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    Bernie Sanders: US sick of subsidizing 'starvation wages' at Walmart and McDonald's

    US taxpayers should not be “forced to subsidize some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America”, Bernie Sanders told a Senate hearing on Thursday.As Congress debates the first rise in the minimum wage in over a decade, the Vermont senator said he had “talked to too many workers in this country who, with tears in their eyes, tell me the struggles they have to provide for their kids on starvation wages” even as the chief executives of companies including McDonald’s, Walmart and others take home multi-million dollar pay packages.Executives from Walmart and McDonald’s were invited to the hearing, titled Should Taxpayers Subsidize Poverty Wages at Large Profitable Corporations?They declined to appear.The senators heard from low-wage workers from McDonald’s and Walmart. Terence Wise, a McDonald’s employee from Kansas City, Missouri, said his low pay had led to his family becoming homeless.“My family has been homeless despite two incomes. We’ve endured freezing temperatures in our purple minivan. I’d see my daughter’s eyes wide open, tossing and turning, in the back seat. Try waking up in the morning and getting ready for work and school in a parking lot with your family of five,” said Wise.“That’s something a parent can never forget and a memory you can never take away from your children. You should never have multiple jobs in the United States and nowhere to sleep.”Sanders cited a government accountability office (GAO) report that found nearly half of workers who make less than $15 an hour rely on public assistance programs that cost taxpayers $107bn each year.Walmart spent $8.3bn on stock buybacks in 2017, the Walton family, the chain’s founders, are worth over $200bn and have increased their wealth by $50bn since the start of the pandemic, said Sanders. And yet the company “cannot afford to pay its workers at least $15 an hour”.“If Walmart thinks they’re going to avoid answering that question because they’re not here today, they’re deeply mistaken. The American people are sick and tired of subsidizing the wealthiest family in America,” said Sanders.The hearing comes at a tense moment for minimum wage advocates. Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour from its current level of $7.25. The proposal is part of his $1.9tn Covid stimulus package.But that package faces stiff opposition from in the Senate with the Republican minority set to vote against it and some Democrats opposing the wage rise.A recent Congressional Budget Office concluded 27 million Americans would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $15, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty. But the CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years. The Economic Policy Institute, and others, have called the report “wrong, and inappropriately inflated”.Republican Senator Mike Bruin told the hearing that an increase would be unfair on states with a lower cost of living and would hurt small businesses.“We need to slow it down,” he said. “The main result is you are going to hurt Main Street,” he said. More

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    'Sore loser': Walmart apologizes after tweet mocks Senator Hawley

    Walmart on Wednesday apologized to Josh Hawley, the Republican senator who said he would not vote to certify electoral college results, after a post on its Twitter account called him a “#soreloser”.“The tweet published earlier was mistakenly posted by a member of our social media team. We deleted the post and have no intention of commenting on the subject of certifying the electoral college,” the retail giant said in a tweet. “We apologize to Senator Hawley for this error and any confusion about our position.”The social media controversy started unfolding before noon, about one hour after Hawley tweeted his position on the usually ceremonious count. “Millions of voters concerned about election integrity deserve to be heard. I will object on January 6 on their behalf,” Hawley said.“Go ahead. Get your 2 hour debate. #soreloser” said a reply posted to Walmart’s Twitter account.Hawley replied “Thanks ⁦@Walmart⁩ for your insulting condescension. Now that you’ve insulted 75 million Americans, will you at least apologize for using slave labor?” In another tweet, the Missouri legislator said: “Or maybe you’d like to apologize for the pathetic wages you pay your workers as you drive mom and pop stores out of business.”Congress will meet on 6 January to count electoral college votes, which is the last step in affirming president-elect Joe Biden’s win. Hawley’s move won’t thwart Biden’s victory, but it could delay the count by spurring separate House and Senate votes. The move would force other Republicans to openly cast a vote that puts President Trump’s false voter fraud allegations against millions of voters’ enfranchisement. More

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    Walmart sued by US over alleged role in fuelling America's opioid crisis

    The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Walmart on Tuesday, alleging that the retail giant filled “thousands of invalid prescriptions” for powerful painkillers, helping fuel America’s opioid crisis.Walmart runs more than 5,000 pharmacies across the country. Until 2018, the chain was a wholesale distributor of controlled substances for its own pharmacies, giving it extensive reach into many communities.The civil complaint points to the role Walmart’s pharmacies may have played in the crisis by filling opioid prescriptions and by unlawfully distributing controlled substances to the pharmacies during the height of the opioid crisis.“As a nationwide dispenser and distributor of opioids, and given the sheer number of pharmacies it operates, Walmart was uniquely well positioned to prevent the illegal diversion of opioids,” the 160-page civil suit, filed in Delaware federal court, said.“Yet, for years, as the prescription drug abuse epidemic ravaged the country, Walmart abdicated those responsibilities,” the suit added.In response, Walmart said the suit was “riddled with factual inaccuracies”.The DoJ document said the company “knowingly violated well established rules requiring it to scrutinize controlled-substance prescriptions to ensure that they were valid – that is, issued by prescribers in a legitimate manner for legitimate purposes, not for purposes of abuse or other diversion,” the suit continued. While Walmart was legally required to check potential red flags, it “made little effort to ensure that it complied with them”.Instead, Walmart made it hard for pharmacists to abide by these regulations. Managers pressured pharmacists to fill high volumes of prescriptions as quickly as possible “while at the same time denying them the authority to categorically refuse to fill prescriptions issued by prescribers the pharmacists knew were continually issuing invalid prescriptions”, the complaint charged.Even though Walmart’s compliance arm had amassed extensive information showing that people were repeatedly trying to get invalid narcotic prescriptions filled, the unit kept that data from pharmacists, authorities also said.Walmart filled prescriptions from prescribers who its own pharmacists had “repeatedly reported were acting as egregious ‘pill mills’ – even when Walmart was alerted that other pharmacies were not filling prescriptions for those prescribers. In fact, some of those pill-mill prescribers specifically told their patients to fill their prescriptions at Walmart.”So intense were the pressures on pharmacists that managers told them to “[h]ustle to the customer, hustle from station to station” because completing prescriptions “is a battle of seconds”, federal authorities alleged.As early as 2013, Walmart adopted a plan that used the number of prescriptions processed by an employee’s store as a factor in determining if the pharmacy staffer “was entitled to monetary incentive awards”.The DoJ contends that Walmart has committed “hundreds of thousands of violations” of the Controlled Substances Act. If Walmart is found liable for violating this act, each unlawfully filled prescription could result in a $67,627 penalty. Each suspicious order that was not reported to authorities could result in a penalty of up to $15,691. Civil penalties could reach “billions”, the DoJ said.More than 232,000 people died in the US from opioid-involved overdoses between 1999 and 2018, according to the DoJ.In a statement, Walmart said that the DoJ’s investigation was “tainted by historical ethics violations, and this lawsuit invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors, and is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context”.“Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) approved to prescribe opioids is a transparent attempt to shift blame from DEA’s well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place,” the company said.Walmart recently sued the DoJ and DEA, alleging that authorities wrongly ascribed blame to the company. The retailer’s suit wants a federal judge to determine that the government doesn’t have grounds to pursue civil damages, according to the Associated Press. More

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    America's billionaires are giving to charity – but much of it is self-serving rubbish | Robert Reich

    America’s billionaires are giving to charity – but much of it is self-serving rubbish Robert Reich Well-publicized philanthropy shows how afraid the super-rich are of a larger social safety net – and higher taxes Jeff Bezos’s $100m donation, for example, amounts to about 11 days of his income. Photograph: Katherine Taylor/Reuters As millions of jobless Americans […] More