Walmart Continues to Value Profits Over People, Always

Walmart Taking Away Insurance For 30,000 Workers and blaming rising costs rather than their ever increasing greed requirements.

Walmart can pay living wages, Walmart can provide benefits to its employees. It chooses not to because it bumps their bottom line profits to foist those expenses on to the economies of the localities they infect with their Big Box Hellholes.

Make no mistake about it, when you shop at Walmart, you are removing money from your local economy permanently. Part of it goes into the Walton coffers and the other part goes into China.

Buying goods at Walmart harms America. Shopping at Walmart is un-American. Patriots vote every day of their lives with their wallets and the choices where they spend their money makes.

America Needs More Men Like Bernie Sanders

Walmart is THE Money Sucking Leech

Or, Subsidy is a Four Letter Word

I do not shop at Walmart, I haven't spent a dime there in close to 20 years. And yet my money is STILL going to help bridge the gap between how much they pay and the services Walmart employees and their families need and use.

Walmart is the largest corporation on the planet. It is owned by the wealthiest family on the planet and yet I, not the wealthiest anything anywhere, am being forced to help pay for the services that Walmart has weaseled out of.

At best, this unethical, unseemly and unsustainable. At its worst, this is a codified business decision to maximize profits for as long as possible until the whole shithouse falls down around their ears.

Walmart CAN pay a living wage but they will not until they are forced to do so. This is, coincidentally, a strong argument against libertarian "ideals" of letting the free market sort everything out. The free market sorted out Walmart and we are still paying the price today, you, me, every single one of us is paying Walmart to exist.

I'd like to cancel that payment, now and into the future. If Walmart cannot stand on its own feet without my subsidies then they do not deserve to be in business.

How Wal-Mart Steals From Us All

Walmart's Executive Bonuses Cost Taxpayers Millions

This new report, co-published by IPS and Americans for Tax Fairness, reveals that taxpayers (note, NOT Walmart customers exclusively, we are all being forced to pay their executive bonuses) also subsidize much of the cost of Walmart’s executive pay.

Key report findings: 

• Walmart reduced its federal tax bills by an estimated $104 million over the past six years by exploiting a tax loophole that allowed eight top executives to pocket more than $298 million in “performance pay” that was fully tax deductible.  That sum would have been enough to cover the cost of free school lunches for 33,000 children for those six years.

• Michael T. Duke, Walmart’s recently retired President & CEO and currently Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors, pocketed nearly $116 million in exercised stock options and other “performance pay” during the period 2009-2014. That translates into a taxpayer subsidy for Walmart of more than $40 million—enough to cover the average cost of food stamps for 4,200 people for those six years.

• Taxpayers would save $50 billion over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, if Congress closed this perverse “performance pay” loophole by capping the tax deduction at $1 million for each employee’s total compensation, with no exceptions for performance pay.

Full report: PDF

Full report with year by year data breakdown: PDF

California Says No More Subsidies Walmart

California To Wal-Mart: Enough! No More Taxpayer Subsidized Profits For You

Legislation is now making its way through the California legislature—with the support of consumer groups, unions and, interestingly, physicians—that would levy a fine of up to $6,000 on employers like Wal-Mart for every full-time employee that ends up on the state’s Medi-Cal program—the California incarnation of Medicaid. 

The amount of the fine is no coincidence. 

A report released last week by the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, estimates that the cost of Wal-Mart’s failure to adequately pay its employees could total about $5,815 per employee each and every year of employment.

Way to go, California. Make it so that the price of doing dirty business is MORE than the cost of doing honest and clean business that doesn't shave profits from employee paychecks. Of course, if it were up to me, the amount of the fines would assess how much profit they made by breaking the law and then multiplying that profit by 5 or 10 to get their fine. Profiting from crime should NEVER be so easy, especially not for a mega-corporation like Walmart.

And an important fact for the Tea Party knobs out there,

 "Note that these are not people who rely on ‘government handouts’ because they do not wish to work. Rather, these are people who show up to do their jobs for as many hours a week as their employer will permit them to work."

I hope more states start to follow California's lead in clamping on Walmart's profit maximizing by shoving costs on to taxpayers. There is, simply, no way to justify what Walmart is doing outside of runaway greed.

Walmart is Worse Than You Think, Much Worse

I read Think Walmart is an Evil Empire? ended up learning several new things about the world's largest (and dirtiest and greediest and most exploitive) corporation. Here's an excerpt:

When you first get hired you’re given an orientation, like at most jobs. In this orientation you’re shown several videos, one of which is called “The Benefits of Working for Walmart.” But it’s really a 30 minute video bashing unions. No, I’m not kidding. It’s literally a video about 30 minutes long of people telling you how terrible unions are to work for.

After that, depending on your job, the training is fairly typical. But the true nature of the greed of this company is found in how they run their business. 

See, everything is controlled in Arkansas. From the air conditioning and heat, inventory to the scheduling system. Everything is controlled at their home office in Arkansas.

There is more, plenty more to chew on and think about and be pissed off about. I mean, really, how many dollars is enough? At what point will the Walton family realize that they can't do anything with the gigantic piles of money they have? At some point doesn't there have to be a wake up call, a coming to consciousness moment where the blinders are removed and the reality of the situation can be seen?

That Walmart absolutely cares more about their bottom line than, literally, anything else. Not people, not towns, not laws, not governments, nothing is more important to Walmart than profit and maximizing that profit no matter what.

Walmart is what happens when unfettered greed isn't checked. Spend your money at a store where they treat their employees like human beings, where they pay their own costs for healthcare and don't rig hours to make sure that nobody outside of management gets health coverage.

You do NOT have to shop at Walmart. You are not saving any more money there then at other stores that don't exploit so heavily and harshly. Stores that pay living wages like CostCo and don't force stores to cut employee hours while maintaining sales quotes and other BS.

I'd never ever shop at a Walmart, I can't even imagine what kind of a hell it would be to call that hell hole your place of employment.

Fighting Back with Technology

Scan and know where the money goes.

Got signed up and rolling with Buycott tonight.

Mind. Blown.

First some good news. Godiva Chocolates are clear of conflicts with regards to the Koch Brothers and GMO Labeling. Eat Godiva Chocolates happily and with a clean conscience (though perhaps they conflict on other campaigns, I don't know).

Bad news that I kinda, sorta already knew: Coca-Cola is on the No side. $1.75 million to fight GMO labeling? Tsk, mother fucking, tsk. 

I hate spending my money where it is going to be used to fight against things I believe in. Now I don't have to.

Now, I will grant that the contact information on the site is, ummm, mysterious, there are no named personages on the site. The WhoIs info is informative,http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=buycott.com. Based in LA, protected name on the registration. They clearly do not want to be known who they are and that isn't confidence inspiring. And there aren't sources for the data which isn't especially comforting either, okay, alot of cool and a few question marks. Kind of big question marks. 

Some, but not all, of which were resolved by reading this Forbes article about Darcy Burner her idea that she demonstrated and other developers have since run with.

But, in the end, the concept is sound and the resulting information /appears/ reliable but maybe should be verified randomly a few times just to make sure, ya know? The app is going to be put to use in my house for sure and I expect my cash will start going more towards places I can be happier supporting.

I'm going to send some feedback to the contact email on the site, feedback@buycott.com and ask for some transparency in the operation. Data sources at the very least. Not that I don't trust them but I don't trust them. Nothing personal. I just like sources I can look over myself or have verified by other third parties without potentially vested and nefarious interests.

Thanks to +Ole Olson for bringing the app to my attention in the first place. Much appreciated as this is one of those things that will change my day to day in a better way and that, my friends, is okay.

Further product updates:
Hansen's is clean for my campaigns. Krusteaz is clean, Jif is evil, Planters is clean. Doritos are the very epitome of evil but you already knew that regardless of any campaigns. And, most shockingly, Santa Cruz Natural Santa Cruz Organic Lemonade is on the no fly list because they contributed some $485,000 to fight GMO labeling. Seriously? By the way, Santa Cruz, Natural Santa Cruz Organic Lemonade is made in Chico, not Santa Cruz. So, yeah. They'll not be getting my money anymore.

Wal-Mart Depresses Wages, Study Finds

The Hometown Advantage - Wal-Mart Depresses Wages, Study FindsThe study "focuses on stores that opened between 1992 and 2000 and concludes, "Opening a single Wal-Mart store lowers the average retail wage in the surrounding county between 0.5 and 0.9 percent."

Currently, more than of Wal-Mart's employees earn less than $10 an hour.

Think about that for a moment. This is the world's largest company and the majority of its employees earn less than $10 an hour. They made $11.2 billion in profit last year, they can afford to pay a (more) livable wage. They choose not to because it would cut into their profits, which makes them greedheaded jerks.

That is both pitiful and infuriating.

The rest of the article has quite alot of interesing and useful information (among the juicy bits is the breakdown of raising their wages and the effect it would have on consumers, which is to say not much).

I'm not anti-Wal-Mart per se, I'm anti-exploitation and Wal-Mart is the world leader in worker, supplier, locality and consumer exploitation. And they do it on purpose to make every last penny they can for their stockholders.