The Black Cross Campaign & The Wal-Mart Boycott

[Nesayem]

Peace Kings and Queens. Some of the brother and sisters her in Cali have been organizing to provide clothing, food , and other needed items the people of New Orleans. Here's is some information about the Wal-Mart boycott
(which I hope we can all show our solidarity with) and other needed information about the Black Cross. I will be posting the Black Cross Campaign donation drop off sites in the Bay Area forum and in the LA forum.

The Blackout Boycott of Wal-Mart

by JR, POCC Minister of Info

Over the last month, the Prisoners of Conscience Committee initiated the Black Cross Campaign to aid and assist the refugees fleeing the Gulf States. Yes, I did use the word refugee, because I believe that these evacuees were fleeing a war, not just the 500-year war that we have been in since we were shipped to Amerikkka at the bottom of slaveships, but also the war that was initiated by the U.S. military blowing up the levees in New Orleans while the hurricane was passing through.

The POCC is not calling it Hurricane Katrina; we’re calling it Hurricane Amerikkka, since Amerikkka blew up the levee, Amerikka neglected saving people trapped in the floods and on rooftops, Amerikkka put “shoot to kill� orders on Black people looking for food, Amerikkka has refused to acknowledge and accept Fidel Castro’s offer to send over 1,500 doctors to the U.S. to aid Black people and it is Amerikkka who is planning to steal the land of Black landowners in New Orleans and whiten the city, among other things.


Sharon Chew and her twins from New Orleans were one of the families that got clothes and school supplies from the Black Cross Campaign last week.
Photo: JR
Recently the POCC butted heads with Wal-Mart, the largest company in the world, over donating to the Black Cross Campaign. Over the years, Wal-Mart has had a number of enemies who don’t agree with their business practices. Now the POCC and the Black community is gearing up for a Blackout Boycott of Wal-Mart, nationally and internationally.

I took this opportunity to talk to Jazzmine, a member of the POCC from LA, about the recent run-in with the corporate giant. Check her out …

JR: What is the Black Cross Campaign? And what are people doing in Los Angeles?

Jazz: Well, the Black Cross Campaign is a campaign started by the POCC in response to the neglect that went on in regards to the victims of Hurricane Katrina (aka Hurricane Amerikkka). It’s about us taking care of us, like only we know how to do.

They have huge amounts of support from all kinds of people in LA. We’ve set up a drop-off spot dead in the middle of the hood, and it’s been tons of love from all of the people out there. So people have been doing a lot in LA.

JR: Why is there a need for a Black Cross Campaign? Some people would say that they donated to the Red Cross …


POCC member Jazz is a key organizer with the Black Cross Campaign in Los Angeles. She is also heading up the POCC’s Boycott Wal-Mart campaign.

Jazz: It’s definitely a need for that alternative, because we all know that the Red Cross is really on some shady stuff and for the most part, the evacuees didn’t see any money. So it’s like, where is all of that money going?

So there is a need for a Black Cross Campaign because there needs to be some kind of balance to that. There has to be a place where the people who need help could go to and get the genuine and real help that they need and they don’t have to worry about being exploited.

JR: I know that the Anti-Wal-Mart Campaign is being organized. How did the Black Cross Campaign and Wal-Mart come head to head?

Jazz: Well, what happened with Wal-Mart was that one of the organizers that I am friends with in LA had worked out an agreement with a Wal-Mart associate that they were going to donate a certain amount of clothes. They had a huge backroom full of clothes (baby clothes, men and women’s underwear, bottles) and all kinds of stuff that were out of season, and they weren’t doing anything with. So we went up to Wal-Mart and we spoke to the department manager, and she ok’d for us to come and pick up the stuff the following Monday.

So JR (the minister of info of the POCC) went and got a U-Haul truck, and they were on their way to drive down when Wal-Mart cancelled. So it was real shady. And their reason for canceling was because they felt that donating to the POCC wouldn’t give them the proper credit that they felt needed to be awarded to them because they donated.

Because what is the point of doing it if ain’t nobody gonna know, you know what I’m saying? So they were on something like that. The day that it was supposed to go down, they ended up canceling. So that’s where the anti-Wal-Mart campaign comes from.

JR: So what are we asking people to do?

Jazz: Well we’re asking people to first off stop shopping at Wal-Mart. If you could get anything anywhere else, go there and get it. Avoid Wal-Mart as much as possible. Just do what you can do, and that’s not a lot. Because when it was time for them to really give and make a good honest contribution, they didn’t want to do it, so it’s really a small thing to do. Just stop shopping at Wal-Mart.

[IfasehunReincarnated]

important read.

[Nia Imani]

Wal-Mart's Free Market Fallacy

Jonathan Tasini

April 21, 2005

Jonathan Tasini is president of the Economic Future Group and writes his "Working In America" columns for TomPaine.com on an occasional basis.

Conservatives run around singing the praises of Wal-Mart, proclaiming it an American success story. None other than Dick Cheney calls the Beast of Bentonville his favorite company. But what I love about Wal-Mart is the way the company highlights the phoniness of two centerpieces of the conservative movement¹s sloganeering propaganda: the so-called ³free market² and ³local control.²

In the mythical world of the free market‹for which Wal-Mart supposedly serves as a shining example‹prices for goods and labor should rise and fall based on the magic of the ³invisible hand² of market supply and demand. In the nirvana of the so-called free market, workers can sell themselves for whatever the market can bear.

So let me introduce you to a place called China. Wal-Mart‹in its never-ending quest to promote its heartland, Arkansan family values‹is a willing customer of the Chinese labor system, where people work 12- to 18-hour days, earn meager wages and have no days of rest‹all for the honor of laboring inside factories full of chemical toxins and hazardous machines, leading to sickness and death at the highest rates in world history. Wal-Mart says its business with China is just a virtue of the free market.

Putting aside the morality of forcing people to work in slave-like conditions, the so-called free market does not exist in China when it comes to wages. China artificially suppresses wages by anywhere from 47 to 85 percent below what they should be,according to the AFL-CIO's complaint about China's labor policies filed with the United States Trade Representative last year. With Wal-Mart as its willing customer, an authoritarian regime ruthlessly warps the market for wages by enforcing a system that controls where people can work and imprisons and tortures people who attempt to organize real unions or strike. Maybe the rock-bottom labor costs are really behind Wal-Mart¹s slogan ³always low prices,² but the company is certainly not an example of how to win in a free market economy.

It¹s easy to see why Wal-Mart and its conservative defenders discard
ideology: money. By ignoring free market principles, the left-wing Harvard Business School estimates that Wal-Mart reduces its procurement costs by 10-20 percent, primarily by taking advantage of the artificially suppressed labor market in China. One can¹t help note the delicious irony that Wal-Mart¹s ³free market² leadership is powered by an authoritarian regime that still refers to itself as communist.

Back at home, Wal-Mart¹s free market mantra stops at the water¹s edge of the public till. By one estimate, Wal-Mart has pulled in $1.5 billion dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies (see www.walmartwatch.com) . And that's at the low end, because subsidies are sometimes hard to track based on the lack of public reporting requirements. Wal-Mart is happy to cash in on government largess like property tax abatements, infrastructure support, free land and just straight-out cold cash‹all of which are the antithesis of ³free market² ideology.

Here¹s a way to get rich, if you could collect the dough: How many of you wish you had a dollar every time you heard some conservative rant first about the evils of the federal government and, then, call for denuding the federal government and handing more control over decision making to local communities? We¹d all be rich, no? Well, an odd thing has happened. Conservatives appear to be against local control.

Conservatives and their allies in the press have been bent out of shape over recent campaigns to keep Wal-Mart from opening stores. These campaigns were spearheaded by community groups nationwide from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York. Recently, The Economist , the international organ for the so-called ³free market,² railed against the opposition to Wal-Mart¹s entry into the New York City area. Writing in its April 2nd edition about local legislation aimed at requiring standards for workers¹ pay and health care, the magazine opined that, ³Municipal socialism may seem an odd strategy for the world¹s capital of capitalism to embrace.²

Oh, I get it: Local control is only a lofty principle when the goal is to destroy the government¹s ability to implement basic community values like fairness, equality and justice. But when people rise up to challenge the idea that a corporation shouldn¹t do what it chooses with local community resources like workers, water, air and soil‹oh my God, we¹re teetering on the brink of rampant radicalism and a titanic battle between socialism and the free market.

Truth is, Wal-Mart could not survive in a real free market: It would, for example, have to pay Chinese workers more (which would ruin its low-wage business model) and spurn any offers of government subsidies. Indeed, it¹s fitting that Wal-Mart, the business model fawned over by free-marketeers, exposes the so-called ³free market² as a lie, no more than a crude‹albeit effective‹marketing phrase. By offering the seductive promise of prosperity through something ³free,² we¹re told we have to hand over control of our communities to some mystical ³market² force. But that¹s just an illusion conjured up to hide from us real-life actors who exploit the sweat of our brows, deplete our natural resources to make huge profits and take handouts funded by our hard-earned incomes.

Ironically, Wal-Mart¹s behavior does have one redeeming factor. By puncturing the Wal-Mart-generated myths that it is good for America, by showing that its low-prices come with a heavy cost, and by revealing how the company is a leech on communities, we may begin to pull back the curtain hiding the true nature of the so-called ³free market.²

Source: http://www.tompaine.com/print/walmar...et_fallacy.php