The two executives’ travel plans in September reflect how the introspection has been reversed to leverage the demands for 24-hour global trading, using Chicago’s advantage of a time zone capturing parts of the business day in Asia and Europe as its hub.
...Chicago may have lost its mantle as manufacturing capital of the world, but has been honest and nimble enough to groom itself as the pre-eminent derivatives centre”.
In fact, Maersk reveals little more about its activities than the minimum required by the Copenhagen Stock Exchange and says almost nothing about its corporate strategy. But the Copenhagen-based group’s $38bn annual revenues last year make it not much smaller than Microsoft, the software giant.When it costs less to move a container across the ocean than 100 miles inland, what does that do to the definition of space?
...
As the largest company in the sector, Maersk is a key driver of the reduction of the costs of ocean shipping that has been under way since the container was invented in 1956. The process has been crucial to making globalisation possible and has driven costs down so far that it often now costs more to ship a container by road 100 miles from a port to its final destination than it does to move the container by sea from China to Europe.
The most important goal they identify is that Maersk should control as many as possible of the companies that influence its containers’ movement from country to country. The other is to pursue scale – both in the size of the company’s main businesses and in its ships.
The company can be single-minded in pursuit of these objectives because it is largely immune from short-term shareholder pressure. The founding McKinney-Møller family holds 55 per cent of the shares and 75 per cent of voting stock, with 49.8 per cent of the shares all held by a single family charitable trust.
When a private company can be this successful, what does that mean for the comparative advantage of a public corporation?
Textbooks are a model waiting to be broken. So... suppose the Open Source community has a way to monetize efforts that don't need the publishers?
Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won't pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko's and Pura Vida coffee.
Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television either cheap or free. But so far, the model hasn't spread to college textbooks -- partly for fear that faculty would consider ads undignified. The upshot is that textbooks now cost students, according to various studies, about $900 per year."
By Jonathan Birchall and Holly Yeager
Published: August 16 2006 19:40 | Last updated: August 16 2006 19:40
John Edwards, Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2004, was in Pittsburgh this month doing his bit for the party ahead of November’s midterm elections to the US Congress. His agenda included addressing a rally against the shortcomings not of the Bush administration but of Wal-Mart, the country’s biggest retailer and largest private-sector employer.
“Wal-Mart needs to be a more responsible employer, by offering decent wages,” Mr Edwards told a crowd who had turned out to support Wake Up Wal-Mart, a campaigning group funded by the UFCW grocery workers’ union that, along with others, the company staunchly refuses to recognise. Mr Edwards also attacked the company’s record on health benefits, arguing that the dependence of some Wal-Mart employees on state-funded Medicare programmes meant the chain was being unfairly subsidised.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Every consumer should know when they walk into Wal-Mart their tax dollars are going to provide healthcare for Wal-Mart workers...while the people who own Wal-Mart are making billions of dollars,” he proclaimed. The retailer struck back immediately. A Wal-Mart official denounced the Pittsburgh event as part of “a union-funded publicity stunt that’s more about politics than anything else”.
Then Working Families for Wal-Mart, officially a non-profit lobbying group, hit even harder, pointing out that the former senator’s family had previously held Wal-Mart shares. “Now he and other political candidates are telling working men and women that they can’t save money or take jobs at Wal-Mart? This is all about special-interest politics. And that’s sad,” said a spokeswoman for Working Families.
This is the world of Wal-Mart, the political retailer.
Under Lee Scott, chief executive, the company has in the past year expanded beyond the usual realm of corporate lobbying to wage a fully-fledged campaign in the mainstream of American politics. “When a company is as large as ours, we’re certainly going to have a lot of interaction with both politics and government,” says Bob McAdam, vice-president of corporate affairs.
On Tuesday it sent 18,000 “voter education” letters to its employees in Iowa, pointing out what it said were factual errors made by politicians who had attacked the company. The group is to despatch similar letters to its staff in other states.
But Wal-Mart’s embrace of some of the darker arts of US politics – it has set up a campaign-style “war room” at its Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters – also attests to the success its critics have had in turning the “big-box” retailer into a political issue at local, state and, increasingly, national level.
In January, Maryland passed a law aimed at making Wal-Mart increase the amount it spends on its workers’ health benefits – a move that has led to similar legislation being proposed elsewhere. In July, in an initiative aimed at large national retailers including Wal-Mart, Chicago’s city council passed an ordinance intended to raise the minimum wage for retail workers.
John Kerry, to whom Mr Edwards was running-mate, cited Wal-Mart and the family of founder Sam Walton in a speech this month on the failings of the US healthcare system. “It’s unconscionable and it is unacceptable that five of the 10 richest people in America are Wal-Mart stockholders from the same family – worth double-digit billions each – but they can’t find the money to secure health coverage for their own workers and their families,” he complained.
Senator Byron Dorgan in his new book, Take This Job and Ship It , uses the company to illustrate what he sees as bad consequences of globalisation. He devotes a chapter to Wal-Mart’s business practices in China, which he calls “the most obvious example of what has gone terribly amiss on the way to a healthy and truly free market”.
For Wal-Mart, all this raises an unwelcome possibility – that it will become a focus of debate during the 2008 presidential election campaign as well, something that its union critics are eager to bring about. “It’s going to be so important in the presidential cycle,” says Chris Kofinis, of the Wake Up Wal-Mart campaign. “Everyone is going to talk about this issue . . . about where you stand on corporations that make $11bn a year in profits and say they can’t afford to pay for healthcare for their workers.”
Wal-Mart’s evolving political strategy, shaped with advice and support from Edelman, the public relations consultancy, has been twofold. First, it has attacked its critics – arguing that it is the victim of an unholy alliance between Democrat lawmakers and the unions they rely on to deliver votes and campaign financing. Second, it is seeking to make the argument that the company is good for America.
It is doing this by mobilising its own political constituency, seeking alliances with local community leaders and businesses – in particular, black and Hispanic groups – that accept Wal-Mart’s argument that the company helps low-income Americans by offering low prices and jobs with the prospect of advancement.
Working Families for Wal-Mart, funded mainly by the retailer, is part of both strategies. Operating with more personal animosity than might be appropriate from the company itself, it is attacking the store chain’s critics. For instance, it has just launched a website called PaidCritics.com, aimed at exposing what it says are special-interest links between the anti-Wal-Mart campaign, the unions and politicians in the Democratic party (Wake Up Wal-Mart struck back with its own site – Abunchofgreedyrightwingliarswhoworkforwalmart.com).
Working Families has also set out to mobilise support. It is chaired by Andrew Young, the pro-business former mayor of Atlanta who served as the first black US ambassador to the United Nations. Its board includes Hispanic business figures, while its recently created state organising groups include leading black clergy.
“There’s a large majority of people out there who support Wal-Mart and who have had no vehicle to voice their opinions on what they see as Wal-Mart’s positive impact on their lives and on the economy,” says Kevin Sheridan, Working Families campaign director and a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee.
At the same time, Wal-Mart has reorganised its own community relations operations and has announced plans for “Wal-Mart jobs and opportunity zones” in inner-city areas, aimed in part at encouraging businesses owned by people from ethnic minorities.
In an indication of the strategy’s potential, the black caucus on Chicago’s city council was evenly split on the move to set a minimum wage for workers in the city’s big stores – with opponents saying depressed inner-city areas needed Wal-Mart’s investment and tax revenues.
The vote in Chicago also highlights the risk to the Democrats of trying to use Wal-Mart’s record to galvanise support in the run-up to 2008. While Mr Kerry and Mr Edwards might see Wal-Mart’s low-paying jobs and healthcare record as a rallying point for voters who feel left out of the American dream, other elements of the party will take a different view – including New York’s Senator Hillary Clinton, who in 1986-92 served on the board of the retailer based in Arkansas, her home state.
John Zogby, the pollster, argues that focusing too much on Wal-Mart “means no net gain”, because union voters already favour the Democrats and the party must seek other support if it is to recapture the White House in 2008. “When are the Democrats going to talk to Wal-Mart shoppers?” he asks (see below left). Mr Zogby, who has done some polling work for Wake Up Wal-Mart, says Democrats still lack “a strategy that deals with Joe and Mary Middle America – and Joe and Mary Middle America are at Wal-Mart”.
Polling shows that people who shop at Wal-Mart do care about human rights and worker healthcare, he adds. Democrats therefore need a more subtle message “about trouble in paradise, without carpet-bombing paradise. There are too many people who shop there”.
Mr McAdam counters that the recent criticisms from the Democrats are instead tied to the party’s own battles in the primaries. To win union support, candidates are prepared to deliver an anti-Wal-Mart message that will often not be carried through in the coming midterm campaign.
“There’s abundant survey data that says that attacking Wal-Mart for the population as a whole is detrimental,” he argues. “So if they persist in doing this as the general election approaches, they may find themselves doing more harm than good.”
Wal-Mart is meanwhile taking no chances. It is pursuing a broad effort to enhance its public image, including its record on environmental sustainability. That might drive a wedge in an alliance between its union critics and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, which have faulted the company on issues ranging from waste water management to its stores’ impact on urban sprawl.
In a sign that political Wal-Mart is here to stay, Leslie Dach, a former political adviser to Al Gore’s failed 2000 presidential campaign, this month becomes head of its government relations and corporate communications. Mr Dach, who will serve on the company’s powerful executive committee, joins Wal-Mart from Edelman, where he became the retailer’s top politics tutor.
His appointment shows just how far the chain has come, with its small army of consultants and political advisers, from the days when Sam Walton argued that if you gave the customers low prices and good service, everything else would look after itself.
Mr McAdam, who will work for Mr Dach, argues that the retailer had no choice. “I think any company that is faced by the kind of campaign-style attacks would be naive not to respond in kind. It became clear to us that, to maintain our ability to do our business, we needed to have a similar style of response.”
By Holly Yeager
Published: August 17 2006 03:00 | Last updated: August 17 2006 03:00
What does where you shop say about how you vote? In the case of Wal-Mart, John Zogby, the highly regarded pollster, thinks it says a lot.
As he reviewed data from the 2004 US presidential election,
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr Zogby noticed something unusual: a strong correlation between how often people shop at Wal-Mart and how conservative they are.
The figures are stark: 76 per cent of voters who shopped at Wal-Mart every week voted for George W. Bush, while 23 per cent voted for John Kerry. By contrast, 80 per cent of those who never shopped there supported Mr Kerry, while just 18 per cent voted for Mr Bush.
"Wal-Mart is more than retail. I think it has become a culture unto itself," says Mr Zogby, who is writing a book about what he calls "the new American consumer". That culture is seen in the books and magazines the retailer puts on its shelves and those it keeps off. "You walk into a Wal-Mart and you're walking into the moral equivalent of a spiritual revival tent for born-again Christians."
Just as "soccer moms" and "Nascar dads" drew the scrutiny of pollsters in past elections, Mr Zogby is now paying close attention to weekly Wal-Mart shoppers.
African-Americans and Hispanics who shop there frequently are significantly more conservative than their cohorts who do not, he says. And he knew that Mr Bush was in deep trouble with the public when the president's standing slipped among weekly Wal-Mart shoppers, who had been among his strongest supporters.
Mr Zogby has placed other US retailers on the political spectrum. Firmly on the left are Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale's and Macy's. Target, he says, is near the centre, "a hair to the left", and in the centre-right are Sears and JC Penney.
But none are as strong a predictor. "Wal-Mart's pattern is just incredible."
"In a striking decision that is certain to reverberate throughout the country, the city of Chicago ordered 'big box' stores to raise the wages of their employees by the year 2010. As the NY Times reports this morning, 'The ordinance, imposing the requirement on stores that occupy more than 90,000 square feet and are part of companies grossing more than $1 billion annually, would be the first in the country to single out large retailers for wage rules.'
The response from the Walmonster: 'It means that Chicago is closed for business.' Yet it seems that the onerous requirements are not barriers for Costco, a box store that currently offers wages and benefits that exceed those of Chicago's statute."
"In this light it is interesting to consider historian Arnold Toynbee's observation, after studying twenty-one collapsed civilizations, that what they had in common was inflexibility under stress and the concentration of wealth into few hands. We cannot deny the current stress. Will we remain inflexible in maintaining a system that concentrates wealth to the increasing detriment of most humans?"
"September 2005: the end of Empire. It matters not who or what is to blame other than nature’s ugly daughter Katrina, one war of retribution, and another of pre-emption. What matters is that the United States of America, the richest and most powerful superpower of all time is no longer particularly super.
Not in the eyes of our enemies, not in the eyes of our friends. Is Sri Lanka mocking us with an offer of 25 grand in aid? Surely not. Or is Nigeria, with her offer of a cool mil? What about Iran, ready to airlift aid workers and ship five tanker-loads of oil; is she mocking the ‘Great Satan’? Fidel Castro wants to send doctors; maybe they can bring us some cigars. And Hugo Chavez? Good thing the CIA didn’t listen to Pat Robertson, for dead men can’t offer aid.
The Empire accepts the offer of aid from the U.N., yes, the U.N., where John Bolton was just rolling up his sleeves. Lop off how many stories of the U.N. Secretariat building and it wouldn’t matter? Perhaps not, Mr. Ambassador, the floors where aid is decided and dispatched.
Iran rejects the latest European demands they cease uranium conversion just as National Guard troops are flown from the Persians’ gulf to ours. Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? We are in shock, the world watches in awe. There is no spectacle quite like the spectacle of an empire on her knees. And Caesar can do nothing but fiddle."
Is the United States in the last throes of empire? That sounds like an ideologically loaded, fatalistic and defeatist question. But it's what I've been wondering about at the start of this holiday season. Might future historians look back at the Bush II days and ask if this was the point when the country started slipping? Might the war in Iraq be regarded as a desperate act of a superpower that had already peaked? Will economists of the latter 21st century examine our economic decisions and say, 'What were they thinking?' Or has the Grinch gotten to me?"
Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books, including Human Scale, The Conquest of Paradise, Rebels Against the Future, and The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream.
All empires collapse eventually: Akkad, Sumeria, Babylonia, Ninevah, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Mali, Songhai, Mongonl, Tokugawaw, Gupta, Khmer, Hapbsburg, Inca, Aztec, Spanish, Dutch, Ottoman, Austrian, French, British, Soviet, you name them, they all fell, and most within a few hundred years. The reasons are not really complex. An empire is a kind of state system that inevitably makes the same mistakes simply by the nature of its imperial structure and inevitably fails because of its size, complexity, territorial reach, stratification, heterogeneity, domination, hierarchy, and inequalities.....
In my reading of the history of empires, I have come up with four reasons that almost always explain their collapse. (Jared Diamond's new book Collapse also has a list of reasons for societal collapse, slightly overlapping, but he is talking about systems other than empires.) Let me set them out, largely in reference to the present American empire....
First, environmental degradation. Empires always end by destroying the lands and waters they depend upon for survival, largely because they build and farm and grow without limits, and ours is no exception, even if we have yet to experience the worst of our assault on nature....
Second, economic meltdown. Empires always depend on excessive resource exploitation, usually derived from colonies farther and farther away from the center, and eventually fall when the resources are exhausted or become too expensive for all but the elite....
Third, military overstretch. Empires, because they are by definition colonizers, are always forced to extend their military reach farther and farther, and enlarge it against unwilling colonies more and more, until coffers are exhausted, communication lines are overextended, troops are unreliable, and the periphery resists and ultimately revolts....Finally, domestic dissent and upheaval. Traditional empires end up collapsing from within as well as often being attacked from without, and so far the level of dissent within the U.S. has not reached the point of rebellion or secession-thanks both to the increasing repression of dissent and escalation of fear in the name of "homeland security" and to the success of our modern version of bread and circuses, a unique combination of entertainment, sports, television, internet sex and games, consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that effectively deadens the general public into stupor....
Jared Diamond's recent book detailing the ways societies collapse suggests that American society, or industrial civilization as a whole, once it is aware of the dangers of its current course, can learn from the failures of the past and avoid their fates. But it will never happen, and for a reason Diamond himself understands.
As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that collapsed in the early 15th century: "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity." If this is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then we can isolate the values of American society that have been responsible for its greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to them no matter what. They are, in one rough mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism, technophilia, and humanism (as the dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance whatever, no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a society that we will abandon those.
The experience of the UK is not mentioned. They seem to have made the transition form empire to non empire rather well. While no longer a world power supported by their military might, they continue to deliver a decent citizen experience to those lucky enough to be within their borders. Whether this is enabled by their reliance on the American military adventure or there are other more replicable reasons, it is a history worth understanding.
"U.S. Senators Tom Coburn, M.D., R-OK, Barack Obama, D-IL, John McCain, R-AZ, and Tom Carper, D-DE, today urged the full Senate to pass S. 2590, the 'Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act,' a bill that will create a Google-like search engine and database to track approximately $1 trillion in federal grants, contracts, earmarks and loans. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved S. 2590 unanimously today. The House has already passed similar legislation that is limited to grant disclosure only.
'Passing this bill will help end the culture of secrecy in Washington and restore some measure of the public's confidence in government. Technology has made it possible, like never before, to fulfill our founders' vision of enabling all citizens to understand our nation's finances, investigate abuses and hold elected officials accountable,' Dr. Coburn said, adding that a hearing being held today in the House Government Reform Committee on abuses in homeland security contracting highlights the urgent need to include contracts in the database.
'All Americans deserve to know where their money is being spent. 'Googling' the government will not only help expose and eliminate waste, but dispel misconceptions about the scope of our commitments. Many Americans, for example, assume we are spending a large percentage of our budget on foreign assistance when we are not. Whether you're on the left or right, there is no worthy argument against transparency,' Obama said."
"The United States and Israel have each fought conventional armies of nation-states and shadowy terror organizations. But Hezbollah, with the sophistication of a national army (it almost sank an Israeli warship with a cruise missile) and the lethal invisibility of a guerrilla army, is a hybrid. Old labels, and old planning, do not apply. Certainly its style of 21st-century combat is known — on paper. The style even has its own labels, including network warfare, or net war, and fourth-generation warfare, although many in the military don’t care for such titles. But the battlefields of south Lebanon prove that it is here, and sooner than expected. And the American national security establishment is struggling to adapt.
“We are now into the first great war between nations and networks,” said John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a leading analyst of net warfare. “This proves the growing strength of networks as a threat to American national security.”
In a talk that Mr. Arquilla calls Net Warfare 101, he describes how traditional militaries are organized in a strict hierarchy, from generals down to privates. In contrast, networks flatten the command structure. They are distributed, dispersed, agile, mobile, improvisational. This makes them effective, and hard to track and target.
A net war differs from all previous wars, which were about brute confrontation of forces, mass on mass — what Matthew Arnold called bloody contests of “ignorant armies” meeting on the “darkling plain.”
Net war is the battle of the many, organized in small units, against conventional militaries that organize their many into large units. These network forces are not ignorant. They are computer literate, propaganda and Internet savvy, and capable of firing complicated weapons to great effect.
“The pooling of information is certainly a characteristic of these kinds of insurgencies,” said Daniel Benjamin, who served on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton before joining the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In Iraq, for example, the lessons on how to build and place I.E.D.’s have spread and been assimilated in record time. There is certain to be the insurgent equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation on Hezbollah’s successes that will make the rounds of the insurgent and terrorist Web sites.”
and... at the end of the column, the most prescient quote:
“Most critically, we have to get better at — it’s such a cliché — winning hearts and minds,” said a military officer working on counterinsurgency issues. “That is influencing neutral populations toward supporting us and not supporting our terrorist and insurgent enemies.”"Winning hearts and minds" is also the central business problem of customer facing business in the GME.
"Simplifying our customers' daily lives
Wawa's vision is 'to simplify our customers' daily lives.'
To achieve this, we hire the best people, build world-class facilities and provide an overpowering offer.
Now, while all of these things are important to our success, the number one reason our customers 'gottahava Wawa' is the special relationship our associates have with our customers. A relationship built on the 'Wawa Values' each associate lives every day. Our values are: Value People, Delight Customers, Embrace Change, Do Things Right, Do the Right Thing and Passion for Winning.
At Wawa, every customer is a valued friend who is always welcomed back with a warm smile and a friendly greeting.
When we talk to our customers, they tell us they like to shop at Wawa because our associates like each other and work together as a team and because our associates always include them as part of our store family.
The 'Cheers' of Convenience Stores
Wawa has been called the 'Cheers' of convenience stores by our loyal customers -because we are a friendly neighborhood store where everybody knows your name. A place where you can see familiar faces, a place where you can leave your worries behind for a few minutes each day.
We all live in a hectic world - too much to do - not enough time - Our associates attempt to simplify our customers' life and make their day just a little bit better, from a fresh cup of coffee - to a great tasting hoagie ....to a friendly smile .... to making a new friend - the effort and personal connection with our customers is what makes Wawa so special.
No matter what an associate's job at Wawa is, the number one goal will always be the same, to simplify our customer's life by fulfilling this goal, each and every day, creating an atmosphere of trust, friendship and brand loyalty that few companies can match.
To our customers, our associates are Wawa."
"Asked about the EV1, a General Electric electric car that was summarily shut down, Musk said the car's short life wasn't likely the result of a conspiracy between car manufacturers and oil companies. Instead, he said, the car probably failed because of big-company inertia.
'Don't explain...by conspiracy what you can explain by incompetence,' he said."
"The fact that Hamas and Hezbollah pursue democratic legitimacy within the state while also employing violence on their own marks a watershed in Middle Eastern politics. For one thing, the boundary between state and nonstate violence has essentially been erased. Has the Palestinian government demanded an exchange of prisoners with Israel, or has the Hamas militia? Israel has been acting as if it were at war with Lebanon — its targets have included a Lebanese Air Force base and Beirut's international airport - but Hezbollah began the hostilities, not the Lebanese government."
"Nearly every aspect of higher education in America needs fixing, according to a draft report of a national commission that calls for an overhaul of the student financial aid system, better cost controls by colleges and universities and more proof of results, including testing.
The report by the panel appointed last year by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings was highly critical of the nation's institutions of higher education. It said there was a lack of accountability to show that students were learning, that college costs have risen too high, and that 'unacceptable numbers of college graduates' were entering the workforce without skills that employers say they need.
In addition, the draft said, 'rising costs, combined with a confusing, inadequate financial aid system, leave some students struggling to pay for education that, paradoxically, is of uneven and at times dubious quality.'"
Published: July 3, 2006
WASHINGTON, July 2 — Exasperated by his party's failure to cut government spending, Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is seeking cyberhelp.
Jamie Rose for The New York Times
Mark Tapscott of The Washington Examiner has promoted the spending database in that newspaper and on his blog, Tapscott's Copy Desk.
Mr. Coburn wants to create a public database, searchable over the Internet, that would list most government contracts and grants — exposing hundreds of billions in annual spending to instant desktop view
Type in 'Halliburton,' the military contractor, or 'Sierra Club,' the environmental group, for example, and a search engine would show all the federal money they receive. "
"In an interview with Fortune magazine, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett announced he will give nearly $31 billion -- most of his wealth -- to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.As the world moves from an information scarce to an information rich environment, the concepts that organized 20th century reality become a little less useful.
"In regard to your editorial (“Closed primary means low turnout,” The Daily Astorian, May 25) you correctly point out that there are a number of reasons for low voter participation in the primaries. Your solution is to allow the independent voters to participate in the partisan political process. Unfortunately, this defeats the purpose of primary elections.C'mon.. most of the folks who are "independents" are not consumers or fans of the political industry. They don't vote because they don't care. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing can be legitimately argued, but a mediocre product, with a terrible customer experience, will not attract grow it's market. even with huge infusions of cash.
They were originally set up to allow party members full participation in their party’s selection as opposed to the decisions of a few powerful men in a smoke-filled room. This has generally been successful. Yes, it does exclude the uncommitted independent, but then this was also true under the old system. Should Oregon institute open primaries, I will not vote in them, since they no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended."
"Election day will come, and it won't matter how many people rallied in the park.As long as the election system is based on the niche market that votes, it doesn't supply a very sustainable incentive structure for finding the best solution for the most people.
Springdale saw 5,000 people in the park in April. Another large rally for immigrants' rights took place in May. Then a couple of months passed. Thursday, Republican party nominee for governor Asa Hutchinson came to Springdale to announce how he'd curb illegal immigration."
Tougher laws in Arkansas won't slow immigration to the United States but could divert it to other states. That's victory enough for many. My problem is this: There is no way to be tough on immigrants who arrived today and not be tough on immigrants who arrived years ago.
The people who arrived years ago broke our laws too. However, we showed little interest in enforcing our laws until this election year. Even the most ardent anti-immigration forces acknowledge that. It's a sore point with them.
