The Affordable Care Act is coming. No matter how many times Republicans vote against it (39 and counting!) it’s here to stay. While that’s good news for many workers, it can mean bad news for bigger companies like Walmart. Already, some companies are planning on cutting the hours (and wages) of full-time employees to avoid having to pay for insurance and other benefits. The government of California doesn’t think that’s right. Here’s why.

When a company like Walmart pays dismal wages, its employees turn to government programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and subsidized housing to make ends meet. In some cases, Walmart even encourages employees to seek government assistance. (Occasional Planet ran a great article on this earlier.) While the company makes billions of dollars in profit, it expects the government to foot the bill for services to these impoverished employees. This system has been in place for years, with many companies besides Walmart exploiting workers and the government. The Affordable Care Act is throwing a new complication into this formula by adding thousands of new workers who will become eligible for healthcare. Walmart intends on denying these people that right and shifting responsibility onto the government like it’s always done. But California is saying enough is enough and trying to pass legislation that will fine large corporations $6,000 for every full-time employee that ends up on the state run Medicaid program.

Sonya Schwartz, a program director at the National Academy for State Health policy says, “Accurate and timely data on Wal-Mart’s wage and employment practices is not always readily available. However, occasional releases of demographic data from public assistance programs can provide useful windows into the scope of taxpayer subsidization of Wal-Mart. After analyzing data released by Wisconsin’s Medicaid program, the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimates that a single 300- person Wal-Mart Supercenter store in Wisconsin likely costs taxpayers at least $904,542 per year and could cost taxpayers up to $1,744,590 per year – about $5,815 per employee.”

And that’s just for one Walmart Supercenter. (There are about 120 Walmart stores in Missouri where I live, and about 180 in California.) It’s shocking that government has put up with paying that amount for so long. We can only hope that the legislation in California passes and spreads to other states quickly.

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If you had $600 billion to invest in various businesses, how would you do it? Would you only invest in companies that provided a fair wage for factory workers? Or maybe only businesses that were environmentally friendly? The answer most of us would choose is whatever would make the most money. (Which would probably rule out fair wages and being environmentally friendly.)

Thankfully, Norway isn’t like most of us. Being fortunate enough to have a low population and high reserves in oil, the country has been flush with cash. So much cash that their government has a $600 billion pension fund to invest in various enterprises. (To put it in perspective, that fund is the largest single investor in Europe and the third largest in the world.) And how do they invest it? In companies that don’t violate “humanitarian principles” and “fundamental ethical norms.”

That sounds nice, but what does it really mean? For starters, Norway doesn’t support cluster weapons or landmines. Which means it had to divest from several American arms manufacturers. Companies that produce tobacco aren’t funded either. Other corporations have been removed for illegal logging, river pollution, and environmental abuses. There’s even a watch list for companies like Siemens, which is accused of gross corruption. (In most cases, Norway’s central bank tries to mediate concerns with the business before divesting.) The other big company that Norway has severed ties with is none other than Wal-Mart. In 2006, Norway purged itself of $430 million worth of shares from the retailer. The reason? Serious and systematic labor violations in numerous countries. As of 2012, the fund has stopped doing business with 40 corporations. Instead of sweatshops and pollutants, that money is being spent on things like solar panel production, and renewable energy research.

For a more capitalistic viewpoint on the Norwegian Fund, you should read this wikileaks memo. It was sent between diplomats who were fretting about whether or not ethical investing would hurt American companies. (Unless you’re Wal-Mart or a tobacco baron, it really hasn’t.)

Most of us don’t have that kind of money to invest. But we can decide to follow the Norwegian example and advance human rights and ethics with where we shop. By supporting the companies with good business practices, we punish the ones who misbehave. It won’t completely stop corruption, sweatshops, and environmental offenders, but it will cut into their bottom line. We should do business like Norway.

The post We should do business like Norway appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Before you dash off to the store, you go through that little checklist. (Your list is probably similar to mine.) Wallet? Check. Keys? Check. Cell phone, shopping list, gun. Check, check, …wait. You don’t go shopping with your gun? Why not? If you live in Missouri you have the right to. It’s one of the joys of living in an “open carry” state. Open carry means that as long as you legally own a gun you can proudly wear it in plain view of everyone. Now the idea of wearing your gun to go grocery shopping may sound odd, but on March 12, a man did just that in my neighborhood. And it caused a small uproar.

Let’s take a moment to talk about that little incident. On March 12, Brett Darrow was in the checkout lane of the Maplewood Wal-Mart. He was wearing a gun, it was clearly visible. Other patrons had seen the gun and alerted some store employees, who in turn called 911. He wasn’t behaving weird, he wasn’t causing any trouble. Brett was just wearing a pistol and that made people uncomfortable enough to want to call the cops. (Once the cops showed up, he refused to identify himself and they arrested him for an outstanding traffic warrant, but that really isn’t important.) The important thing is that it’s perfectly legal to be out in public wearing a gun.

That might be changing in my neighborhood. The city council of Maplewood decided that maybe being open carry wasn’t such a great idea. (Remember, just the sight of one gun at Wal-Mart was enough to make people nervous. Imagine what would happen if we all started packing heat.) They proposed an ordinance that would ban open carry in our city of about 9,000. It gets voted on Tuesday, April 12, 2011. The ban is expected to be a shoe-in. But that only matters here in my backyard. The whole state of Missouri is legally open carry. It’s up to the local government of each city whether or not they want their citizens carrying guns in plain sight.

Missouri isn’t alone in its open carry status. According to OpenCarry.org (a self-described, “pro-gun Internet community focused on the right to openly carry properly holstered handguns in daily American life.”) 27 other states are open carry without a license. 14 states are open carry with a license. All together that’s 41 states in which you can wear a pistol out in the open at a Wal-Mart. And don’t think it’s just grocery stores or big box stores where you can wear a gun. Open carry applies to bars, restaurants, churches, political rallies, offices, hospitals, movie theaters, parks, and even some airports. (Colleges, schools, and some government buildings have restrictions, but it generally varies state by state.) Businesses have a right to refuse service to someone with a gun and some places will have signs saying whether or not guns are allowed on the premises. Even with a few exceptions, that’s a long list of places you can go armed.

It should come as little surprise then, that I’m not a big fan of the open carry law. It’s not that I mind guns. I’m fine with hunting. I even own a pellet gun. It’s fun. But it’s the fact that we have some lenient gun ownership laws that make me uncomfortable with open carry. Even though I live near the city with the highest crime rate in America, (Go St Louis!) I feel safe. I don’t feel like I need to take a gun with me everywhere I go to defend myself. Safety and security are one of the perks of living in a civilized society. Despite all of our political bickering and trashy reality television, I’d like to think we live in a civilized society. In all honesty, if I were picking up groceries and I saw a person wearing a gun, I’d call the cops. Because I trust police. I don’t trust the random guy in aisle 3. So the next time you’re shopping, please leave the gun at home. Most of Maplewood agrees, it just makes us feel safer.

The post I’m going shopping, and I’m bringing my gun appeared first on Occasional Planet.

What a study in contrasts.  This evening we went to hear Greg Mortenson speak. He’s the innovative humanitarian who has brought education to girls in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had previously forbidden them to go to school.

Mortenson’s speech  followed a day when we learned that one Stan Kroenke (the minority owner of the St. Louis Rams) is “greenmailing” Shahid Khan, the prospective buyer of the football team.  For those who are not football fans and just want the skinny on “capitalist gone wild,” the bottom line is that Kroenke is pushing every possibly legal loophole to the limit to line his pockets and threaten Ram fans (and there are some) with moving the team elsewhere in 2015.  His real goals may be more modest, perhaps just extorting another $50 to $90 million dollars from Mr. Khan to live up to a “gentleman’s agreement.”  As St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist Bryan Burwell says,

As far as I can tell, what we have learned about Kroenke is that every move he makes is straight out of a Machiavellian playbook.

I wonder how Greg Mortenson and Stan Kroenke will sleep tonight.  Mortenson may have pocketed more money between 8 and 10 pm tonight.  I’m sure the speaker’s fee for the Maryville /Powell Hall series is considerable. But  unlike what we might expect from Kroenke, I doubt that Mortenson’s fee will go to buy another home, a yacht, or another sports team.  Rather, he may be thinking about starting another school or two with the fee, or perhaps replenishing existing ones with basic supplies such as paper and pencil.  He may be wondering how to keep his schools safe from the Taliban.

Does Mr. Kroenke quickly fall into REM sleep without a care in the world?  His march up the Fortune 400 list of the wealthiest individuals in the United States (he’s currently at number 113) perhaps moving up a notch or two?   Does he think about when he’ll emerge from the shadows of uncertainty and drop a few ambiguous hints about what he really has in mind?  Does the word “gotcha” cross his eyelids before he falls asleep?

St. Louis radio host McGraw Milhaven (KTRS-550AM) is asking fans to boycott Rams games if, by the start of Thursday’s draft, Kroenke doesn’t make some kind of statement about keeping the team in St. Louis..  But that may be just what Kroenke wants, a reason to leave St. Louis and return the Rams to Los Angeles, a market more than four times the size of St. Louis.

Mr. Kroenke has some other inviting financial targets.  Let’s not forget that he’s married to Anne Walton; yes, from that family; she’s a Wal-Mart heiress.  Kroenke has made much of his fortune in real estate, where he specializes in building developments in which Wal-Mart is the anchor store.  In theory it might be helpful to boycott Wal-Mart and the shopping centers where they reside, but it’s a somewhat absurd suggestion from the Occasional Planet:  We probably have as many readers who shop at Wal-Mart as there were people in the audience for Greg Mortenson who don’t listen to NPR.

So what is the solution?  Perhaps it lies four hundred twenty miles north of St. Louis in a town with a population just a shade more than 100,000.  It’s called “Title Town, USA, ” aka Green Bay, Wisconsin.  Their professional football team, the Packers, is the only community-owned major league professional franchise in the United States.   Since 1919, the team has thrilled the fans of Green Bay and brought the small community a dozen NFL titles.  How can a community so small be so supportive of a team?  Perhaps it’s loyalty that only comes from the security of knowing that no one is taking your team from your town, and that you as a fan, have a personal investment in the well-being of the team.  If all professional teams were community owned, the blackmailing of fan loyalty and tax dollars would stop, period.

That’s more than four hundred twenty miles from Stan Kroenke.  The contrast between Mr. Kroenke and Mr. Mortenson goes to fundamental questions in our society.  Kroenke is a walking advertisement for us to take from the private sector that which properly belongs to the public.  Mortenson is a walking advertisement for what an individual can do to help a community without government assistance.

Wherever we draw the line along the private/public continuum, the system will work only as well as the people in it. .  More power to Greg Mortenson: Thanks for reminding us of the good that one person can do.

The post Night and day with Greg Mortenson and Stan Kroenke appeared first on Occasional Planet.