James Stewart, a [...]]]> New Orleans   $24 million in bribes is not a onetime thing, a rounding error, or a mistake in judgment.  It is evidence of company policy and a corporate culture.  Walmart has proven that it is trying to buy its way into the Mexican marketplace one bribe at a time, many stores at a time.

James Stewart, a columnist for the Times, and several op-ed columnists for the Journal are already trying to warn us in one case and spin us in the other that we shouldn’t expect that there will be any REAL accountability at the level of top executives going to the dock and doing time in a Mexican or USA prison.  Jail is something for blue-collar, no collar folks caught up short or Mexican workers trying to find jobs on the wrong side of the border.  The message seems to be that with enough money and lawyers, everything is fair in love, war, and big companies.

Painfully, Stewart uses as his prime example Tyson Foods, another Springdale, Arkansas big-time corporation (and, no, this can’t just be about a special Springdale or Arkansan, thing!) that walked away from bribes around its chicken plants in Mexico with a $4 million fine.  Reading about Tyson, which like Walmart, also had a charismatic, folksy founder and family and a long history of labor conflicts around unionization, there was too much déjà vu all over again.  Maybe there is something in the Arkansas water after all.  Maybe the license plate shouldn’t say Wonder State, but Who Me State?

Slowly the news from Mexico coming through ACORN International’s organizers in Mexico City is that some of the people and parties out of power are in fact forcing there to be some push to accountability there.  President Calderon increasingly has been forced to pay attention and respond.  This is an election season of sorts in Mexico with the PRI posed to make a comeback.  Ironically, part of the economic push from the PRI seems to be increased foreign direct investment.  They undoubtedly will have to make sure that there are guarantees that the Walmart bribery fiasco will not be part of the FDI package.

ACORN International’s annual staff and leadership meeting is scheduled for Mexico City in two weeks.  We will be meeting with many people convened in San Miguel de Allende including those convened by the Center for Global Justice.

Walmart’s accountability and the demand for the full force of the law will be center state in all of these discussions.

In the recent deification of Apple and its co-founder Steven Jobs, there has been unstinting praise for Apple and its high priced, sleek products as a great American success story.  The [...]]]> New Orleans   As improbable as it may sound; sweatshops seem to have a lot of high placed advocates who simply swear by them.  Yes, sweatshops!

In the recent deification of Apple and its co-founder Steven Jobs, there has been unstinting praise for Apple and its high priced, sleek products as a great American success story.  The credible allegations and proofs of how much of Apple’s manufacturing operation rested on the backs of sweatshop labor, particularly at huge manufacturers like FoxConn, were sometimes mentioned in passing, but largely swept under the rug.  Not surprisingly a front page article on the death and demise of American manufacturing featuring both Jobs and Apple prominently also tried to bury the sweatshop reality on which so much of this manufacturing “miracle” exists in a few paragraphs of the very long story.

The reporter and others marveled at how on a whim 8000 workers could be pulled out of bed in company owned and run dormitories and put to work on a last minute changeover.  Wow, the article and others seemed to say, that couldn’t happen here in America.

Well, that’s wrong.  It could happened here in America, but Apple would have to pay for it, and that’s still the real difference.

One fool asked where you could find some thousands of workers in the United States, who would be ready to roll to work.  Hey, just about anywhere, jerkwater!  Has word of the recession gotten to none of these folks?

Even in the pages of the New York Times, if they were interested they can read about the skilled workers by the thousands that have trucked themselves into North Dakota (of all places!) to live in, yes, bunks, trailers, and all manner of man-caves in order to work in the oil industry on the plains.  But, whoops, once again, I should add that they are doing so, because they get paid, and paid pretty damned well to do so!  We saw thousands of workers flood into New Orleans to help on the recovery, but once again they did so on their own dime, because they thought they could make a dollar.  In all of these cases these are workers with crazy, mad skills, too.

The article seemed to say Apple employed 700,000 workers in manufacturing around the world, oh, and 40,000 or so in the USA.  Their spokesperson wanted to make sure all of us knew that the American economy is not “their problem.”  Their problem is only “making a good product.”  Life and business is not that simple, and the responsibilities go much deeper.

This seems to be a problem throughout much of the Times.  Nicholas Kristof did a column that I had to read because it was about Olly Neal from Arkansas, who I had worked with in the 1970’s when he was running the Lee County Clinic.  Posting the article, more than one of my buddies reminded me how they too had to hold their noses to read anything Kristof wrote because he is such a relentless apologist for sweatshops.

Good news that we are really talking about manufacturing.  Bad news that the ideology underpinning the conversation is that there can only be manufacturing at the expense of workers’ rights and wages in sweatshop conditions.

Shame on Apple, the Times, and the rest of the tribe that makes these rationalizations!

The old ACORN Arkansas office in Little Rock

Little Rock Zach Polett worked with me for more than 30 years, so basically forever.  I was first introduced to Mary Mayeaux, who would become his wife, by my high school buddy, Danny Russell who was working with her at the welfare office in New [...]]]>

The old ACORN Arkansas office in Little Rock

Little Rock Zach Polett worked with me for more than 30 years, so basically forever.  I was first introduced to Mary Mayeaux, who would become his wife, by my high school buddy, Danny Russell who was working with her at the welfare office in New Orleans when ACORN opened up there in 1976.  Danny and I leaned on Mary, who had been the valedictorian at Loyola University there, to volunteer for us, so when she did so, it was a coup.  Press the forward button and after some fact-checking yesterday with Zach, his sister, Jo Allison, and Mary, and we collectively remembered that I had been a late arrival at Zach and Mary’s wedding, and now fast forward even farther and Maxine Nelson, the great Pine Bluff, Arkansas leader and former national Secretary of ACORN’s board, my daughter Dine’ and I were the last just-in-time arrivals at their oldest son, Mark’s wedding.

Sitting together at a table after the wedding with some of that crowd along with Neil Sealy, the ramrod of Arkansas Community Organizations, the “only three words short” of the old Arkansas ACORN, and Jim Lynch, a long time friend, counselor, and ACORN supporter in Little Rock, it was hard for me not to reprise a conversation I had had earlier in the morning at Joe Fox and Lia Lent’s Community Bakery (also old ACORN staff!) on Main Street with John Honey, a long time ACORN supporter, friend, and former auditor for ACORN, as well as some new friends who had worked at the local paper or gone to the social work school about my visit the day before to the STFU museum in Tyronza.  And not needing to play poker or be anything less than clear, once I started on what an excellent job the Arkansas State University had done with the STFU there, I was straight to the point that while we all still had strong heartbeats and clear minds (relatively speaking), we need to start putting together the pieces for an ACORN Museum in Little Rock.

Fox or Honey had mentioned that the first ACORN building at 523 W. 15^th was looking a bit worse for wear, so who knows.  Later Dine’ and I drove by, and it’s certainly not abandoned, but neither is it candidate for a home tour.  I pushed Jim, only recently retired from UALR, about what we would need to do to get them interested, and more importantly who had contacts at Philander Smith College, a historic black college, only a couple of blocks from the old ACORN office, and their energetic president who seemed committed to justice and change.  In the good news category they claimed that finally the Little Rock Central Library had claimed some interest in some old ACORN memorabilia, so the director there will have to go on my list.  I couldn’t resist telling the ironic tale of how I ended up negotiating to put the ACORN archives at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in their Social Change Collection, because UALR was so totally uninterested whenever I had inquired as early as the 1970’s.

Seems to me it’s worth getting our hands on our history while we still can, rather than regretting later how much has slipped away, gone to ground, or been lost in the shifting sands of memory.   An ACORN Museum in Little Rock, or if not there, New Orleans, would be a hard push, but worth the climb.