Wal-Mart Watch: The Times’ Steven Greenhouse reports on the growing movement to beat back Wal-Mart race-to-the-bottom assault on workers’ economic security:

Union leaders, academics and community activists plan to hold an unusual meeting in Washington today to begin mapping out a strategy to check Wal-Mart’s growing power and to press the company to improve its wages and benefits…Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, convened the meeting, which will bring together union leaders, professors who have studied Wal-Mart and leaders of Acorn and other community groups…Many union officials have complained that the United Food and Commercial Workers, the union with jurisdiction to unionize Wal-Mart, has done too little to try to organize the retailer and has been highly unsuccessful in those efforts.

…One idea that will be under consideration at the meeting, several participants said, is to issue a set of principles, like the Sullivan principles for South Africa, that Wal-Mart would be urged to follow regarding wages and treatment of its workers. John Wilhelm, president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, has recommended that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. focus on just two things after the November elections: politics and finding ways to press Wal-Mart to improve wages and benefits.

As Nathan points out, the best line of the article is this one citing Wal-Mart’s spokesperson:

She said that while critics say 40 percent of Wal-Mart’s workers do not have company health insurance, 90 percent of its employees have health benefits through some plan – perhaps a spouse’s or through state Medicaid.

In other words, Wal-Mart is so committed to free enterprise that its workers depend for healthcare on…the government and other businesses, which are both forced to effectively subsidize Wal-Mart’s wage- and benefit-slashing approach to business.

Sam Smith:

READER ROY ROCKWELL points out something stunningly absent from all the verbiage about torture spewing out of Washington: neither George Bush nor Donald Rumsfeld has issued a direct order not to do it again: no more beatings, excessive restraints, torture of children, attacks on eyes, sexual threats and abuse, naked punishment, women’s underwear worn on the head, hoods, sleep deprivation, pouring ice cold water or using dogs to bite prisoners…The order should be issued by Bush and should apply to federal prisons in this country as well as those in Iraq and Gitmo. Anything less is an implicit approval of torture at home and abroad.

Amen.

Human Rights Watch condemns Malaysia for selling out Indonesian domestic workers:

On May 10, the two countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding that seeks to regulate recruitment procedures for the hundreds of thousands of Indonesians who migrate to Malaysia for work each year. One to two million Indonesian migrants work in Malaysia, and more than half of them do not have legal immigration status. Approximately 75 percent of legal migrants are women…

“This migrant labor agreement misses the opportunity to protect the rights of those who need it most,” said LaShawn R. Jefferson, executive director of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. “Indonesian workers often encounter abuses at every stage of the migration cycle, but this accord treats them like tradable goods, with almost no guarantees for their rights.” Abuses against Indonesian migrant workers—including unpaid wages, unsafe working conditions, restrictions on freedom of movement, and verbal and physical abuse—are rampant.

Scientists mull resigning from the Advisory Board of the FDA over its choice to disregard its own experts and the interests of millions of women and men:

“E-mails suggesting mass resignations are already flying around among people who were on this committee,” says Michael Greene, a Harvard OB-GYN who serves on the Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. “People are just hopping mad. The decision is blatantly contrary to the science and the facts, and so blatantly politicized.”

In December, Greene’s panel and the Non-Prescription Drugs Advisory Committee voted 23 to 4 in favor of selling Plan B, a “morning-after pill,” over the counter. The FDA almost always follows its outside experts’ advice.

The National Review’s Deroy Murdock tracks Ashcroft’s war on pot:

The Justice Department has appealed a December 2003 federal court decision that barred Uncle Sam from impeding Californians who use personally grown, locally cultivated, or charitably donated medical marijuana. In Raich v. Ashcroft, the Ninth Circuit correctly disallowed the Constitution’s commerce-clause rationale for federal intervention. After all, how can interstate commerce include intrastate, noncommercial activity? Rather than accept defeat and confront genuine dangers, Attorney General John Ashcroft seeks Supreme Court permission to keep raiding medical-marijuana suppliers and harassing people such as Angel Raich who has used medical marijuana to treat a brain tumor, wasting syndrome, seizures, and more…

“We are disappointed, but not surprised, that Attorney General Ashcroft has chosen to ask the Supreme Court for what amounts to a license to attack the sick,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Washington-based Marijuana Policy Project. “Conservatives should be appalled that the Justice Department is arguing that two patients and their caregivers, growing and using medical marijuana within California — using California seeds, California soil, California water, and California equipment, and engaging in no commercial activity whatsoever — are somehow engaged in ‘interstate commerce.'”

I’ll be the first to admit that while I see instrumental value, in some cases, in local control, I don’t see inherent moral worth in it and I’m yet to be convinced that citizens’ rights are better protected by granting rights to their states. But it would be good to see more conservatives like Murdock up in arms when the federal government is intervening to stop states from veering left of federal policy rather than only when states want more leeway to, say, poison more groundwater or treat welfare mothers worse than their neighboring states. Good to know I’m not the only one troubled when the Bush Administration sends Condi Rice on television to compare California loosening restrictions on medical marijuana to states resisting federal orders against segregation…

More civil service civil disobedience:

One week before same-sex marriage becomes legal in Massachusetts, the Cape Cod town of Provincetown voted Monday to issue marriage licenses to out-of-state same-sex couples even if they have no intention of moving to Massachusetts. The move contradicts a directive by Gov. Mitt Romney, who has said that no same-sex couples residing out of state would be allowed to marry here.

…the board of selectmen in Provincetown, a town with a large gay population, voted unanimously to issue the licenses even if the applicants declare on the form that they do not intend to live in Massachusetts. The new policy reads: “The town clerk may issue marriage licenses to any persons — whether residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, non-commonwealth residents that intend to reside in Massachusetts, or non-commonwealth residents that do not intend to reside in Massachusetts.” The couples must sign the form, attesting that they have been truthful on their application and that they know of no “legal impediment” to their marriage.

According to a Red Cross Report disclosed today:

…coalition intelligence officers estimated that 70-90 percent of Iraqi detainees were arrested by mistake and said Red Cross observers witnessed U.S. officers mistreating Abu Ghraib prisoners by keeping them naked in total darkness in empty cells. The report…supports its allegations that abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was broad and “not individual acts” — contrary to President Bush’s contention that the mistreatment “was the wrongdoing of a few.”

The report said “high-value detainees” were singled out for special mistreatment. The report did not specify them, but The Associated Press has learned they included some of the 55 top officials in Saddam Hussein’s regime who were named in a deck of cards given to troops. “Since June 2003, over 100 ‘high-value detainees’ have been held for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells devoid of daylight,” the report said. “ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogators,” according to the confidential report.

Meanwhile, what does the Commander-in-Chief have to say?

You are courageously leading our nation in the war against terror,” Mr. Bush said after meeting at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld, who stood by his side during the president’s remarks. “You’re doing a superb job. You are a strong secretary of defense and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude.”

Residents of Zephyrhills, FL, home of “Pure Water from a Pure Place,” explain their zealous opposition to naming a street after Dr. King:

Sixth Avenue residents said that the Council had railroaded the plan without consulting them and that they did not want the bother of changing their addresses. A business owner told local newspapers that property values would fall, saying streets named after Dr. King were a guarantee of economic blight.

…Cullen Smith said he would have preferred to name the street after Abraham Lincoln, who he said had done “more for the black people than just about anybody.”

But let it not be said that they’re the only predominately white community which wants its street names white:

Most of the [MLK] streets are in the South, in places where the population is at least 30 percent black. Georgia, Dr. King’s birthplace, has the most, Dr. Alderman said. Many run mostly through black neighborhoods, he said, often because efforts to name a central thoroughfare for Dr. King fail. “The second choices are often not the most prominent, the most healthy streets,” Dr. Alderman said.

The AP reports on a growing trend:

American Apparel and SweatX, which specialize in T-shirts and other casual clothes, are marketing themselves as “sweatshop-free” to boost sales among young consumers. Being socially responsible isn’t easy in a business like the garment trade, which has low profit margins and customers more interested in price than politics. Some industry analysts say success could lie in the right mix of style and social consciousness.

SweatX was founded by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees in 2002 with $1.5 million from the Hot Fudge Social Venture Fund established by Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen. Workers at the Los Angeles-based firm make $10.60 an hour while getting medical coverage and two weeks of paid vacation a year.

More power to them.

The President of Chechnya is assassinated in a bombing in the capital:

As many as 13 others were killed, two officials there said, while more than 50 were reported injured, including the Russian military commander for the region. Akhmad Kadyrov, a former rebel leader elected the republic’s president last fall in a vote widely considered fraudulent, was the political figure Mr. Putin entrusted and empowered to wind down nearly a decade of war in Chechnya.

His death now plunges the Kremlin’s strategy into ominous uncertainty. The explosion, reportedly caused by a bomb planted inside a concrete pillar, occurred at 10:35 a.m. as Mr. Kadyrov and other Russian and Chechen leaders attended a parade and concert in Grozny commemorating the 59th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany.

From the Sacramento Bee:

Curtis Sean Mouser died in his sleep after a hard night’s work. He was 17. Those two factors – weariness and youth – are prompting state officials to investigate why the teen was working the graveyard shift for a specialized cleaning company.

A tragic story which highlights the urgency of labor laws and the sorry state of labor regulation in this country.