Wienies

I don’t have much use for those people who write on the editorial and op-ed pages of the paper. With very few exceptions, whether they’re liberal or conservative, they’re shills for the system. However, there are right-wingers of a certain type who really grate on me, guys like George Will, David Brooks, and John Tierney. I like to call them wienies. These are the guys who, in elementary school, spied on the class when the teacher left the room. When she returned, they’d tell her who talked and misbehaved while she was gone. No doubt, their mommies had to pick them up after school. If they’d walked they wouldn’t have made it home without a beating, and if they’d taken the school bus, they would have been forced to ride in back with the big boys, and the big boys didn’t play nice.

Now that they’re all grown up, they’re still playing at teacher’s pet, and John Tierney was really sucking up a few days ago. In the lead-in to one of his regular op-ed pieces in the New York Times, he said that if Muhammad Yunus was chosen for the Nobel Prize Prize, then Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, also deserved consideration. I couldn’t read the piece because I don’t pay the subscription fee to have access to the op-ed columns, so I don’t know what the article said. However, given his political positions, I don’t believe that Tierney was denigrating Yunus by comparing him to Walton. On the contrary, he was undoubtedly saying that Walton deserved consideration for the award.

For those of you who don’t know, Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi who started a bank in his country that specializes in so-called microloans. These are very small loans made to the poor to help them become self-sufficient, mainly by starting little, home-based businesses of their own. I don’t know that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for that but, on the other hand, there are a dearth of candidates these days. What I do know for certain is that Sam Walton sure as hell doesn’t deserve it.

In an era when capitalist enterprises have been squeezing and squeezing their workers, Walmart has been particularly egregious. Wages are pitiful, and benefits are paltry, so paltry that thirteen percent of their work force are on Medicare or Medicaid. If that isn’t bad enough, they are now attempting to cap wages and reduce benefits by running off long-standing employees and by increasing the percentage of part-time workers in their workforce from twenty to forty percent. In Florida, they’re apparently trying to rid themselves of the elderly who work as greeters, cashiers, and fitting room attendants by no longer permitting them to sit on stools while at work. That right there is the legacy of Sam Walton.

Come the revolution, if there were indeed any reasonable hope that such a thing could happen, I’d love to see the wienies forced to share a cell with Bubba the Butt Fucker. He’s big, and he’s bad, and he doesn’t take no for an answer.