Viva Walmart! Down with Duke!

I love Walmart. Sure enough, for its prices, but also because of the jobs it produces. You should have seen the opening week of the last Walmart here in Savannah: every employee was smiling. Many of the new employees had been looking for a job for a long time. I liked these smiles: I knew what they meant. I also liked the fact that Walmart carried the products of a nearby Alabama delicatessen. Their products were not sold here in summer because that small producer could not afford to buy refrigerated trucks. Now they got the strength of Walmart behind them. Good for them.
What I am less fond of is Walmart CEO Mike Duke. He kept the mentality of his mentors.
During the Cold War, bribery was a way of life, the cost of doing business abroad. I still remember how Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was led to abdicate after her husband accepted a million-dollar-bribe from the Lockheed Corporation. The minds were starting to change, not only in the US, but in many countries, realizing that paying bribes abroad was counter-productive. For Pete's sake, even the Russians signed the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention! Lobbying to water down our anti-bribery legislation is a sign of old age, and I'm polite about this (see details in the Washington Post).
The same Mike Duke, I heard, refused to follow the politics of McDonald who fights the terrible conditions met by pregnant pigs. There is no need to torture pigs, and the fight serves McDonald image. Burger King has similar pledges. See, the end of the Cold War: no bribery, cage free: signs of progress. Wake up, Walmart! Don't linger in past ideologies!

Nowadays, you need not only to sell cheap, you need an image. The image of Duke-Walmart is terrible.
Time for fresh air.

Terrorism and Tacit Consent

Some years ago, I was convinced that my neighbor was a drug dealer, because I saw dealers going in and out of her apartment all day long. I was wrong: she would never deal because she was a very Christian person, but she sheltered the dealers. It was a totally new concept to me. Why did she do it? Because, she said, they were kids with no hope of getting a job. These dealers were hard to eradicate: they had been on our street for decades, but when that neighbor moved away, the dealers on the corner of my street moved too. It convinced me that dealing is the kind of crime that most often comes with a support group.

It reminded me of another Christian I had met in Ireland. He would never commit an act of terrorism, but he would always hide a terrorist. The idea of calling the police seemed to him equivalent to a betrayal.

Similarly, I knew of a very pacifist Palestinian who would never commit an act of terrorism himself, but he understood and would have protected terrorists. Why? He understood what they were fighting for, agreed with the ends if not with the means. And of course he was constantly subjected to propaganda. For instance he told me that the proof that "the Jews own America" is that the star of David is on the US dollar; I guess he meant the 13 stars from the 13 first states.

I do not understand tacit consent: to me, it is like shooting yourself in the foot; but it is a force that we ignore too often.

Corruption everywhere

OK, after every election, there is a cleaning up factor plus of course rumors that are shown later to be untrue. But I cannot remember an election followed by the discovery of so many bad guys in so many high places and in so many fields (I do not claim that these bad guys belong to any political party, I am just surprised that we got so many popping up).
There is of course the wave of investment schemes like Madoff followed by Allen Stanford. We are over 60 billions dollars for these two, which explains that the many millionaires recently arrested by the FBI do not make headlines: Canadian George Georgiou (a fraud of only 26 millions so far), David Gwin from Colorado (only a multi-million dollar fraud scheme), Niketa Williams, of San Francisco, California (condemned for wire fraud to reimburse 1.6 million dollars), Robert Miracle, of Bellevue, Washington, Mukhtar Kechik and Fahimi Fisal (operating a $65 million Ponzi scheme, five people in Oklahoma (for a fraud over 41 millions), Scott Luster from Missouri (only a 4.5 million fraud) all of them arrested in February alone. What is a million dollars nowadays? Not much, of course, it is easy to spend, but in my neighborhood it is still the value of about ten houses. All these frauds add up to a lot of money lost by innocent people. On the budget I am on, I could feel the difference when a thief took off with my purse and less than 100 dollars in it. Ponzi schemes are very common at all financial levels: here in Savannah GA I find that I frequently have to explain it to naive and uneducated people in my neighborhood: there is always a false prophet or a false friend ready to take advantage of the poorest people.

We are all aware of the housing problems, but there is also a lot of pure mortgage fraud. In the first 20 days of February alone, we see cases popping up in Missouri, in Maryland, in Florida and in New York.

I have been surprised to see educators on the take too. It ranges in the last few months from a Professor of Western Kentucky University misusing Federal money to people accused of embezzlement, bribery, corruption, kickback and racketeering.

And to top it all, we now get judges on the take in activities so mean that it is hard to comprehend. Two Pennsylvania judges have been charged in a fraud scheme involving the placement of juveniles in juvenile detention facilities. The two judges "jailed juveniles for profit". You can read that story in the New York Times here and here

And there are the things that we seem unable to correct: dishonesty in sports, 30 million Americans on illegal drugs, enormous frauds in medicare-medicaid, and the horrible abuse of the military by their suppliers (The military are easy victims: it is the same all over Europe).

I am not claiming that we, ordinary people, are perfect, just saying that we, ordinary people, do not want to hurt other people. Some of the public sense of morality has degenerated in the US since the 1980s. Maybe too much easy money- easy credit produces that. Maybe it is a side effect of women having to work instead of staying at home, maybe it is linked to increases in separation and divorces, maybe it is the increasing disparity between the poor and the rich so lavishly exposed on TV. Maybe all of it. What I do know is that it starts early: most kids, according to surveys, cheat at school. But we got to reduce this corruption before we fall like the Roman Empire or the British and French Empires once dominating the world and brought down by their own rot.
This corruption is going too far.