Walmart Still in NOW’s ‘Gender-Gap’ Crosshairs

September 22nd, 2011 | Filed in Affirmative Action, Feminism, Gender Gap
Posted by Chuck Roger

Originally at American Thinker

By Chuck Rogér

Despite emerging victorious from a class action suit alleging sex discrimination, Walmart recently announced costly programs designed to “help empower women across its supply chain.” Over the next five years, the mega-company will “source” $20 billion from female-owned American companies and double purchases from global suppliers run by women. Walmart will offer training and specific career opportunities to 60,000 female factory workers to help those women “develop the skills they need to become more active decision-makers in their jobs and for their families.”

Not enough, says National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill. In O’Neill’s way of thinking, Walmart has committed many past sins for which the company must repent. Spending a mere $20 billion that the company is not legally compelled to spend on women’s professional development apparently doesn’t scratch the surface layer of required penance.

O’Neill wants Walmart to “follow the law, stop discriminating against women … be transparent [and] allow independent auditors to go in and actually ascertain that they are following civil rights laws with respect to employment discrimination.” O’Neill also wants Walmart to “create some family friendly policies for women trying to make it up the corporate ladder at Walmart.” The NOW president explained that the company should create work schedules in which women are not forced to decide whether to spend time with their children on holidays or work at Walmart.

Point for point, the NOW president’s demands are harebrained.

First, NOW wants Walmart to stop engaging in a practice (sex discrimination) for which the Supreme Court of the United States found insufficient evidence of existence.

Secondly, what constitutes “independent” audits in NOW’s view is not specified. Picture any company, from mom’s and pop’s country store to the world’s largest retailer, allowing a third party to probe into, analyze, and judge hiring, firing, performance review, and employee promotion practices. A realistic expectation? Or a shrill Big Sister on steroids?

And finally, O’Neill’s third demand–holiday flex-time specifically aimed at moms–is a jewel. How does a fair-minded, logically-operating employer go about deciding which employees to boost up the “corporate ladder?” The operative terms are “fair-minded” and “logically-operating.” To act in a fair manner, an employer would select workers for promotion after applying logic to objective performance data. In other words, employees who contribute more would get promoted faster than employees who contribute less.

But gender-tribalist organizations such as NOW see such reasoning as obstructive to the feminist agenda–an agenda in which employers must create special “work schedules” to preferentially treat certain employees. The gender gap warrior’s El Dorado is a workplace that exempts women who want to spend less time at work and more time with their children from the same performance evaluation criteria against which other employees are judged.

NOW President O’Neill’s holiday work-time thinking is something to behold. The logic is worth breaking down.

  1. Require that people who find a way to manage both family and work put in the holiday hours.
  2. Let moms who do not wish to give up holiday time be credited with the same dedication and contributions as employees who do give up holiday time.
  3. Women who want to be moms and corporate executives must be considered a special class which deserves to be treated as, well, special.

It’s a special world, the world inside the feminist mind.

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Business-Killing Obama Is No Candyman

September 21st, 2011 | Filed in Barack Obama, Regulation, Small Businesses, The Economy
Posted by Chuck Roger

Originally at American Thinker

Guest Post

By Don Ross

In New Deal or Raw Deal, Burton Folsom, Jr. explains that an atmosphere of regime uncertainty kept businesses wary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.  Today, under President Obama, the economy is suffering similarly due to the understandable hesitation of companies to expand.  The two presidents share certain behavioral and policy similarities: incessantly admonishing businesses for being successful, taxing companies excessively, and goring industry with regulations, thus creating widespread uncertainty and depressed economies.  Even at the level of a small business, such uncertainty affects major business decisions.

In our small business, my wife and I buy ingredients, then make and sell candy.  Payments received from customers (gross income) are used to pay fixed and variable costs.  The fixed costs include loan and credit repayment, rent, and utilities.  Variable costs include labor, taxes, ingredients, and packaging.  After these costs are removed from gross income, the remainder is profit, or net income.

Since we are a specialty food manufacturer and retailer, the majority of our gross income is obtained around various holidays, especially during the Christmas season.  We transact 75 percent of our business in the last quarter of each year, relying heavily on corporations sending our products as gifts to clients and customers.  In 2010, our production capacity was near its maximum from November through December.  Based on last year’s sales, and assuming an increase for 2011, the wise business decision would be to invest in additional equipment and labor to increase production. However, we cannot risk going into debt to finance new equipment while Washington issues threats to business.

A new chocolate machine could easily cost $25,000, necessitating a loan and adding another payment to our fixed costs.  To incur this additional expense, there must be a relative certainty that business will increase.  Indeed, a decision to take out a large loan in a small business can be a fatal mistake.  So considering the current anti-business environment, the rising national debt, and government behemoths flooding the market with regulations, investing in additional equipment at the present time could add enough cost to wipe out our profit.  In effect, acting as though Barack Obama will create policies that reward business risk amounts to an invitation for financial disaster.

In addition to production costs, shipping expenses also constitute a major concern for our small business.  President Obama promised to significantly increase energy rates.  He has managed to achieve this goal by destroying the Gulf of Mexico oil industry and refusing to consider new domestic drilling and production.  As gasoline prices rise, shipping companies such as UPS add fuel surcharges to most shipments.  Unable to absorb such increases, we must pass the added costs on to the consumer.  Customers unwilling to pay higher prices will take their business elsewhere.

The resulting economic tightrope-walk of keeping prices down without losing money gets shakier when our national “leaders” spout language and policies that make conducting business even riskier.  Business operators’ risks increase in proportion to taxes, regulation, and the shrillness of the Marxist rhetoric emanating from the White House.  As Washington raises or talks of raising taxes, increases spending, and vilifies profit, I am less inclined to risk my family’s future by investing for growth.

For sustained growth cannot transpire under the Obama administration.  The big-government “help” that the president offers won’t spur the economy, entice entrepreneurship, or engender consumer confidence.  Obama’s ridiculous “tax incentives” for hiring new employees, for which only a tiny fraction of businesses qualify, could have been dreamed up only by someone who has never made a payroll and whose only associates are leftist ideologues.  Obamaesque socialism has a deadening effect on innovation, entrepreneurism, and the economy.

Economist Robert Higgs explains the deadening effects.  Referring to the current Obama recession, Higgs observes:

[D]uring the past three years … an important reason for [the] apprehension and the consequent reluctance to make new capital commitments is regime uncertainty-in this case, a widespread, serious fear that the government’s major policies in areas such as taxation, Obamacare, financial reform, environmental regulation, and other areas will have the effect of depriving investors of control over their capital or diminishing their ability to appropriate the income that the capital generates. President Obama’s harping on the desirability of making “the rich” pay their “fair share” (that is, more) of the government’s ever-rising costs only exacerbates regime uncertainty. Business leaders have spoken again and again of how the present political environment is discouraging risk-taking and entrepreneurship

Mitigating risk and entrepreneurship are the business of small business.  But in our small company, we are holding our breath and riding out the Obama storm until a free-market leader emerges to instill confidence that the risks which we take will be rewarded with increased profits that we can keep.  Until federal spending is curtailed, regulations decrease, and taxes stabilize at a fair level, we will remain skeptical of every word that issues forth from the mouth of Washington.

Our skepticism will keep our growth on hold.

Former U.S. Marine captain Don Ross and his wife own and operate a candy business and homeschool their nine children.  E-mail: Chesterton123@gmail.com

 

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Are Some Conservatives Willing to March off a Cliff to Preserve Moral Purity?

September 20th, 2011 | Filed in 2012 Election, Conservatism, Ideology, Republicans
Posted by Chuck Roger

By Chuck Rogér

Reaction to my article, “Conservatism that Assures the Unthinkable: the Reelection of Barack Obama” (also at American Thinker), has been understandably mixed. Most reactions have been refreshingly receptive, demonstrating a recognition of the catastrophic effects of GOP presidential contenders pushing social issues on the cusp of an economic inflection point.

Yet there have also been emails and comments suggesting that a fair number of conservatives are unwilling to take a measured strategic approach to Election 2012. And there are die-hards determined to push the conservative social agenda even if the tactic gets Barack Obama reelected.

Several comments are so insightful that I thought it good idea to reproduce the remarks here and expand where appropriate.

Enjoy.

1)  We cannot trade nanny state Democrats for Christian sharia. Sanctimonious social intervention and control from either left or right won’t work and guarantees endless controversy and strife (of which we have way too much already). It poisons the discourse (as many on the left have so deftly demonstrated). Enough already.

… Issues like abortion and gay marriage are best left to individual choice. It’s not like we’re not already overrun with dumb people (as the whole world is). …[F]undamentalists of whatever stripe are a real hindrance to common sense and moving forward.  Enough already! Free markets in a free country!

Though commentator #1 employs an over-the-top analogy with the use of the term “Christian sharia,” the point is well-taken. Sanctimoniousness of any kind, forced on the people through the power of government, will not bring about a truly free America.

2)  Every time I read one of these indignant commenters [sic] here who wants to dig in and keep warring to the bitter end on every moral issue, I brace myself for an inevitable sequel to Hope & Change. That’s fine, gentlemen, go down with the Titanic, heroically brandishing your swords over gay marriage and faith, denouncing the loathsome RINOs who agree with you only 80 percent of the time instead of the mandatory 100 percent. Let’s see how that works.

[…]

To you conservatives who think the average American wants an arch-conservative in the White House who majors in social issues: You need to expand your circle of acquaintances. You’re misjudging the electorate, to our great peril.

The ideological stubbornness criticized by commentator #2 constitutes a surefire recipe for alienating independent voters who just want to live lives free of ideological oppressiveness from any direction — right or left.

 3)  …a GOP professional politician would be the worse thing for this country.  I’d rather have Obama and a Republican Congress than a substitute crony capitalist. The GOP professional politician “frontrunners” …reek of crony capitalism.

Commentator #3 provides an important perspective. Indeed, would merely another corporatist in the White House, this time wearing an elephant skin, be all that much better than the guy in the donkey skin currently in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

4)  Since the 1960′s, an alien leftist ideology has conquered America by invading and “marching through its institutions” — education, the universities, the media, film and theater, the arts and literature — a strategy developed and elaborated by the Italian communist Antonia Gramsci and by the Frankfurt school.  Subvert the culture they said, and the apparatus of all political power will fall into our hands without firing a shot.  The overarching goal of the great American conservative movement must be “reconquest” — to “march back through the institutions” and take back the culture and America.  The goal of the invaders was to subvert the culture; hence the effort to destroy the roots of culture, which is the family and religion.

However, in their strategy of reconquest, the Spanish adopted flexible tactics, sometimes advancing, sometimes retreating. As I read Chuck Rogér, he is not talking about the longer-term goal but about shrewd tactics.

Precisely. Commentator #4 understands that something that took decades to accomplish — the nastification of American society — will take time to reverse. Trying to use the 2012 election to reverse decades of cultural Marxism will turn off a large number of voters that the GOP candidate will need in order to defeat Obama.

5)  With only 2 choices (parties), peripheral issues can skew the election results, because of voters who do not grasp the overall picture and vote on one issue. If we want to reduce the size & scope of government to save our economy, the candidates need to concentrate on that and put the social issues aside for now.  If we end up with an economic collapse and civil unrest, the social issues become moot.

Commentator #5′s observations sum up exactly what must happen in 2012. Republicans biting off a bigger chunk than necessary to save our economic butts will result in our butts getting flushed down the economic drain by a Barack Obama who will grow ever more ideologically crazy in his second four years.

6)  If our more socially/religiously conservative brethren must (at least overtly) temper their fundamentalist, scriptural literalist zeal in the effort to DEFEAT OBAMA, so be it. We must struggle within the confines of our political reality. Smart up conservatives!

Commentator #6′s analysis needs no clarification.

7)  Wow, I think many of you that remain staunch in our “Conservative Values” miss the man’s point. To stick to a 100% “No-Bend” righteous viewpoint (or we won’t vote conservative) is absurd. I don’t care if it’s Howdy Doody up against Obama, I’m voting for the Doody ticket . . .

This isn’t about compromise at all, and nobody suggests that we change our Values. It’s about Priorities Folks. Stay on the Fox hunt and quit chasing the Rabbits the MSM keeps throwing out there to distract the Top priority. Obama and the Left’s Agenda needs to be jettisoned off the Planet. You think 25 Million folks out of work care about Darwin, Gays, and Abortion right now?

Talk about “get it”; commentator #7 nails it. People who really want to work but cannot, because of Obama’s economically devastating policies, care not one iota whether the fossil record shows the “transitional” lifeforms that “should” be evident if the theory of evolution is correct. The motivated but unemployed also couldn’t care less whether Jim and John have the same government license for their relationship as George and Tammy have. And while many of the unemployed may care about the millions of babies killed each year in abortions, they also recognize that with other voters not seeing things the same way, 2012 is not the time to make abortion an election issue.

8)  I am not a citizen of the USA. It is my modest opinion that if the conservatives want to win ANY future elections, they have to “get out”…

1-Get out of peoples’ bedrooms! Are you against “The pursuit of happiness”? We are talking about consenting humans above the age of consent.

2-Get out of science! The applications of science and technology are something that comes under the jurisdiction of law makers. Science as the FREE pursuit of knoweledge for knoweledge sake should bee, well, FREE. Your never-ending bickering with Evolution only makes you (the conservatives) look ridicoulous.

3-Get out of religion! Yes, freedom of religion includes freedom FROM religion. Otherwise it’s up to the Capitol to decide what is religion and what is not! Does THE RELIGION OF ATHEISM qualify?

Even if I have not convinced you, don’t you understand that NOW is the time to save Western Civilisation?

Commentator #8′s remarks capture the pure libertarian spirit of the Founders, who never intended that government get involved in any of the three areas discussed.

9)  The left is aware of this and will surely try to sidetrack every debate by bringing these issues up.

If a candidate simply says: “That issue is completely irrelevant,” then that candidate will be seen in a negative light. Americans have been propagandized to expect definitive opinions on these issues, and will be disappointed if they don’t get the answers.

So, the advice should not be to candidates so much as to the American people to get away from thinking inside the idological box.

Commentator #9 reinforces common sense.

Let’s end with a real barn-burner.

10)  I could not disagree [with Chuck Rogér] more. If the only way to beat Obama is to accept such huge parts of the “Cultural Marxist” agenda, then I don’t care if Obama wins. What difference does it make? For example take illegal immigration. We can implement all the Tea Party planks with respect to limited government, federalism, low taxes, less regulation, etc etc etc, yet if we don’t stop and reverse the ethnic cleansing of white America due to the tidal wave of illegal immigrants swarming over the border and putting unbearable and unaffordable burdens on our welfare, then nothing matters anyway! All victories will just be temporary as white people are erased from our own homeland. You make it sound like it is so important to win the upcoming battle that it doesn’t matter if we lose the war (our country). I say, I want a full fledge dyed in the wool conservative or i will just stay home on election day. I have nothing but contempt for someone who only cares about economics while the rest of our country goes to Hell.

Ah, commentator #10 provides the preeminent staunch conservative mindset and engages in two thought errors:

  • That my thesis is that “the only way to beat Obama is to accept such huge parts of the ‘Cultural Marxist’ agenda.” (This is categorically not my thesis, not at all.)
  • That if weak thinkers like this commentator have to give up their weak thinking, then they “don’t care if Obama wins” again in 2012.

Had I pondered long and hard, I could not have encapsulated this mindless, over-the-top emotional, staunchly ideological posturing. The commentator’s position is exactly the nonsense at which my article is aimed. The piece lays out a case for focusing on the economy for 2012 in order to make it possible to later address the social issues. The payoff paragraph reads: “There will be plenty time for America to debate the contentious social issues that distinguish the progressives who dominate government, education, and media from the conservatives who once enjoyed but lost similar dominion.  But there will be time for such debates only if America returns to prosperity.  Without economic healing, economic survival will consume the people.” But to the stubborn ideological crusader, these three sentences did not, and might not ever, register.

Commentator #10′s rant about the “ethnic cleansing of white America due to the tidal wave of illegal immigrants” is so shrill that I wonder if the comments may be a plant by a lefty. Yet, I have observed such absurdities coming from known conservatives. And finally, as if to illustrate my point, it appears as though I arranged for this commentator’s call for “a full-fledged dyed in the wool conservative,” followed by the promise to “just stay home on election day” if said arch-conservative does not emerge. But I did not arrange for this ridiculousness. Such people really do exist. And if enough of them “stay home on election day,” then we will all be screwed.

Take heart. Many more of the responses to my article read like the next one, which came shortly after the remarks posted by commentator #10.

11)  Good grief, people here are declaring they’ll stay home on election day if they don’t get a gung-ho social conservative on the ticket. Words fail me. Just what do you think the president’s job is? To elevate the moral climate of our nation? To promote faith and personal virtue? None of those things fall within the strict purview of government, certainly not the Constitution. It’s up to families, religious institutions and individual citizens to foster those things, not the president. Your unwavering demand for 100-percent ideological purity — if it’s shared by enough people like you — will usher in Obama II. Is that what you want?! Don’t you see the bankrupting of successive generations as a moral issue? I’m baffled by you people. Baffled!

Baffled indeed. Let’s hope that the vast majority of conservatives understand the utter stupidity of including “gung-ho” social conservatism in the GOP platform. I, for one, do not wish to experience Obama II.

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