? Because there isn’t one protestant on the Supreme Court (seriously thinking about those caps, too). So you guys walked into the lion’s den and came out unscathed—gotta hand it to you.

Of course, let’s hope your daughter doesn’t work for a closely-held corporation that has strong Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. Otherwise, that blood transfusion? Or the vaccines, which oddly enough have gotten prohibitively expensive? Here, courtesy of The New York Times, is the lead from an article entitled “The Price of Prevention: Vaccine Costs are Soaring:”

There is little that Dr. Lindsay Irvin has not done for the children’s vaccines in her office refrigerator: She remortgaged her home to afford their rising prices.

Guys? Can you imagine what the rest of the world is thinking about us?

Now the situation is so bad that a rabid little college in Illinois—Wheaton College—has decided it doesn’t want to fill out a form telling the government that the college is opting out of the contraceptive clause; here’s the Columbus Dispatch on the subject:

The school had argued that simply doing the paperwork — the form asks only for name, contact information, signature and date — infringed upon its religious liberty because it would trigger the employee’s ability to get the disputed contraception.

What’s this about? Simple—the Supreme Court has just declared the right of corporations to impose their religious beliefs on workers.

Nor did the religious right waste any time, because, the day after Hobby Lobby? A whole gaggle of religious groups sent a letter asking Obama to not issue an order directing the federal government to not award contracts to companies; enter The New York Times, again:

Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s addlebrained Hobby Lobby decision, several groups wrote to Mr. Obama on July 1 asking him to allow federal contractors to fire or refuse to hire workers based on their religious objections to a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

Oh—just for your information, the article is titled “Tax-payer Financed Bigotry,” a statement so pithy that it spares you the need to read further.

Well, we already have the catholic church firing teachers and principals of their schools who have gotten married—to members of their own sex, that is. Oh, and by the way, are those schools entirely self-funded? No nickel of the taxpayers going there?

Here’s a clue:

More than 80 percent of students receiving federal vouchers through the D.C. program attend private religious schools with such civil rights exemptions but no opt-out option for religious instruction. 

Oh, and don’t think, by the way, that all you have to do is worry about federal money, because you also have to worry about what the bastards in your statehouse are doing. Because increasingly, that’s where the action is; consider this, from The Washington Post:

In North Carolina, the state legislature recently passed a bill to divert $10 million of taxpayer money meant for public schools to private schools, including those that “provide an education that is Christ-centered” and teach “the truth of scripture” with “Bible-based facts,” such as: “dinosaurs and humans co-existed on Earth; slave-masters generally treated their slaves well; in some areas, the KKK fought the decline in morality by using the sign of the cross; and gay people have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”

Know what? I’m now radicalized—for (easily) ten years I worked in a company where wearing a gold crucifix around your neck was almost de rigeur, where saying “bien, gracias a Dios” was the standard response to the question of how you were doing. And I shut up because I was respectful, though I admit to fighting the life-size crèche that Human Resources—ladies? Aren’t you guys supposed to be the experts here?—put up one Christmas. But now?

Now, I wish I had turned the company into a battleground. I wish I had said, “god doesn’t exist,” at every turn. I wish I had told everybody that had a crucifix to take it off, because I found it offensive. I wish the whole company had ground to a halt, so that 499 people could have been jumping the throat of little me. I should have duked it out until the end.

Reasonable?

Done with it!

Sam and Company

Now then, having straightened out the Mormon Church—rescind that excommunication, boys!—I can get right down to work on the Walton family.

Full disclosure: I worked for seven years for Wal-Mart, and was treated well, even when they decided to cut me loose (they gave me a severance package that was not legally required). And though someone once described founder Sam Walton as “the world’s nicest guy until he gets down to putting you out of business”—well, why not? This is business, guys, not a Sunday school class: do you think Macy’s isn’t going after Bloomingdale’s?

There were things I liked about Sam. He squeezed that dollar till the eagle squawked, once picking up a muffler he found on the side of the road, since he was mufflerless himself at the time. Did the guys at the shop sigh heavily, throw the damn thing away, install a new one, and never tell Sam? Think that’s how that story went….

There were the reporters who asked why he was still riding around in the famous red truck, which sits squarely in the Walton museum, or visitors’ center, or whatever it is. “Get a decent car, for God’s sake, Sam!” His response? Something like where was he gonna put his four hunting dogs in a Rolls Royce?

Well, I was thinking about all this yesterday, when I read an article Susan had sent me about the Walton Family Foundation. True, it’s from a website called Liberal America, which tells you right off the bat what song this choir will be singing, but the question is: is it true? Because the headline reads:

New Report Suggests Walmart Heirs’ Foundation Is A Massive Tax Dodge

Ouch! And a further ouch when I read this:

An analysis of 23 years of foundation tax returns revealed that Sam Walton’s heirs only gave only 0.04 percent of their combined net worth to their own foundation–not even a fraction of what other wealthy Americans give to charity.

The article goes on to say that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett give over 36% and 27%, respectively, of their net worths to charity. And Rob Walton? You know, chairman of the board, Sam’s eldest son? He hasn’t given anything.

OK—let’s let Walmart speak:

Sam Walton believed in the power of opportunity to change individual lives and communities, and that anyone through hard work and determination can achieve the American dream, something he personally experienced. His wife, Helen, understood the importance of giving back. In fact, one of her favorite sayings was “It’s not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived.” Their combined vision has led the Walton family to contribute more than $5 billion to charitable organizations and causes and continues today to drive the work of the Walton Family Foundation. 

In 2013, the foundation invested more than $325 million in K-12 education reform, freshwater and marine conservation and quality of life initiatives in our home region. Family members carried forward a philanthropic approach of sustained and focused giving, believing that it is the key to achieving lasting change, and they continue to challenge the foundation to find new, innovative solutions as well as measure impact from the individual grant level to the effectiveness of overall strategies.

Here’s a view from the middle, Forbes Magazine:

The Walton family is America’s richest, worth some $140 billion between them and longtime fixtures of the Forbes 400 list thanks to their approximate 50% ownership of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer.

Their Walton Family Foundation, established by the late Sam and Helen Walton in 1988, is considered a heavyweight in the world of nonprofits with just under $2 billion in assets.

Granted, the Forbes article was based, as was Liberal America’s, on a report by the Walmart 1%, which is a project of Making Change at Walmart, which doesn’t sound rabidly pro-Walmart. But it’s still Forbes, which presumably vets things….

All right, how does the Walmart Family Foundation match up with other foundations? According to Wikipedia, the world’s largest fund is something out of the Netherlands called the Stichting INGKA Foundation with a cool thirty-six billion. Next up are Bill and Melinda's, with 34.6 billion. And the Walton Family Fund?

Not on the list…

Yes, that list only covers the top 31 (no idea why they chose that number…) and number 31, with 3 billion—that’s a billion more than Walton—is the Kresge Foundation.

Kresge?

Could it be?

Run back to Wikipedia:

In 1924, with an initial gift of $1.6 million, Sebastian Kresge established The Kresge Foundation in Detroit. Twelve years earlier, he and partner John G. McCrory opened the first 5-and-10-cent store, and parlayed the concept and operations into a chain of stores that were incorporated as the S.S. Kresge Company. Many years later the enterprise became known as Kmart.

What would Sam think?

Ode to Wal-Mart

It’s a curious matter—for the last two days, I have had waking dreams in which I was back working at Wal-Mart. OK—that’s explicable: after you have spent seven years of immersion therapy, you don’t come out of it unchanged.

Immersion because, physically, the building swallowed you up. True, it was capable of holding 600 workers, or so, plus providing a cafeteria and a huge auditorium, but it only had five or six windows, all of which were in the cafeteria. But so photophobic were we—note that pronoun there—that we kept them covered with translucent hurricane shutters, no matter what time of the year, or what chance there could be of a hurricane.

It was more than that. There was never a meeting in which the corporate “culture” wasn’t trotted out, but it was a culture honored in word only. Don’t think, however, that there wasn’t a true culture operating—one very much against the official, expressed culture. It wasn’t about doing your work or producing something, it was about going along with the herd, sending defensive emails, printing them, and then producing them, if anyone attacking the herd happened to single you out for the kill.

You ran, ideally, as much inside the herd as possible, since obviously the people on the outside, or—God forbid—the stragglers behind, were the logical victims to be picked off. And it was also true—you didn’t want to be out front. So that meant never, ever thinking outside the box, no matter how often it was urged on you.

This was a lesson lost on me. At one point in some meeting, the quality assurance lady gave a talk in which she stressed that fruits and vegetables must be rigorously kept away from meats, with their potentially leaking cellophane packages. All of that dripping blood, you see, is a perfect medium….

‘So why do we have the shopping carts that we do?’ I was thinking.

“You see, we have the basket on the right side of the cart in red, with pictures of meat cuts and chicken and so on—so that we don’t have to translate into Chinese or Korean or whatever for our foreign markets. And on the left side, we have a green basket, with pictures of bananas and apples and oranges. See? We’ll be an industry leader! We’ll save countless lives! We’ll reduce the number of food poisoning incidents by 333%!”

“We’ll see, Marc….”

That was five years ago, and if you go, as I did last week, into Wal-Mart today? The same stupid carts from the 1950’s, in which fruit and vegetables and meats can fornicate as much as we people ever did in the sixties.

Even after two-and-a-half years away from it, I still think of it, occasionally, and that makes sense to me. But here’s my question—why was it that yesterday, I dreamed of being chased down, and told that there was an important meeting, an urgent meeting, a mandatory meeting, at which everybody but guess-who was? And when I got to the meeting? The topic was poetry.

Yes, poetry. And the good Human Resources ladies (my apologies to the other three men in department) had done their best, which…

…wasn’t very good.

One speaker was awful, in fact. She was cowering behind a PowerPoint presentation with mutilated, hideous slides that were unreadable and anyway swung about unpredictably. Oh, and the speaker was mumbling into the microphone and painfully nervous.

This morning’s dream?

Elizabeth, the woman who first hired me, has told me to go to Sam’s Club, where I am to teach math. OK—do that, leave for lunch, get back, start to grade the tests that I have given. Except that—being math—I have no idea what answer is right. Elizabeth reappears and tells me that she’s sure I’ll have some pertinent remarks about poetry.

I protest—I know nothing about poetry. “Certainly, you do,” she returns. At this point I wake up.

I wake up wondering—has Wal-Mart decided to do to poetry what they did to the grocery business, which was to trample it? Or am I to write poems about Wal-Mart?

Confession: I have just made the attempt, and there isn’t much there.

It was a time in my life when the poetic impulse, or any creative impulse, was thoroughly squelched. Except that, in a curious way, it wasn’t. I am perhaps the only person you’ll ever meet who designed and created an office-wide ESL website in PowerPoint, complete with narrated lessons, quizzes, games. I devised a word-of-the-day scheme that I remember, even now, as being quite beautiful. And then, of course, there were all those batty but good ideas—like the new and improved shopping cart—that somehow never got anywhere.

I am the person least suited to corporate America, and after I got used to that realization, I then realized: the ax would fall when it would fall, so really, there wasn’t much sense worrying about it. I could have tried harder, I suppose: tried to fit in more, gone to more meetings, learned to love the box. But why bother?

Fear and lethargy

Walked hand in hand down

The grey-clad aisle,

Past the cubicles where

Bamboo shoots pointed up

To the florescent lights,

Where workers slouched

Eyes glazed, minds numbed

Their hands caressing the mouse…

And Crest snuggled, in

Three thousand stores,

Six inches to the left of

The Colgate, though in fact

The two had hated each other for years,

Despite their wives having gone to

School together….

And their kids?

After never having spoken,

They developed a strange

Taste for dope,

Which could be satisfied,

After hours

Underneath the gondola,

That metal rack that sails

Down the aisles of

Big box stores,

Propelled by mustachioed black-haired

Blue and white striped burly

Consumers, ardent, burning           

Maddened to sample the new

16-ounce Crest—24 hour cavity protection!

O Sole Mio, sing the packages,

And the waves recede,

All passion spent.

Right! Did it!

That Well-Hated Company

Well, you have to admire Peter Schiff—as someone who has tried to engage in debate about gun control, I know that what he was trying to do in a Wal-Mart parking lot wasn’t easy.

And what, you ask, was he doing?

Only asking two questions: did they support higher wages for Wal-Mart workers? If so, would they pay 15% of what they had spent at the store today? He promised to give the money to the workers at the end of the afternoon. Oh, and good try—saying you had no cash! He took plastic.

Understandably, he didn’t get many people to donate….

Well, he comes right out and says it—we love those low prices, but most of us have no idea how tricky the retail business is. The iPad you bought at Wal-Mart? The company didn’t make a dime on it. In fact, Wal-Mart and everybody else makes no money on electronics; for Black Friday, they’re bleeding money, and people in the stores are begging customers to buy the cables, the stands, the insurance for the gadgets. That’s where the money is.

Think that’s bad? Wal-Mart is also the leading grocer in the USA, and that business is even worse. You’ve got perishables, for one thing, and the margin is miniscule. So despite the huge sales, the actual profit is—comparatively—small. So I believe Schiff when he says:

A raise to a $15 hourly minimum would increase its $26 billion annual payroll of hourly workers by 50%, or $13 billion per year. This is approximately 80% of the company’s total operating profit of $16 billion. Taking those increases from profits would devastate the company’s finances, place it a serious disadvantage to its competitors, and force a dramatic restructuring.  

So what is it that Wal-Mart does that is a red cape to so many liberal bulls? Sure, they pay miserably, but guess what? The supermarket next to me pays just as little, and has just as many part-timers, if not more. And I used to ask people who hated Wal-Mart which job they’d prefer: Wal-Mart or McDonalds? Trust me, not a lot of people chose McDonalds.

Still don’t think that Wal-Mart arouses deep passions? Here’s what Schiff wrote about the reaction from the Left.

The reaction I have seen online leads me to believe that the left wing of the political spectrum is home to some of the most intolerant, hypocritical, vindictive, and judgmental people in the country.  In the comments on my Facebook and YouTube pages I have been called some of the most vulgar names imaginable.  I, and all members of my family, have been wished slow and painful deaths, with some even inferring that they would be willing to hasten the process themselves.  Others did not think I should actually forfeit my life, just my liberty, as they thought I should be thrown in jail.  Many on the religious left have even offered prayers that my soul could find a special place in hell where my torment could surpass the anguish of the commonly damned.

The insults were not limited to me, but extended to woman who appeared in the video with me. She did not utter a single word, but merely stood by my side holding a sign.  Yet many made extremely rude comments about her physical appearance.   I thought liberals didn’t do that?

People often charge that Wal-Mart drives everybody out of business, an argument I find a little strange. Look, guys, this is business, remember? This is about competing for customers, who are driven by (mostly) price, service, and very marginally loyalty. And competition means there winners and losers—and what happens when you lose in business?

Is it the fact that Wal-Mart is and was an essentially southern company? Is that what’s bugging all the (mostly) northern liberals?

It’s true that Wal-Mart is rigidly, adamantly anti-union. And also true that at the first hint that employees are organizing, management calls a hotline, and a TEAM flies out to the store. At that point, the manager loses all control—the anti-union is calling the shots. And yes, as a former part of management at Wal-Mart, I had to go through the famous training on what to say—and not to say—to non-management employees.

It’s also true that this morning’s edition of The New York Times had an article about the Local 1 of the stagehand union. Here’s the headline:

Hey, Stars, Be Nice to the Stagehands. You Might Need a Loan.

Here’s a quote from the article:

Five stagehands at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center were each paid more in total compensation in 2011 than the highest-paid dancer at New York City Ballet, filings showed. And, in 2010, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” paid its stagehands a total of $138,000 a week, while the principals and members of the ensemble earned slightly less than $100,000 put together, according to documents submitted to the state attorney general’s office.

Look—there’s something screwy when a stagehand can earn than the highest paid dancer at City Ballet.

So what is it about Wal-Mart that we hate? Let’s be honest: too many of us are living lives completely dedicated to possessions, to consuming, to have more and more for which we have to work harder and harder at jobs we hate. We’ve become junkies.

And Wal-Mart?

Our pushers.

Wisconsin is Open for Abuse

It’s the time of the year when my mood turns cynical, or rather, more cynical, since I’m never entirely free of the outlook.

But in this case, it seems absolutely justified, since the great—well, at one time—state of Wisconsin passed a law that forbids…OK, here’s the headline:

New state law conceals records of abuse, neglect in nursing homes

I came upon it via Ralph Nader, whom you can see and hear below, on his talk on the defining question / issue of our time: the corporation. And, in passing, he mentioned that tort lawyers are finding it difficult to sue nursing home chains. Why? Because the homes are owned by a corporation with few assets that are owned overseas (probably a tax shelter) by another corporation, which in turn may be owned by another corporation. So even if you sue successfully and get a judgment, can you collect? Nope!

Well, that was sufficiently interesting to turn off Nader—sad the things you can do cybernetically but not in real life—and google “tort law nursing homes.” And that’s where I came across the state law, which was meant to promote a more business-friendly environment in the state.

And what’s the essence of the law? Here’s the State Journal:

The law, which went into effect in February 2011, bars families from using state health investigation records in state civil suits filed against long-term providers, including nursing homes and hospices. It also makes such records inadmissible in criminal cases against health care providers accused of neglecting or abusing patients.

What does that mean? It means that if you—as did Joshua Wahl, in the article cited above—leave Mother in a home and she is lying in her feces for hours at a time, she will very likely develop a bedsore. And if, as happened to Wahl, the bedsore is never adequately treated, Mother may develop an infection that may turn into septicemia. And that’s life threatening.

Now, let’s imagine you are the incredibly slacking type who doesn’t turn Mother over every two hours and perform a thorough inspection along with good skin care. You shockingly assume that that’s their job, after all. What resource do you have, to make sure that old Mother is getting the proper care? The friendly smile of the home’s administrator?

You know, of course, that the state inspects the facility, and there’s that official-looking certificate on the front door (or next to it). And so you decide to go online and check if the Wisconsin Department of Health Services has any info on Mother’s nursing home (now euphemistically called a “skilled nursing facility”). Well, I did—and came upon a page which, in miniscule type said this:

Wisconsin Nursing Homes: State Citations Issued from 10/01/2012 to 09/30/2013 Information is current as of 10/28/2013

OK—I’ll save you a trip to search for the magnifying glass—it’s Wisconsin’s citation of nursing homes for an entire year, from October 2012 to October 2013. And guess what? I was looking up my own mother’s old nursing home, Ingleside in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. So I was on the “I” page, and how many citations were there for an entire year for nursing homes beginning with “I” in Wisconsin?

One.

OK, it’s diluted but it’s there. Jack, my old journalist father, sometimes spurs me to action. And so I went page by page counting nursing citations in Wisconsin. I can hear the bated breath out there….

There were 28.

Here’s the link: try it yourself.

Yeah? Well, let’s do a posthumous—in my mother’s case—search for records on Ingleside. So I did a search in the “providers” page, entered the name, the county, and the city. And guess what? The search turned up this:

No records were found for your search criteria

(At least that’s what happened to me. It has to be said, however, that the talented Ms. Taí came up—somehow—with a helpful six-page report. Here’s the link, and good luck!)

https://www.forwardhealth.wi.gov/WIPortal/DQA%20Provider%20Search/tabid/318/Default.aspx

OK—Ingleside doesn’t exist, what about the Attic Angels, where I worked many a night shift?

Also not found….

Four Winds in Verona?

Curiously, the site found it! Wow, and there was a map!

What wasn’t there?

Anything else….

All right—time to trot over to Google, to check out how many nursing homes—including the phantom one that had sheltered my mother three times in three years—there are in Wisconsin. And I chose what must be an industry (word used quite intentionally) site. Here’s the dough:

Wisconsin contains 390 certified Medicare and Medicaid nursing homes. These nursing homes have a total of 34,876 available beds for skilled nursing residents and at the time when we updated this data 82% of those beds were full. The overall average Medicare 5 Star Quality rating for Wisconsin skilled nursing homes is 3.5 which ranks 13 nationally.

What! We’re only 13 nationally when in an entire year we only had 28 citations for 390 certified homes! Wow, those twelve other states must be immaculate!

Walker, with his “Wisconsin is open for business” slogan, seems to have gutted any effective regulation of at least nursing homes. And you know, I spent a portion of today inventing new, Walkeresque regulations. Things like:

Inspectors are encouraged to choose between on versus off site inspections.

Or how about…

Inspectors are under no circumstances permitted within 50 yards of the facility. Inspections should be limited to general questions—e.g. “everything going OK in there”—to passing staff members. Non-responses will be considered a “overwhelmingly positive.”

You know, I worked for years in those places. I know perfectly well that in even the best homes I could have found a dozen citations, had I been armed with the regulations. Considering a little time to rest up in a nursing home?

Enter at your own risk!