The following is an Op-Ed by John L. Burton, Chairman of the California Democratic Party, Former President Pro Tempore of the California State Senate and Former Member, US House of Representatives.

The past year should have been a banner one for Walmart.  The company celebrated its 50-year anniversary and its stock reached an all-time high.  The Walton family, which largely controls the retail giant, includes four of the top 10 richest Americans and boasts a fortune of more than $115 billion.  But instead, 2012 has been a year of crisis for Walmart.    

In April, the New York Times published an expose alleging systemic bribery of government officials and a purported executive-led cover-up effort in the company’s Mexican division. The company is facing yet another gender discrimination lawsuit–on behalf of 100,000 women in California. And its supply chain has come under fire. Workers at seafood suppliers in Thailand and Louisiana went on strike to protest against slavery-like conditions, and warehouse workers who supply Walmart stores in Southern California and Chicago walked off their jobs to protest employer retaliation.

In the last month, strikes hit Walmart directly when associates in Los Angeles, Dallas and the Bay Area, to name a few places, walked off their jobs to protest retaliation against workers who spoke out about hours and pay in stores, among other issues. Last week, hundreds of Walmart associates traveled to company headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. to tell executives and Walmart chairman Rob Walton that it’s time for change.

Workers are tired of watching Walmart management retaliate against those who speak out to improve their stores.  But it shouldn’t just be Walmart Associates standing up.  Four members of the company’s board of directors are Bay area residents, and they should play leadership roles in helping a company sorely in need of change chart a new course.

The Bay Area Walmart directors include Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer; venture capitalist and Facebook board member Jim Breyer; Clinton Cabinet member Aida Alvarez; and Walton-by-marriage, Greg Penner.  They have ignored repeated efforts by Walmart workers – members of the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) – to discuss change at the company.

Instead of pretending the workers don’t exist, they should join Walmart Associates in promoting a vision of a better Walmart, where everyone is respected on the job and where Walmart jobs are good, stable ones with livable wages that support families. Walmart is the largest private employer in the world and the US, and is also the nation’s largest employer of African-Americans, Latinos and of women. If Walmart workers can change the company’s course, they will have helped catalyze a transformation of the entire American economy.      

Ms. Mayer and Mr. Bryer, as leaders in the new economy, and Ms. Alvarez, as a respected leader in the Latino community, can especially bring a fresh perspective to Walmart that helps the company find common ground with its employees instead of maintaining a decades-old strategy of confrontation. They should take a lesson from the brave Walmart associates who were in Bentonville last week and stand up for what is right, and for a better Walmart.  

This is an article written by Matthew Fleischer for Frying Pan News. Check Frying Pan News for regular in-depth coverage of Prop 32, its funders, and how it will impact working Californians.

Any lawyer with some experience in Sacramento politics can draft language for a statewide initiative. But crafting deceptive ballot measures that can trick people into voting against their core beliefs is nothing less than an art form.

For many years, the undisputed master of the misleading initiative has been Thomas Hiltachk. So it’s little surprise that Hiltachk is the author of Proposition 32, which promises to rid Sacramento of special interest money – but which would actually give almost complete control of state politics to corporations and the super-rich by effectively crippling the ability of unions to participate in elections and lobbying. Hiltachk has also quite possibly written into the initiative a poison pill that would shield corporations from its provisions and leave only unions to suffer the consequences if Prop. 32 passes.

A full-time political and election lawyer since 1998, Hiltachk is an old hand at drafting legislation benefiting Big Tobacco or beating back living wage campaigns. He is also the California Republican Party’s go-to legal mind for penning regressive ballot initiatives intended to give conservatives maximum political power in an otherwise majority progressive state. Like the political consultants at the Dolphin Group, Hiltachk is known for promoting “Trojan Horse” political gambits. As Hendrik Hertzberg put it in a 2007 New Yorker piece, Hiltachk and his law film Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk, “specialize in initiatives that are the opposite of what they sound like.”

In other words, when political ideas won’t fly with voters on merit, Hiltachk and company trick Californians into voting against their wants and interests-and use every legal maneuver possible to keep voters unawares. If recent history is any indication, Hiltachk and his law firm have only one goal: Getting Republicans elected at any cost. (Hiltachk did not return repeated requests for an interview.)

Proposition 32 is just the latest in a string of initiatives authored by Hiltachk that do exactly that. In 2003, Hiltachk penned the initiative to recall then-California Governor Gray Davis. He later served as the spokesman and legal counsel for Rescue California-the committee that spent $3.6 million lobbying and signature-gathering for the initiative. When Davis lost his recall election to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hiltachk had little trouble finding his next job-as legal counsel to the new governor.

Working for the Schwarzenegger state house, however, didn’t stop his own efforts to push California’s political agenda as far right as possible. In 2006, Hiltachk and his firm authored and pushed for the Fair Pay Workplace Flexibility Act-a progressive-sounding bit of legislation that would have increased California’s minimum wage by a pittance. Hovering just above that carrot, however, was a giant stick. The bill would have eliminated overtime pay for many workers and frozen all future minimum wage raises without the consent of two-thirds of both houses of the California legislature-a nearly impossible feat.

In 2009, Hiltachk authored and promoted California Proposition 23-which would have eliminated the protections of California’s landmark environmental bill AB 32. As with Prop. 32, Hiltachk’s measure received the backing of the Koch brothers, to the tune of $1 million, donated through their company Flint Hills Resources. It failed miserably at the polls. But that didn’t deter Hiltachk-who served as legal counsel for billionaire Meg Whitman‘s gubernatorial campaign. The first thing Whitman vowed she would do in office was to suspend AB 32.

This past March, Hiltachk’s law firm even sued to prevent Democratic 10th Congressional District candidate Jose Hernandez from listing his job title as “astronaut” on the June ballot. Hernandez, whose life could not possibly better encapsulate the American Dream, grew up the son of immigrants, working in the agricultural fields outside of Stockton, California. He didn’t learn to speak English until he was 12. Hernandez literally worked his way up from the ground to become a scientist and crew member of the 2009 flight of the space shuttle Discovery.

A reaffirming life story? Not in the world of Thomas Hiltachk, where one person’s giant step for mankind is no cause for community pride-only litigation.

Hiltachk’s influence isn’t confined to state politics. In 2007 he was the legal mastermind behind the failed Presidential Election Reform Act-which proposed divvying up California’s massive pool of electoral votes by congressional districts in presidential elections, instead of in the current winner-take-all fashion. The effort would have virtually ensured a permanent gift of 20 electoral votes to Republican presidential candidates-a larger electoral chunk than the all-important state of Ohio. For good measure, Hiltachk is also the treasurer for this year’s No on 37 campaign-an agribusiness attempt to thwart labeling of genetically modified foods.

Proposition 32’s Trojan Horse nature fits Hiltachk’s modus operandi-it’s a law masquerading as campaign finance reform that really serves as part of a national effort to gut unions and enhance the clout of the Republican Party. But this particular effort is far less precise than his previous campaigns. For instance, his decision to leave the term “corporation” undefined in the ballot language will clearly invite a host of lawsuits should the measure pass. Do LLCs count as corporations? How about non-profits?

Not to mention that Prop. 32’s proposed restrictions on union and corporate donations to individual candidates seem to conflict with the recent Supreme Court Citizens United ruling.

Hiltachk is no sloppy legal mind. One has to assume these conspicuous holes are intentional. Could it be that Prop. 32 was designed so that only a part of it could stand up to a constitutional challenge? Say, for instance, the one thing backers of Prop. 32 have historically been interested in-the end of union workers’ automatic payroll deductions?

“Prop. 32 has a separability clause,” says Alan Crowley, a labor lawyer with the legal firm Weinberg, Roger and Rosenfeld. “In theory, if a law is challenged, the parts that aren’t ruled illegal could go forward. Hypothetically that might be enforced.”

If this scenario unfolds, Prop. 32 will have the effect its backers no doubt intended-to give corporations and wealthy donors unchallenged control of state politics.

This is a video and article from Frying Pan News. Check Frying Pan News for regular in-depth coverage of Prop 32, its funders, and how it will impact working Californians.

Newspapers across California are calling out Proposition 32-a ballot measure that would outlaw using automatic payroll deductions from union members and corporations for political purposes. Editorial writers and columnists charge the initiative is dishonest for positioning itself as an anti-corporate campaign finance effort – even as supporters of the initiative have recently taken to union-bashing to frame their arguments. However, for a period of several months over the summer, Prop. 32 backers did their best to fool Californians with a disingenuous Occupy Wall Street-inspired “fight the power” advertising campaign. Let’s take a look at some vintage Trojan Horse political advertising.

0 minutes 05 seconds – Nice special effects. Michael Bay is impressed.

0:16 – Does that briefcase combination read “666”? Perhaps the flow of “special interest” money into politics is a deal with the devil. Only problem: The devil is wearing a wedding band. Given that such Christian conservative Proposition 8 backers as Howard Ahmanson and Larry T. Smith are among the primary bankrollers of Prop. 32, we’ll guess that, in this case, the devil must be gay-married!

More…

0:19 – Here’s a funny story: Billionaire Thomas Siebel, the man credited with paying for this advertisement, runs a technology company called C3, which has Condoleeza Rice and former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham on its board of directors. So, yes, politicians do quite literally work for special interests-the interests behind Prop. 32.

0:26 – Charles Munger Jr. is personally spending more than $60,200 per day to pass Prop. 32.

0:32 – Prop. 32 backers love to demonize AT&T’s political spending. Probably because AT&T, (unlike, say, the Koch brothers, who toss comparable amounts of money around the political realm, almost exclusively to Republicans) actually support state Democrats in California. The Los Angeles Times story in question opens with a description of a fundraiser that raised $1 million for the California Democratic Party.

0:56 – Not going to stand up for AT&T on this one. However, it’s worth noting that the Koch brother-owned gypsum, pulp paper product and packaging company, Georgia-Pacific, is in the midst of lobbying to gut the regulations of California’s Green Chemistry Initiative-a 2008 law protecting California citizens from exposure to toxic industrial chemicals. Georgia-Pacific is an LLC (limited liability company), that, thanks to loopholes in Prop. 32’s language, won’t be hampered in the slightest by the initiative’s proposed restrictions. The Kochs have so far donated $4 million to support 32.

1:04 – We called AT&T to see if the company was for or against Prop. 32. Interestingly, the company’s Director of Communications, Lane Kasselman, told us AT&T has “no position” on the measure. Which seems kind of counterintuitive – if, as this ad suggests, the bill stands to completely cut off their access to channels of power in Sacramento. Wonder why is AT&T staying so neutral? Perhaps because 32 is a sham and won’t restrict its political influence in the slightest.

1:21 – Only individuals will be allowed to donate…plus LLCs, PACs, Super Pacs, 501(c)(6) corporate trade associations, politically motivated non-profits and corporations that don’t use automatic payroll deductions, which is all of them…You get the picture.

1:26 – “Special interest” count: Seven.

1:27 – Eight.

1:34 – Nine (16 if you include screen titles).

1:44 – Fade to black already. Whoever made this ad is the same kid in high school who had to triple-space and use size 14 font to finish his five-page papers.

1:50 – “Supported by small business owners, farmers, educators and taxpayers.” And by that we mean large corporations, chemical companies, management consultants and billionaires who don’t want to pay their taxes.

This is an article written by Matthew Fleischer for Frying Pan News. Check Frying Pan News for regular in-depth coverage of Prop 32, its funders, and how it will impact working Californians.

“Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” Gloria Romero tells me on the phone. “It’s flowing to both sides. Government isn’t about drawing lines. It’s not about saying you’re on that side and you can’t come over.”

Her voice is friendly, somewhat placid, but it’s clear Romero is not thrilled with having to answer questions about her political alliance with the Koch brothers and other wealthy supporters of Proposition 32, and she conspicuously avoids bringing up their names. When pressed about the Kochs and the money behind behind Prop. 32, falls back upon her experience in Sacramento.

“I have sat in the belly of the beast,” she says. “I have seen the realities of money and its influence.”

With Election Day still one month away, the battle to pass Prop. 32 has seen its share of political shockers, including the sudden injection of $4 million of Koch brother money to the Yes on 32 campaign, along with millions more from Charles Munger Jr. But nothing has been more surprising than the decision of Romero, a former California State Senate Democratic majority leader, to serve as the measure’s frontwoman.

A liberal Latina firebrand from East Los Angeles, Romero was Occupy Wall Street before that movement existed. In 1990, as a member of the Latino Community Justice Center and a professor at Cal State Los Angeles, she co-authored an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in support of striking Century City janitors who had been beaten by police. She used the cred acquired from that op-ed and several others to win a hotly contested run for the California Assembly in 1998, largely by decrying Prop. 32′s progenitor, Proposition 226-the first ‘paycheck protection’ initiative.

In 2001, she was elected to the State Senate – largely with the grateful backing of labor. In 2007 she received a 97 percent rating by Capitol Weekly for her positions on progressive issues. Now she’s seen as carrying water for the Kochs and anti-gay culture warriors like Howard Ahmanson and Larry T. Smith. Romero, however, casts Prop. 32 in terms of uplifting historical pageantry.

“We’re saying as Democrats we want to form a more perfect union,” she says. “It’s a civil rights movement and our schools are the ticket out of poverty.”

Despite her rightward ideological swing, Romero isn’t backing the entire Koch agenda. Instead, she’s become Prop. 32’s human face on behalf of the seemingly progressive political action committee (PAC) Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), where she serves as director of the organization’s California operation. An examination of DFER’s backers, however, shows that right-wing billionaires aren’t her only Prop. 32 bedfellows.

New York University Research Professor of Education Diane Ravitch, who has followed the lobbying efforts of DFER since its inception in 2005, is blunt about Romero: “She’s working for Wall Street hedge fund managers. That’s where her interest lies.”

Indeed, DFER is the brainchild of Whitney Tilson, founder of the hedge-fund firm T2 Partners – an LLC that, like other hedge fund contributors to DFER, is conveniently exempted from Prop. 32′s proposed donation restrictions. In a 2010 New York Times interview about charter schools, Tilson suggested that privatized education was a potentially lucrative investment target for Wall Street.

“[H]edge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital,” he said of his interest in the charter school movement.

And, in a 2010 documentary, A Right Denied, Tilson suggested that DFER was created because of Walmart patriarch John Walton’s support of vouchers and “school choice.”

In the film, Tilson recalled a meeting he had with Walton at the Harvard Club:

“We told John Walton, ‘Thank you, you’ve inspired us to do this and we’re going to create an organization with quite a similar mission to what you’re doing…You’re our friend. We’re doing something you would support, but we can’t take a penny of your money.’ Because the moment we take any Walmart money – that’s ‘anti-union,’ etcetera, etcetera – then it becomes a partisan issue again.”

Democrats for Education Reform takes pains to avoid such overt financial ties to right-wing backers like Walton. Tracing its finances isn’t easy, though. According to Form 410 documents that DFER filed with the Secretary of State’s office, it qualified as a political action committee in the state of California on November 21, 2011-meaning it had either raised or spent $1,000 for political purposes.

According to California Fair Political Practices Commission spokesperson Tara Stock, when a committee “qualifies,” it is supposed to file Form 460 finance disclosure documents.

“Once a committee hits $25,000 they are required to file electronically,” she explains. “Before that, they file on paper. From what it looks like, I don’t see that they have done either.”

Despite qualifying as a committee, DFER missed two necessary deadlines to file their 460 financial forms on January 31 and July 31 of this year. This lack of disclosure makes it impossible to tell where its money is coming from and where it’s going in the state.

Romero insists DFER’s activity in California is above board: “We’ve made no contributions in California at this time. We are not actively fundraising. We don’t even have an open bank account. The bulk of our work in California is done under our non-profit Education Reform Now.”

Interestingly, Despite Tilson’s protestations to the contrary, Education Reform Now has no problem accepting Walmart cash. In 2011, the non-profit lobbying wing of DFER received $1.1 million from the Walton Family Foundation.

That same year, Education Reform Now spent more than $36,000 on lobbying expenses to eliminate teacher protections in California and make it easier to privatize schools. In the organization’s filings, Romero is listed as the “responsible officer” behind these activities. Furthermore, that same year, she was given a warning by the FPPC for personally lobbying for these same measures extra-legally.

More recently, Education Reform Now spent $1 million on ad buys pushing Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s talking points in September’s Chicago teachers’ strike.

Romero denies that her support for Prop. 32 is a move to foist a privatization agenda upon California’s schools.

“Do Democrats for Education Reform and myself support charters? Absolutely. Do I think 32 will help put more charters into place? No.”

However, as it turns out, this wouldn’t be the first time Romero has fronted for a conservative agenda in the state of California. Romero authored California’s 2008 “Parent Trigger” law, which allows parents in low-performance schools to vote on whether to hand over their administration to a private charter company.

“I call it the ‘parent tricker,” says Ravitch. “It tricks parents into handing control of their school to a corporation. It’s the equivalent of a group of people on a public bus who are unsatisfied with their ride, so they take it over and give it to a private company. Public schools belong to the community, not to the current crop of parents.”

Ravitch credits the Parent Trigger concept as originating from the neoconservative think tank American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), noting the issue has become part of ALEC’s “model legislation” that the group is lobbying for in multiple states.

Romero disputes the ALEC connection.

“When I wrote this law,” she says, “I didn’t know who ALEC was, quite frankly. Whoever picks it up and supports it, I respect that. The U.S. Conference of Democratic Mayors also supports the law.”

Ravitch says Prop. 32 shares much in common with the Parent Trigger. “I would see Prop. 32 in the context of the privatization movement. They want to kill off the unions because they are the guardians of public education.”

Romero did not win labor backing for her unsuccessful 2010 run for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, but did garner support from charter school advocates. Some political observers believe her embrace of Prop. 32 is payback for the endorsement snub, although Romero denies being anti-union.  And despite blistering criticism of Prop. 32’s corporate loopholes and anti-union agenda from the editorial boards of California’s papers of record, she maintains that the measure is purely about campaign finance reform.

“I was against previous paycheck protection measures in California because it only targeted one side. Now that it goes after both sides, I feel comfortable putting my name behind it. This will change the culture of Sacramento.”

That seems unlikely. Even Prop. 32′s supporters argue the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling makes it impossible to remove money from politics. What Prop. 32 will fundamentally alter is the balance of power in Sacramento.

One thing that will undoubtedly change, regardless of the outcome of the election, is Romero’s reputation as a stalwart progressive.

Down below, Robert Cruickshank does a brilliant job of taking down Michael Arrington’s hypocritical anti-government screed on TechCrunch, arguing that what Arrington should really be complaining about is corporate domination of American politics, not big scary government regulation.  Cruickshank also implies, in passing, that the high-tech industry should be the last to complain about government meddling, given that it was the Defense Department that created the internet in the first place.

One thing Cruickshank leaves out is that not only was Big Government the midwife (if not the mother) of Silicon Valley, but it’s also been its bodyguard, protecting online commercial ventures from their rivals on the mean streets of the free market.  In 1992, the Supreme Court deemed retailers exempt from having to collect sales taxes on purchases made in states in which the retailer has no physical presence.  Since then, online stores have enjoyed a major competitive advantage over their brick-and-mortar competitors, especially those that are local, independent, and without the resources to establish an online or mail order merchandising business.

The Supreme Court, it should be noted, did not rule it unconstitutional to establish a taxation system for interstate electronic commerce; it merely interpreted existing law as granting this exemption.  At Silicon Valley’s behest, however, state and federal elected officials in the 90s refrained from passing laws to close this loophole and maintained a government-imposed, grossly uneven playing field, quite consciously in order to give preferential treatment to what was then considered a fledgling industry in need of protection.

In other words, politicians used tax subsidies as a tool of centralized economic planning by the government.  It may have been smart, forward-thinking economic planning, but it was economic planning nonetheless, and I don’t recall Arrington or any other Silicon Valley pundit at that time raising the specter of dangerously misguided government bureaucrats trampling over the delicate free market habitat.

Today, the tax privilege for e-commerce continues, though now it’s no longer considered a temporary protectionist measure to help usher in our new economic future, but, like the Bush tax cuts for the rich, an inherent right of these go-it-alone, by-your-bootstraps entrepreneurs who have been subsidized, coddled and protected at every stage of their industry’s manic success story, even after the bursting of the tech bubble exposed the hype and dysfunctionality of Silicon Valley business culture.  The “Main Street Fairness Act” was introduced in Congress as one solution to the problem, but it died quietly in committee.  State governments have tried to fill in for the leadership vacuum in Washington, but e-commerce businesses like Amazon have begun to play hardball with states like Colorado that have tried to devise ways to collect taxes on online purchases in the face of soaring budget deficits.

Arrington might just be libertarian enough to point to repealing all sales taxes as his preferred approach to leveling the playing field between online and brick-and-mortar stores, but unless and until that happens (it won’t), Silicon Valley’s sales tax subsidy will remain not only a drain on desperately needed public resources, but a government-created obstacle to free and fair competition in the retail sector.  If Arrington cares about consistency in his political ideology, he could start by renouncing his own industry’s government-subsidized perks.

Here’s an interesting factoid from a new white paper from the Consumer Federation of California.  With the nearly $38 billion California taxpayers have spent on the war in Afghanistan since 2001, we could have paid for any one of the following:

•    15.6 million people with health care;

•    5.7 million scholarships and 7 million Pell Grants for university students;

•    4.5 million Head Start placements for children;

•    500,000 new elementary school teachers;

•    676,649 public safety officers;

•    535,058 music and arts teachers;

•    113,373 affordable housing units;

•    And 67.4 million homes with renewable electricity.

As Californians watch our utility rates spike, our library hours get cut back, our fire stations get pared down, our potholes mushroom and our cities’ bond ratings tank, we might pause to ponder the price of single predator drone in Afghanistan: $4.5 million.  That would fill a lot of potholes.

If you want to understand why Americans are so outraged by obscene executive compensation levels in a time of severe economic malaise, consider not just the 51% bump awarded to WellPoint CEO Angela Braly for her performance at a time when the insurance behemoth prepared to raise rates on policyholders in California by as much as 39%.  Consider, as well, the pro forma excuses offered by her company flacks.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Braly’s total compensation shot up from $8.7 million to $13.1 million last year.  At least three other executives there did just as well, with raises of up to 75 percent.  Meanwhile, 800,000 individual policyholders in California are learning of this good news for WellPoint executives a month before their own insurance rates are set to spike by double digits – an unprecedented rate increase initiated on Angela Braly’s watch.

WellPoint, of course, is merely doing what it must to pursue the gold standard of excellence in its service to shareholders and customers, according to company spokesman Jon Mills:

“WellPoint wants to attract and retain top talent.  In order to be the best, to be innovative, to continue delivering the best service, we do have to retain the best quality.”  He added: “We are in no way trying to inflate the salaries and compensation figures but trying to maintain a high level of talent at the organization.”

It’s all just a big misunderstanding, see.  The problem is that all of us amateur, casual observers, with our pious concerns about “fairness” and “right and wrong,” just don’t understand the entirely rational and ultimately equitable dynamics of the free market system for labor compensation.  Companies have to find and keep talented leaders, and if it takes $6.2 million in restricted stock, a $1.1 million salary increase, a $1.5 million performance bonus, $4 million in stock options and $292,036 in “other expenses” (including over $150,000 in “security-related improvements” to protect Angela Braly from us, the angry, overcharged, underinsured hordes) to retain a CEO who had the wisdom to force hundreds of thousands of Californians off the company’s rolls or into bankruptcy-threatening situations in order to buoy WellPoint stock prices (which rose by close to 40% last year), then that’s just how the free market works, which is nobody’s fault, really, when you think about it.

Except the reality is, there is no misunderstanding.  Ordinary Americans understand exactly how the free market works.  In fact, it’s precisely this understanding that infuriates everyone from your longtime local union activist to your freshly-minted Tea Party revolutionary.  It’s the Jon Millses of the world that don’t get it.  Their explanations illuminate nothing, except insofar as they confirm exactly what everyone suspects: that there are in fact two economic realities in America today – one that Angela Braly occupies along with Wall Street CEOs, corporate lobbyists and corrupt politicians, and the other that the rest of us experience.

In the former, forcing hundreds of thousands of everyday people to spend thousands more on their premiums to pay for the mess you’ve made of the healthcare system, then pointing to the increased revenue as proof of your leadership and profit-making abilities, is called “taking responsibility” and is rewarded with a $4.4 million raise.  It’s market meritocracy at work.

In the latter, it really doesn’t matter how hard you work or how great of a job you do — if the executives at the helm steer your company over rocky shoals, you stand a good chance of losing your wage increases, your benefits, or your job altogether.  If you’re not “top talent,” you simply don’t need to be “attracted and retained.”  The world doesn’t work that way for you.  Or to take another example, if the executives at your insurance carrier decide they didn’t make enough money last fiscal quarter, you better cough up thousands of dollars more this year or lose your coverage.  Never mind that you had exactly nothing to do with WellPoint’s problems with rising medical costs, or its shareholder’s demands for 40% increases in their stock values.  It really doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done or what you haven’t done; you don’t control your destiny, the “market” does.  That’s just basic economics.  We don’t need a WellPoint spokesman to explain that; everyone knows it already.  With the economy in turmoil, we’re all getting our noses rubbed in it every single day.

What’s incredible is that even after witnessing the public’s reactions to the taxpayer-financed AIG bonuses, the auto company CEOs flying on private jets to DC to beg Congress for bailouts, and Goldman Sachs’ record profits a year after benefiting from $62 billion in publicly-financed AIG pass-throughs, corporate executives like Braly and their PR handlers still can’t comprehend the outrage.  But then, that points to something else we already know: that from a mansion on a hill, the riot below can sound like a distant and dull roar, or like nothing at all.

Cross-posted on The Huffington Post.

When voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama last year, they could have been forgiven for harboring the expectation that they were voting for, among other things, a more humane American immigration policy.  On the campaign trail, Obama had made such enlightened statements as: “Ultimately, the danger to the American way of life is not that we will be overrun by those who do not look like us or do not yet speak our language. The danger will come if we fail to recognize the humanity of [immigrants] — if we withhold from them the opportunities we take for granted, and create a servant class in our midst.”  For the most disempowered population in the country, as for many others, hope was in the air.  For the first time, a person of color (and son of an immigrant) was poised to control America’s sprawling immigration enforcement apparatus, and the Democrats riding to Congress on his coattails were bound to loosen the grip that Nativism had held on the Capitol for nearly a decade.

With the news of this week’s government-coerced layoffs of a quarter of American Apparel’s workforce, those same voters could now be forgiven for looking back on those speeches as so much election season pandering.  The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency’s audit of American Apparel – and the layoffs that it has provoked – have put the President one big step closer to the position of Brian Bilbray, Republican Congressman from northern San Diego County and former lobbyist for the anti-immigrant, vigilante-friendly FAIR, who applauded the crackdown on American Apparel and complained to the New York Times of employers that have “become addicted to illegal labor.”

To be fair, the targeting of American Apparel is entirely consistent with Obama’s campaign promise to “reform” immigration by penalizing the companies that employ undocumented labor.  By this, most would imagine that he had in mind the rampantly exploitative meat packing plants of the Midwest and South and the fly-by-night sweatshops of L.A.’s garment district, not a company that provides full medical benefits to its workers and a fulltime staff of masseurs to get the muscle knots out of the aching shoulders of tired seamstresses.

Why, then, has the Obama administration chosen to make such a special example out of American Apparel?  One answer may be related to the special symbolic value that American Apparel, with its obstinate and principled resistance of the federal immigration enforcement regime, holds for anti-immigrant demagogues like Bilbray.  The conjured image of American Apparel among American Nativists is part and parcel with the unique role the company plays in the Los Angeles economy, both symbolically and materially.

The American Apparel factory in downtown L.A. is one of the biggest manufacturing plants left in a city denuded of a once thriving manufacturing industry.  During the 1980s, Los Angeles, like much of the country, experienced an exodus of blue-collar jobs as factories closed en masse as an outcome of America’s losing position in the global race to the bottom (and Los Angeles’ losing position in a regional flight of capital to the suburbs).  As scarcity of employment was replaced by an almost total absence of jobs for L.A.’s low-skilled workforce, the ghettos and barrios of South Central and East L.A. found themselves without even the prospect of upward mobility.  The conditions of poverty ossified; rising crime rates, substance abuse, gang activity and other social dysfunctions followed.  With no viable economic model emerging to fill the void left by the erosion of industry, and with “welfare reform” destroying the last pretense of government responsibility for the least among us, poor neighborhoods became veritable warehouses for the surplus working class, surveilled and contained by an increasingly paramilitarized LAPD.  Indeed, if not for the enormous foreign-born population of Los Angeles, with its immigrant entrepreneurialism, its underground economy and its internal labor market, much of L.A. today would be the Sunbelt equivalent of a post-industrial Rust Belt wasteland.

In this context, the American Apparel manufacturing plant has been a monument to anachronism.  In the ’90s, as companies all over the country went “flat” and “flexible,” spinning off actual manufacturing to contractors in far-flung continents and abandoning their downsized rank-and-file workforces to the low-wage service sector while consolidating design, finance and marketing in corporate headquarters in the financial districts of U.S. cities, American Apparel reintroduced old-fashioned Fordism to downtown Los Angeles.  Vertically integrated from top to bottom and from production to retail (even its advertising posters are designed and printed in-house), the company is structured as much to produce employment as to produce t-shirts and underwear.  With the exception of the Green Dot charter school system, no other private employer in Southern California has made the kind of investment in an inner city community that American Apparel has.  What the flat and flexible global economy was unable to do for Los Angeles’ enormous poor population, American Apparel did for a lucky several thousand among them: provide good-paying, benefited jobs for low-skilled workers.  It is this promise, this model for the economic advancement of poor workers, that in the midst of a recession of historic proportions Obama’s ICE threatens to destroy for the sake of appeasing a few bigots in Congress.

If American Apparel were located in downtown Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Detroit, perhaps its workforce would have been comprised of laid off black and white American workers, and Republicans could join in bipartisan applause for its achievements.  But as it so happens, it is located in L.A., the city with one of the largest immigrant populations in the country and easily the largest undocumented immigrant population (twice the size of New York’s).  No matter how much Brian Bilbray may dream of a lily white Mayberry in Southern California, this primarily Latino and Asian population constitutes the majority of the working class of the city of Los Angeles, and it is these workers who comprise the labor market that the garment industry draws from.  American Apparel is not unique among garment manufacturers for employing immigrant workers, with or without papers, it is unique for doing so by offering decent wages and benefits rather than subcontracting production to American sweatshops or offshoring manufacturing altogether.  The President should be pointing to American Apparel as a model of the kind of investment our country should be making in our inner-city communities in order to steer ourselves out of an economic morass and toward broad working class prosperity.  Instead, at the Obama administration’s behest, 1600 of these gainfully employed workers are out of a job in the midst of a national recession and a complete economic meltdown in California.

Where will these workers end up?  One possibility is the underground economy.  Other possibilities are homelessness and crime.  Their families will be pauperized.  Their children will be far more likely to turn to truancy and juvenile delinquency.  And the city’s threadbare social safety net will be strained that much more.

The forced downsizing of American Apparel is more than a tragedy in its own right.  It is  a canary in the coalmine for how the most vulnerable populations in this country will fare under the Obama administration’s economic regime.  Immigrant workers and America’s inner city communities are overlapping populations that have suffered from vicious attacks and malignant disregard under administrations going back much farther than Bush.  Whether Obama continues this tradition of neglect and criminalization or whether he seeks to create real opportunities for economic advancement for these communities is a litmus test of whether the mandate for change is in fact a meaningful commitment to social justice or just another of a long list of specious campaign slogans offered as an empty promise to a population starved of hope.