[lbo-talk] Blaming Katrina's victims for not being rich

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Thu Sep 1 06:15:42 PDT 2005


John Thornton:
> donated them to both a homeless shelter and the shelter for battered
women. When the store
> manager
> found out he went nuts. He actually bought a large press and had a blade
attached so we
> could cut the
> returned shoes in half before we discarded them. We had to keep a track of
them and turn in
> a monthly log
> to prove they were destroyed rather than donated. Better they be garbage
than a donation as
> far as capital
> is concerned.

This may be the case of managerial assholism, but generally businesses refrain from donating returned or damaged product to avoid liability issues. My ex used to work in a restaurant that donated unused food to a homeless shelter until they were advised by their attorneys to stop doing it, because if there were any spoilage (a likely occurrence) they would be liable.


>From a business perspective, writing off damaged stuff rather than donating
it makes more sense not because they are greedy (albeit many of them probably are), but because of the bureaucratic hoops they have to go through to claim a donation.

John Costello:
> 2) New Orleans may not be rebuilt at all. It's hard to see how that
> could happen without multiple tens of billions of dollars of cash
> inflow, and it's hard to see how that expenditure can be justified
> given that a Cat 5 hurricane would destroy it all -- again. If it's
> not rebuilt, New Orleans will be our first Dhalgrenesque
> post-apocalyptic urban wasteland.

Very unlikely. The Mississippi river is the largest transportation route in this country that moves billions tons of goods from the sea to the center of this land and vice versa. It's got to have a large port at its mouth - hurricanes or not. NO might not be rebuilt in the shape it existed, as for example it happened to the city of Santa Cruz, CA after the 1989 quake - a hippie town that was rebuilt as an outdoor suburban mall (yuk!) - but it will certainly be rebuilt as a port and industrial city in one form or another.

Wojtek



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