A Shield for Wal-Mart

Congratulations to Justice Antonin Scalia for trumpeting a blueprint for large corporations to get by with discriminatory practices! According to the New York Times, he had this to say this week about Wal-Mart's strategy of granting local managers great leeway in hiring and promotions while officially having a corporate policy forbidding gender discrimination:

“On its face, of course, that is just the opposite of a uniform employment practice that would provide the commonality needed for a class action. It is a policy against having uniform employment practices.”

I wonder if Scalia is aware that Wal-Mart has long been accused of using local managerial autonomy as a shield to protect itself against claims of unfair worker practices. A company that micromanages every aspect of store appearance, inventory and accounting is said to have a wink-and-nod understanding with managers when it comes to bending labor rules.

According to Nelson Lichtenstein's "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business," the folksy, we're-one-big-family ethos promoted in stores has enabled individual managers to do things like casually tell employees to straighten up a messy department after they've clocked out, almost as if they're just asking for a friendly favor. Lichtenstein points out that Wal-Mart's high volume, low-margin business model puts enormous pressure on store managers to shave every possible penny off labor costs. Rather than being a written policy, practices like off-the-clock work are "built in" to the culture of the company.

None of this proves Wal-Mart discriminates against women, or even that the same incentives are there to avoid promoting women as are there to pay employees less. But it should raise a red flag that the lack of, as Scalia puts it, "a common answer to the crucial question, why was I disfavored?" does not mean Wal-Mart does not discriminate. It could mean the exact opposite.

For a good summation of the history and practices of Wal-Mart, see my write-up about Lichtenstein's book.

Eight things I wish people would understand about the Republican approach to economic policy.

1. Deficit reduction does not lead to economic health. Economic health ENABLES deficit reduction—a la the Clinton administration. When George W. Bush took office, the federal budget was in the black.

2. Slashing the federal budget will not lower your taxes. It shifts the burden of service provision to local and state governments, which then must pick up the slack by raising taxes—if not immediately, than eventually. Just look at the mess unfolding in Texas. Denial cannot drive their budgeting approach forever.

3. Lower taxes do not automatically equal job creation by freeing up more money. If this were true, big business in this country—flush with cash from the recent run-up on the stock market—would be on a hiring spree. They aren't.

4. Job growth from lower taxes cannot wipe out the federal deficit. It did not work in the Reagan years, and it won't work now.

5. Privatization does not necessarily mean greater effectiveness or efficiency. Look at for-profit prisons or the outsourcing of security and other contracts in Iraq. While privatization of public services is sometimes a good idea, as a blanket policy it's a terrible plan. With privatization comes a loss of transparency that can create its own web of corruption and special interests rivaling anything that has ever occurred in the public sphere.

6. Much of the rhetoric coming from Republicans in Congress is based on false assertions about the recent past. It seems ridiculous to even have to point this out, but the 2009 Obama stimulus is not the primary reason for our debt situation. That would be the two Bush tax cuts (2001 and 2003), the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recession. Also—just to be clear—TARP passed under Bush.

7. The Obama 2009 stimulus does not disprove Keynesian economics. Nearly 40 percent of the money spent on the plan went to tax cuts. In addition, many economists feel the effort was too timid overall to achieve its goal of kick-starting the economy. More generally, drawing conclusions about the correlation between government spending and economic growth is difficult and the debate among economists continues (unlike what some conservative bloggers would have you believe). Some very good empirical studies conclude there is a positive correlation between government spending and GDP growth. Certainly, robust government spending—and even large deficits—do not necessarily prevent economic expansion, as was proven in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

8. The vaunted prosperity created by Reagan was a house built on sand. Since the '80s, our economy has been propelled by 1) The housing market; 2) The rise of two-income households; and 3) Rising consumer debt, with an added boost from ever-cheaper goods from China. Well, housing is a bust; in most households, there are no more adults to go to work (unless you practice polygamy); Americans are maxed out credit card-wise; and the price of imported goods is starting to rise. There is no Republican plan that can bring to the table what the country most needs: real wage growth. (Not coincidentally, the only uptick in real wages in the last 35 years occurred during the Clinton administration.)

Loco Motion

Someone I know well is going for a job interview in Emmaus, Pa., just south of Allentown, and it got me thinking about how improbably stupid it is that there's no passenger train service between Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley. Even in its current state, our run-down national rail service does manage to connect most metro areas of significant size, especially in the Northeast.

How then did we manage to lose the rail connection with this region less than 60 miles to the north? It will surprise no one in this area to hear it has something to do with SEPTA. Passenger trains continued to run on the former Reading RR line, from Lansdale through Quakertown and up to Bethlehem and Allentown, through the 1970s. The route was never nationalized, unlike most intercity lines, and was operated by Conrail under contract to SEPTA. In the early eighties, SEPTA eliminated all routes serviced by diesel locomotives after state and federal subsidies were pulled.

Upper Montgomery-Bucks County is one of the fastest growing, most traffic clogged areas in Southeastern Pennsylvania—as anyone who has driven up 309 or on the Northeast Extension can attest. Efforts to restore passenger rail service above Lansdale have been in the news lately, as reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Allentown Morning Call (the Morning Call's report is better). A scaled-down plan to restore trains almost as far north as Sellersville could happen.

Restoring trains all the way to Bethlehem would be much tougher. A large rail right-of-way just below Bethlehem has been turned over to recreational use as the Saucon Valley Trail—though it's leased from SEPTA, which could one day reclaim it. Some rails-to-trails projects make sense, such as Lower Merion's Cynwyd Trail, where rail restoration would be mostly redundant. This one doesn't.

Vanishing Indie Radio

We've heard a lot lately about Congress' defunding of NPR, but there's another, more troubling trend afoot in radioland. In an effort to raise money, cash-strapped colleges around the country are selling off campus radio stations to the highest bidder. Twelve have been sold recently, and another 14 are on the chopping block, according to Ken Freedman, station manager and program director at WFMU in New Jersey.

WFMU and nine other independent, freeform stations staged a minute of on-air silence April 28 to protest the sales. The most notorious is the recent sale of the University of San Francisco's legendary KUSF, which saw staffers locked out after the abrupt announcement in January that the station would become a feeder station for a national network of classical music stations. With this sale, an institution important to rock music history and a cultural bastion of the city was stripped of all local control and character (the university plans to move operations online, though in what form is not clear).

As funding for education continues to erode and colleges seek cash windfalls from selling long-held radio frequencies, outlets for eclectic, free-form music and cultural programming vanish, replaced by the sort of formula-driven fare one can find in every corner of the land—the cultural equivalent of the spreading geography of nowhere.

The KUSF situation is "a non-commercial microcosm of the the 'Clear Channelization' of the FM band," Freedman noted.

Often bidding for these frequencies are deep-pocketed religious groups, looking to replace free-form programming with preaching. Their main competition, according to Freedman, is a nonprofit group that sets up NPR feeder stations (often in areas that already have NPR), rebroadcasting news and talk produced elsewhere. To me this is telling: two monolithic cultural entities butting against each other, one from the left and one from the right, at the expense of a messy, amorphous, creative outlet for non-entrenched ideas.

This is happening everywhere. In politics, education, religion, business and the media, people seem to fear ambiguity, as if allowing some "play" poses unacceptable risks. A less insecure culture would worry less about niche audiences, targeted results and direct outcomes and want to support artistic, cultural and scientific eclecticism.

Isn't that what universities are supposed to be for?

Photo a No Show

Obama will not release photo of bin Laden

The right call—show it privately to high ranking members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, and maybe even a few media execs (such as Roger Ailes). Obama does not owe it to the world to release this photo.