Late last year, the federal government allowed its emergency unemployment compensation benefits program to expire. This decision has left much of the nation’s long-term unemployed without access to unemployment insurance after their standard eligibility ended. Efforts to revive the program have not been successful so far.
Read the whole story at 24/7 Wall St.
Steal a pen from your office and you could find yourself on a path toward becoming the next Bernie Madoff.
That's the warning of a new study, called "The Slippery Slope: How Small Ethical Transgressions Pave The Way For Larger Future Transgressions," by David Welsh of the University of Washington, Lisa Ordóñez of the University of Arizona, Deirdre Snyder of Providence College, and Michael Christian of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. According to the study, which was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, minor unethical behavior at work, if undetected, puts workers on a "slippery slope" that could lead to worse behavior over time.
Stealing a pen is basically a gateway to massive corporate fraud.To most of us, fairly innocuous sins like taking a pen from work or neglecting to refill the office coffee pot are much easier to justify than, say, racking up $2 billion in trading losses. But over time, the researchers found, those minor misdeeds make it easier to justify more and bigger evils in the long run.
“People rationalize their behavior to justify it,” Ordóñez, one of the study's authors, said in a press release. "They might think ‘No one got hurt,’ or ‘Everyone does it.’ The next time, they feel fine about doing something a little bit worse the next time and then commit more severe unethical actions.”
The researchers tested this theory by watching subjects in a number of different situations. One interesting experiment found that subjects who were given 25 cents for doing a minor unethical thing were much more likely to take $2.50 to do something more egregious later on than those who were offered $2.50 to do a big no-no at the start. According to the researchers, this shows that people are less likely to commit what they call "abrupt and large dilemmas" when they haven't already committed gradual, small transgressions.
If you're considering taking home a ream of copy paper, just think: doing so could land you behind bars with this guy.The study cites Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years in prison for orchestrating the largest Ponzi scheme in history and spoke of this phenomenon to his longtime secretary, according to Vanity Fair:
“Well, you know what happens is, it starts out with you taking a little bit, maybe a few hundred, a few thousand. You get comfortable with that, and before you know it, it snowballs into something big.”
So what can you do to prevent yourself from becoming the next Jeff Skilling?
The researchers offer a number of tips to discourage the minor stuff, like putting in place a firm set of ethical guidelines and calling workers out for the small things, like taking home too many office supplies.
“The ideal is for employees to recognize when they’ve committed a minor transgression and check themselves," Michael S. Christian, one of the paper's co-authors, wrote.
Accused of paying its workers too little, Walmart has responded in the most 2014 way possible: by being snarky on the Internet with a "fact check." Unfortunately, it is longer on snark than on facts.
Walmart rep David Tovar recently took a digital red pen and marked up a New York Times opinion column by Timothy Egan that suggested Walmart could help fix America's income inequality problem simply by raising wages for its low-paid workers. It was a fun idea with a lot of viral potential, and way cheaper than actually paying a living wage.
So. Hilarious. At least to right-wingers: The Wall Street Journal's in-house rape apologist James Taranto called it "devastating." NewsBusters called it not just "devastating" but also "spirited." Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller called it "EPIC."
In the face of such success, it seems almost unsporting to fact-check Walmart's fact-check -- almost, but not quite. (Tovar's full fact-check can be seen at the end of this story.)
Egan accused Walmart of draining U.S. tax coffers because its workers make so little that they have to go on food stamps and other public assistance to make ends meet. "We are the largest tax payer in America," Tovar countered. "Can we see your math?"
Actually, we would like to see Walmart's math, because Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Apple and Wells Fargo paid more in taxes than Walmart, according to a January study by 24/7 Wall Street. That study used 2012 data in some cases, but fresher numbers haven't changed the picture much, according to HuffPost's review of company financial reports. It could be that Tovar meant that Walmart has the biggest U.S. tax bill, but that would also not be correct -- Apple paid more in U.S. taxes than Walmart in the latest fiscal year. Wells Fargo, too, if you count deferred taxes, as the bank does, taking a hit to earnings.
Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg said in a phone interview that the company was looking into the discrepancy.
Walmart does pay a lot in taxes, for sure -- more than $6 billion in U.S. federal taxes alone in its latest fiscal year. But by not paying its workers a living wage, which does force some unknown number of them onto public assistance, its policies also arguably eat into a lot of tax revenue. A recent study by Americans For Tax Fairness estimated that Walmart workers cost the U.S. government $6.2 billion a year. The group also estimated that Walmart and its founding Walton family cost the government another $1.6 billion in tax revenue through various tax loopholes.
Walmart has repeatedly disputed the ATF's $6.2 billion number, and Tovar did so again in his fact-check. Trouble is, Walmart never offers any numbers of its own. Tovar claimed, "We see more associates move off of public assistance as a result of their job at Walmart." But that is not a particularly informative statement. "More" than what? Do more associates move off of public assistance than move on to it? How many move in each direction annually? Tovar's link takes you to one person's story in a YouTube video -- which, thanks, but without hard numbers, this is not so much a fact-check as it is an unsubstantiated assertion.
Walmart's Lundberg said the company has studied the number of its workers who are on public assistance, but declined to share its data.
"There are people that come to Walmart on public assistance, and through their job at Walmart, we see that most are able to move off of it within a couple of years," he said.
Regarding a 2013 study by House Democrats that estimated that one store in Wisconsin costs taxpayers nearly $1 million per year in assistance, Tovar claimed the fact-checking website Politifact has declared it "mostly false." But Tovar's claim is mostly misleading -- Politifact was addressing an Ed Schultz segment on MSNBC that cited the study, not the study itself.
Tovar also claimed that the company pays hourly employees $12.91 an hour, and that this figure does not include the pay of any store managers. But Walmart's pay figure has not changed much from what it was in previous years, when it did include some store managers who are paid hourly.
In a phone interview, spokesman Lundberg conceded that the latest figure does include some department managers who are paid hourly. Tovar's fact-check is not factual.
Egan's column cited a November 2013 story by Fortune reporter Stephen Gandel, which argued that Walmart could "give workers a 50 percent raise without hurting shareholder value." In his "fact check," Tovar questioned the credibility of Gandel, an established journalist, without offering any reason to do so. He suggested that we should instead listen to Jason Furman, chairman of President Barack Obama's Council Of Economic Advisors, as if Furman had recently written something that countered Gandel's argument.
Tovar did offer a link to an unrelated piece by Furman from 2006 about how Walmart helps the poor by letting them buy cheap stuff. Furman's piece was flawed -- Walmart could probably also help the poor by giving them better wages -- but, more importantly, it has no relation to Gandel's argument.
In the past, Walmart has also pointed to a 2005 paper by Furman that calls Walmart a "progressive success story." But in that paper, Furman also wrote that Walmart "does not pay enough for a family to live the dignified life Americans have come to expect and demand" and that the company had tried to shred the social safety net on which many of its low-paid workers rely.
Tovar did not dispute a recent Lake Research Partners survey that found Walmart has a 28 percent disapproval rating among Americans. Instead, he used math to point out that this result means that Walmart has a 72-percent approval rating. He did not mention that rivals Target, Costco and Amazon have far, far higher approval ratings than Walmart.
Tovar also rather desperately tried to co-opt some of the corporate goodwill that has been accumulated by Starbucks over the years, by marking up an Egan sentence about Starbucks' OK pay and benefits to make it look as if Walmart offers OK pay and benefits, too.
Tovar wrapped up his rebuttal by suggesting that Egan write a different story. This story would be one about how Walmart is helping bring back the American Dream by buying more U.S.-made goods -- which is pretty ballsy, after Walmart has spent decades helping to wreck America's manufacturing base by selling us cheaply made foreign goods. This alternative story would also explain how Walmart is "expanding training, education and workforce development programs," all stuff that Walmart says is more important than just paying a boring old living wage.
This is the standard corporate objection to raising wages: We're not going to pay people more now, we're going to train them so they can earn more in the distant future. But you can't eat education, or pay your mortgage with a workforce development program. Why can't low-wage workers have some of both?
I'm going to have to declare Walmart's fact check "Mostly Bullshit."
Here's Tovar's response in its entirety:
The biggest question about American Apparel's ousting of chief executive Dov Charney might be why it didn't happen long ago.
In a press release Wednesday, American Apparel's board of directors said their decision to remove Charney "grew out of an ongoing investigation into alleged misconduct." While the company doesn't give a reason for his firing, Charney has been at the center of several lawsuits filed by former employees, accusing him of sexual and other harassment. He also has a reputation for lewd behavior.
But Charney easily could have been fired many times for a more obvious reason: Quite simply, his company has performed terribly under his leadership in recent years.
"As a CEO he failed on the most basic of levels," said Brian Sozzi, chief equities analyst at Belus Capital Advisors. He called the board's lack of action until now a "great mystery."
American Apparel's business has struggled for years. The company hasn't posted an annual profit since 2009 and has racked up $270 million in losses since the beginning of 2010. The clothing chain was brought to the brink earlier this year when it faced a debt payment and didn't have enough cash on hand to pay. Charney found an investor just in time.
Supply-chain problems have plagued the retailer, which makes its assortment of casual clothes in the United States. A federal investigation in 2009 found that thousands of employees at an American Apparel factory complex in downtown Los Angeles had problems with their status as legal workers. The company was forced to fire about 1,800 immigrant workers, nearly a third of its workforce. Then in 2012, the opening of a new distribution center proved disastrous, costing the retailer millions and leaving it short on cash.
Some of Charney's broader strategic decisions haven't worked either. In 2010, excessive expansion nearly bankrupted the retailer. More recently, sales withered as American Apparel tried to weather the assault from rapidly expanding fast-fashion monoliths Zara, H&M and Forever 21, which bring styles from the runway to store shelves in weeks.
Shares of the company's stock have dropped below $1 this year after trading as high as $15 per share in 2007.
Retailers have fired CEOs for less, Brean Capital analyst Eric Beder told HuffPost. The fact that the board didn't show Charney the door in 2013 or before makes it more likely this decision isn't related to company performance, he noted. And lately, American Apparel has improved.
Antony Karabus, CEO of Hilco Retail Consulting, said Charney received so many lifelines over the past few years, even as the mistakes piled up around him, because he was American Apparel's well-known figurehead. But now, as the business becomes more complex and competition ramps up, the retailer needs a more experienced, professional executive at its helm.
"It's time to separate the individual from the company," said Karabus.
The board has suspended Charney and moved to fire him after a 30-day waiting period, as required by his contract. Chief Financial Officer John Luttrell, a veteran of retailers Old Navy, Wet Seal and Cost Plus, has been named interim CEO while the company searches for a full-time replacement.
"We take no joy in this, but the board felt it was the right thing to do," Allan Mayer, the company's newly appointed co-chairman, said in a statement.
A spokesman for Sitrick & Co., an external firm to which American Apparel's public relations department referred questions, declined to comment beyond the press release. Attempts to reach Charney by phone were not successful.
Johannes Minho Roth, whose investment firm owns a stake of about 13 percent in American Apparel, speculated to Bloomberg that the company may be planning for a sale.
Whatever the case, Charney hasn't quite yet been defeated. The L.A. Times reported that the embattled executive is determined to fight to the very end to regain control of the company.
We've seen some pretty ridiculous flops during the first round of the World Cup. But a new Durex ad urges us to quit the fake performances in another arena: the bedroom.
Of course the "flop" in soccer is a notorious technique in which a player overreacts to contact from opposing players in order to get a penalty called against the other team. The tongue-in-cheek ad depicts soccer players dramatizing nonexistent fouls as if they were career-ending injuries and ends with the condom maker telling viewers "#dontfakeit."
Durex clearly knows that if there are two things that truly unite the world, it's sex and soccer.
Tesla may already be reaping the rewards of freeing up its patents.
Four days after CEO Elon Musk offered most of his company’s patents to rivals in hopes of cultivating a bigger electric car market, Nissan and BMW are “keen on talks” to cooperate on charging networks, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.
That pretty much validates why the Silicon Valley company freed up its patents in the first place: Tesla wants its superchargers to become the industry standard.
That way, other companies will use and enlarge Tesla's existing network of 97 charging stations that currently dot a path across the continental United States, making it more and more feasible to swap fuel-burning cars for battery-electric ones, even for long-distance travel.
Here's Tesla's current network of 97 charging stations:
Think of electric cars in terms of smartphones.
Tesla -– long compared to Apple, with its sleek design, luxury prices and chargers that exclusively plug in to Apple products –- now wants to become open-source like Android. Like the micro-USB chargers that fit Android and Blackberry smartphones, all compatible cars could use Tesla’s superchargers.
“It makes natural sense,” Carter Driscoll, senior analyst of clean technology at MLV & Co., told The Huffington Post. “BMW and Nissan see that you have a company here that’s dedicated to electric vehicles.”
Alexis Georgeson, a Tesla spokeswoman, declined to comment and a spokesperson for BMW did not immediately respond to HuffPost. Nissan spokesman Travis Parman said it is working with "with numerous partners across the world" to develop charing infrastructure.
"We welcome others joining in the effort as we believe universally compatible charging will further accelerate [electric vehicle] adoption," Parman said in a statement emailed to HuffPost.
BMW -- which last week released its i8, meant to compete with the Tesla Model S, in Germany -- said on Friday it had talks with Tesla on "how to further strengthen the development of electro-mobility on an international level."
Seemingly in response to the news, Tesla's stock price rallied to its highest point in months on Monday.
So, why design new chargers and invest in building a whole new infrastructure for BMW and Nissan drivers? The Tesla network already stretches from coast to coast and is expected to expand rapidly over the next year.
Here's what Tesla's network of charging stations could look like by the end of 2015:
This seems to have been Musk’s plan all along.
Tesla’s planned “gigafactory,” due to start production in 2020, will be the biggest battery-making facility in the world. At peak production, it alone will create 500,000 lithium-ion packs a year, more than all batteries produced worldwide last year.
That’s more than enough to fuel the competition, and then some.
This post has been updated to reflect that Tesla's patents were not trade secrets, and with a statement from Nissan.
