What Happened Today: August 17, 2023
Abortion pill access heads to Supreme Court; office workers for Ford factories; new largest mammal
The Big Story
Another blockbuster Supreme Court decision on abortion rights appears on the horizon after a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday that the abortion pill mifepristone will remain legal but that patients could no longer receive the medication through the mail or be prescribed the drug via telemedicine. While the drug will still remain available as litigation continues, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the case following Wednesday’s decision. The high court, then, will either take up the case or deny the review, effectively endorsing the appeal court’s ruling.
Since the Supreme Court’s landmark overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, abortion has been a high-priority issue for voters in state races, often energizing Democratic voters to come out in decisive fashion at the ballot box. As a Gallup poll found in June, a record-high 28% of voters said they will only endorse candidates for major offices who share their abortion-access position. Just this month, a ballot initiative for a constitutional amendment in Ohio served as a proxy battle over abortion rights.
While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said in their 6-3 decision on Roe v. Wade that they wanted the states to tackle the issue of abortion access, they could overcome such reluctance to hear this new case because of its significance. The issue at hand—whether it’s the FDA’s approval of mifepristone 23 years ago or the FDA’s subsequent moves to increase access to the drug by mail and telemedicine—could find the Supreme Court ruling on the proper scope of the FDA’s regulatory authority, which could have ramifications for several other drugs.
Read More: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/16/abortion-pill-appeals-court-ruling-on-mifepristone.html
In the Back Pages: Life Inside Walmart’s Perfect City
The Rest
→ Salaried white-collar Ford workers were “sworn to secrecy” about the automaker’s contingency plans to move them out of their offices and into the factories and warehouses should the United Auto Workers union strike during ongoing contract negotiations. According to a new Detroit Free Press report, the possibility of another strike lasting as long or longer than the 40-day strike against General Motors in 2019 has led Ford executives to meet with engineers and other salaried workers about relocating to factory operations across 15 states, where they would obtain safety training before working in parts supply, logistics, or “driving a power material handling vehicle or … forklift,” a manager told the workers. The move would potentially limit some of the disruptions caused by the strike, but John Deere’s similar use of office workers during a factory strike last year led to at least one salaried employee crashing a tractor into a pole.
→ A U.S. district judge ruled on Wednesday that Starbucks will have to pay Shannon Phillips $2.7 million in lost future pay and damages after she was fired from a Philadelphia store location where a video of two Black men arrested there went viral. Phillips had previously won $25.6 million in damages from a federal jury after she sued the coffee company in 2019, saying that she had nothing to do with the arrests when she was the store’s regional operations director. She’d been fired a month after the incident because she’d refused to relocate a white district manager to another store over claims of pay disparities because of race, which Phillips said were untrue. Her attorney said her client had been a “scapegoat” for Starbucks to “show action being taken” following the viral episode.
→ Questions over who financed Rep. Ilhan Omar’s trip to watch the World Cup in Qatar last November went unanswered, even as The New York Times pressed her office for details for the funding source. On Wednesday, Jewish Insider reported for the first time on House financial disclosure records filed in May that showed the Qatari government had covered the congresswoman’s “food” and “lodging,” expenses the Qatari embassy confirmed covering to JI. The trip was allowed as part of the House Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act, a program that permits its members to take trips abroad courtesy of foreign governments as long as they disclose the funding in statements later. “We see a huge amount of Qatari influence in the halls of Congress on a regular basis,” Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JI, adding that while “Omar is [not] unique in that sense,” her visit nonetheless stands in stark contrast to her regular criticisms of the pro-Israel lobby influence in American politics. It’s a good example of “selective outrage,” Schanzer noted.
→ The Texas woman who allegedly threatened to murder the judge who is hearing the election fraud case against Donald Trump will now face federal charges. According to the criminal complaint filed Friday, the woman, Abigail Jo Shry, admitted to Department of Homeland Security investigators that she was the person who left a threatening voicemail with racist epithets and a warning for “all Democrats in Washington, D.C., and all people in the LGBTQ community … You are in our sights. We want to kill you.” She went on to add that “if Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you.” Shry faces up to five years in prison.
→ Roughly $700,000 worth of high-end jewelry was stolen from a Baltimore retailer after suspects drove a cargo van through the store front and made off with the watches and other luxury items. The smash and grab used on Radcliffe Jewelers, a popular stop for affluent Baltimore residents buying wedding registry gifts and designer accessories, is one that’s become increasingly common across the country, with two similar heists at California jewelry stores taking place earlier this year.
→ An internal probe into allegations that Credit Suisse harbored Nazi bank accounts after World War II failed to audit all available bank documents, including those that could have uncovered more accounts, according to previously redacted sections of an independent ombudsman’s report commissioned by the Senate Budget Committee. The bank’s “investigation was not only extensive, it was thorough and robust,” said a Credit Suisse representative after the disclosures were made. The new findings were provided to the Senate committee on July 31, and they’ve been reported on this week by Bloomberg News; they come after allegations by the bipartisan panel that the bank has been trying to slow the investigation.
→ Fans of the blue whale might have to alter their claim of loving the largest animal to ever live, after Nature published a new report that finds that the Perucetus colossus, an extinct marine mammal thought to have lived around 40 million years ago, could have weighed as much as 340 tonnes, a size that would easily make it the largest animal to have ever existed. The findings from University of Pisa paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci and his team have made that size estimate after recovering an incomplete Perucetus colossus skeleton in the arid desert of southern Peru. What’s unclear is why an animal would have grown so big that long ago. Big bodies require lots of food, and whales have only grown to their modern heft as recently as 5 million years ago, when changes to the climate allowed for the richer marine life they needed to eat and grow.
→ Winning in a landslide, rising Pennsylvania first-grader Rory Ehrlich took the kid’s division crown at the USA Mullet Championships this week, defeating a pack of some 900 contestants by earning more than 16,000 votes, an almost 6,900-vote margin over the runner-up. Nicknamed “Cheddar Whiz” in his mullet profile, Ehrlich has kept it business in the front and party in the back with regular visits to Sal’s Barbershop in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. The mullet, judges noted, had “great flow,” with judge and competition founder Kevin Begola observing that “if Rory was older I could see him playing for an NFL team and taking off his helmet and whipping around. It’s cool.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Israel’s Elites Revolt Against Democracy: The architects of the anti-Bibi protests are clear about their motives: defending elites from the masses by Gadi Taub
Robbie Robertson Was Everyman: How a Canadian-Jewish-Mohawk Indian became the voice of poor white Americana by Geoffrey Clarfield
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Life Inside Walmart’s Perfect City
The model of America’s oligarch urbanism is Bentonville, Arkansas, a dazzling but eerie new cultural capital of the South
By Sean Cooper
Philadelphia recedes through the cabin window of my plane, the Comcast towers and turtle-shell stadiums disappearing, along with the drug and gun epidemics swallowing neighborhoods whole.
I land in an entirely different version of an American city. Rolling through the wide, lush, tree-lined streets of Bentonville, Arkansas, I have arrived in what appears to be a safe, clean, outpost in northwest Arkansas that in short order has become home to a flourishing middle class and the best museums within a thousand miles. I’ve made it just in time for the start of the Bentonville Film Festival. At the pristine Skylight Cinema I snag one of the last backrow seats just before the house lights dim.
After some cursory remarks from the festival’s organizers thanking Walmart, the founding sponsor, as well as Coca-Cola, the presenting sponsor, the films begin. I soon realize we won’t be watching films at all. The first tranche of screenings for this Storytellers Showcase, which I wrongly assumed to be a slate of indie shorts, are instead the finalists who’d created commercials as part of the Coca-Cola Refreshing Films Program.
The opening spot features a slim, attractive white woman texting plans to meet up with a slim attractive Indian woman at an AMC cineplex, where they purchase Cokes in the lobby before walking into the theater. The camera pans over 28 diverse audience members—many ethnicities, gay couples, etc.—with everyone holding a Coke product, label out, smiling like children being tucked into bed. And that’s the commercial. ”I strive to give representation to outcasts and underdogs,” the director, Christine Zivic, writes in the mission statement I find on my phone. “My upbringing in a neurodiverse family, with Serbian and French-Canadian parents informs my progressive outlook on cultural diversity and inclusion.”
I look around the theater to see if anyone else is confused or surprised to have paid $40 for a ticket to this screening, only to end up watching soda commercials. But the standing-room-only crowd, some of whom are drinking Cokes purchased in the lobby, appear entranced.
In the next commercial, I realize that Zivic misstepped by not including anyone from the disabled community. Titled “A Leg Up,” this spot follows a young white girl with a broken leg and crutches frustrated by her injury as she tries to make a meal in her kitchen. Suddenly appearing in the theater lobby, she purchases her 48 oz. Coke and large popcorn, and then via some movie magic that helps her carry the wares, she’s in her seat beaming manically. The theater is packed: A young white man high-fives a young Black man, a trio of women, one Asian, one Black, and one white joyfully recline into their seats, while nearby a young white woman with blond hair leans on the shoulder of her young Black date.
They all go on like this, and oddly, none of the creators introducing their finalist spots in prerecorded messages, nor the festival organizers adding their 2 cents at the front of the theater, calls them commercials—or even branded content. These are all films.
And this, I realize, is Bentonville—the greatest product Walmart has ever sold.
Ashort walk from the film festival screen is the free-admission site of the Walmart History Museum, a temporary location while the new state-of-the-art facility, set to launch in 2024, is under construction. It is easy to forget, wandering the museum, that for much of the first 20 years of this century, Walmart’s reputation was in tatters. Perusing Sam Walton’s family photos, and the lucite paperweights of mini Walmart stock prospectuses, the case is convincingly made that all Walton ever wanted to do was spread the good gospel of affordable prices for regular, working-day people.
In the back of the museum, a holographic Sam Walton sits on a stool in a bright, white box. He wears a red tie, sports coat, and blue jeans. Though Sam died in 1992, and the box has more than a passing resemblance to an open coffin, the virtual Walton appears quite real, shifting his weight back and forth while he waits for visitors to engage his AI-powered voice to discuss his road to success as one of the richest humans in history. When I try to chat up the projection, Walton’s major motor functions seemed to be offline, yet his digital eyes still follow me as I read his words off a display. “I would like to be remembered as a good friend,” he once said. “I have such a strong feeling for the folks in our company. They have meant so much to me.”
Some of those folks—or associates, in Walmart’s parlance—might have struggled to fully register the warm feelings during and after Sam’s reign. The history of Walmart’s breakneck expansion across the United States includes a long list of victims broken or destroyed by the company. “Wal-Mart has been fingered as the source of virtually every conceivable economic ill. It kills jobs and downtowns, say critics, and destroys community character,” according to a 2008 Federal Reserve Bank report. “[Walmart’s] been accused of discriminating against women, using illegal immigrants, requiring work off the clock and being overly aggressive in stopping the formation of labor unions among its workers. It’s been blamed for sprawl and traffic congestion, as well as aesthetic offenses.”
As Walmart’s communications officers have tirelessly argued in response to such criticisms, the company provided products at a low price to many places that didn’t have them, as well as jobs where the alternatives might have been fast food, dangerous factory work, or nothing at all. Still, their low wages left tens of thousands of workers unable to “make ends meet without their paychecks being leavened by government food stamps, Medicaid, or the succor of a nonprofit,” as Rick Wartzman observes in his book about the retailer, Still Broke.
In contrast to a company like General Motors, which, as Wartzman points out, helped build the postwar American middle class with union job security and benefits, the cutthroat mentality incubated by Sam Walton in Bentonville was to use Walmart’s dominance to eliminate retail competitors by slashing costs wherever possible—including on labor.
Walmart’s aggressive anti-union approach thwarted some doomed organizing efforts in the 1980s and 1990s, rapidly deploying corporate staff that could unleash a full court press against any sign of union activity in the break rooms. “I’ve never seen a company that will go to the lengths that Walmart goes to, to avoid a union,” said Martin Levitt, a former Walmart consultant who later wrote a book titled Confessions of a Union Buster. “They have zero tolerance.”
In the late 2000s, Walmart’s image had become so bad, and recruitment of top talent so difficult, that the company finally began to change some of its ways, at least cosmetically, by embracing environmental and corporate social justice initiatives, though it would take until this year for the company to bump its minimum hourly rate to $14—still hardly enough to keep track with the cost of living.
It was at this time that the family began investing in Bentonville, a former sleepy Southern town of livestock processing factories and cash crop farms that happened to become the headquarters to Walmart after Sam Walton opened his first retail location nearby. The exponential economic growth of Walmart catalyzed a similar change of pace across the whole city—and indeed all of northwest Missouri—which has led to the explosive sprawl of beautifully designed restaurants and cultural amenities like the Tower Bar, the top-floor bar of Bentonville’s new modern art museum, The Momentary, where I found myself after an afternoon of film festival screenings.
One couple sat along the wall of glass quietly drinking craft cocktails and watching clouds float by like stage props, while Prince’s How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore played to the otherwise empty sixth-floor lounge. Midcentury bucket chairs and glistening terrazzo floors completed the cosmopolitan lacquer of this newly remodeled town, firming up an emergent version of the city that would be unfamiliar to anyone who called it home just a decade ago. But that kind of acute alienation from the recent past can simply be a sign of incredible progress.
“Boy, they make it seem like it’s the biggest thing in the world,” said Zach Orr, who’d taken a bar stool beside me. Orr was talking about the film festival, spread out along the lush lawn of The Momentary, which includes an outdoor performance stage that hosts popular bluegrass bands and once hot hip-hop acts like Wu-Tang and Outkast’s Big Boi. Like several other attractions in the area, the museum charges no admission, and the entire complex—museum, music venue, bar, artist-in-residence studio spaces—is one of dozens of big ticket projects spearheaded in recent years by the Walton brood. Before it opened, Sam Walton’s grandson Tom said The Momentary would be “huge for the younger generation, the millennial,” the type of attraction that would help Bentonville “become one of the hottest destinations in the country.”
Orr, 31, looked over a printed lineup for the Walton-funded film festival, noting that the program’s politics also seemed targeted to millennials. “Purpose Driven Progress,” he said, reading the title of a panel on the main stage. “That’s just about people competing to complain about who’s the biggest victim. Oh, wow—you’re a victim, in the most progressive community in America. I just don’t care. I’m too busy making money.”
A native of Little Rock, Orr had embraced the hustler’s mentality when he dropped out of the state university in Fayetteville. “I was going to class losing $1,000 a day,” he said, recalling the cost of attending lectures compared to running his power-washing business, cleaning the thousands of new windows sparkling across the booming business and residential sectors of Bentonville, which now stands as the commercial engine of northwest Arkansas (NWA). Selling the operation for a handsome pay day, Orr left the area for several years, streamlining front-of-house operations for Twin Peaks locations around the Middle West, a sports lodge chain chipping away at Hooter’s dominance in the breastaurant category. The nomadic pleasures of well-paid road life waned, though, as the siren of opportunity back home grew too loud to ignore.
When you talk to people in Bentonville a lot of stories go like this: Something the Walton’s built or funded created new, lucrative opportunities for various schemes and side hustles. Orr’s family, for example, recently caught wind of the site of the latest mountain bike trail being built in the area, and were poised to expand their rental property business to cash in on the new hot spot. Mountain biking was never a thing in Bentonville—but it’s a passion pursuit of Tom Walton and his brother Stuart, the millennial third gen heirs who’ve peeled off $75 million from the family fortune to build out hundreds of miles of new biking trails that, practically overnight, have made the four cities within northwest Arkansas—Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, and Fayetteville—an international destination for cycling. As the site of the cyclocross world championships (sponsored by Walmart) and dozens of other events each year, the massive cash expenditure to build out the trails that thread in and around the downtown corridors have elevated the sport into a $159 million local market. Providing an outdoor recreational activity to Walmart’s middle-class knowledge workers and the thousands of vendors and suppliers that operate in close proximity to the retail giant, the money turned out to be a great “return on investment” Tom Walton told Outside magazine—and “a great model for rural America.”
Sipping The Momentary house old fashioned, I asked Orr about the seven construction cranes just outside the window in the middle distance. In fact, all around Bentonville, the only sound of comparable frequency to the whizzing metallic whine from packs of spandexed mountain bikers coasting along the wide, protected bike lanes that line the pristine streets was the heavy bang of dozers, jackhammers, and nail guns busily creating new luxury townhouses and commercial buildings on what seemed like every block. It’s all part of the infrastructure and housing needed to keep up with the inflow of 36 people currently moving to NWA every day. Recent estimates predict the area will double its current population to a million by 2045, a flood of new city dwellers that would make top-tier cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston blush with envy as they struggle to grow or even maintain their post-pandemic populations.
For Orr, as with many here I encountered, the primary draw is the opportunities created by Walmart. As both the world’s largest retailer, with a store at least 10 miles from every American driving up annual sales to some $570 billion, the company is also the biggest employer in America, with roughly 1.6 million people on its rolls—the equivalent of the entire city of Philadelphia. Walmart’s leaders have seen the writing on the wall about brick and mortar, and are now finally embracing the digital sphere as they spin up an e-commerce platform to compete with Amazon. Such an undertaking, though, requires a new kind of workforce—a highly educated talent pool of software engineers, web developers, cyber security experts, and other web-business operators accustomed to the restaurants, shopping, recreation, and entertainment they find in coastal urban centers. A type of lifestyle, in other words, that wasn’t available in the Ozark Mountains until Walmart decided to remodel them.
“I have connections to the people building the campus,” Orr said of the new Walmart headquarters being built by those cranes in front of us, adding that his uncle manages one of the construction outfits behind the new 350-acre Walmart home office. The roughly $1 billion facility will open in 2025 with 12 office buildings, its own hotel, pools, a yoga studio, and on-site fitness and food offerings competitive with the headquarters of Apple and other top Silicon Valley operators. “So I say, give me your campus, that’s like $40,000 a month in power-washing maintenance,” Orr says, estimating what he can make once he starts up a new power-washing outfit. “That’s my BMW account.”
Just about everyone I meet in Bentonville turns out to either be getting in on the Walmart hustle or know a handful of people trying to climb the ladder within the Walton extended family universe. The opportunities seem endless. As long as you are willing to play the game, you can come out a winner.
And it is a game that doesn’t appear to have many appealing alternatives—particularly for the region’s fastest growing target demographic, Americans in their 30s. It was that slice of the age bracket that held almost $4 trillion in debt by the end of 2022, a 27% increase from three years prior and the fastest rate of debt accumulation for the age group since the 2008 Great Recession. Looking to stretch their dollars, young, white-collar professionals continue to flood out of states with high costs of living. Last year, New York and California said goodbye to more upwardly mobile American workers under 35 than any other state, with most heading to the middle of the country.
But it’s not just economics repelling young Americans from expensive coastal enclaves. While crime rates are finally beginning to dip in major urban centers, the remote work exodus out of dense office districts took commercial activity with it, leaving behind clusters of homeless camps that continue to drive away retailers and restaurants of all sizes while office skyscrapers go dormant from lack of activity. Combine the decline in downtown amenities with some of the worst public transit systems in the country, and it’s no surprise that affordable, safe, and well-run cities like Bentonville are ascendant.
Yet, there’s a catch to getting all of these amenities at such a good price: The benefactors who built this city have a very particular notion of what life should look like. This isn’t so different from company towns built by reigning business titans of their day—at least the ones like Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Lowell, Massachusetts, which were generally benevolent to the employees they recruited to these corporate-centric communities, helping to build homes, churches, community centers, and even critical infrastructure while instilling a reigning culture that, as much as anything else, held up the company as an enlightened entity worthy of loyalty and devotion. What distinguishes Bentonivlle is that no family has ever had so much money at their disposal to execute such a comprehensive vision of what it means to live in an American city.
And Bentonville is but one example of a city being built festival by festival and museum by museum by America’s oligarchy, where fashionable politics and a trendy arts scene serve as the benign or even beautiful face of ruthless corporatization and elbows-out labor practices. It is, in fact, leading the way for a flourishing new form of oligarch urbanism—of centralized development concentrated around the interests and unprecedented wealth of a small group of the ultrarich. While these metro areas reflect the idiosyncratic preferences of their patrons—bike trails, eco-preservation, and modern American art in the case of Bentonville—they rely on the same homogenized corporate structures of clustered nonprofits and for-profit consultant entities that vertically integrate the local government and business economy to serve the parent corporation which the benefactors ultimately control.
To be sure, there were advantages to fabricating an entire metro area up from scratch with seemingly no budget constraints. Not only had the Waltons given birth to an entirely new arts scene and thriving recreational biking and hiking economy, but they helped the city with little budget items, too, smoothing out growing pains that can hinder local governments trying to quickly absorb tens of thousands of new residents. When I popped into the pristine city hall building to check out its calendar, I noticed that the city council was voting on a half-million dollars in grants from the Walton Family Foundation for a revised city land-use plan, as well as runway improvements at the local airport.
Read the rest at Tabletmag.com.
Yeah I googled it and can confirm that it’s a pretty sick mullet.
Gadi Taub’s article re: the ongoing attack on the Netanyahu govts effort to rein in the Supreme Court is nothing short of frightening!
The level of delusion and diabolical machinations on the Left to achieve their Authoritarian ends is beyond insane. It is unadulterated evil.
I pray for the people of Israel to see through their wickedness and save the country from these suicidal megalomaniacs.