I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but "three cheers for the LA Times!"
WITH ONE EYE ON 2008 and one on their labor union base, Democratic luminaries are canvassing Iowa and other states this summer to campaign against the nation's incumbent … retailer. They obviously see Wal-Mart as this season's Enron, the one corporation that represents all that is wrong with America...
Wait, isn't that what you guys think, too?
Most Americans do not want their politicians ganging up on one company. Wal-Mart may be a behemoth that employs 1.3 million people in this country and earned $11 billion in profit last year, but it still looks like bullying when politicians single out one business to scapegoat for larger societal ills. And when they start passing laws aimed at their scapegoat — as the Maryland Legislature did when it passed legislation forcing Wal-Mart to spend a certain amount on employee healthcare — the judiciary rightly balks. A federal judge struck down the regulation, holding that it violates laws requiring equal treatment of employers.
Right again.
But there is no stopping the campaign rhetoric. At an anti-Wal-Mart rally last week in Iowa, Biden noted that the retailer pays people $10 an hour, and then asked: "How can you live a middle-class life on that?" It's clearly the company's fault, at least from a skewed senatorial perspective, that all Americans cannot live a comfortable middle-class life. How dare it pay prevailing retail wages?
Did the LAT editorial writers use the phrase, "prevailing wages" without saying we should magically make them higher? I think they did.
Read the whole thing. It's quite a smackdown. Note to Dems: If the LAT thinks you're acting like elitists, you've got a big, big problem.