New Orleans   Walmart annual board meetings are legendary dog-and-pony shows with literally thousands traipsing to Bentonville for a Roman circus of entertainment and company spectacle.  This meeting next month may have a sharper edge that not even a packed room of handpicked “associates” can stifle.  It will be impossible [...]]]>

Walmart Protest in New York City

New Orleans   Walmart annual board meetings are legendary dog-and-pony shows with literally thousands traipsing to Bentonville for a Roman circus of entertainment and company spectacle.  This meeting next month may have a sharper edge that not even a packed room of handpicked “associates” can stifle.  It will be impossible for the board to ignore shareholders questions about how they could have not known about the corporate corruption and bribery, involving $24 million in Mexico and known and covered up by all of the top executives.

Someone else besides me is upset that Walmart was hiding its hands behind rock in 2005 when many of us were organizing aggressively in an attempt to win real corporate accountability from the company on community and labor standards.  John Liu, New York City controller and sometime candidate for mayor, was involved in pushing for an outside investigation of Walmart’s labor standards in China and other source countries through a shareholder resolution then, which was pushed aside despite a direct meeting with the board.  Now, the New York City pension funds have pledged 4.7 million votes according to a story by Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times to unseat the Walmart directors facing re-election.

Too bad for Walmart that too many of us that were straight armed with constant denials and obfuscation then are still around and asking the same questions and now knowing that the answers are different than the board and top executives claimed at the time.  New York City funds may be out in front but from Morgenson’s reporting it seems clear that Illinois Retirement funds and F&C Management, which she describes as a $150 billion asset manager, are also on the record still smarting from the slap down in 2005 and laying in the gap in 2012 still looking for satisfaction.

Shareholder “democracy” is largely a joke, but my bet is that win, lose, or draw, opposition to the board will be broad and significant and this time, if these folks survive the test, they will only do so by finally giving the right answers, which will mean giving in and establishing real and objective external accountability measures for a corporate culture now proven corrupt to the core.

Side bet:  when are we going to start looking at how they greased palms in India?  How about now!

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.

New Orleans  We told you so!  We just couldn’t be heard clearly enough over the roaring engines of the corporate spinning machinery of Walmart in September 2005.

Let’s set the stage exactly.  In Florida at the sharp point of the organizing engagement at Walmart as the curtain was being pulled down [...]]]>

Walmart Store in Mexico City

New Orleans  We told you so!  We just couldn’t be heard clearly enough over the roaring engines of the corporate spinning machinery of Walmart in September 2005.

Let’s set the stage exactly.  In Florida at the sharp point of the organizing engagement at Walmart as the curtain was being pulled down by all of the top corporate management from Lee Scott, the CEO on down, we were convening the first Sitefighters’ Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida bringing together Walmart Watch, Wake-up Walmart, and all of the other key players around the country to strategize on how to bring community, workplace, and political pressure to force some accountability on the company.  Walmart Watch, a coalition driven by SEIU, and Wakeup Walmart, the UFCW’s effort to tackle the company on the web, were nicking the company regularly in the papers, and our efforts through our community-labor alliance, WARN (Walmart Alliance for Reform Now) and direct organizing of workers in the Walmart Workers Association were showing good results.

At that same time in September 2005 when Walmart was trying to garner good publicity for its logistical response to Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, the internal reality was “duck and cover:”

In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The lengthy New York Times piece by David Barstow gives an amazing inside look at how Walmart was working from the bunkers of Bentonville and the impact our work was having:

Under fire from labor critics, worried about press leaks and facing a sagging stock price, Wal-Mart’s leaders recognized that the allegations could have devastating consequences, documents and interviews show. Wal-Mart de Mexico was the company’s brightest success story, pitched to investors as a model for future growth. (Today, one in five Wal-Mart stores is in Mexico.) Confronted with evidence of corruption in Mexico, top Wal-Mart executives focused more on damage control than on rooting out wrongdoing.

In one meeting where the bribery case was discussed, H. Lee Scott Jr., then Wal-Mart’s chief executive, rebuked internal investigators for being overly aggressive. Days later, records show, Wal-Mart’s top lawyer arranged to ship the internal investigators’ files on the case to Mexico City. Primary responsibility for the investigation was then given to the general counsel of Wal-Mart de Mexico — a remarkable choice since the same general counsel was alleged to have authorized bribes.

The level of bribes?  $24,000,000 has been documented.  Most were paid through an elaborate network of fixers (gestores). 

All of the top brass at Walmart knew the score.  Lee Scott slowed the investigation down and punted it back.  Michael Duke, who was their international man at the time, and the executive of our ACORN International’s India FDI Watch Campaign was checkmating in India to stop their expansion there,  knew the whole deal and is now the Walmart CEO.  The head of the “ends justify the means” team for Walmart in Mexico fueling the fire of corruption, Eduardo Castro-Wright, is now the retiring Vice-Chairman of Walmart.

Lee Scott

As the whistleblower allegations finally found traction, the company filed a vague “play pretend” notice with the FCC without identifying that the problem was in Mexico and still claiming there would be no “material impact” to its results.  Now of course there will be full scale investigations in Mexico and in the United States for violations of both countries laws.  In the US these bribes by Walmart are clear criminality under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  It is hard to imagine a clearer case of situations where top executives should be held accountable (Scott, Castro-Wright, Dukes, etc) and face criminal charges and potentially jail.  In Mexico the detailed annotations on the invoices indicating the officials who were bribed could absolutely lead to jail time as the scandal widens.

An international corporate culture based on bribery also makes us wonder whether the same system has been active in their work to expand and find a foothold in India where their efforts and others to modify the restrictions on foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail have been huge political issues in recent months, bringing government to a standstill at some points.

All of this is huge and demands sweeping action.

Click to read the entire  Times story.

Buenos Aires One of the flash points in the USA immigration reform debate continues to be over the demand from farmers for help in their fields from migrant agricultural workers.  Recently  they left the Republican (and Obama Administration) consensus in droves as US-farmer organizations and Congresspeople bridled at the fact that employers, i.e. [...]]]>

Buenos Aires One of the flash points in the USA immigration reform debate continues to be over the demand from farmers for help in their fields from migrant agricultural workers.  Recently  they left the Republican (and Obama Administration) consensus in droves as US-farmer organizations and Congresspeople bridled at the fact that employers, i.e. farmers, would have to pay steep fines for hiring undocumented workers.  The so-called bracero program has long been out of business in the US, which used to bring up seasonal workers from Mexico into the fields of California, Texas, and Arizona, and from the Caribbean to help in tobacco, cranberry, and other harvests in the Northeastern states.

ACORN International crack researchers led by Carleton University (Ottawa) volunteer, Amanda Sullivan, and ramroded by ACORN International and Edinburgh University (Scotland) super-summer intern, Melanie Craxton, stumbled onto a huge program though in Canada while researching remittance ripoffs as part of ACORN International and its federated partners on-going Remittance Justice Campaign (www.remittancejustice.org).   The Canadian SAWP is not an armed strike team, but 20,000 migrant workers from Mexico and the Caribbean Islands who are recruited through bi-national agreements and shipped up to the fields of Canada, largely in British Columbia and southern Ontario, as part of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program.  Needless to say conditions are regularly reported as substandard and exploitive by our long-time partners, the UFCW and its agricultural workers organizing program which has been in the fields for years with these workers.

In fact the Canadian government extracts a 25% of wages share for taxes and the like which will never benefit these workers who will return home after a maximum of eight (8) months in the field.  Neither does the Canadian government seem to care much about how much money they actually go home with even though ostensibly that is one of the goals of this cooperative labor exchange.  The workers are in fact even chosen according to the SAWP criteria because they have stable families, and that means invariably they send significant remittances (about 50% of wages while in Canada) back home to their families.

The money transfer organizations of choice according to our researchers interviews are Western Union and a smaller, somewhat cheaper company called Vigo.  Either way a huge chunk of their checks are extracted by these MTOs, way over the 5% maximum demand that ACORN International has made as part of the Remittance Justice Campaign and that Canada as part of the G-8 has claimed to adopt as a world standard.

Talking to SAWP representatives though was like visiting Mars.  Yes, Canada collected its taxes.  Yes, the migrant workers made remittances home.  No, the governmental representatives had no idea how much was extracted by the MTOs of the checks, despite these bi-national agreements with Mexico and Caribbean countries.  It is impossible to escape the core immorality, even venality, of this predatory governmental operation.  The Canadian government gets migrant help for its agricultural enterprises, profits from taxes that can’t benefit the workers, and then turns a blind eye as predatory fees are extracted from the laborers before they return home with what little is left.

ACORN International and its federated partners like ACORN Canada, ACORN Mexico, and ACORN Dominican Republic, have stumbled onto a scandal and are busily preparing demands to force immediate change in these practices along the lines we have continued to make in recent months for cost caps and desperately needed regulations.  Without a doubt this is an outrage that demands the authorities finally listen and act!

When Obama was working at the neighborhood level

New Orleans According to a fascinating article by Damien Cave in the New York Times the families that have hunkered down and stayed in the Ciudad Juarez warzone in Mexico directly across the Rio from El Paso in Texas are frequently headed by generations of women [...]]]>

When Obama was working at the neighborhood level

New Orleans According to a fascinating article by Damien Cave in the New York Times the families that have hunkered down and stayed in the Ciudad Juarez warzone in Mexico directly across the Rio from El Paso in Texas are frequently headed by generations of women and their children, welded to jobs and livelihood, they are now called familia anclada – a family anchored to the city.  Despite losing more than 200,000 people or 20% of its population to a Katrina- like tsunami of crime, such families have seemingly stabilized Juarez at over 800,000 as part of the linked metropolitan complex we so often ignore with El Paso which has a population of around 650,000, the 21^st largest city in the United States.  This is all fairly amazing in many ways and speaks of the tremendous resilience of families in the face of adversity often ignored.

In the celebration of the “power of weak links” which undergirds the fascination and impact of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter to link people who kinda, sorta, maybe know or want to know each other and create somewhat of a personal “affinity” group, something like the familia anclada should once again remind us of the stronger values found in the power of strong links and deep engagements between people.  Maria del Socorro Velaquez Vargas, a sociologist quoted in the same article speaks plainly saying, “People don’t have faith in government.  They have faith in their neighbors.” In some ways that’s a pretty fair definition for the root strength of community organizing methodology and practice over the last 50 odd years.

In the celebration of the new and the justifiable excitement over the prospects of new tools found in technology, communication, and activism, something like the daily swelling numbers in Tahrir Square in Cairo should be a stark reminder of the power of people, the force of action on the street, the passion that defines youth, and the anger that triggers liberation.  The combustion of these elements is not some electric flash from a computer screen or a beep from a mobile phone but the connections made in the streets of Egypt, in the neighborhoods in Juarez, and in communities big and small where organizing is going on every day around the world.

It is probably important to remember that this has always been so.  I might even argue that this very strength of community engagement is perhaps what has been the most radical and unique of all American political contributions.  We certainly did not invent representative government or democracy, but we did seem to have modeled how to build the power at the grassroots level, whether we are talking about the Populists or the Tea Party people.  Community organizers were somewhere between smart, shrewd, or dumb lucky enough to understand that the community and constituency level is where change has to be constructed in order to win and be sustainable.

Using house meetings, organizing committees, and the constant connections of the community all came to mind thinking about the most exciting part of T. H. Breen’s writing on the role of “committees” in building deep engagement of the base in his recent book, American Insurgents, American Patriots. He painstakingly details the way “faith in neighbors” replaced “faith in government” in 1774 and 1775 even before the outbreak of full on armed struggle against the British.  The organization of hundreds, if not thousands, of locally based committees of safety and whatever operating in plain sight to force the most direct accountability at the community level welding ties between “Americans” more deeply and isolating sympathizers with the Crown essentially outside of the community norms, uprooted the British at ground level rendering their attempt to govern a dead letter even before troops were massing across the land.  These very local committees dealing with local people and local issues were the practicing crucible of real government based on the Articles of Correspondence way before there was a Declaration of Independence or thoughts of a Constitution.  Those flowery documents were constructed on what was built by arguably the most successful community organizing we have ever seen in this country.

Hannah Arendt, the conservative political philosopher, argued that the single most important contribution of the American Revolution was found in the decades following independence in the construction of the “ward” as the basic unit of government.  For modern Americans the notion of the ward and ward government as revolutionary must seem like heresy and certainly there could be some conservative headaches trying to assemble rationalizations here, but Arendt’s point that constructing government on the most basic building block that allows maximum participation by people in the most connected and engaged community at the most local level possible through wards is in fact very radical, and therefore, American in the truest sense.

Community organizations operating at the very level of participation and engagement that governments have mostly abandoned  have created the bonds of steel that allow families to (for example) rebuild after Katrina or remain anchored in Juarez or fuel change all over the world, which proves daily that the excitement over weak links should never let us forget the power of deep engagement and strong ties in creating both change and the possibility of full democratic participation by all people.

Bill Clinton Urged Florida Democrat to Quit Bid

Phoenix I’m pretty sure either Mexico billionaire Carlos Slim didn’t make his contribution this year to the Clinton Foundation Global Initiative and decided to take it out in trade, or the New York Times is so desperate to find something upbeat for the Demos about the midterm [...]]]>

Bill Clinton Urged Florida Democrat to Quit Bid

Phoenix I’m pretty sure either Mexico billionaire Carlos Slim didn’t make his contribution this year to the Clinton Foundation Global Initiative and decided to take it out in trade, or the New York Times is so desperate to find something upbeat for the Demos about the midterm elections that they had to come up with somebody, but whatever the reason we are being treated to the equivalent of a sudden outpouring of media puppy love for the old big dawg, former President Bill Clinton.

Suddenly, he’s just where he wants to be again:  everywhere!  And, better than ever before, he’s unleashed and unaccountable to anybody or anything.

We get treated to a story about how he makes and breaks restaurants around the world by stopping by and chowing down whether hot dog stands in Iceland or pricey digs in 5 star Indian hotels.  We also learn that he is both a vegan, and someone who orders the biggest steak in – where was that – Spain?  Germany?  No matter, like I said, a meat-eating vegan:  accountable to no one!

He’s supposedly a big draw out on the hustings and going where President Obama supposedly can’t go or isn’t welcome or thought to be a liability.  Clinton’s popularity is way up, while Obama’s is way down.

Unleashed is a tricky place for big Bill.

Certainly he was all over the line in the primary fight for Senator Blanche Lincoln, but I guess the general readership could look the other way at his blatant union bashing and say, “well, it’s Arkansas, it’s the home state, what can you do?”

Today the story is everywhere, released by Clinton’s people, but without a doubt cleared by Obama’s political folks, as he throws Congressman Kendrick Meeks (Democrat – Florida) under the bus with a tale that he had “almost” convinced him to withdraw from the race for the Senate and support the more moderate, Governor Charlie Crist, a Republican running as an independent, against the Tea Party swoon, Mark Rubio.   I’m having trouble remembering a time where it was clearer that a candidate was knifed in the back, Brutus-and-Caesar-in-Rome-style in front of God, TV, and the full on print media, in hopes of turning the tide for the candidate that Clinton and Obama have decided they want.  Did I have to say that Meek is African-American or that he had won the primary in Florida?  No, I didn’t think so.  So, Clinton suddenly in the warm glow collects a big chit for Obama by tossing an African-American under the bus so that Obama doesn’t have to take this heat to his own base, and Clinton can still posture that folks will be ok, because, hey, remember, he was the “first black president.”

Here the dog barked for the master, but given the buildup of the “new” Bill, it could all still look like more of the “no boundaries, do my own thing” Bill of recent years.

The next move in this sweet dance between two lively Presidents is going to be very interesting with the good ol’ boy from Arkansas goes to collect on these big time favors.

Meanwhile the press will keep fawning as if they are still at the McDonald’s line on Broadway in Little Rock in the ‘90’s, and miss the story even as it unfurls in front of their own eyes, lost in the warm glow of puppy love for the big dawg.

Arf-arf!