News for July 3

Price Check on Health Care

Global retail giant Walmart this week announced that it’s backing an employer mandage on health care; that is, the idea that employers must either provide health insurance coverage for its employees or provide cash compensations so that they can obtain it elsewhere. Not only is tradtionally union-busting Walmart supporting this idea, which many U.S. businesses are against, but it also is standing with liberal think tank the Center for American Progress and the Service Employees International Union in its support. Is Walmart changing its image, or is the move business as usual? Links include:

ProfessorBainbridge (via Andrew Sullivan) |  “I think the unionization point is significant even if there is no Wal-Mart–SEIU deal. When unions have tried to organize Wal-Mart, they’ve always used health benefits as one of their selling points. If there’s a public option (or, better yet, a single payer plan), Wal-Mart gets to defang a strong argument for unionization at the tax payer’s expense.

“But there’s something else going on here too. Cannon claims that ‘Wal-Mart is a capitalist success story.” (Or, I guess, he thinks it used to be.)

“In fact, however, Wal-Mart has been suckling at the government teat for decades, transferring costs to the tax payer whenever possible.”

GOOD Magazine |  “The company has never been shy to admit that, when it adopts social causes, the reasoning is less about altruism and more about cash flow. Lee Scott, the company’s outgoing CEO, admitted as much when he first began Wal-Mart’s massive environmental push in 2005. At the time he said, “As I got exposed to the opportunities we had to reduce our impact, it became even more exciting than I had originally thought: It is clearly good for our business …” Scott’s successor, Mike Duke, underscored that commitment last week, at Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Milestone Meeting. “This is not optional,” he said. “It’s not something of the past. This is all about the future.””

Ezra Klein @The Washington Post |  “This isn’t, of course, a story of altruism. By being of use to the administration, Wal-Mart ensures that its concerns will be heard and heeded. By publicly associating itself with health reform, the company repairs some of the damage SEIU and others have done to its reputation in recent years. And, in a more macro sense, by throwing its weight behind strict cost controls, Wal-Mart makes it likelier that it gets the largest of all possible benefits: an eventual slowing in the double-time march of health-care costs.”

• Related link: An Interview with Wal-Mart Spokesman David Tovar  |  Ezra Klein

Pandagon |  “The likely employer mandate that Wal-Mart wants to see would cost every business that doesn’t provide benefits to part-timers, particularly those that finagle hours so that full-time employees are nominally part-time.  The clearest example of this?  Retailers, particularly grocery stores.  If there’s one operational tactic that Wal-Mart has perfected, it’s short-term loss for long-term gain.  Five years of an employer mandate on most small margin retailers around the country will put many of them out of business, leaving Wal-Mart with an effective monopoly across most of the country.”

Megan McArdle @The Atlantic |  “Wal-Mart is always going to have a seat at the table when employer mandates are discussed, because Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest private employer.  Target and Macy’s probably won’t have a seat at the table.  So Wal-Mart can influence the rules in ways that benefit Wal-Mart at the expense of the competition.  This is partly because the regulators often cycle into jobs at the firms they regulate, but also simply because the regulator’s attention is finite, so being consistently at the table allows you to shape their views over time.”

Homophobia: Who is Responsible?  |  Womanist Musings

Renee @Womanist Musings shares a video of Somali youths harassing a gay man that sets the stage for good insights about the intersections of race, sexuality, colonialism and education. She says:

These children have been failed by their parents, the education system and every other agent of socialization.  It is easy to look at what happened and feel rage because this man should not have been attacked, however I feel the anger would be misplaced if it is targeted solely at these children.  They are a product of our society and if we feel anger, it should be at the way that we have failed to endow them with a sense of value.  Each and every single person matters and until we can pass this message on to our children, we are avoiding the most basic lesson in how to be a decent human being.

Another display of the status of LGBTQI rights in the world is found at FP Passport, which marked Thursday’s decriminalization of homosexuality in India by posting a map of the countries left in the world where homosexuality is still a crime, and the six countries where gay couples have full legal rights: South Africa, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Norway and Canada.

Also, Queers United has a link to YouTube’s full-length upload of the Oscar-Award-winning documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk.

A General Theory about Politicians’ Infidelity  |  The Monkey Cage

Since South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s admission of his “soul-mate” romance and infidelity, political and social commentators have been comparing Sanford to former Demcratic candidate for president Sen. John Edwards, and wondered why it is that extra-marital dalliances seem to sideline Democrats (remember also Gary Hart? Eliot Spitzer?) but not Republicans. John Sides asks another question: Are politicians, irrespective of party, just more prone to cheat? And, if so, why?

I do not know the answer to the first question. Thinking about recent presidents, my categories are: definitely yes (FDR, JFK, WJC), there-are-rumors-but-just-rumors (LBJ, GHWB), I-have-no-idea (RWR, HST, DDE, RMN), and almost-certainly-not (JEC, GWB, BHO). So I wouldn’t hazard any definite answers based on this list. This article suggests some sort of systematic family dysfunction among the GOP’s class of 1994, although the stories there don’t necessarily involve affairs.

But for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that politicians are more likely to have an affair. Why? A typical class of explanations revolves around personality, such as arrogance, hubris, neediness, or a desire for attention. Politicians are presumed to be “higher” in these qualities, and this leads them to have affairs. The counterfactual: take these same individuals out of political life — say, into the corporate world or some other occupational sphere — and they would be equally likely to have affairs.

He ends by musing that opportunity plus the kind of self-confident personality that leads one to seek higher office may be a killer indicator for cheating.

Salon’s Gene Lyons also weighs in on the “Do Republicans cheat more than Democrats?” discussion and says the only difference between the two stripes of politicians is that the GOP polices personal morals more strictly than do the Dems.

Theologically speaking, the two parties have divided the Seven Deadly Sins as follows: Republicans oppose lust, sloth and envy; Democrats scorn gluttony, greed, wrath and pride. Little progress is reported.

Rep. Barton: Obama Should Be Worried about Carbongate  |  TPMMuckraker

Yesterday we wrote about Environmental Protection Agency economist Al Carlin, the author of a report that casts doubt on climate change. Carlin’s study wasn’t taken as seriously by the agency as he’d been hoping — perhaps because he’s not a scientist, and because his bosses never asked him to produce it.

But his cause has become a favorite of right-wingers, who suddenly believe science to be sacred, and are charging that the Obama administration is “suppressing” a report whose conclusions it dislikes. The anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute first publicized Carlin’s report last week. Since then, Carlin has discussed his “findings” with Glenn Beck on Fox News, and on Monday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) called for a criminal investigation into the issue.

Now, Rep. Joe Barton is taking the outrage to a new level. This morning on America’s Newsroom, the industry-friendly Texas Republican accused the EPA of suppressing the report, and declared that “just as Nixon had Watergate, Obama now has Carbongate to deal with.”

Watch.

Designer Vaginas: Is Female Circumcision Coming Out of the Closet?  |  Truthdig

In this article for Truthdig, Gbemisola Olujobi outlines the latest cosmetic surgery trend for women, labiaplasties and genital rejuvenations, and asks how this quest for a porn-fueled standard of beauty differs with female circumcision practices of some cultures in Africa. She writes:

At the end of the day, it looks like female circumcision and FGCS are done for very much the same reasons. According to Simone Davis, professor and gender theorist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, among the key motivating factors raised by African women who favor female genital surgeries are beautification, transcendence of shame and the desire to conform. These clearly matter as well to American women seeking cosmetic surgery on their labia, says Davis.

And according to McNamara, although most plastic surgeons usually insist that the women they treat seek the procedure to enhance their own sexual satisfaction, some concede that many women have a consultation at the urging of their husbands, boyfriends or partners who want increased sensation for themselves.

These procedures—vaginoplasty, labiaplasty, hymenoplasty, female circumcision or genital mutilation—all have one thing in common. In McNamara’s words, they “highlight the constructedness of the sexed female subject because her body requires constant maintenance to adhere to gender requirements.”

While she agrees that the process through which her own circumcision occurred was less-than hygenic, the intent and outcome behind it were little different than those behind the high-priced surgeries. Olujobi pokes at the blindspot in the Western eye that condemns aesthetic practices in one part of the world and ignores those in its own back yard.