The gerrymandering worked. This year opened with the state sporting -- for the first time ever -- a conservative GOP governor, Supreme Court majority, and legislature all at the same time. The state budget director? Pope himself.
Pope's budget priorities would soon start wreaking havoc with the lives of North Carolina's most vulnerable. In a state with America's fifth-highest jobless rate, lawmakers indebted to Pope and his millions slashed top weekly jobless benefits and denied 170,000 long-term jobless special federal aid.
North Carolina's conservatives didn't stop there. They put in place, notes one Duke University analyst, an agenda that cuts education and social programs, shifts the tax burden "toward the less affluent," and restricts voting rights.
North Carolinians have responded to this rich people-friendly legislative onslaught with spirited demonstrations. The latest protest: an "educational picket campaign" outside the discount stores the Pope family owns.
Art Pope, sums up state NAACP president William Barber, has brought a "cynical and sinister form of wealth and power manipulation" to North Carolina.
Pope has put his stores "deliberately and publicly in communities of low wealth," used low wages to make his wealth "off of people" in these communities, and then employed his resulting power, notes Reverend Barber, "to push and promote policies" that undercut the quality of average people's lives.
6/ Tim Cook: Lost Even with a Compass
The $100 million club, researchers from the corporate watchdog GMI Ratings revealed this past October, has become a bit less exclusive. Last year, for the first time, America's ten top-paid CEOs all realized over $100 million in compensation. High on that list, at $143.8 million: Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Cook's good fortune came as no surprise to computer industry observers. Apple retail stores, notes Forbes, "take in more money per square foot than any other United States retailer."
Yet Apple store employees only average $25,000, and Apple can't seem to afford to compensate its 42,000 retail workers for the time they spend every day waiting to get searched -- for stolen goods -- before they can leave the store premises.
Two former Apple employees have filed a class-action lawsuit to recoup those unpaid wages, estimated at about $1,500 per year.
But give Apple credit. The company remains an equal-opportunity exploiter. The company mistreats workers both at home and abroad. Workers at Apple's offshore suppliers continue to work in factories that, says the Economic Policy Institute, "reflect some of the worst practices of the industrial era."
Apple, details EPI analyst Isaac Shapiro, "has not met commitments to ensure that workers in its supply chain receive retroactive compensation for working unpaid overtime" or "ensured promised wage increases."
Apple CEO Cook's response to critiques like this?
"Apple," he told reporters before U.S. Senate testimony this past spring, "has a very strong moral compass."
5/ Ron Packard: The ABCs of Avarice
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