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Two articles in The Daily KOS a day apart illustrate some things I've been on aboput for years. First up, yesterday's discussion of the some hatchet job Wall Street analysts have been attempting to pull on Costco . This is going to be long, so I'm going to split it into two parts. Class war, and the best defense.
Some background: Costco, for folks who live elsewhere, is a giant warehouse chain. I mean a chain of giant warehouses. They are ostensibly suppliers to small businesses, and that may be, as far as I know, a major or even the major part of their business. It's growing concern: their profits are good, their shares rose 10% while Wal-Mart's went down 5%.
I've always been fonder of Costco than other big stores because when they built here they played fair. To make a long story short, the City had a lot of environmental and traffic abatement concessions they wanted, and Costco hung in there and worked out a deal that not only prserved but restored a little bit of wild land, and did the stupid traffic things (well, I think they turned out to be stupid things, but traffic is desperate where they are, and you can't blame them for trying, or you can, but that's silly). The development-at-any-cost factions predicted we'd lose the store to neighboring towns who don't make such demands. Now Costco is a major employer here.
And this is where the implacable class war comes in. Costco has decent wages and benefits. It treats workers with respect. Its prices are lower than many similar places which pay their employees less and cover less of their benefits. So there are some Wall Street analysts who are trying to scare off investors on these grounds. They say that shareholders are getting cheated because Costco pays its employees decently. They are recommending that investors buy Wal-Mart stocks more than twice as often as they recommend that they buy COstco stock, even though COstco has been performing better than Wal-Mart.
Why would they do this? Recommend to their constituency to avoid a more profitable stock? Whenever that happens, you know there is a bigger purpose. I'm not talking about conspiracy necessarily here, though I wouldn't rule out strategy discusions over lunch. But these Wall Street guys are engaged in class war. They want Costco to go down, because Jim Sinegal (CEO) and the rest of the bosses at Costco are not doing their part in the class war. They're traitors to their class. Wal-Mart, with its secondary boycott of unions (they refuse to buy goods made by union labor: you do know that the secondary boycott is illegal for working people, right? But it's legal for Wal-Mart and Ross), its outrageous employment practices, its depressing effect on local economies, is taking effective offensive action against the working class. Therefore, these guys want to support Wal-Mart. It's that simple.
Some background: Costco, for folks who live elsewhere, is a giant warehouse chain. I mean a chain of giant warehouses. They are ostensibly suppliers to small businesses, and that may be, as far as I know, a major or even the major part of their business. It's growing concern: their profits are good, their shares rose 10% while Wal-Mart's went down 5%.
I've always been fonder of Costco than other big stores because when they built here they played fair. To make a long story short, the City had a lot of environmental and traffic abatement concessions they wanted, and Costco hung in there and worked out a deal that not only prserved but restored a little bit of wild land, and did the stupid traffic things (well, I think they turned out to be stupid things, but traffic is desperate where they are, and you can't blame them for trying, or you can, but that's silly). The development-at-any-cost factions predicted we'd lose the store to neighboring towns who don't make such demands. Now Costco is a major employer here.
And this is where the implacable class war comes in. Costco has decent wages and benefits. It treats workers with respect. Its prices are lower than many similar places which pay their employees less and cover less of their benefits. So there are some Wall Street analysts who are trying to scare off investors on these grounds. They say that shareholders are getting cheated because Costco pays its employees decently. They are recommending that investors buy Wal-Mart stocks more than twice as often as they recommend that they buy COstco stock, even though COstco has been performing better than Wal-Mart.
Why would they do this? Recommend to their constituency to avoid a more profitable stock? Whenever that happens, you know there is a bigger purpose. I'm not talking about conspiracy necessarily here, though I wouldn't rule out strategy discusions over lunch. But these Wall Street guys are engaged in class war. They want Costco to go down, because Jim Sinegal (CEO) and the rest of the bosses at Costco are not doing their part in the class war. They're traitors to their class. Wal-Mart, with its secondary boycott of unions (they refuse to buy goods made by union labor: you do know that the secondary boycott is illegal for working people, right? But it's legal for Wal-Mart and Ross), its outrageous employment practices, its depressing effect on local economies, is taking effective offensive action against the working class. Therefore, these guys want to support Wal-Mart. It's that simple.