Tag Archives: mother

The Kansas Economy Sucks, So Let’s Do a Little Gay Bashing to Distract Everyone

by KellieBagot Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

Michael Hiltzik reports on Kansas governor Sam Brownback’s move this week to revive the culture wars:

Brownback’s latest stunt is to abolish state employees’ protections against job discrimination based on sexual orientation. In an executive order Tuesday, Brownback reversed a 2007 order by his Democratic predecessor, Kathleen Sebelius, that had brought state anti-discrimination policies in line with most of corporate America and 31 other states.

….Possibly, Brownback is hoping to deflect attention from the disastrous condition of the Kansas state budget, which has been hollowed out by Brownback’s extremely aggressive tax-cutting. Income tax receipts continue to fall below Brownback’s rolling projections — the latest estimates show them coming in 2% below forecast made just last November.

….The economic suffering that Brownback’s policies have imposed on Kansans is bad enough; to add to the pain by removing protections against workplace harassment over sexual orientation is a new low.

As Hiltzik points out, there’s no special reason for Brownback to do this now. The anti-discrimination policy has been in place for eight years, and Brownback apparently felt no particular angst about it during his entire first term.

But things are different now. When he was first elected, Brownback promised that his planned tax cuts on the rich would supercharge the Kansas economy and bring about prosperity for all. That turned out to be disastrously wrong, and now he’s slashing spending on education and the poor to make up for the catastrophe he unleashed. This is understandably unpopular, so what better way to distract the rubes than to engage in a bit of gay bashing? That’ll get everyone riled up, and maybe they won’t even notice just how much worse off they are than they used to be. It’s a time-honored strategy.

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The Kansas Economy Sucks, So Let’s Do a Little Gay Bashing to Distract Everyone

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Is Republican Concern About Middle-Class Wage Stagnation Just a Big Con?

by HayleyFaulding Posted on February 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the past few weeks, Republicans have become oddly troubled about the state of the American economy. It’s not just that recovery from the Great Recession has been slow. Their big concern is that income inequality is growing. Middle-class wages are stagnating. GDP growth is benefiting corporations and the rich, but no one else. The economy is becoming fundamentally unfair for the average joe.

This is certainly a sharp U-turn for a party that’s traditionally been more concerned with cutting regulations on businesses and lowering taxes on the rich. Why the sudden unease with the fact that the rich are doing so well?

The cynical side of me says the answer is simple: Republicans don’t really care about the growing unfairness of the economy any more than they ever have. They’ve just decided to attack Democrats on their strongest point, not their weakest. This was a favorite tactic of Karl Rove’s, and over the past decade or two it’s become a fairly conventional strategy. If Hillary Clinton thinks she can make hay by pointing out how the well the rich are doing at the expense of everyone else—well, let’s just defuse that right from the start by agreeing with her. Thomas Edsall puts it like this:

The danger for Democrats is that they will lose ownership of the issues of stagnation, opportunity and fairness. But they also face what may be a deeper problem: What happens when their candidates are not the only ones who can harness the emotional power that stems from the anger many Americans feel as they helplessly watch the geyser of wealth shooting to the top?

The less cynical view is that the Republican Party is finally responding to the views of the “reformicons,” a loose group of youngish thinkers who have urged the GOP to adopt a more populist, family-friendly economic agenda. This, goes the story, is pushing Republicans in a more centrist direction, and is responsible for their increasing attention to issues of economic fairness. As Edsall says, they have to move to the center if they want to win in 2016. However, Yuval Levin, one of the most prominent of the reformicons, says this is just flatly wrong:

A lot of Edsall’s confusion would be resolved if he considered the possibility that we are actually trying to drag the party to the right, not the center—on the tax question that is his focus, and on the other issues we have taken up.

….Edsall’s treatment of the tax question as the one on which the reformers have stepped furthest from traditional conservative arguments is a good illustration of his failure to see this dynamic….The kind of proposals that “reform conservatives” tend to call for, and the sort that Lee and Marco Rubio have advanced in Congress, consist of the same basic components as most of the successful conservative tax reforms of the last three decades….It does emphasize the business tax code in pursuit of growth more….It does emphasize marginal rate reductions less….It does deliver more of its tax relief through payroll-tax cuts….It does prominently feature the over-taxation of parents among the distortions it seeks to correct.

….This approach to tax reform is precisely an application of longstanding conservative principles and goals to contemporary circumstances….So on taxes, the question between some reform conservatives and some other conservatives is how best to move Republicans to the right….At its core, at least as I see it, “reform conservatism” is just applied conservatism. In many areas of policy, we’re trying to move Republicans from merely saying no to the left, or worse yet saying “yes, but a little less,” to showing what the right would do instead.

I remain unsure what to think of this argument. In one sense, it just seems opportunistic. Reformicons have so far made little headway with a Republican Party that’s been relentlessly moving to the right, so now they’re trying to insist that their agenda is more conservative than even the tea party agenda. Honest. You just have to squint at it in the right way.

But in another sense, I buy Levin’s pitch. Most of the reformicons really are trying to shrink the size of government and lower the overall tax take. The fact that their proposals are perhaps more likely to get adopted in the real world makes them, in a practical sense, more conservative than a firebrand who just wants to scream about taxes with no real chance of ever getting a conservative tax plan passed.

That said, I still think Levin underestimates some of the differences here. The reformicons, he admits, do emphasize marginal rate reductions less than traditional conservatives. But this is not just some minor point of tactics. Ever since Reagan, lowering marginal rates on the rich has been one of the two or three unshakeable Holy Grails of the conservative movement. You see this over and over again when Republicans actively oppose tax cuts if they don’t include a rate cut at the top. They don’t want to reduce payroll taxes. They don’t want to increase child tax credits. What they want is to cut tax rates on the rich. The evidence on this point could hardly be more crystal clear.

Overall, then, I’d say Edsall has the better of this argument, and he’s right to be a bit befuddled. The reformicons may say that their agenda is both more populist and more conservative than traditional Republicanism, but that’s a hard argument to swallow. And when it comes to issues other than taxes, the problems get even worse. Reformicons mostly want to accept the welfare state but transform it into something more efficient. That’s not a message that the modern Republican Party is open to. Ditto on social issues, where reformicons tend to simply stay quiet. But in real life, politicians don’t get to stay quiet. They either toe the line on social issues or else they’re drummed out of the movement.

The bottom line remains the same as it’s always been. To the extent that reformicons are successful, it’s because they aren’t really reformers. To the extent that they’re true reformers, they aren’t successful. Maybe that will change in the future. But not yet.

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Is Republican Concern About Middle-Class Wage Stagnation Just a Big Con?

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Jon Stewart Picked a Good Time to Retire From the Daily Show

by KrystynaK18 Posted on February 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess I’m curious about something. How many of you think Jon Stewart made the right decision stepping down from the Daily Show? I’m reluctant to say this because I’ve long been such a pretty devoted follower, but the truth is that Marian and I gradually stopped watching him last year. It wasn’t any single thing, or any big change in what he did. It was just a growing sense that we weren’t really laughing as much as we used to. There were still good bits, and the correspondents still had their moments, but they were fewer and farther between than in the past.

Are there others who feel the same way? I don’t want to turn this thread into a pile-on, especially if you happen to be someone who’s never liked Stewart’s brand of comedy. I’ve always been a big fan. But over the past year he seems to have lost a lot of his edge. Or is it just me?

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Jon Stewart Picked a Good Time to Retire From the Daily Show

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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

by EmilWUNhxbb Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican hawks have insisted from the start that President Obama isn’t being tough enough in his approach to the Ukraine crisis. And perhaps he isn’t. It’s a point that’s arguable by reasonable people.

But what’s not arguable is that regardless of what Obama would do if he had a truly free hand, he pretty clearly doesn’t have a free hand. Ukraine is, first and foremost, a European problem, and the leadership of Europe just isn’t on board with a more aggressive strategy against Russia:

Through nine months of struggle to halt Russia’s military thrust into Ukraine, Western unity has been a foremost priority for American and European leaders. Now, with the crisis entering a dangerous new phase, that solid front is in danger of collapsing.

….A growing number of U.S. officials, and some in Europe, particularly in countries bordering Russia, believe that the only way to dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from continuing what they see as an invasion of Ukraine is to raise the military cost to Moscow. That means giving the Ukrainians better weapons, they say.

….But the Germans, French and many other European leaders are equally convinced that arming the Kiev government will not halt Putin, but will increase carnage in a war that already has killed about 5,300 people and risk an all-out East-West confrontation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a security conference in Munich, Germany, made clear that not only would Germany not contribute arms, but it also opposed allies doing so. “Military means will lead to more victims,” she said, arguing that the West should apply a patient containment approach toward Russia.

I’m skeptical about providing arms to the Ukrainians, but I remain open to arguments that it’s the only way to stop Vladimir Putin’s aggression. However, there’s just no way that this will work without European cooperation. End of story. The US can’t pretend that acting on its own has even the slightest chance of success.

So the hawks need to stop obsessing over Obama’s alleged weakness, and instead look overseas. The truth is that Obama has been one of the most aggressive of the Western leaders in the fight against Putin, while it’s Merkel and her colleagues who have insisted on a less confrontational approach. If John McCain and his buddies want to arm the Ukrainians, they need to figure out a way to persuade Merkel that it’s the right thing to do. That might be less congenial for their tea party buddies, whose interest in Ukraine is pretty much zero aside from its role as a way of painting Obama as a weak-kneed appeaser, but it’s the only way they might get what they say they want.

So that’s their choice. Continue bashing Obama, which feels good but will get them nowhere. Or start pressing our European allies, which is boring and difficult and pays no political dividends—but which might actually get them closer to what they claim is their goal. Which is it going to be, boys?

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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

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A Baton Rouge ER Is Closing Because Bobby Jindal Won’t Accept Medicaid Expansion

by JaiFitzGibbon Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Louisiana’s capital city is losing one of its emergency rooms:

The Baton Rouge General Medical Center-Mid City will close its emergency room within the next 60 days, a victim of continuing red ink and the Jindal administration withdrawing the financial support that kept it open.

….The General’s Mid City campus suffered a financial hit as a result of the April 2013 closure of the LSU Earl K. Long Medical Center….More and more poor and uninsured patients from the low-income neighborhoods of north Baton Rouge ended up at the Mid City hospital, which was the next-closest facility.

Mid City hospital reported losses of $1 million a month as more and more patients who could not pay arrived. Losses jumped from $6 million to $8 million annually from 2009 to 2012, then up to $12.5 million in 2013, according to Baton Rouge General. Last year, the facility lost $23.8 million.

The nearest ER for residents who are currently served by Mid-City is now 30 minutes further away, and it’s a certainty that people are going to die because of this. But what’s the real story behind this closure? Shouldn’t the expansion of Medicaid be offsetting the increased losses on uninsured patients?

You bet it should. And it would, if Bobby Jindal were willing to accept Obamacare’s offer of virtually free Medicaid expansion. But he’s not, and that means Baton Rouge is losing one of its central emergency rooms and more people will die who otherwise could have been saved. That’s some nice work, Bobby. Michael Hiltzik has more details here.

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A Baton Rouge ER Is Closing Because Bobby Jindal Won’t Accept Medicaid Expansion

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Book Bleg Followup

by Myron83Nao Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago I asked for reading recommendations that wouldn’t tax my brain too much since my chemotherapy regimen has left me more fatigued than usual. Light, multi-part fiction was my primary request. There were loads of ideas, and I figured some readers might appreciate a quick summary. Here are the five that got the most positive comments:

Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series
James Corey’s Expanse series
Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers series

I probably made this thread harder than it needed to be by not mentioning stuff I’ve read or genres I don’t like that much. Pure genre mystery stories, for example (Christie, Hillerman, Leonard, etc.), have never done much for me. On the flip side, I’ve read lots of 20th century science fiction (Asimov, Heinlein, Willis, etc. etc.), so there’s not a lot new to recommend there. Among specific recommendations that popped up several times:

I’ve read James Clavell’s Asia series and loved it. Maybe I should reread it!
I’ve read Red/Green/Blue Mars. Meh.
I made it halfway through Wolf Hall and finally gave up. That doesn’t happen often.
I’ve read everything by Neal Stephenson. Big fan.
I’ve read lots of John Scalzi, and all of the Old Man’s War series.
I’ve read Roger Zelazny’s Amber series about, oh, a dozen or two times. It begins with maybe the best first chapter ever written. Obviously I’m a big fan.
I’ve tried a couple of Iain Banks’ Culture novels and I’ve just never been able to get into them.
I’ve read most everything by John LeCarre. But it’s not a bad suggestion. I’m sure there are a few I’ve missed.
I’ve read Charlie Stross’s Merchant Princes series but didn’t care for it much. Ditto for the one Laundry book I read. It’s too bad since I like most of his other stuff.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions, and I hope everyone enjoyed it. I also got some good nonfiction recommendations, including several by email that didn’t end up on the comment thread. Much appreciated.

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Book Bleg Followup

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John Boehner’s Big Triumph Is Now Just a Big Shit Sandwich

by AbelSmallwood Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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I could use a good laugh, and this afternoon I got one. For starters, as the White House hinted yesterday, Joe Biden won’t be attending Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech next month before a joint session of Congress. Apparently he’ll be out of the country that day:

The vice president’s office on Friday confirmed the plans to skip the March 3 speech. “We are not ready to announce details of his trip yet, and normally our office wouldn’t announce this early, but the planning process has been underway for a while,” a spokesperson for the office said.

So where exactly will Joe be? Well, um, somewhere. The planning process “has been underway for a while,” the White House insists with a straight face, but they don’t know yet what country they’ve been planning to send him to. But they’ll think of one. Maybe Latvia or something.

This is all part of the mounting fury from Democrats in Congress and the White House over the speech, and it’s become increasingly clear that the whole thing is a major blunder for Netanyahu. But who to blame? The invitation came from Speaker of the House John Boehner, so why not blame him? Today Netanyahu did exactly that, throwing him under the proverbial bus with barely a passing glance:

A senior Israeli official suggested on Friday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been misled into thinking an invitation to address the U.S. Congress on Iran next month was fully supported by the Democrats….“It appears that the speaker of Congress made a move, in which we trusted, but which it ultimately became clear was a one sided move and not a move by both sides,” Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told 102 FM Tel Aviv Radio on Friday.

Poor John Boehner. You almost feel sorry for the guy sometimes. President Obama has been running rings around him for months now, infuriating the Republican caucus and causing Boehner endless headaches over Cuba, immigration, net neutrality, Homeland Security shutdowns, and dozens of other subjects. No matter how hard he tries, Boehner just hasn’t been able to get ahead of any of this. Instead he’s been forced over and over to respond to Obama’s agenda while desperately trying to keep the peace among the tea partiers who control his future.

Then, finally, it looked like he’d pulled something off. He announced the Netanyahu speech two weeks ago, catching the president off guard and garnering huzzahs from every corner of the the conservative movement. Finally, a victory!

But now it’s all turned to ashes. His big spectacle is in tatters, with Democrats in open revolt and pundits of all stripes agreeing that he overreached by going around the White House on a foreign policy matter. It’s been nothing but a headache, and even Netanyahu has joined the lynch mob now. What’s worse, there’s nothing he can do. The speech is still four weeks away, and Boehner has no choice but to let the whole dreary debacle play out. He already knows his show is a flop, but the curtain has to come up anyway and Boehner has to keep a stiff upper lip the whole time.

Poor guy.

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John Boehner’s Big Triumph Is Now Just a Big Shit Sandwich

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We May All Be Sinners, But Please Shut Up About Our Actual Sins

by EarthaRunyan Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Religious conservatives are mad at President Obama again. I suppose the appropriate reaction is a big yawn, since they’re always mad at President Obama. It hardly matters what new horror he’s ostensibly perpetrated, does it?

Still, this latest brouhahah is kind of interesting. Obama was speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast and said this:

As we speak, around the world, we see faith inspiring people to lift up one another….But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge — or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon….So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities — the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history….This is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith. In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try.

Hmmm. Nothing wrong with that. We are all sinners, and sometimes we don’t live up to our highest ideals. Still, God calls on us to keep trying. This is the kind of thing we hear from fundamentalist preachers all the time—except for one thing. Obama actually named names. Here’s the bit I left out in the second paragraph:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

It’s one thing to agree that we are all sinners. But apparently it’s quite another to provide an example or two. America’s conservative Christians really, really don’t like that. They prefer to be make-believe sinners, not actual sinners who might have some actual sins to account for. Obama decided not to give them such an easy out, and that made them spitting mad.

It’s easy enough to laugh at this kind of cowardly refusal to acknowledge real sin. But that aside, Christopher Ingraham argues that Obama omitted a key nuance:

Some slave traders may indeed have sought justification for their actions in the Christian faith, but much of the trade was driven by economic reasons (a demand for cheap labor) and racism. The Crusades were just as much about political power as they were about religion.

….But the evidence also shows that religion has become a much more powerful motivator of terrorism in the past 15 years or so….And most religiously-motivated terrorism today is perpetrated by Islamist terrorists in the name of their misreading of Islam. Fully two-thirds of terror-related deaths in 2013 were caused by just four Islamist groups — Al Qaeda and its affiliates, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Islamic State, and the Taliban.

I’d be mighty careful about this. The fact that Islamic jihadists say they’re inspired by religion doesn’t mean that’s their sole motivation. Like the Crusades and slavery, the real motivations are much more varied. After all, Islam has been Islam for 14 centuries, but al-Qaeda style jihadi terrorism is a fairly recent phenomenon.

So what happened in the 70s and 80s that suddenly turned a relatively peaceful religion into a persistent wellspring of terrorist attacks? Probably not anything about religion itself. That’s just the public justification. Underneath, there’s a whole stew of anti-colonialism; hatred of occupation by foreign powers; lack of economic opportunity for young men; geopolitical maneuverings; tribal enmities; fear of cultural subjugation; hostility toward Israel; and dozens of other things. Religion is part of it, and religion may often be the hook that sucks angry young men into jihadi groups, but it’s far from the whole story. We make a big mistake if we look solely at the surface and go no further.

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We May All Be Sinners, But Please Shut Up About Our Actual Sins

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America’s Newest Diplomat Will Defend LGBT People Around the World

by Joe Mosh Posted on February 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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LGBT communities around the world will soon have a powerful advocate in the State Department whose sole job is to watch out for their interests. Later this month, the State Department will name a special envoy to focus on the rights of LGBT people globally, a department official tells Mother Jones. In an emailed statement, the official said that Secretary of State John Kerry and his staff are in the final stages of selecting an openly gay Foreign Service officer as the United States’ first-ever diplomat to focus on LGBT issues. The position will not require Senate confirmation.

Congress has attempted to push for a special envoy on LGBT issues in the past: In 2014, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced the International Human Rights Defense Act, which proposed establishing the position and taking steps to make the protection of LGBT individuals a foreign policy priority. Markey’s 2014 bill failed to become law. He reintroduced it last month, but the measure’s fate is uncertain—mostly because of opposition from congressional Republicans. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), the chairman of the House subcommittee on human rights, said last week in a hearing that he does “not construe homosexual rights as human rights,” and suggested that the White House’s public support of LGBT rights negatively affected the United States’ ability to work with Nigeria to combat terrorism. On the same day Smith made these remarks, Nigerian police arrested a dozen people for attending a same-sex wedding.

The State Department official called Markey’s bill a “very helpful vote of confidence” but said, “We wouldn’t want to wait for passage to do something we’ve long thought was the right thing to do and which has been in process.” Appointing a special envoy for LGBT rights has long been a priority for Kerry, who has tried to make defense of LGBT rights a hallmark of his tenure as secretary and was vocal on LGBT issues as a senator. In recent years, some foreign governments have taken harsh action against LGBT people, provoking outrage among human rights advocates globally. In 2014 alone, Gambia passed a law punishing homosexuality with life in prison, Kyrgyzstan moved to pass a “gay propaganda” bill even harsher than Russia’s, and the Ugandan government fought to reinstate a law that would punish homosexuality with a life sentence. LGBT people are criminalized to some extent in 76 countries, a group that includes countries like Pakistan and Iran as well as Jamaica and Singapore.

As secretary of state, Kerry has attempted to push back against anti-LGBT sentiment and law: He has spoken with some African heads of state about their countries’ policies, and has supported legal and media networks that support LGBT communities in Africa and Eastern Europe. Now, the United States will have a full-time diplomat committed to doing that work. “It’s been long in the making,” the official wrote in an email, “because the Secretary insisted the envoy be a career Foreign Service officer from inside the institution, someone who is part of the fabric of the institution, a diplomat by training.”

Advocates for appointing a special LGBT envoy had expressed concern that any action the State Department takes could potentially be undone when a new administration takes over in 2016. But precedent suggests that LGBT-oriented diplomatic progress is unlikely to be rolled back. In 1999, President Bill Clinton appointed the first openly gay US ambassador, James Hormel, as a recess appointment, bypassing deeply critical social conservatives in the US Senate.* President George W. Bush would go on to appoint an openly gay ambassador himself.

Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state at the time, was the first State Department head to allow domestic partners, including same-sex partners, to accompany overseas staff, and require that foreign governments officially accredit them. Selim Ariturk, president of GLIFAA, an organization that represents LGBT individuals in the foreign service, is optimistic about the State Department’s latest step. The envoy, he says “will be uniquely situated at the intersection of human rights and gender rights issues, and will allow the State Department to make progress combating the violence that plagues LGBT communities around the world.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated Hormel’s current position.

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America’s Newest Diplomat Will Defend LGBT People Around the World

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Walmart Cut My Hours, I Protested, and They Fired Me

by ChelseyUyc Posted on February 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today, the union-backed Our Walmart campaign will hold demonstrations across the country calling on Walmart managers to reverse disciplinary actions against 35 workers in nine states who participated in Black Friday protests against the retailer. Our Walmart will also add claims of illegal retaliation against the workers to a 2013 unfair labor practices case against Walmart that is now being prosecuted by the National Labor Relations Board. One of the workers being added to the case is 26-year-old Kiana Howard of Sacramento, California. This is her story, edited for length and clarity, as told to Mother Jones:

My mom worked for the state legislative office for about 17 years and then she got laid off. My dad was in our life at the beginning, then he wasn’t around. Still, we have a big family and I had a pretty good life growing up, although I grew up in East Sacramento, in the ghetto. I didn’t graduate from high school because I couldn’t pass the math part of the exit exam. I did go back in 2013 and get my diploma. I was screaming and crying. I was so happy.

About a week later, I started working at the local Walmart. I love working around people and having conversations while ringing them up. You could be having a bad day and one customer in line says a joke and changes your whole day. My coworkers there were like family. We took care of each other because we were all going through the same situation. The managers, on the other hand, they don’t give a damn about us.

I started off at $8.40 an hour. Then California raised the minimum wage, and I got my yearly raise, which put me up to $9.80. But the most hours I could get in any week after picking up extra days and taking extra shifts was 36. After paying rent and utilities, I was barely scraping by. I was on welfare, getting $300. When they cut that off, I really started struggling. And then they cut my food stamps down by more than half, to $136, so I started having to spend money on food. I went to food banks to make sure I fed my seven-year-old son.

I live an hour away. I don’t have a car. I have to catch the bus and the light rail every day. My schedule was all over the place. Some days I would have to be at work at 5:30 in the morning, and then some days I would work from 8 p.m. to midnight. I was tired all the time. It was just madness. Especially because there’s no buses that run after 10 p.m.

Sometimes coworkers would give me rides home, but sometimes they would be like, “Oh, I can’t go that way, I don’t have the gas.” And I didn’t have gas money for them. Other times I would get on Facebook and ask people to give me rides.

Or there was this dating website called Tagged. I would write on my status: “Could anybody give me a ride home? Stranded at work.” And then people would message me. “Well, what time are you off?”

Some of the guys were people that I knew. Other guys I didn’t know. A lot of times I was scared but I had pepper spray and I was ready for whatever. I just had to make sure I got home. I was not spending the night at Walmart.

At the time, I was trying to get promoted to customer service. The manager kept telling me she was going to pick me, but then she takes somebody who has been at Walmart for a month and puts her there instead because she hadn’t missed any days. But she doesn’t have a child like I do. I missed three days because my son was sick, and I was late three days. They hold that against us for a whole year, and I feel like that’s just too long.

I actually started applying at different jobs. I applied at Burlington Coat Factory, Macy’s, Sears. But I just wasn’t getting calls back from those people. I just kind of gave up and kept working at Walmart.

Around August of last year, I’d had enough and put in an availability change with my supervisor. I told them I could only work between 5:30 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. That way I could get home to my son. People who had worked there for years told me, “Oh, they are going to cut your hours back for a while, and then you will get them back again.” But they cut my hours back—to just 23 a week—and they kept them cut back. It went on for a good month or two. That’s one reason I decided to join Our Walmart.

I feel like we were overworked and underpaid. When my customer service manager, who is in Our Walmart, told me we are going to be fighting for $15 and full time, I just felt like it needed to be done. A lot of associates were like, well, isn’t that too much for Walmart? I’m like, “No, dude! This is the richest family in America! What do you mean that’s too much? Really?” Walmart, I call it the devil’s palace. That’s how I feel.

On Black Friday we went on strike. The organizers picked us up in a white van and drove us to a picket at the Rancho Cordova store. It was me and a couple of other Our Walmart people. They had balloons; they tied them on our wrists. They had posters. And we stood out there for a minute, we talked, and we had people get on the mic and speak. We had a DJ out there. It was like a little party. I did an interview on the news.

Then we stated marching. They had me and my son in the front. We were chanting and singing and people were jumping and dancing. Then the police came. The people that got arrested, they were sitting down in the street. Santa Claus got arrested as well. They didn’t put handcuffs on Santa Claus, though. We took lots of pictures. It was good. I felt great. Everybody was like, “I seen you on the news!”

They retaliated on January 13, which was the day I got fired. I had a four-hour shift. Thirty minutes before I was about to get off, they pulled me off the register and brought me in the office. It was like, “You went on strike for Black Friday…” I wasn’t listening because I was upset. She said it counted as my fourth unexcused absence and that rolls over into me being terminated. I signed my papers and I gave her my badge and my vest and I left.

Since then, it has been hard. Our Walmart is going to help out with the retaliation fund, but that only lasts six months. With my last check I was able to pay my rent, but I can’t do laundry, I can’t pay any bills. I ran out of food and I had to go to the food bank once again. I feel like I’m gong into a depression. I just try to keep myself humble, because my son needs me. I can’t show him that I’m going through a lot right now.

Some employees don’t want to join Our Walmart because they don’t want to be in a predicament like I am. But I know they believe we’re fighting for a good cause. I’m just trying to stay prayed up and hope for the best.

See the article here:  

Walmart Cut My Hours, I Protested, and They Fired Me

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