The Volkswagen Kills Edition
Today, we open with a little (1:01 minutes) film about Volkswagens and death. Then there is a strong article about the national parks and the drive to steal those public resources. We have a little short story about a guy pulling off one of the oldest cons – “Producers” style. There are several business ethics stories but the most interesting of what follows is a public musing on what might happen if Donald Trump loses. I don’t think his supporters are going home quietly after the election, either.
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James Pilant
From Reuters!
Read more from one my favorite blogs – Dear Kitty, Some Blog.
National Parks in danger of privatization and neglect
While the political landscape has tilted, public support for national parks remains rock solid. It’s almost impossible to find an issue that 95% Americans agree on, but polling suggests this is the level of support for federal government protection of national parks.
Separate polls show a hefty majority of voters would be unhappy if their representatives stripped protections from public land. A record number of visitors – almost 305 million – gazed at the vistas of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Gettysburg and other NPS properties last year.
While the NPS could be enjoying a triumphant centennial in 2016, it has to cajole funds from a recalcitrant Congress to deal with crumbling visitor centres, trails, campgrounds and education programs.
An overdue maintenance backlog has grown from a headache under George W Bush to a weeping sore under Obama. It will cost nearly $12bn to patch up all of the creaking infrastructure in national parks, at a time when a recent study found Congress has trimmed the budget of the NPS about 15% over the past 15 years.
It sounds like the plot of Broadway hit “The Producers” come to life: A man conned seven investors into giving him $165,000 to produce a fake Broadway play, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said Friday.
CEO Severance Raises EyebrowsThe corporate food system rigs the game
What do Trump supporters do if he loses?
So I think the danger is . . . when they lose and I tend to agree with you, I think they’re gonna lose, although it’s not guaranteed. The question is, If the vote total is close — if it’s 10 points, it’s different — but if it’s 4 points or 5 points or less, where do they go? I wrote “Dear White America” in 2012. My argument at the time was, What do these white folks do who have been nurtured in this anxiety and resentment and this idea that they’ve ‘lost their country’?
At the time I was thinking about the Tea Party; I wasn’t even thinking about Trumpkins. My point at the time was, What do these people do? Are these the kind of people who gladly say, “Oh gosh, we lost, that sucks. But we’ll just work harder next time and gosh darn it, in four years we’ll come back and we’ll be ready to go.” My argument was then, and is now, I don’t think that that’s what Trump’s people are like. I don’t think Trump’s people are the kind of people who go, “Gosh darn it. How can we tweak our message to get moderate voters?” These are people who I think, to be perfectly honest, lose in November and then they look around and look at their wall and they say, “Well goddamn. We’ve got a lot of guns. We don’t have the vote, but we got the guns.”
Is Wal-Mart a magnet for criminals?
Time reported last week that police in many communities get more calls to Walmart shopping centers than anywhere else. For some stores, police are called multiple times a day. The problem appears to be far larger for Walmart than for competing retailers like Target. And the crime ranges from mostly standard shoplifting and petty theft to the occasional rape, stabbing, shooting, murder, or meth lab hidden in a 6-foot drainage pipe under the store parking lot.
“I’ve got all my bad guys in one place,” Darrell Ross, a Tulsa police officer permanently stationed at the local Walmart, joked to Bloomberg.
Critics in both stories point to Walmart’s aggressive cost-cutting, beginning in 2000 with the tenure of former CEO Lee Scott, as a big part of the problem. Retail consultants told Time that Walmart likely has about 400,000 fewer workers in the U.S. today than a decade ago. In giant stores that can range up to five acres, that translates into one worker for every 524 square feet of retail space — a 19 percent decrease in workers per square foot from 10 years ago. The greeters at the entrances are gone, many cashiers have been replaced with automated checkout scanners, and there are simply fewer eyeballs monitoring everything than before.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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