I don't know too many liberals who shop at Walmart. The primary reason is principle—the company is notoriously cruel to its largely low-wage workforce, works to crush the faintest hint of a desire for collective bargaining with a ferocity that would be the envy of any early 20th century industrialist, and imposes vicious cost-cutting all the way down its supply chain. But not shopping at Walmart is also easy. The stores are rare in the urban areas where lots of liberals live, and elsewhere, there's probably a Target nearby where you can get stuff just about as cheaply (Target's own corporate citizenship is a complicated topic for another day). So it isn't like not shopping at Walmart is some kind of hardship or costs them any money.

But what about Amazon? A few months ago, Harold Pollack explained why he no longer shops there: nearly every sin of which Walmart is guilty, Amazon also commits. And the online world has its own particular sweatshop: the fulfilment center, where people who work not for the place you bought your book or toothpaste from but for a logistics company or a temp agency toil in conditions that are absolutely hellish. That's the topic of Mac McClelland's article in the latest Mother Jones, in which she spent some time working at a fulfilment center, and reports on the physically brutal, psychologically dehumanizing, low-paid work that drives the cyber-economy.

I tried to find one excerpt to give the flavor of the piece, but you really have to read the whole thing to grasp the full awfulness of what it's like to work at one of these places, where you're treated like crap, you run around like a maniac for 10 hours getting objects ready for shipping, and despite the low pay you know there are a dozen people back at the temp agency eager to take your place if you slip up. If you've ever ordered something off Amazon or a similar retailer and said, "How the hell can they sell that thing for only three bucks?", this is part of the reason why.

So where does that leave us consumers? It's awfully hard, if you're just getting by yourself, to choose to pay more for the things you get every day. And unlike walking by the struggling Mom & Pop's Grocery to go to Walmart, where you interact with the people whose working conditions you know to be substandard, online you interact only with a bright, cheery website where all you have to do is click "Add to Cart" and you're done. The moral implications of your consumer choices are physically remote and concealed. But as online retailers, particularly Amazon, have grown so big, it's a question all of us are going to have to confront. I'll confess that I haven't yet begun my own personal boycott—the prices are just too damn good. But the moral questions are getting harder to ignore.

Kansas Republicans, under the leadership of “compassionate conservative” Sam Brownback, are working hard to stick it to the poor:

A Kansas House tax committee passed a bill in which anyone making less than $25,000 a year — roughly half a million of the state’s 2.9 million residents — will pay an average of $72 more in taxes, while those making more than $250,000 — about 21,000 people — will see a $1,500 cut, according to Kansas Department of Revenue estimates cited by the Kansas City Star.

The hike would come from the elimination of tax credits typically benefiting the poor.

The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery. By Noam Scheiber, Simon & Schuster, 351 pages, $28.00.

The White House plans to release guidelines for internet companies to help them protect consumers' privacy today. However, the rules are voluntary, which means the web will likely remain an information free-for-all. The Federal Trade Commission will only police companies who agree to the administration's Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. The only real incentive for companies to agree to the rules is to boost consumer confidence.

The federal minimum for an hourly wage was $3.35 in 1982 and now it’s $7.25, up 120 percent. Inflation, meanwhile, has climbed during that period by 135 percent. Eight states, including New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, are considering legislation to boost the base wage. Advocates say that such state measures are fair and make good economic sense: Putting more money in the hands of workers means more demand—good news for small businesses struggling to overcome poor sales. Then there’s politics. More than two-thirds of Americans favor raising the hourly wage to at least $10.

Foxconn Technology—responsible for assembling iPhones, Xbox 360s, and Dell computers—announced a 25 percent pay raise for its employees at Chinese factories on Saturday. News of the raise comes after weeks of increased scrutiny of the working conditions at the plants, which together employ 1.2 million workers who work as much as 14 hours a day. The pay raise comes with a limit on overtime hours. “This is the way capitalism is supposed to work,” said David Autor, a MIT economist, to The New York Times. “As nations develop, wages rise and life theoretically gets better for everyone.