Walmart Manager Allegedly Wanted to 'Shoot Everyone' Organizing for Better Working Conditions at Store

[freebuddy]

Truthdig / By Chris Hedges

The Corporate State Gets Stronger Every Time a Cop Kills a Citizen with Impunity

Mass acts of civil disobedience, now being carried out across the country, are the only mechanism left.

Mayor Bill de Blasios plans to launch a pilot program in New York City to place body cameras on police officers and conduct training seminars to help them reduce their adrenaline rushes and abusive language, along with the establishment of a less stringent marijuana policy, are merely cosmetic reforms. The killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island was, after all, captured on video. These proposed reforms, like those out of Washington, D.C., fail to address the underlying cause of poverty, state-sponsored murder and the obscene explosion of mass incarcerationthe rise of the corporate state and the death of our democracy. Mass acts of civil disobedience, now being carried out across the country, are the only mechanism left that offers hope for systematic legal and judicial reform. We must defy the corporate state, not work with it.

The legal system no longer functions to protect ordinary Americans. It serves our oligarchic, corporate elites. These elites have committed $26 billion in financial fraud. They loot the U.S. Treasury, escape taxation, drive down wages, break unions, pillage pension funds, gut regulation and oversight, destroy public institutions including public schools and social assistance programs, wage endless and illegal wars to swell the profits of arms merchants, andyesauthorize police to murder unarmed black men.

Police and national intelligence and security agencies, which carry out wholesale surveillance against the population and serve as the corporate elites brutal enforcers, are omnipotent by intention. They are designed to impart fear, even terror, to keep the population under control. And until the courts and the legislative bodies give us back our rightswhich they have no intention of doingthings will only get worse for the poor and the rest of us. We live in a post-constitutional era.

Corporations have captured every major institution, including the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government, and deformed them to exclusively serve the demands of the market. They have, in the process, demolished civil society. Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation warned that without heavy government regulation and oversight, unfettered and unregulated capitalism degenerates into a Mafia capitalism and a Mafia political system. A self-regulating market, Polanyi writes, turns human beings and the natural environment into commodities. This ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The ecosystem and human beings become objects whose worth is determined solely by the market. They are exploited until exhaustion or collapse occurs. A society that no longer recognizes that the natural world and life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves. This is what we are undergoing. Literally.

As in every totalitarian state, the first victims are the vulnerable, and in the United States this means poor people of color. In the name of the war on drugs or the necessity of enforcing immigration laws, those trapped in our urban internal colonies are effectively stripped of their rights. Police, who arrest some 13 million people a year1.6 million of them on drug charges and half of those on marijuana countswere empowered by the war on drugs to carry out random searches and sweeps with no probable cause. They take DNA samples from many whom they arrest to build a nationwide database that includes both the guilty and the innocent. And they charge each of the sampled arrestees $50 for DNA processing. They confiscate cash, cars, homes and other possessions based on allegations of illegal drug activity and use the proceeds to swell police budgets. They impose fines in poor neighborhoods for absurd offensesriding a bicycle on a sidewalk or not having an IDto fleece the poor or, if they cannot pay, toss them into jail. And before deporting undocumented workers the state levels fines, often in the thousands of dollars, on those being held by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in order to empty their pockets before they are shipped out. Prisoners locked in cages often spend decades attempting to pay off thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands, in court fines from the paltry $28 a month they earn in prison jobs; the government, to make sure it gets its money, automatically deducts a percentage each month from their prison paychecks. It is a vast extortion racket run against the poor by the corporate state, which also makes sure that the interest rates of mortgages, car loans, student loans and credit card loans are set at predatory levels.

Since 1980 the United States has constructed the worlds largest prison system, populated with 2.3 million inmates, 25 percent of the worlds prison population. Police, to keep the system filled with bodies, have had most legal constraints on their behavior removed. They serve as judge and jury on the streets of American cities. Such expansion of police powers is a long step down the totalitarian path, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas warned in 1968. The police, who are often little more than predatory, armed gangs in inner-city neighborhoods, arbitrarily decide who lives, who dies and who spends years in prison. They rarely fight crime or protect the citizen. They round up human beings like cattle to meet arrest quotas, the prerequisite for receiving federal cash in the drug war. Because many crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to intimidate defendants into pleading out on lesser offenses. The arrested are acutely aware they have no chance97 percent of all federal cases and 94 percent of all state cases are resolved by guilty pleas rather than trials. An editorial in The New York Times said that the pressure employed by state and federal prosecutors to make defendants accept guilty pleasan action that often includes waiving the right to appeal to a higher courtis closer to coercion than to bargaining. There are always police informants who, to reduce their own sentences, will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police. And, as we saw after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and after the killing of Garner, the word of police officers and prosecutors, whose loyalty is to the police, is law.

A Department of Defense program known as 1033, which was begun in the 1990s and which the National Defense Authorization Act allowed along with federal homeland security grants to the states, has provided $4.3 billion in military equipment to local police forces, either free or on permanent loan, the website ProPublica reported. The militarization of the police, which includes outfitting departments with heavy machine guns, ammunition magazines, night vision equipment, aircraft and armored vehicles, has effectively turned urban police, and increasingly rural police as well, into quasi-military forces of occupation. Police conduct up to 80,000 SWAT raids a year in the US, up from 3,000 a year in the early 80s, reporter Hanqing Chen wrote in ProPublica. The American Civil Liberties Union, in Chens words, found that almost 80 percent of SWAT team raids are linked to search warrants to investigate potential criminal suspects, not for high-stakes hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios. He went on to say, The ACLU also noted that SWAT tactics are used disproportionately against people of color.

The bodies of the incarcerated poor fuel our system of neo-slavery. In prisons across the country, including the one in which I teach, private corporations profit from captive prison labor. The incarcerated work eight-hour days for as little as a dollar a day. Phone companies, food companies, private prisons and a host of other corporations feed like jackals off those we hold behind bars. And the lack of employment and the collapse of education and vocational training in communities across the United States are part of the design. This designwith its built-in allure from the illegal economy, the only way for many of the poor to make a livingensures rates of recidivism of over 60 percent. There are millions of poor people for whom this country is little more than a vast penal colony.

Lawyer Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, identifies what she calls a criminal caste system. This caste system controls the lives of not only the 2.3 million people who are incarcerated but also the 4.8 million people on probation or parole. Millions more people are forced into permanent second-class citizenship by their criminal records, which make employment, higher education and public assistance difficult or impossible, Alexander says.

Totalitarian systems accrue to themselves omnipotent power by first targeting and demonizing a defenseless minority. Poor African-Americans, like Muslims, have been stigmatized by elites and the mass media. The state, promising to combat the lawlessness of the demonized minority, demands that authorities be emancipated from the constraints of the law. Arguments like this one were used to justify the war on drugs and the war on terror. But once any segment of the population is stripped of equality before the law, as poor people of color and Muslims have been, once police are permitted under the law to become omnipotent, brutal and systematically oppressive tactics are invariably employed against the wider society. The corporate state has no intention of carrying out legal reforms to curb the omnipotence of its organs of internal security. They were made omnipotent on purpose.

Matt Taibbi in his book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, brilliantly illustrates how poverty, in essence, has become a crime. He spent time in courts where wealthy people who had committed documented fraud amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars never had to stand trial and in city courts where the poor were called to answer for crimes that, until I read his book, I did not know existed. Standing in front of your home, he shows in one case, can be an arrestable offense.

Thats what nobody gets, that the two approaches to justice may individually make a kind of sense, but side by side theyre a dystopia, where common city courts become factories for turning poor people into prisoners, while federal prosecutors on the white-collar beat turn into overpriced garbage men, who behind closed doors quietly dispose of the sins of the rich for a fee, Taibbi writes. And its evolved this way over time and for a thousand reasons, so that almost nobody is aware of the whole picture, the two worlds so separate that theyre barely visible to each other. The usual political descriptors like unfairness and injustice dont really apply. Its more like a breakdown into madness.

Hannah Arendt warned that once any segment of the population is denied rights, the rule of law is destroyed. When laws do not apply equally to all they are treated as rights and privileges. When the state is faced with growing instability or unrest, these privileges are revoked. Elites who feel increasingly threatened by the wider population do not resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police, Arendt writes.

This is what is taking place now. The corporate state and its organs of internal security are illegitimate. We are a society of captives.

[Twilight Sparkle]

i didn't know people still said "hella"

[nucklehead]

The whole article seems to be written at about a grade eight level.

[Ghostsof1915]

The whole article seems to be written at about a grade eight leve..

Along with Wal-Mart employees, Management, Ownership, Customers.....

[riffraff]

Meh...who hasnt wanted to shoot everyone?

[nucklehead]

I didn't know people still said "meh".

[RUPERTKBD]

The whole article seems to be written at about a grade eight level.

That's what I thought as well. This paragraph especially, is hard to follow:

The NLRB wrote in their decision that Walmart should cease and desist from threatening Richmond, California store associates that it would shoot the union threatening Richmond, California store associates by telling them that associates returning from strike would be looking for new jobs Issuing disciplinary coachings to associates because they engaged in a protected work stoppage, and to discourage associates from engaging in those or other protected activities.

[Warhippy]

It's Chrsitmas shopping season.

My trigger finger gets itchy walking in to a mall.

[Chalky]

I agree,

This article was written by a child.

I too fight the urge to kill.

I didn't know people still said Hella.

...I still use "meh" from time to time though

This manager, Van Riper, told one of the associates who was a memberthey were pulling a shelf with rope around his waistand he told him that hed like to put that rope around his neck, Bravo said. And the associate is African American.

The terrible grammar above is actually on you Freebuddy, if you're going to copy and paste an article, maybe edit it a little to make sure it makes sense. In the original article, this was a quote, and it didn't paste very well...otherwise you're just making spam threads.

[sam13371337]

Along with Wal-Mart employees, Management, Ownership, Customers.....

although im no fan of wal-mart and the way they treat their employees like slaves..

I care even less for snobby people who go around with a smug attitude that they are better then everyone else.

[Hobbes!!!]

Wut? The article barely makes sense. I gave up.

[freebuddy]

I too fight the urge to kill.

Not surprised.

[Dazzle]

The whole article seems to be written at about a grade eight level.

Here is the broad behind that awful article that she wrote, which I'll just break it down in the next post.

[Dazzle]

So, Alyssa, here's what's wrong with your article, grammatically:

http://www.alternet.org/labor/walmart-manager-allegedly-wanted-shoot-everyone-organizing-better-working-conditions-store?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

Let's start with the TITLE.

Walmart Manager Allegedly Wanted to 'Shoot Everyone' Organizing for Better Working Conditions at Store

If you're going to put 'Shoot Everyone' in quotes like that, there is no need to use the word allegedly before that. Are you somehow unsure about what the manager meant when he said it? If he said that he wanted to shoot everyone, regardless of what the reason was behind it, he said it. There is no 'allegedly' behind it, unless, of course, your story was from unreliable hearsay.

-> Walmart Manager wanted to 'shoot everyone'...

Much better already.

However, if you read ahead, my suggestion exposed a grammatical error.

"Walmart Manager wanted to 'Shoot Everyone' Organizing For..."

Either, it's "Walmart Manager wanted to 'Shoot Everyone' FOR Organizing

OR

"Walmart Manager wanted to 'Shoot Everyone' THAT Organized..."

Let's move onto the caption:

Walmart has been ordered to stop making illegal threats against OUR Walmart members.

This is poorly written. This time though, the sentence is grammatically sound. What's wrong?

If it's 'an 'illegal threat'', which sounds akin to blackmail, why isn't the police involved? Oh, the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) is involved. How quaint of you to let us know what NLRB stood for, but not 'OUR'...

So, what is 'OUR' Walmart members?

Are you part of Walmart? OR are you referring to an organization spelled out as "OUR". It's unlikely to be the former, so the 'OUR' part needs to be properly quoted throughout the article, which wasn't.

Raymond Bravo, a former Walmart employee in Richmond, CA, decided to go on strike with his co-workers back in November 2012 because they were tired of being disrespected. After their white manager made a racially charged comment, enough was enough.

Who cares what race their manager was? Disrespect is disrespect. But, of course, this woman of darker skin (a fact that is totally irrelevant to what I'm writing) had to point out the race factor.

“This manager, Van Riper, told one of the associates who was a member—they were pulling a shelf with rope around his waist—and he told him that he’d like to put that rope around his neck,” Bravo said. “And the associate is African American.

This no longer is a 'racially charged comment', in which, freedom of speech, if not promoting injury or death, would've allowed. But, it's equivalent to uttering a threat and is completely reportable to police.

As for the grammatical construction, she could've said:

One of the associates, who was a member, was pulling a shelf with rope around his waist. Van Riper, the manager, told him that 'he'd like to put that rope around his neck.'

Much cleaner construction.

Even with that fixed, improper English is used liberally within the quotes, but she doesn't put a (sic) notation beside it. Is 'hella' an actual word? What the frack? It's used TWICE - "hella people" later on. LOL.

When OUR Walmart members return to work following a strike, they go as a group to their manager and read a script of their rights to strike and return to work. After Bravo and his co-workers at the Richmond store followed that procedure, their manager Riper responded by threatening workers’ lives.

So how many times have these members followed this ritual? All the time? Once?

How many threats has the manager made on the employees then? Wouldn't it be a lot more reliable to do it so that there would be even more charges put onto him, for each count of uttering threats? It is, after all, criminal. He could see jail time.

Fighting Back Against Walmart

Since OUR Walmart workers nationwide held their first Black Friday strikes back in 2012, managers have escalated their threats to deter workers from fighting for change. A group of lawyers filed charges against Walmart to the National Labor Relations Board on the workers behalf. As the result of one of these charges, the NLRB on Tuesday called on Walmart to immediately stop its threats against OUR Walmart members and remove the illegal disciplinary actions from six workers who went on strike in Richmond.

*workers' behalf.

Pressing charges doesn't mean that Walmart's been proven guilty. There may be evidence, but there needs to be a ruling first.

Look at this awful run-on SENTENCE (!) that RupertKBD has pointed out earlier. Did she not proof-read her article? One read should've made her realize something before hitting the submit button. She's an "associate editor". Really?

Even if it's a true story, her credibility is non-existent now.

The NLRB wrote in their decision that Walmart should cease and desist from threatening Richmond, California store associates that it would shoot the union threatening Richmond, California store associates by telling them that associates returning from strike would be looking for new jobs Issuing disciplinary coachings to associates because they engaged in a protected work stoppage, and to discourage associates from engaging in those or other protected activities.

Also:

In 2013, Jobs With Justice reported on Walmart’s efforts to silence workers, uncovering more than 150 incidents in stores nationwide. But in the report, they also called the NLRB out for taking years to make decisions, leaving workers without immediate relief. Bravo, for one, was fired from Walmart and is awaiting legal proceedings. He said he couldn’t discuss his case.

Are you serious, Mr. Bravo? You've just accused Walmart, at length, in this article about how Walmart tried to shut you up, as well as mention about what happened during your workplace. Adding that sentence into this article was stupid as hell by the author.

This was a complete waste of time. This article was the rambling of a darker-skinned woman intent on aggravating racial tensions, ahead of her desire to tell the story using her limited writing skills.

Phooey!

[freebuddy]

Here is the broad behind that awful article that she wrote, which I'll just break it down in the next post.

I guess you should ask someone to read it to you. Ask your parents.

[jdatb]

I guess you should ask someone to read it to you. Ask your parents.

So your mom?

[Dazzle]

So your mom?

[Gross-Misconduct]

Thanks for this post. I'll try to read it later when I have half a day to waste.

[Ghostsof1915]

although im no fan of wal-mart and the way they treat their employees like slaves..

I care even less for snobby people who go around with a smug attitude that they are better then everyone else.

Given the attitude I get from my buddy of mine that I don't like shopping at Wal-Mart. He keeps going on about how much money he saves. I counter with well did you need to buy it in the first place? I don't mind shopping at London Drugs, and other places, but I don't like how Wal-Mart treats it's employees, and I don't like how they even treat their suppliers. I have no problem with people shopping at places like Costco, Dollar Stores, etc. So if I sound smug it isn't meant to sound that way. I have made a choice and I stand by it. People want to save money. I understand that. But where you shop and how you shop does make a difference. I'd rather pay a little more and have a decent product, and make sure the people that make that item make a living wage. Of course on the latter that's harder to do.

[Gurn]

The lady in question is probably an ESL person. I think her English is much better than my Spanish.