SFVYD Boycotts Circuit City
Democrats,
According to recent news reports, Circuit City has laid off 3,400 workers for no better reason than their higher rate of pay. These workers will be offered their jobs back after 10 weeks, but at minimum wage.
Like too many American businesses, Circuit City is replacing skilled workers, knowledgeble about the products the stores are selling, with unskilled workers simply to boost profits. Now these predominantly young twenty-somethings - many of whom are paying for college or supporting a family with their jobs - are being thanked for their loyalty and service with a pink slip. If we don’t stick up for these fired employees, we move one step closer to an economy where young workers have no opportunity to get ahead.
Yesterday SFVYD’s Executive Board voted unanimously to promote a boycott of all Circuit City stores. Until the company offers these employees their old jobs back at their previous salary, we will encourage consumers young and old to take their electronics-buying business elsewhere.
Additionally, we are asking our membership to contact Circuit City and express your disappointment in this insulting and appalling business decision. Here’s the contact info:
Circuit City Store, Inc.
9950 Mayland Drive
Richmond, VA 23233
Phone: 804-527-4000
Fax: 804-527-4164
Web Site: http://www.circuitcity.com
By the way, according to their Yahoo! Finance profile, Circuit City’s Chairman, CEO and President Philip J. Schoonover is paid $1.42 million annually. He’s not getting a paycut this week.
If you are a member of another Democratic, consumer, or labor-friendly organization, please urge them to join us in this boycott. Together we can stick up for these employees and promote an economy that serves consumers and workers, not just profits.
Democratically Yours,
Damian Carroll
President, SFVYD
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This provocative piece makes the inevitable comparison of George W. Bush and the Pharaoh. How timely. (editor’s note)
PHARAOH OR FREEDOM IN AMERICA? by Rabbi Arthur Waskow *
There are four traditional questions that are recited at the Passover Seder. But the real first question is this:
“Is Pharaoh our god, or is the Breath of Life?”
From Rabbi Jesus marching in Jerusalem against the Roman Empire just before Passover time (”Palm Sunday”) down to Fannie Lou Hamer chanting Black American freedom songs like “Go Down, Moses,” the Exodus story has been used for centuries as an inspiration for resistance to tyrants. We should also pay attention to the other side of the story: its brilliant description of Pharaoh’s addiction to top-down, unaccountable power. We should pay attention because we are living through this history in America today.
The story begins at the end of the Book of Genesis with a Pharaoh who feeds the whole nation during famine — at the price of taking over all their land, turning yeoman farmers into serfs. Then comes a Pharaoh who turns his absolute power into a military addiction — an aggressive army of chariots and an internal police that scapegoats the Israelite “foreign element,” enforces slavery, and attempts genocide. Finally this addiction to coercion shapes a Pharaoh who cannot step back from his own need for control and violence, even though it brings about disaster for himself and his country.
Pharaoh begins by hardening his own heart to the plight of the poor and powerless, and after a series of disasters (the “plagues”) brought on by his own arrogance, his addiction takes over.
God — read “Reality” — takes over, and from then on it is God Who hardens his heart.
What is this like? — Use heroin once, twice, thrice - and you are making a free choice. But at some point the addiction takes over, Reality takes over, God takes over. Now it is the heroin that is doing you, not you doing heroin.
If you choose hard-heartedness so long you get addicted to it, at some point you are no longer choosing: God, Reality, is hardening your heart.
And arrogance is not only a moral and spiritual malady. It breeds stupidity. For those who are utterly convinced of their own absolute rightness cannot hear the warnings of others, cannot pay attention to the signals from the world around them.
Pharaoh depends more and more on violence to control the rebellious world — rebellious workers, his own rebellious daughter, the rebellious earth itself. Even when Pharaoh’s own advisers shriek at him, “You are destroying Egypt!” he can no longer turn back.
At each stage, at each plague, Pharaoh pauses for a moment, but then falls back into its addictive march to disaster.
We have seen this happen in Washington — twice. In June 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency reported to the UN a bleak picture of the probable effects of global “warming” on the US itself. A few weeks later, a reporter asked the President what he thought of the report. “Ohhh, bureaucrats!” sneered the president. Even a warning from his own advisers that his policies were endangering America did not deter him.
Just a few months ago, the same scenario. The Iraq Study Group, made up of Establishment luminaries (structurally, our equivalent of “Pharaoh’s own advisers”), warned that the Iraq war was weakening America. They called for a staged withdrawal of troops from Iraq and for direct discussions with Syria and Iran. But the Bush Administration’s pharaoh-like addiction to power and violence took over once again, and it decided to send more Americans to die in Iraq and decided to threaten - and perhaps to consummate - a war against Iran.
Today, we face not merely a single person but a set of interlocking institutions that are our “Pharaoh” –
Big Oil, the swollen military, the Imperial White House. This Pharaoh has so addicted itself to its own uncontrollable power that it can no longer make a free choice.
Unfortunately, when those who have great power insulate themselves in arrogance and violence, the disasters they create do not wound only themselves. They wound the whole society.
• They chose to ignore evidence that Al Qaeda was preparing a major strike inside the US,
• chose to ignore warnings of plans for a airliner hijacking,
• chose to ignore scientists’ warnings about the onrushing climate crisis of global scorching,
• chose to ignore all the warnings that an invasion of Iraq would mire the US in a disastrous and unending occupation,
• chose to ignore all the evidence that Saddam had no mass-destruction weapons, and chose to invent evidence that he did,
• chose to smear, humiliate, and fire honest officials who questioned these falsities;
• chose to ignore warnings of hurricane disaster in New Orleans and chose to ignore the plight of hundreds of thousands of people who could not evacuate the city,
• chose as Attorney-General, Chief Justice, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court supporters of Presidential power to order the use of torture despite US and international law,
• chose to ignore the health and educational needs of Americans in order to funnel obscene amounts of money to those already rich.
The results of this arrogance have been enormous disasters. Plagues:
Iraq.
New Orleans.
The advance of global scorching and the melting of the Arctic ice.
The disappearance of health insurance for one-fourth of the American people.
The debacle of care for veterans at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
The Oil/ / Bomb/ Power interlocking Pharaoh sent the present US government to war, killing more than 3,200 Americans so far and somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 Iraqis, partly for control of oil.
Katrina’s ferocity owed a great deal to the global scorching that heated the Gulf beyond all historical records. And much of that scorching came from the over-use of oil. The hurricane’s fury owed a great to the oil wells that made tatters of the Gulf Coast wetlands that had absorbed past storms. Many died because after the hurricane disaster, the National Guard that usually rescues and protects was far far away, fighting for oil. An entire city shattered, thousands dead, many more homeless. In great part for oil.
People die - and Big Oil makes the highest profits in world history.
In the biblical account of Pharaoh’s downfall, YHWH, the “Breath of Life,” acts almost independently of human resistance. Pharaoh’s oppression of the poor brings the earth itself into rebellion, and that is ultimately what topples him. In our world, it is possible for grass-roots energies to check the power of institutionalized pharaonic power.
We are not Pharaoh’s “advisers.” We are the sovereign people of the United States. Through elections, through mass demonstrations in Washington, through en-masse constituent visits to local district offices of members of Congress, through direct actions of refusal to cooperate with the machinery of war and oiloholic addiction, we can draw on the God-power inherent within us to check the unbridled use of Pharaoh’s power in our lives. Against our lives.
Congressional votes to force an end to the Iraq war are the first firm action by our representatives to say to the interlocking institutions of Big Oil, Big Army, and Big Presidency –”We will not obey your murderous orders, Pharaoh!” — just as the ancient midwives Shifra and Puah refused to obey Pharaoh’s murderous decree. I wish Congress had set the deadline much sooner, but they have remembered the Constitution, have remembered that the American people is sovereign, and have taken the first step forward in standing up to Pharaoh.
Will they keep moving forward? On the war? On the oiloholic addiction and its “drug lords” — Big Oil — that are dooming us to global scorching? On ending and punishing the disgusting use of torture and the illegal behavior of the FBI — our modern Pharaoh’s modern “overseers”? It is only if we take our stand that our representatives will stand fast.
The midwives who refused Pharaoh’s murderous orders revered the God Who is the Breath of Life, more than they feared the Pharaoh who claimed to be god — and whom all Egypt obeyed as a god until that moment. Today it is the same question that we need to face: Is the Oil / Blood/Bomb interlock our god, or not? Is our oiloholic addiction our god, or not? Is Pharaoh our god or not? That is the root of our crisis, as it was so long ago.
Palm Sunday, Passover, our memories of Martin Luther King on April 4 — are all moments for us to face this question. The first question.
———————–
* Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center www.shalomctr.org and the author of many books - some on US foreign and military policy and some on Jewish thought and practice. Most recently he is a co-author of The Tent of Abraham (Beacon, 2006). Permission is granted to use this essay
Why I Was Fired - By David C. Iglesias
The New York Times - March 21, 2007
WITH this week’s release of more than 3,000 Justice Department e-mail messages about the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors, it seems clear that politics played a role in the ousters.
Of course, as one of the eight, I’ve felt this way for some time. But now that the record is out there in black and white for the rest of the country to see, the argument that we were fired for “performance related†reasons (in the words of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty) is starting to look more than a little wobbly.
United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political.
Politics entered my life with two phone calls that I received last fall, just before the November election. One came from Representative Heather Wilson and the other from Senator Domenici, both Republicans from my state, New Mexico.
Click to read full article
The power of nation’s unmarried women
By Page Gardner - Sacramento Bee - Saturday, March 17, 2007
The recent census finding that there are about as many single women as married women nationwide has triggered a flood of speculation about the cultural fallout from this demographic shift. But now that the single woman has officially arrived, the implications are broader than cultural. This emerging majority could have significant influence over America’s political future as well.
Who, exactly, is she? For starters, most unmarried women don’t lead lives straight out of “Sex in the City.” As a whole, their reality is more accurately reflected by the sitcom “Grace Under Fire,” which featured a newly divorced woman struggling to support herself and three kids by working lousy, low-paying jobs. Half of unmarried women have household incomes of less than $30,000.
Nearly 40 percent rely on the government for their health care, and nearly 20 percent have no health insurance at all. Twenty-three percent are widowed, and slightly fewer are single moms.
Whether widowed, divorced, separated or never married, these women are less likely to own their homes or cars than their married sisters.
These women are on their own in an America where it’s hard to earn a decent living, raise children, afford health care and secure a nest egg for retirement. While these women are a huge constituency, until recently they haven’t participated in the political process in anything approaching their numbers. Thus, their voices haven’t been heard, and their needs haven’t been addressed, much less answered.
That is why it is so important that single women are beginning to increase their political participation. By every indication, single women want the nation’s politics to be more civil and solution-oriented. And they want public policies to reflect the reality that most people can no longer count on the support of stable jobs, traditional nuclear families and communities that reach out to the most isolated individuals.
Why aren’t our nation’s leaders paying more attention? After all, there are 48 million unmarried American women — 25 percent of potential voters. Yes, they usually participate much less than married women; in 2000, unmarried women accounted for only 19 percent of voters. But things are changing. With national efforts to encourage their participation, unmarried women cast 22.4 percent of the total vote in 2004 and had a significant effect on the outcome of many races in 2006.
Increased participation by unmarried women will have a healthy effect on the political process and public policies. In surveys conducted over the past two years, unmarried women said that they were turned off by the abusive tone of much political campaigning. They said they wanted factual information from trustworthy sources without appeals to support specific candidates or parties.
Once politicians understand that this pivotal constituency prefers issue-oriented information, not personal attacks, campaigns will become more enlightening.
Similarly, increased participation by unmarried women could forge new public policies for the new America.
In the same surveys, unmarried women said they supported raising the minimum wage, expanding access to health care and health insurance, and making higher education and job training more available and affordable for young people and older workers. Single mothers place a priority on improving child care and public education. Older women are concerned with maintaining Medicare and Social Security.
Taken together, unmarried women’s concerns could reshape the nation’s public- and private-sector policies, which still assume that most families consist of a wage-earner, a homemaker and their children. School days that end at 3 p.m., schools that shut down for the summer, and health insurance and pension plans that assume a breadwinner providing for his wife and kids — all are decades out of date.
When policymakers listen to the unmarried majority of women, they can begin to provide for an America where women and their children are trying to make it on their own.
That America isn’t as comforting as “Ozzie and Harriet” or as glamorous as “Sex in the City.” But it’s the land we live in, and we’re honor-bound to make it better for all our people, including the unmarried majority of women.
Copyright © The Sacramento Bee
This story is taken from Sacbee / Opinion.