We just heard about two great retail sales—one at Liz Henry and another at Fondren Traders, both in Fondren. Both are discounting their very stuff up to 40 percent to make room for fall merchandise. Head on over there and tell 'em the JFP sent you.
Also, if you know of good sales, log in and add them below. We're going to start trying to track good sales to tell people about here in the BusinessBlog to encourage folks to Think Global, Shop Local. So let us know. As always, it doesn't matter whether they're an advertiser or not. At the JFP, editorial is completely separate from advertising, as it's supposed to be. So bring it on!
From Salon today: "[I]it's clear that Cheney deserves another nomination: as one of the worst CEOs in recent American history. Of course, there are plenty of CEOs that deserve to be on that list, including Enron's Kenneth Lay, Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Adelphia's John Rigas. While those bosses certainly are being pilloried, Cheney's disastrous five-year-long tenure at Halliburton deserves far more scrutiny than the mainstream business press has bothered to provide."
(Click on the free day pass to read the full story without a subscription.)
Today, The Clarion-Ledger featured JFP photographer Jaro Vacek and John "Staxx" Tierre in a story about Staxx's company Blockwear distributing in the Czech Republic with Jaro's help. We consider Staxx a member of the family, too, having featuring his clothes several times in JFP shoots. And, last October, Charlie Braxton wrote in the JFP about Staxx, and other local hip-hop designers who are distributing nationally and internationally last October. We also featured Staff as a young businessman to watch in April.
Cheers to Jaro and Staxx for all the hard work they do for Jackson. We're very proud.
New York Times reports: "WHILE partisan political ads continue to dominate attention, a rapidly growing number of nonpartisan campaigns from recently created groups are trying the tactics of Madison Avenue pros to register new, and especially young, voters. Today, Declare Yourself, a nonpartisan voter-registration group started by the television producer Norman Lear, will raise two giant billboards in Times Square, showing Christina Aguilera and André 3000 with their mouths held shut, next to the message, 'Only you can silence yourself.
"'We're approaching a cause as a brand,' said Howard Benenson, chief executive at Benenson Janson in Studio City, Calif., the Declare Yourself agency. 'It's not any different than any corporate American company," he said. "It's all about creating a brand of passion for consumers.'
"The great unregistered are receiving pitches from groups with wildly divergent world views, including Cast the Vote, the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, Redeem the Vote, Voter Virgin, VoteLoud, Voces del Pueblo and Punk Voter. Rock the Vote and Choose or Lose, continuing campaigns that were established in the 1990's, are veterans by now."
The NY Times reports: "A federal judge ruled yesterday that a lawsuit that accuses Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of discriminating against women can proceed as a class action covering about 1.6 million current and former employees, making it by far the largest workplace-bias lawsuit in United States history. The lawsuit, brought in 2001 by six women, accuses Wal-Mart of systematically paying women less than men and offering women fewer opportunities for promotion. The lawsuit stated that while 65 percent of Wal-Mart's hourly employees are women, only 33 percent of Wal-Mart's managers are.
"While not ruling on the merits of the lawsuit, the judge, Martin J. Jenkins of the United States District Court in San Francisco, wrote that the case was "historic in nature, dwarfing other employment discrimination cases that came before it."
"Wal-Mart said it would appeal the class-action certification, arguing that the company did not discriminate and that decisions about raises and promotion were made by individual stores, not at the corporate level.
"As the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart has become the target of dozens of lawsuits regarding off-the-clock work and other employment practices. Indeed, because of its huge size, the company has become a lightning rod for criticism. Famed for its low prices, it has become one of the biggest sellers of products from detergent to DVD's. Wal-Mart's power helps consumers as the company pushes manufacturers and suppliers to reduce prices on many items. But Wal-Mart's influence is at times more far reaching: entertainment companies, for example, say they edit music albums and movies to suit Wal-Mart's conservative sensibilities.
"Such controversies, however, pale compared with the potential the job- discrimination lawsuit has to hurt the company's image and bottom line. Shares of Wal-Mart fell 1.6 percent yesterday in trading on the New York Stock Exchange."
More NAFTA woes ... New York Times reports today: "Any Canadian or Mexican business that contends it has been treated unjustly by the American judicial system can file a similar claim. American businesses with similar complaints about Canadian or Mexican court judgments can do the same. Under the Nafta agreement the government whose court system is challenged is responsible for awards by the tribunals. 'This is the biggest threat to United States judicial independence that no one has heard of and even fewer people understand,' said John D. Echeverria, a law professor at Georgetown University.
"In the Massachusetts case, brought by Mondev International, the Nafta tribunal decided in 2002 that the Massachusetts courts had not violated international law. But in a separate pending case, brought by a Canadian company challenging the largest jury verdict in Mississippi history, a different Nafta tribunal offered a harsh assessment of Mississippi justice.
"'The whole trial and its resultant verdict," the three-judge tribunal ruled last summer, "were clearly improper and discreditable and cannot be squared with minimum standards of international law and equitable treatment.'"
"Corporate responsibility" is becoming the mantra at many business schools, AP reports: "As the stereotype goes, business students are supposed to be single-minded in their career goals: making money, more money and still more money. But don't tell that to Daron Horwitz, who spent his spring break in Iraq - visiting schools that will be helped by a nonprofit group he and a small group of students formed at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
"Experts say they're part of a new breed of MBA student, influenced by everything from corporate scandal to the dot-com bust to concerns over the effects of globalization on everyday people. They also note that the curriculum at business schools across the country has been changing in recent years, placing more emphasis on ethics, nonprofit work and "corporate social responsibility."
"'Our data suggests that the students are more interested in thinking about the role of business in society ... and as a generation, are saying 'We want to do a better job,'" said Nancy McGaw, deputy director of the New York-based Aspen Institute Business and Society Program, which has been tracking the trend."
AP reports: "Black Americans are less likely than white Americans to own homes, don’t earn as much as whites, don’t live as long, and don’t do as well in school, according to a report by the National Urban League. The report, released on March 24, is a collection of survey data and essays by experts in race, social justice, health, psychology and civil rights. The most conspicuous differences it found were in the areas of home ownership and economic parity, with black earning power about 73 percent that of whites. 'The wealth gap is significant,' Urban League President Marc Morial said in an interview."
NY Times reports: "Medicare's financial condition has significantly deteriorated, partly because of exploding health costs and partly because of the new Medicare law, the government reported on Tuesday. In its annual report to Congress, the Medicare board of trustees said the program's hospital insurance trust fund could run out of money before the end of the next decade. The trustees have made such projections in the past, but this one was much bleaker than the outlook reported just last year.[/url]
Let me guess: federal tort reform is the cure-all?
AP reports: "Allies of Democrat John Kerry in this down-on-its-luck industrial state are armed with depressing statistics on unemployment and poverty, hoping to persuade voters to blame President Bush for the hit on their pocketbooks. In Michigan, 6.6 percent of workers are unemployed, with the strain sharpest in communities that have suffered plant closings and manufacturing cutbacks as jobs moved overseas. There is widespread anger, spreading into conservative areas, that Bush is not doing enough to keep those jobs at home or help the poor."
"'There's a lot more they could be doing rather than fattening the rich man's pocket,' said Michael Rucker, who was fired from his job at a packing plant. As Rucker stood in line for help at a state work force development office in Flint, several cars circled its expansive parking lot, waiting for a space to open."
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