Dems See Wal Mart Bashing As A Winner

[Annie]

Hiring illegals is definitely illegal, and undercutting the competition like that can be construded as probably illegal or, at best, in a very, very, very dark gray area.

Gotcha on the illegals, but you can't just go after deep pocket employers. The undercutting, as long as there isn't monopolies price fixing, is not illegal. One may bemoan the loss of mom & pop places, like many of us miss the penny candy stores and soda fountains in the drug stores, but times change.

What Walmart has done to some small business, even a lot of small business, is not much different than what Walgreens/CVS has done to the sole proprietor drug stores. Or what mega food stores have done to the mom & pop grocers and butchers.

 

[red states rule]

Another liberal voices his hate of Wal Mart. How can the kook left think this will be a winning issue when 110 million people per week shop at Wal Mart?



More than Wal-Mart
By Robert Kuttner | August 19, 2006

WAL-MART is usefully becoming the symbol of an America where tens of millions of hard- working families cannot make ends meet.

Its wages and health benefits are so dismal that in several states Wal-Mart displaces worker healthcare costs onto tax-supported Medicaid for the poor. Wal-Mart batters down wages not just in the United States, but in Third World countries, where it plays foreign suppliers against one another to demand the lowest possible wholesale price (and wage).

The New York Times reported recently that Democratic politicians from Senator Joseph Lieberman to his winning opponent in the Connecticut primary, Ned Lamont, are making Wal-Mart their nemesis. This focus is certainly helpful in spotlighting one mega-employer that is symbol and substance of an America where the middle-class dream is vanishing, but the problems go far beyond Wal-Mart.

The America of a generation ago had multiple institutions for enabling worker incomes to rise with their rising productivity. More industries were regulated. The federal minimum wage was equal to about half the average wage; today, it is below one - third. The federal government actually enforced workers' right to organize a union. Nearly half of US workers were covered by decent, federally guaranteed pensions, instead of funny-money worker-savings plans. Wall Street was more tightly regulated, and corporate executives were not able to grab such an outlandish share of the total pie. Taxation was progressive, and ordinary workers paid much lower rates. We did not trade with countries that had something close to slave labor, like the Chinese factory system.

Since the mid-1970s, under three Republican presidents and too- often-feeble Democratic ones, this social compact was blown up. Since the early 1970s, real incomes for the top 1 percent have doubled, while earnings for most Americans have stagnated. Middle-class Americans have stayed even only thanks to a second wage-earner -- an average increase of more than 500 annual work hours per household. This is a disguised loss in living standards, cutting into leisure and parenting time, and incurring child-care and transportation costs.

Politicians may legislate special laws, requiring higher minimum wages for mega-stores (as Chicago has done) or requiring them to contribute to health coverage (as Maryland has attempted), but until our political system addresses the larger problems, even reforming Wal-Mart is a drop in the bucket.

The system is now essentially rigged so that workers' productivity can rise, but workers' incomes can't. A study prepared last month for Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee and released by Representative Barney Frank of Newton showed that since 2002 annual productivity growth has averaged more than 3 percent, while real wage increases have been under half of 1 percent. Corporate profits, meanwhile, have risen from 8.5 percent to 14.4 percent of national income.

Whenever wages show signs of rising with productivity, the Federal Reserve whacks them back down. It shows no such concern about corporate profits being excessive. Until this month, when the Federal Reserve announced a ``pause" in rate hikes, our central bank had hiked interest rates 17 times since June 2004, citing fears of inflation, mainly in rising labor costs. But note the sleight of hand. If workers' wages are lagging well behind workers' increased productivity, then rising wages are not a source of inflation. The rising ``total labor costs" include pensions and health insurance. Doesn't that benefit workers? In fact, the increase in recent employer contributions to pension plans is mainly to make up for the corporate looting of plans during the 1990s.

In the stock market euphoria of that decade, corporations used outlandish assumptions about future stock market returns to reduce annual contributions they were supposed to make to pension funds. The replenishing of fund shortfalls in recent years is not a source of true worker compensation -- and it can hardly be burdensome given the huge increase in net corporate profits.

The hike in employer health insurance costs, likewise, is not a true benefit for workers. It reflects a health system out of control, and excessive charges and profits by health maintenance organizations and drug companies. Actual health insurance benefits to workers are being cut back, and not just by Wal-Mart. Corporations generally are hiking the employee share of premiums, and plans are increasing deductibles and copayments.

I hope Wal-Mart does become a poster child for all that's out of whack with the US economy. But we need to go after a great deal more than Wal-Mart if politicians are serious about restoring the dream of an America where people who work hard and play by the rules can aspire to be middle class.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/08/19/more_than_wal_mart/

 

[Annie]

Undermining the economy? Is that the point?

Links? Yes.

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_09_03-2006_09_09.shtml#1157726957

David Bernstein, September 8, 2006 at 10:49am] 0 Trackbacks / Possibly More Trackbacks
"Because We're the Good Guys, and They're the Bad Guys":

The New York Times tries to make a story out of nonstory: free-market groups that quite naturally defend the largest, most successful business in the U.S., Wal-Mart, from government regulation, get a tiny fraction of their funding from the Walton Family Foundation (not even from Wal-Mart itself). At least from what can be discerned from the article, none of this money is earmarked for Wal-Mart related research, and some of it is specifically earmarked for causes, like education reform, that have nothing to do with Wal-Mart.

The story does have a classic line. After spending almost the entire article raising suspicions of whether the free market groups are being unduly influenced by Walton family money, and discussing whether they should disclose the contributions in their publications, the article offhandedly mentions that labor unions give prodigious funding to anti-Wal-Mart organizations. Is this an "astroturf problem," as the article tries to avoid implying, or at least something that raises at least as many issues as the Walton Family Foundation funding the likes of AEI?

In response, Chris Kofinis, communications director for WakeUpWalmart.com, an arm of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union that gives money to liberal research groups, said: "While we openly support the mission of economic justice, Wal-Mart and the Waltons put on a smiley face, hide the truth, all while supporting right-wing causes who are paid to defend Wal-Mart’s exploitative practices.”

UPDATE: In the highly unlikely event the Walton family thinks it's buying the Heritage Foundation's allegiance to Wal-Mart for less than $5K a year, it's obviously mistaken. Gues the Times' reporter was too lazy to bother checking whether the think tanks he cites as being potentially subject to Wal-Mart's influence have been cheerleaders for Wal-Mart when the companies' policies conflict with the think tanks' free market ideology, which would be the real test of influence-buying.

FURTHER UPDATE: And here's AEI's (and one of my favorite blogs, Overlawyered.com's) Ted Frank criticizing Wal-Mart in yesterday's Washington Post, surely not something that could have conceivably escaped the Times's attention! Looks more and more like the Times published an anti-Wal-Mart press release as a "news" story.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Actually libs are focusing in the wrong place re: walmart. Instead of bashing walmart, they should be pushing for trade embargos against nations which practice slave labor, china especially. Allowing slave labor into the international labor pool will only reduce everyone to slaves as we attempt to compete with that immorality.

 

[dilloduck]

Actually libs are focusing in the wrong place re: walmart. Instead of bashing walmart, they should be pushing for trade embargos against nations which practice slave labor, china especially. Allowing slave labor into the international labor pool will only reduce everyone to slaves as we attempt to compete with that immorality.

Libs can't focus on anything but power.

 

[Annie]

Libs can't focus on anything but power.

Same with some 'conservatives' and some 'posters'....

 

[dilloduck]

Same with some 'conservatives' and some 'posters'....

I thought about that after I posted it---politics and relationships are about power. It's cool when some can get past it.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Same with some 'conservatives' and some 'posters'....

.... why the four dots? What you typed was a complete sentence.

 

[Annie]

.... why the four dots? What you typed was a complete sentence.

I dunno, why do you think?

 

[rtwngAvngr]

I dunno, why do you think?

Because it implies some sort of intellectual deepness? Something implied, but left unsaid?....

 

[dilloduck]

Because it implies some sort of intellectual deepness? Something implied, but left unsaid?....

I'll give you credit----you never give up !

 

[Annie]

Because it implies some sort of intellectual deepness? Something implied, but left unsaid?....

Could be...

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Could be...

lol. Let's just stop the whole "enemy" routine, shall we?

 

[Hobbit]

First off, Wal-Mart employs minors in GA. I know one. It may have something to do with child labor laws in SC. Sure, they can work, but it may be that the rules on them working are too strict for Wal-Mart to want to deal with it.

Here's free enterprise for you:

Wal-Mart is here in Georgia. It doesn't do very well, though. Know why? It's because they don't treat their employees well enough to compete for higher quality labor. Publix is quite good to its employees, so they get the pick of the litter. By the time you get down to Wal-Mart, they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. As a result, the stores are, dirty, poorly run, and have terrible customer service. Only the trash of the town and people who can't speak English even set foot in that store by choice. Even the mom and pop stores are still alive and kicking here. That's how capitalism works with sufficient competition.

 

[Annie]

lol. Let's just stop the whole "enemy" routine, shall we?

Are you saying I am your enemy? Hmm, I seem to remember defending you on numerous occassions and repping you positively too. Of what do you speak?

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Are you saying I am your enemy? Hmm, I seem to remember defending you on numerous occassions and repping you positively too. Of what do you speak?

Well good. We're not enemies. Cool! I love you.

I just really think some values are seeping into our party that are quite abhorrent. Like the china thing. Do cheap goods really justify any and all human atrocities? We boycotted S. Africa for inhumane treatment of others. What has changed?

 

[007]

What I notice when I go to wal mart, and yes, I do sometimes shop there, hell, it's just up the street, and I know they have the best prices, but, the people they hire look largely like some kind of freak show. They really scrape the bottom of the barrel. But I think hey, if these people didn't work at wal mart, would they have a job at all? So, maybe wal mart is doing a good thing giving people a job who may otherwise not have.

But the wal mart, china thing... I don't like that. I mostly buy just groceries there and that's it. If I look at something else, I look to see where it's made. If it say's made in china, I don't buy it. I'll go out of my way to find what I need that's NOT made in china.

 

[red states rule]

What I notice when I go to wal mart, and yes, I do sometimes shop there, hell, it's just up the street, and I know they have the best prices, but, the people they hire look largely like some kind of freak show. They really scrape the bottom of the barrel. But I think hey, if these people didn't work at wal mart, would they have a job at all? So, maybe wal mart is doing a good thing giving people a job who may otherwise not have.

But the wal mart, china thing... I don't like that. I mostly buy just groceries there and that's it. If I look at something else, I look to see where it's made. If it say's made in china, I don't buy it. I'll go out of my way to find what I need that's NOT made in china.

Libs should be thanking Wal Mart for what they do for America.

Wal Mart is where the working class people can go to get the items they need at a fair price. Every week over 100 million people walk into a Wal Mart store and spend their money.

Without Wal Mart these people would be paying much more for their food, school supplies, clothes, ect.

The only reason libs hate Wal Mart and have declared war on the compnay is, libs must do what the union thugs tell them to do.

As far as the insult about the Wal Mart employees, do not judge a book by its cover, I go every week to my local Wal Mart, and I go early in the morning to avoid the crowds. The night stockers may not look like much, but they work their ass off to get the goods on the shelf and clean the store before the folks start rolling in.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Libs should be thanking Wal Mart for what they do for America.

Wal Mart is where the working class people can go to get the items they need at a fair price. Every week over 100 million people walk into a Wal Mart store and spend their money.

Without Wal Mart these people would be paying much more for their food, school supplies, clothes, ect.

The only reason libs hate Wal Mart and have declared war on the compnay is, libs must do what the union thugs tell them to do.

As far as the insult about the Wal Mart employees, do not judge a book by its cover, I go every week to my local Wal Mart, and I go early in the morning to avoid the crowds. The night stockers may not look like much, but they work their ass off to get the goods on the shelf and clean the store before the folks start rolling in.

RSR, cheerleader for global fascism. Damn he looks good in that tight sweater, AND he puts out. Just kidding, bro.

 

[dilloduck]

RSR, cheerleader for global fascism. Damn he looks good in that tight sweater, AND he puts out. Just kidding, bro.

The GOP has left you, RW. Face it.