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November 29, 2008

Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and ANGELA MACROPOULOS

The throng of Wal-Mart shoppers had been building all night, filling sidewalks and stretching across a vast parking lot at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y. At 3:30 a.m., the Nassau County police had to be called in for crowd control, and an officer with a bullhorn pleaded for order.

Tension grew as the 5 a.m. opening neared. Someone taped up a crude poster: “Blitz Line Starts Here.”

By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.

Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him. Others who had stood alongside Mr. Damour trying to hold the doors were also hurled back and run over, witnesses said.

Some workers who saw what was happening fought their way through the surge to get to Mr. Damour, but he had been fatally injured, the police said. Emergency workers tried to revive Mr. Damour, a temporary worker hired for the holiday season, at the scene, but he was pronounced dead an hour later at Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream.

Four other people, including a 28-year-old woman who was described as eight months pregnant, were treated at the hospital for minor injuries.

Detective Lt. Michael Fleming, who is in charge of the investigation for the Nassau police, said the store lacked adequate security. He called the scene “utter chaos” and said the “crowd was out of control.” As for those who had run over the victim, criminal charges were possible, the lieutenant said. “I’ve heard other people call this an accident, but it is not,” he said. “Certainly it was a foreseeable act.”

But even with videos from the store’s surveillance cameras and the accounts of witnesses, Lieutenant Fleming and other officials acknowledged that it would be difficult to identify those responsible, let alone to prove culpability.

Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

Wal-Mart security officials and the police cleared the store, swept up the shattered glass and locked the doors until 1 p.m., when it reopened to a steady stream of calmer shoppers who passed through the missing doors and battered door jambs, apparently unaware that anything had happened.

Ugly shopping scenes, a few involving injuries, have become commonplace during the bargain-hunting ritual known as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. The nation’s largest retail group, the National Retail Federation, said it had never heard of a worker being killed on Black Friday.

Wal-Mart declined to provide details of the stampede, but said in a statement that it had tried to prepare by adding staff members. Still, it was unclear how many security workers it had at the Valley Stream store for the opening on Friday. The Green Acres Mall provides its own security to supplement the staffs of some large stores, but it did not appear that Wal-Mart was one of them.

A Wal-Mart spokesman, Dan Folgleman, called it a “tragic situation,” and said the victim had been hired from a temporary staffing agency and assigned to maintenance work. Wal-Mart, in a statement issued at its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., said: “The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families at this tragic time.”

Wal-Mart has successfully resisted unionization of its employees. New York State’s largest grocery union, Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, called the death of Mr. Damour “avoidable” and demanded investigations.

“Where were the safety barriers?” said Bruce Both, the union president. “Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner? This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart.”

While other Wal-Mart stores dot the suburbs around the city, the outlet at Valley Stream, less than two miles from New York City’s southeastern border, draws customers from Queens, Brooklyn and the densely populated suburbs of Nassau County. And it was not the only store in the Green Acres Mall that attracted large crowds.

Witnesses said the crowd outside Wal-Mart began gathering at 9 p.m. on Thursday. The night was not bitterly cold, and the early mood was relaxed. By the early morning hours, the throngs had grown, and officers of the Fifth Precinct of the Nassau County Police Department, who patrol Valley Stream, were out in force, checking on crowds at the mall.

Mr. Damour, who lived in Queens, went into the store sometime during the night to stock shelves and perform maintenance work.

On Friday night, Mr. Damour’s father, Ogera Charles, 67, said his son had spent Thursday evening having Thanksgiving dinner at a half sister’s house in Queens before going directly to work. Mr. Charles said his son, known as Jimmy, was raised in Queens by his mother and worked at various stores in the area after graduating from high school.

Mr. Charles said he had not seen his son in three months, and heard about his death about 7 a.m. Friday, when a friend of Mr. Damour’s called him at home. He arrived at Franklin Hospital Medical Center an hour later to identify the body. Mr. Charles said he was angry that no one from Wal-Mart had contacted him or had explained how his son had died. Maria Damour, Mr. Damour’s mother, was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but was on her way back to the United States, Mr. Charles said.

About the time that Mr. Damour was killed, a shopper at a Wal-Mart in Farmingdale, 15 miles east of Valley Stream, said she was trampled by a crowd of overeager customers, the Suffolk County police reported. The woman sustained a cut on her leg, but finished her shopping before filing the police report, an officer said.

Damn the Man Artist!

Herbert on Acorn:

October 21, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

The Real Scandal

By BOB HERBERT

It never ends. The Republican Party never gets tired of spraying its poison across the American political landscape.

So there was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that the press should start investigating members of the House and Senate to determine which ones are “pro-America or anti-America.”

Can a rancid Congressional committee be far behind? Leave it to a right-wing Republican to long for those sunny, bygone days of political witch-hunting.

Ms. Bachmann’s demented desire (“I would love to see an exposé like that”) is of a piece with the G.O.P.’s unrelenting effort to demonize its opponents, to characterize them as beyond the pale, different from ordinary patriotic Americans — and not just different, but dangerous, and even evil.

But the party is not content to stop there. Even better than demonizing opponents is the more powerful and direct act of taking the vote away from their opponents’ supporters. The Republican Party has made strenuous efforts in recent years to prevent Democrats from voting, and to prevent their votes from being properly counted once they’ve been cast.

Which brings me to the phony Acorn scandal.

John McCain, who placed his principles in a blind trust once the presidential race heated up, warned the country during the presidential debate last week that Acorn, which has been registering people to vote by the hundreds of thousands, was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history.”

It turns out that a tiny percentage of these new registrations are bogus, with some of them carrying ludicrous names like Mickey Mouse. Republicans have tried to turn this into a mighty oak of a scandal, with Mr. McCain thundering at the debate that it “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Please. The Times put the matter in perspective when it said in an editorial that Acorn needs to be more careful with some aspects of its voter-registration process. It needs to do a better job selecting canvassers, among other things.

“But,” the editorial added, “for all of the McCain campaign’s manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence — anywhere in the country, going back many elections — of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to.”

Two important points need to be made here. First, the reckless attempt by Senator McCain, Sarah Palin and others to fan this into a major scandal has made Acorn the target of vandals and a wave of hate calls and e-mail. Acorn staff members have been threatened and sickening, murderous comments have been made about supporters of Barack Obama. (Senator Obama had nothing to do with Acorn’s voter-registration drives.)

Second, when it comes to voting, the real threat to democracy is the nonstop campaign by the G.O.P. and its supporters to disenfranchise American citizens who have every right to cast a ballot. We saw this in 2000. We saw it in 2004. And we’re seeing it again now.

In Montana, the Republican Party challenged the registrations of thousands of legitimate voters based on change-of-address information available from the Post Office. These specious challenges were made — surprise, surprise — in Democratic districts. Answering the challenges would have been a wholly unnecessary hardship for the voters, many of whom were students or members of the armed forces.

In the face of widespread public criticism (even the Republican lieutenant governor weighed in), the party backed off.

That sort of thing is widespread. In one politically crucial state after another — in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, you name it — the G.O.P. has unleashed foot soldiers whose insidious mission is to make the voting process as difficult as possible — or, better yet, impossible — for citizens who are believed to favor Democrats.

For Senator McCain to flip reality on its head and point to an overwhelmingly legitimate voter-registration effort as a “threat to the fabric of democracy” is a breathtaking exercise in absurdity.

Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut secretary of state who is now president of Demos, a public policy group, remarked on the irony of elected Republican officials deliberately attempting to thwart voting. Some years ago, he said, he “and all the other secretaries of state” would bemoan the lack of interest in voting, especially among the young and the poor.

Now, he said, with the explosion of voter registration and the heightened interest in the presidential campaign, you’d think officials “would welcome that, and encourage it, and even celebrate it.” Instead, he said, in so many cases, G.O.P. officials are “trying to pare down the lists.”

My Grandpa and John McCain

I just finished watching the clips of Obama and McCain at the Al Smith dinner and I have a confession to make. I don't want to hate McCain. I don't really even want to dislike him. He's no Bush (either one), certainly no Cheney and although the manner in which he's been conducting himself recently makes it more difficult to not dislike him, there's some type of fail safe switch deep inside my psyche that resists. I think it I know what that is : John McCain reminds me of my grandfather. This is not meant as jab at his age; my grandfather died when he was just a few years older than McCain and I was twenty-four. I'm not envisioning some ancient and decrepit centenarian.

William Richard Brady was born on 05/16/1914, the first of a large, Irish family in the tenements of Chicago. Like many in his generation, he left school early (after sixth grade) and went directly to work. Throughout his life, he worked as a trolley-car conductor, a short-order cook, a security guard and a linen delivery man, and although he wasn't educated, he was a very intelligent man.


Grandpa was a die-hard Republican. I'm not sure this was always true, but certainly from the time that he learned his Teamster pension was stolen by Jimmy Hoffa, he was a staunch conservative. He was a grumpy old man, make no bones about it-but not nearly as grumpy as he deserved to be. He lived a tough, tough life; born into poverty and fighting to escape it his entire life. He was the eldest son of an Irish father and German mother-undoubtedly a scandalous union for the time. Growing up in depression-era Chicago he certainly felt the responsibility of his family's survival. Things were tough and, to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, he "knew the raging lash of poverty'. Because his father fell ill relatively young with emphysema, (the disease that would ultimately cause the death of most of his children), and his mother with cancer, he became their sole support and thus avoided being drafted into WWII. No such luck for his brother Richard, the sibling closest in age to Grandpa who, from all accounts, was his best friend, co-hort and partner in crime. Uncle Richard went off to war and came back, like so many young men have and are, even now, an emotionally unrecognizable man. Soon after his return from the war, he disappeared and the only other time Grandpa had word of him was in the mid-1950's when the FBI knocked on his door and grilled him about Richard's whereabouts. Nobody ever really knew why the FBI was looking for Richard, but years after my Grandfather died his youngest brother hired a private investigator who ultimately learned only that Uncle Richard had died in Los Angeles in 1979 of emphysema.


That was but one of many losses; my grandmother nearly died as a result of negligent care after my mother's birth and she suffered a lifetime of pain and disability due to the subsequent emergency hysterectomy in her early twenties and its resulting early onset of osteoporosis. My grandfather seemed to bear these hardships in a surprisingly, for the times, healthy way. He was a man not afraid to cry and to grieve and he would then carry-on, making the best of the situation. My mother, being an only child, became the vessel of his hope for the future. Grandpa, defying the sentiments of the time regarding women's roles in the world, encouraged and empowered her to get an education and succeed in life. Which she did, despite their poverty, earning a BSN from Marquette University's sister school, Alverno College. To this day she credits her father with giving her the mindset and opportunity to reach beyond their circumstances.

Despite their poverty and blue-collar jobs my grandparents did well. A little saavy investing on my grandmother's part and hard work and frugality on my grandfather's enabled them to lift themselves solidly into the middle class-not only owning, but having built to spec their own modest brick bungalow by the time they were in their late forties.


My grandfather's history has little in common with John McCain's, this is true and I mention it only to illustrate a few of the many ways in which he lived an admirable life. The ways in which John McCain reminds me of my grandfather are more about their world-view. They both lived in a world of black and white:you were either good or bad, with them or against them and neither would hesitate to declare which category they felt that you fell into. Irascible, curmudgeonly and yes, irritating, they share many common attributes. At the same time they are funny and charming and when you've just about reached your last straw they always seem to play their last card-they reveal that glimmer of heroics and valor of their youth and their basic integrity and goodness. You just can't completely give up on them. At the same time, towards the end of their lives, they seemed to change, somehow betraying the principles on which they lived their entire life. My grandfather, by becoming incredibly whiny and clinging and disturbingly bigoted, shed the skin of responsibility and independence in which he lived his true life. And John McCain? Well, I think we are all witnessing now, in the way he is allowing his campaign to be conducted, the great betrayal of the moral base from which he has navigated the bulk of his time on earth. It is a sad, maybe even tragic scenario, this vision of great men taking leave of the moral compass that has guided them so far and for so long.


But, in the same way that they could not alter the lack of grey area in their worlds, I can neither let go of the images of the man of integrity.


When someone you love and are close to dies of a protracted and devastating illness, it is not long after their passing that your image of them ill and weak recedes into the background, taken over by your memories of their greatness, their good times and their strength.


This thing is this: those are memories and when all is said and done, that person, the one that you loved and admired, is gone.

So, I can't hate John McCain. But in a sense, it seems, he is already gone.

gotta love them MIT nerds

Jason Jones Interviews Wasilla Residents After the Debate

Last night, The Daily Show featured a segment where reporter Jason Jones, after watching the debate at ye olde watering hole in Wasilla, Alaska, interviewed the viewers there. Here are a couple of the patrons comments:



Fat, Old Grizzly Adams Dude: "Hey I went and asked all my colored friends what they thought of Rev. Wrong (Wright) and neither one of them agreed with him."

Jason Jones: "I believe they prefer the term negro".

FOGAD: "Well...hey.... whatever".
*********
Jason Jones: "The beltway's already saying that it's a wash"

Young goatee guy: "A wash? He's gay".

JJ: "Pardon?"

YGG: "He's gay".

JJ: "Well, the beltway... the washington insiders...they're saying it's a wash".

YGG: "They're all gay".

Speechless

Apparently I watched the VP debate a little too closely because I feel nearly incapable of a coherent original thought, goshdarnit! That's ok, there are plenty of people with a voice left and here's what they have to say about our friend Sarah Palin:

McCain sprung his vice-presidential selection on us at the last minute, possibly under the impression that the country felt things had gotten too boring lately, and would appreciate the excitement of having a minimally experienced political unknown serving as backup to a 72-year-old cancer survivor.-Gail Collins

On Thursday night, Palin took her inexperience and made a mansion out of it.-David Brooks

Palin launched into her charm offensive — winking, smiling, dodging questions and speaking in her signature Sarah-phonics , a mash up of sentence fragments and colloquialisms glued together with misplaced also’s and there’s — gibberish really.

-Charles Blow

As we've seen and heard more from John McCain's running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn't know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.- Kathleen Parker”

Of course, there's a difference between a lack of polish and a lack of coherence. Some of Palin's interview responses can't even be critiqued on their merits because they're so nonsensical. . - Kathleen Parker”

Talking at the debate about how she would “positively affect the impacts” of the climate change for which she’s loath to acknowledge human culpability, she did a dizzying verbal loop-de-loop: “With the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that, as governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.” That was, miraculously, richer with content than an answer she gave Katie Couric: “You know, there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with now, with these impacts.” –Maureen Dowd

At another point, she channeled Alicia Silverstone debating in “Clueless,” asserting, “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.” (Mostly the end-all.)- Maureen Dowd

She dangles gerunds, mangles prepositions, randomly exiles nouns and verbs and also — “also” is her favorite vamping word — uses verbs better left as nouns, as in, “If Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them,” or how she tried to “progress the agenda.”-Maureen Dowd

If bull were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself” -Gail Collins

If Palin were a man, we'd all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she's a woman -- and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket -- we are reluctant to say what is painfully true. . - Kathleen Parker”