Here comes Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas! It’s a month-long season of friends and family, spiritual reflection, and time to decompress from our usual helter-skelter lives, right?
Good lord, shout the corporate bosses, are you nuts? Do you think America is some kind of Norman Rockwell fantasyland? This is the Season of Mass Consumerism, Bucko, so lift your tail-end out of that La-Z-Boy and hit the malls – pronto! And if you happen to have a job in a chain store, don’t even think about taking a holiday, or you won’t have a job the next day. Let us now praise the one God we all serve: Mammon!
Years ago, Macy’s started “Black Friday” as a kickoff to this Holy Month of Frenzied Commercialization. But it produced such a surge of profit that Walmart and other chains converted to the Church of Perpetual Selling. Black Friday used to begin the day after Thanksgiving. Last year, reaching for more, the Elmer Gantrys of Walmart dared to desecrate Thanksgiving itself by opening their doors to the Black Friday masses at 8 pm – on Thursday night.
This year – with Macy’s, Target, Toys R Us, J.C. Penney, Best Buy, Kohl’s, and others also pushing the Friday Shop-A-Rama into Thursday – Walmart will open at 6 pm, intruding even-deeper into Thanksgiving’s family dinner hour. And, pushing excess to a new high, Kmart will open at 6 am on Thanksgiving morning. Yes, 6 am! Still, a Walmart executive says, “We thought 6 o’clock [pm] was the exact right time to win the weekend.”
Wow – did you ever think of Thanksgiving as something to “win”? But, then, your spiritual devotion to mammon probably isn’t as ardent as that executive’s. Meanwhile, the same guy reports that the one-million low-wage workers who’ll have to staff the Thanksgiving profit grab are “really excited to work that day.”

Sure they are. “Excited” as in agitated.

“Walmart Is The Latest Company To Ruin Workers’ Thanksgiving,” www.thinkprogress.org, November 12, 2013.

“How the Black Friday Tradition Got Started,” www.todayifoundout.com, November 18, 2013.

“Walmart giving 1 million employees who work on Thanksgiving extra pay, a turkey dinner and 25% off a future purchase,” www.cleveland.com, November 12, 2013.


McDonald’s: Low-paid  workers, high-flying execs

In this season of generosity, I’m sure that you get as much joy and deep internal satisfaction as I do just by knowing that we – all of us taxpayers together – contribute day-in and day-out to a very big global cause: Supersizing McDonald’s.
The world’s largest hamburger chain is a needy charity case, because without your and my generous tax support, the Big MacBosses in charge would have to pay a living wage to their 800,000-plus American workers. But, thanks to us, the $27 billion-a-year hamburger-flipping flim flammers can get away with paying poverty wages – then send their workforce to get food stamps, Medicaid, child welfare payments, public housing, and other tax-funded poverty benefits. This public subsidy of the Golden Arches adds up to a very golden $1.2 billion a year. What a creative business plan! Who says giant corporations aren’t enterprising?
Well, sniff the chain’s top executives, we operate on razor-thin profit margins, so we can’t afford to throw money at workers. Really? Last year’s $5.6 billion in profits doesn’t sound thin to me. Also, note that McDonald’s more than tripled the pay of its new CEO last year, elevating him from $4.1 million to $13.8 million.
But what really galls its workers (whose low wages and forced part-time schedules mean they average less than $12,000 a year) is that the taxpayer-subsidized profiteer laid out a fat $35 million in October to add a brand new executive jet to its corporate fleet. This one is a “Bombardier 605” with the full package of luxurious amenities, and it cost $2,500 an hour to fly it.
Just flying one hour on the Bombardier cost more than the combined hourly wages of more than 300 McDonald’s workers. Remember, you’re subsidizing this.

To tell the chain’s CEO that this is immoral, go to www.OurFuture.org.

“McDonald’s Wants Another Corporate Jet, Not Raises For Low Wage Workers,” www.alternet.org, October 24, 2013.

“Supersize Those Wages, McDonald’s,” www.huffingtonpost.com, August 13, 2013.

“The rebellion of restaurant workers is challenging the deplorable low-wage ethic of the fast-food behemoths” www.hightowerlowdown.org, November 2013.


The unholy cult of today’s government-subsidized “Boom”

Thomas Carlyle called economics “the dismal science.” But he was only half right.
Dismal, yes, but a science, no. It’s more like religions, where reality is shaped by belief or blind faith. And, in the case of free-market zealots, it can turn into a cult. Thus, we see them pointing these days to the dazzling light of the soaring stock market, proclaiming fervently that Wall Street’s spectacular rise from the ashes of the Great Recession is proof from the God of Mammon that these are boom times. Lo, the magic of the marketplace is upon us.
No, it’s just the wizardry of the Fed. For five years, America’s central bank regulators have been funneling two massive subsidies into Wall Street banks and giant corporations in an ungodly effort to keep them flush, while praying that they might use these government windfalls to create a job or two.
The first subsidy essentially amounts to giving $85 billion every month to big banks. Yes, 85 billion! The idea is that this capital will then be channeled into investments that nourish our grassroots economy. In practice, however, bankers are putting it into gimmicky high-risk investment schemes that create nothing, into buyouts to expand their already too-big-to-fail empires, and into even-heftier paychecks for themselves.
The second subsidy is the Fed’s relentless policy of artificially holding interest rates close to zero. This has severely punished middle-class retirees who count on getting interest income from their savings, but it has been a blessing from on high for huge corporations wanting to buy out their competitors or – in a totally unproductive bit of marketplace voodoo – to buy out themselves.
Meanwhile, the Fed’s tinkle-down monetary policy has produced a truly dismal level of job creation and a hellishly-wide chasm of inequality.

“Fewer jobs posted, hiring rises in July,” Austin American Statesman, September 11, 2013.

“Zero Interest, Zero Jobs,” Austin American Statesman, September 16, 2013