Working Life

This sort of explains it all — when obscenity is stark and clear.

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Full disclosure. I’m typing this blog on a Mac. Within reach is my IPhone. So, this is not some sort of stealth pro-PC campaign. But, enough already — Apple is perhaps one of the biggest corporate tax dodgers in history. And it’s OUR money that Apple is salting away in tax havens around the world — money that isn’t going to the Treasury to fund schools, roads, health care and you name it. I’m right there at the point of throwing all my Apple products away — or at least pledging never to set foot in another Apple store again. What about you?

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This is not really an entirely new story. But, it’s good to see something positive about organized labor — and particularly about a dynamic labor leader.

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If you want change, you have to be consistent. And consistency means you have to call out people no matter what political stripe the person might carry. So, it’s just a fact that Penny Pritzker, the president’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, has been the beneficiary of an off-shore tax dodge.

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The inexorable march to another big financial crisis takes another baby step every day. The banks, hey, they just keep spreading their muscle and graft everywhere to make sure that nothing changes. To wit.

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In the annals of “this is no surprise” let me chalk up yet another example of the immoral behavior of the Wal-Mart family: it is not interested in signing on to a broadly accepted new safety code of practice in Bangladesh. No–the greed and avarice of the five Walton heirs, each of whom is worth around $20 billion, has no upper limit. Even if it means people get killed — though I guess if they aren’t white people and they are far away in another land, the Waltons just don’t care.

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The ghastly industrial killing field in the garment factory in Bangladesh has now claimed over 1,100 lives. Hard to even fathom. But, there is a sliver of hope that out of this massacre of workers will come a little improvement.

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Yesterday, after one week of silence and stonewalling, Lesley Stahl’s name disappeared from the list of Advisors to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. But, this story is not quite over. CBS continues to stonewall over the circumstances of Stahl’s service on the Peterson Foundation Advisors’ board — which was a blatant violation of basic ethical journalistic standards and CBS’ own ethical guidelines. Let us refer to this as Stahlgate — and as usual it’s the cover-up that is the worst part of this saga.

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A week ago, I wrote about Lesley Stahl’s obvious,no-brainer, significant conflict of interest. I wrote to CBS asking for an explanation. Crickets. Are we going to let this nonsense continue

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The toll has risen to more than 800 in Bangladesh. I suppose that must be a threshold of human death and suffering that even Wal-Mart can’t ignore. So, the Beast of Bentonville and some of its sidekicks are getting together to set, uh, labor standards.

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