When Acuity Brands, one of the world's largest and most profitable lighting manufacturers, announced the shutdown of an Ohio manufacturing plant and the relocation of some assembly lines to Mexico, the firm said they were "reducing their footprint in the U.S."

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crossposted at Daily Kos

My friends at Wake-Up Wal-Mart and I have seen something remarkable:

In what we might presume to be the most bone-headed, most egregious iteration yet of the right-wing media's effort to convince <del>us all</del> itself that Wal-Mart = America, and that those who fault the company are in fact terrist sympathizers who no doubt also hate baseball and apple pie, this weekend the New York Post provided us with a nearly three thousand-word manifesto on Wal-Mart's unassailable decency, penned by intrepid regurgitator Charles Platt.

Memeorandum featured it, some right-wing blogs slobbered over it, and Sadly, No! decisively slapped it.

But surely I'm being hyperbolic here! I mean, we have differences of opinion in this country, but it's not like anyone's comparing workers' rights advocates to the Taliban. Right?

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As a community we've had a lot of discussion here at MyDD, most of it around a month ago, surrounding the tragic death of Djimytai Damour at a New York Wal-Mart on Black Friday.

We discussed what it meant to live in a society in which human beings would trample one another underfoot for a deal on a TV. We pondered what Wal-Mart might have done differently, and we argued about whether Wal-Mart was even at all responsible.

I do some work with Wake-Up Wal-Mart, an organization that has worked to bring relief to Damour's family.

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A lot of my posts here pertain to corporate responsibility-- most specifically and most often, with the halting attempts of America's largest retailer to fully grasp and embrace the meaning of that term, especially as it pertains to its employees.

This is because of my association with Wake-Up Wal-Mart and my dedication to the group's agenda.

Generally in this pursuit, I oscillate between a tone of detached snark and one of outraged derision toward the company, so I've been fairly described as having "an axe to grind."

I've been speechless since Black Friday. No snark, and it's hard to even muster outrage. There was a great thread here on the events of that day, and one as well on Daily Kos.

I still don't know what to say, but Meghan Scott of Wake-Up Wal-Mart has just issued the following statement:

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Even when times are good, it's hard to believe that corporate CEOs can look you in the eye and tell you that they've truly earned their outrageous $10 million, $50 million, $100 million or more pay packages.

And right now, times aren't good.

But this week I saw another round of stories on corporate CEOs getting multi-million dollar "bonuses" even as their companies lose millions of dollars.

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