WALMART/Walton

<p>===

<b>promoted to primary 1/14, tho not heavily involved in climate (did back a bunch of denier governors, 40% $ went to pols with 20% LCV and lower.</b>

<b> see tag for newer content</b>

claimed to support cap and trade,but spent to kill lieberman-warner 2006?

edelman PR

 </p><p>charter sch</p><p><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://news.muckety.com/2014/04/07/charter-schools-the-walton-familys-favorite-cause/46471">http://news.muckety.com/2014/04/07/charter-schools-the-walton-familys-favorite-cause/46471</a></span></p><div>
</div><p></p><p>3/15</p><p>Some of America's biggest welfare ranchers:</p><p>
</p><p>David and Charles Koch (Koch Industries)</p><p>
</p><p>The brothers hold a half-dozen grazing permits on public land in Montana to go with its 300,000-acre Matador Ranch there. The brothers are tied for fourth place on Forbes 2014 400 Richest People in America list (net worth: $ 42 billion each). The Koch family ($ 89 billion) is #2 on Forbes Richest Families list; Koch Industries is #2 on Forbes America's Largest Private Companies list, ($ 115 billion in sales).</p><p>
</p><p>J.R. Simplot Corp.</p><p>
</p><p>The largest U.S. public lands ranching entity (with an estimated 2 to 3 million acres of allotments in CA, ID, NV, OR and UT) is #63 on Forbes 2014 list of America's Largest Private Companies ($ 5.8 billion in sales). In 2014, the family was #29 on Forbes list of America’s Richest Families (net worth: $ 8 billion).</p><p>
</p><p>Bruce McCaw (McCaw Cellular)</p><p>
</p><p>
</p><p>McCaw was #382 on Forbes 400 list of America’s Richest People in 2005 (net worth: $ 925 million). Through his 9 sprawling ranches, he controls a significant number of public grazing leases in ID and possibly NV. One of them (Camas Creek ranch) includes 272,000 acres of Federal grazing allotments in Idaho's Camas Prairie. Grazing permitted to his other ranches could easily double or triple that to a million acres or more.</p><p>
</p><p>Barrick Gold</p><p>
</p><p>The Canadian mining company is one of the two largest public lands ranchers in NV, ranking 771st on Forbes Global 2000 list of the World’s Biggest Public Companies in 2014, (sales: $ 12.56 billion). Like many other large public lands ranchers, Barrick buys ranches to secure water rights.</p><p>
</p><p>Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA)</p><p>
</p><p>The supplier of drinking water to Las Vegas is a large NV public lands rancher with an estimated 1 million acres of public grazing allotments. Like Barrick Gold, it, buys up private ranches to gain their water rights.</p><p>
</p><p>W. Barron Hilton (Hilton Hotels)</p><p>
</p><p>The hotel heir dropped off Forbes Billionaires list (ranked #459 in 2011) as well as its list of the 400 Richest Americans (#144 in 2010), with a net worth of $ 2.5 billion. He died in 2013.</p><p>
</p><p>Though records are hard to pin down, Hilton's heirs inherited a ranching operation in the CA-NV border area, which has been known to have vast public lands grazing allotments permitted to it.</p><p>
</p><p>Mary Hewlett-Jaffe (Hewlett-Packard)</p><p>
</p><p>Jaffe holds the largest BLM public lands grazing permit in central ID and is among the top 15 public lands ranchers in the state (estimated at under 200,000 acres that are said to be in extremely degraded condition, according to sources).</p><p>
</p><p>
</p><p>James Barta (Sav-Rx.com)</p><p>
</p><p>Barta is not on any Forbes rich lists, but owns one of the largest cattle ranching operations in the U.S., according to his attorneys. Barta holds grazing permits to nearly 900,000 acres of public grazing allotments in connection with two properties: White Horse Ranch (in OR) and Soldier Meadows (in NV). Barta may have additional NV grazing leases through two other ranches in NV, according to Jon Marvel, founder of Western Watersheds Project.</p><p>
</p><p>T. Wright Dickinson</p><p>
</p><p>Though not on any Forbes list, the Dickinson family is a large public lands rancher, with  grazing permits estimated at more than a half million acres of CO, UT and WY public lands under its LLC, Vermillion Ranches. Dickinson is a former County commissioner and proponent of county efforts to gain control of federal lands, according to the Denver Post.</p><p>
</p><p>Stan Kroenke (Kroenke Group) & Ann Walton Kroenke (Walmart)</p><p>
</p><p>With just two of his ranches (in MT and WY) totaling 664,000 acres (not including public grazing allotments), Kroenke is one of the ten top land owners in the U.S. In 2014, he ranked #89 on Forbes list of the 400 Richest Americans, #247 on its Billionaires list, and #5 on its list of Richest American Sports Team Owners (net worth: $ 5.8 billion). His wife, Ann Walton Kroenke (net worth: $ 5.6 billion), was #261 on Forbes Billionaires list and #11 on its list of America’s Richest Women.</p><p>
</p><p>Family of Robert Earl Holding (Sinclair Oil and hotels)</p><p>
</p><p>Forbes ranks the family #87 on its 2014 list of America’s Richest Families (net worth: $ 2.7 billion). With 400,000 acres of land, the family is the 19th largest private land owner in the US, according to the 2014 Land Report 100. This includes land that Forbes reported “may be the largest ranching operation in the Rocky Mountains.” Public grazing leases are associated with some of the family’s WY and possibly MT holdings, according to Jon Marvel, founder of Western Watersheds. </p><p>
</p><p>Ted Turner</p><p>
</p><p>He's the second largest U.S. land owner (2 million acres in 6 states), is estimated to hold grazing leases in MT and NM (estimated at as much as 300,000 acres), and owns the world's largest bison herd. Forbes ranked him #296 on its 2014 list of the 400 Richest Americans and #818 on its global Billionaires list (net worth: $ 2.2 billion).</p><p></p><p>...</p><p> <span style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">ALEC, which receives much of its funding from the utility industry and fossil-fuel investors like the Kochs, has</span><span style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/12/alec-calls-penalties-freerider-homeowners-assault-clean-energy" style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">long been an opponent of renewable energy</a><span style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">and the Obama administration’s effort to reduce carbon emissions. It's working with conservative activists and corporate interests to fight homeowners who are </span><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/09/alec_climate_change_a_fight_over_rooftop_solar_panels_could_decide_america.html" style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">installing solar panels on their roofs</a><span style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Calling people who install rooftop solar panel “freeriders,” another word for freeloaders, the pro-corporate group is</span><span style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/opinion/sunday/the-koch-attack-on-solar-energy.html?r=0" style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">actively promoting legislation</a><span style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><span style="font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">in states to charge fees, even exorbitant ones, for rooftop solar installations.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Behind the lobbyists are the megarich Walton family. The majority owners of the Walmart retail chain also own several energy interests, including a 30% stake in First Solar, which makes the parts for huge commerical installations of solar panels that operate like power plants. A recent<a href="http://ilsr.org/walton-report/" target="blank" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance</a> shows that the Waltons are giving lobbyist organizations millions to attack renewable energy laws at the state level. Their prime targets are the homeowners and businesses that opt for solar panels to provide their own electricity.</p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Rooftop solar in the U.S. is growing exponentially and more and more Americans have access to affordable solar power that cuts their energy bills and builds a more sustainable energy future," <a href="http://ilsr.org/walton-report/" target="blank" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">says Erich Pica</a>, president of Friends of the Earth. "Yet, the Waltons’ money is instead limiting average Americans’ ability to go solar and control their own energy future,” </p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Tag-teaming with the Koch brothers and some of the nation’s largest utilities, the Waltons are not being shy in browbeating state lawmakers and agencies to roll back or throw out their renewable energy policies. Over the past few years, they’ve bankrolled campaigns against residential solar in Arizona, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma and Washington. Results in these states have been mixed, so far. </p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In Arizona, First Solar, with help from the PACs, was successful in securing fees on rooftop solar installations for the state’s energy utilities. Initially, the utilities asked for a $100-a-month surcharge, which would have utterly destroyed any economic incentive to opt for home-generated power. But with some pushback, a compromise was reached, and the new fees for putting solar panels on a home now come to about $5 a month. As relatively small as it is, the new fee seems to have scared off would-be solar adopters in the Grand Canyon state. The thought of the “tax” increasing in coming years may have homeowners thinking twice about installing panels; rooftop installations in Arizona have dropped 40% since the compromise was reached.</p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">While not going directly after homeowners with solar rooftops, ALEC was<a href="http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/ohio-rolls-back-renewables/" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">similarly successful in Ohio</a>, making it the first state to hold back on new mandates for renewable energy generation. This had ALEC’s John Eick doing his happy dance. "[Ohio] may have laid the groundwork for other states to move in this direction in the coming year," said ALEC’s legislative analyst.</p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ohio’s 2008 standards had mandated that utilities sell an increasing amount of power generated by renewable or alternative fuels over time until it comprised a quarter of the state’s electricity output 10 years from now. It also mandated a sharp reduction in power consumption. Those requirements are now frozen for at least two years while a state legislative commission considers altering them.</p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong>Utilities Versus 'Youtilities'</strong></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Why are conservative luminaries, corporate lobbyists, and the power companies pushing so hard against the little guy trying to save a few bucks while helping the planet? Because even though <a href="http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3" target="blank" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">solar energy</a> still only accounts for 0.23 percent of the nation’s electricity today, rooftop solar is a real threat to the very existence of utilities in the near future.  </p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 32px !important; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">For utilities, the most immediate cause for concern is net metering policies in many states, which allow homeowners and businesses to sell back any excess electricity they create with their solar panels. The surplus electricity goes back into the power grid and is sold to other consumers at low rates, often lower than what the utilities charge for electricity themselves. John Eick told the Guardian that ALEC is worried about how individual homeowners are being compensated for feeding electricity back into the system. He said ALEC wants to reduce the rate homeowners are paid for direct power generation and perhaps even penalize homeowners for selling electricity back to the grid.</p><p>=</p><p><a href="http://ecowatch.com/2014/10/15/walmart-walton-renewable-energy">http://ecowatch.com/2014/10/15/walmart-walton-renewable-energy</a></p><p> </p><p>...</p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The report, <em style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">How The Walton Family Is Threatening Our Clean Energy Future</em>, resolves the contradiction by pointing to the multibillionaires’ main motivation: profit.</p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">According to the report, “The Walton family—majority owners of Walmart—are <a href="http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/19/alec-legislator-renewable-standard/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(67, 146, 65); transition: color 0.2s linear; -webkit-transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">impeding America’s transition to a clean energy future</a>. At a time when more than 500,000 households and businesses are generating their own solar electricity, and the U.S. solar industry is employing 143,000 people, the Waltons are funding nearly two dozen organizations working to roll back renewable energy policies, while a Walton-owned company is pushing for regulations aimed at hindering the growth of rooftop solar power.”</p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As solar energy generation has spread across the country, traditional fossil fuel-based utilities have been campaigning to weaken state policies that encourage the growth of clean energy, including solar. They’ve especially taken aim at anything that would bolster the spread of rooftop solar installations, which threatens their profits. They’ve been backed by anti-environment groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (<a href="http://ecowatch.com/search/?q=ALEC" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(67, 146, 65); transition: color 0.2s linear; -webkit-transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">ALEC</a>), Americans for Prosperity and American Enterprise Institute. The Waltons have donated more than $4.5 million to more than 20 such groups, including all three of those. The study also found that the bulk of Walmart’s and the Waltons’ contributions to individual politicians favor those who oppose legislation reducing energy pollution to address <a href="http://ecowatch.com/climate-change-news/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(67, 146, 65); transition: color 0.2s linear; -webkit-transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;">climate change</a>.</p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style=" background-color: #FFF200;">The anti-renewables groups have had some successes in rolling back the energy future in Ohio and Arizona. Arizona, for instance, gave the state’s largest utility, APS, the right to</span><span style=" background-color: #FFF200;"> </span><a href="http://ecowatch.com/2013/11/19/arizona-imposes-unprecedented-fee-on-solar-energy-users/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(67, 146, 65); transition: color 0.2s linear; -webkit-transition: color 0.2s linear; background: transparent;"><span style=" background-color: #FFF200;">charge a fee</span></a><span style=" background-color: #FFF200;">to homes with rooftop solar. Since then, according to the ILSO study, rooftop solar installations are declining, and so is the number of jobs in the solar industry.</span></p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What’s Walmart’s dog in this fight? Let the report explain:</p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>“A Walton-owned solar company, First Solar, was instrumental in helping APS win in Arizona</b>, backing the utility even as the rest of the solar industry joined environmental and consumer groups in opposing the new fees. First Solar builds solar arrays for utilities and, as such, stands to benefit if households are blocked from generating their own electricity, even if it means slowing the overall growth of solar.”</p><p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </p><p>

</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 25.2000007629395px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>First Solar instigated a proceeding at the World Health Organization that could force several states to repeal solar incentives that encourage job creation there</b>. First Solar does most of its manufacturing in Malaysia, minimizing its contribution to U.S. job creation....10/14

<a href="http://www.prwatch.org/node/12505">http://www.prwatch.org/node/12505</a></p>

<p>

food & water watch</p>

<p>

One of the most frequent questions I get about the food system is what to make of the fact that Walmart sells organic food.

Is it good news or bad?

Is it a sign of progress or the end of organic?

On April 10, a press release from Walmart added fuel to the debate. Not only is Walmart promising to sell more organic products than ever before, but the company says it will sell them cheaply.

There will be folks who spin this announcement as good news, claiming any increase in the volume of organic food sales, no matter where or at what price, is a good thing. But unfortunately, it's not that simple.

Walmart's business model is based on practices that increase the corporate consolidation of the food system, take money away from farmers, workers, and food processors, and drive agriculture to get more industrialized. The organic sector is already facing these pressures, and more exposure to the Walmart way of doing business could only make things worse.</p>

<p>

<a href="http://www.alternet.org/food/why-wal-mart-threat-organic-food">http://www.alternet.org/food/why-wal-mart-threat-organic-food</a>

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/why-you-should-be-skeptical-of-walmarts-cheap-organic-food/

<div class="byline story"><span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden">The Huffington Post</span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/amy-traub" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Amy Traub</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span></em></div>

<div class="story_comments"><span class="small"><b>Food Stamps Don't Keep Walmart's Prices Low, They Keep Its Profits High</b></span></div>

</div>

<div class="story-date"><em><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2014-04-05T11:25:00-07:00">April 5, 2014</span></span></span></span> </em> |  </div>

<p>"<a href="http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/secret-life-food-stamp/save-money-live-better" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The same company that brings in the most food stamp dollars in revenue</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[2]</span> -- an estimated $13 billion last year -- also likely has the most employees using food stamps."

The name of the mammoth food stamp-reliant company is no secret: Walmart.

As journalist Krissy Clark notes in Marketplace's valuable new series "<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/big_box_stores_make_billions_off_food_stamps_often_it_s_their_own_workers.html" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The Secret Life of the Food Stamp</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[3]</span>," Walmart benefits from food stamps in multiple ways, as taxpayers both underwrite the company's food sales and also subsidize its payroll costs.

There is no doubt that food stamps (and a host of other public subsidies from Medicaid to home heating assistance to the Earned Income Tax Credit and beyond) reduce Walmart's employment costs substantially. A <a href="http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/press-release/low-wages-single-wal-mart-store-cost-taxpayers-about-1-million-every-year-says-new" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">study</a><span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[4]</span> released last year by staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that a single 300-employee Walmart Supercenter may cost taxpayers anywhere from $904,542 to nearly $1.75 million per year.

Consider that the working people who turn to food stamps to supplement inadequate wages are demonized as society's lazy "takers" -- a young Walmart employee who enrolled in food stamps to help support his pregnant partner told Marketplace that previously "I'd always considered people who use food stamps as just taking advantage of the government." Yet the company itself continues to be seen as a paragon of free enterprise, notwithstanding the tens of billions of dollars in subsidies through the same program.

Marketplace has done a great service by shining light on a key public misperception, illuminating the low-wage employers who benefit most from programs like food stamps. Yet an important part of the story still gets missed. It's probably intended to be a rhetorical question when part II of the food stamp series asks: "Are Walmart's prices so low because its employees are on food stamps?" But the answer is no.

In reality, it's not Walmart's low prices that taxpayers are subsidizing -- it's the company's mammoth profits.

Walmart made $17 billion in profit in 2013, and spent $7.6 billion buying back shares of its own stock -- further consolidating the company's ownership in the hands of the Walton heirs, already among the wealthiest people on the face of the earth. As my colleague Catherine Ruestchlin and I explain in our <a href="http://www.demos.org/publication/higher-wage-possible" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">2013 study</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[5]</span>, these stock buybacks did nothing to boost Walmart's productivity or bottom line. They contributed zilch to cutting consumer prices or keeping those prices low. But if, for example, funds from this financial maneuvering were redirected to Walmart's low-paid employees, workers would each see a <a href="http://www.demos.org/publication/higher-wage-possible" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">raise of $5.83 an hour</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[5]</span>. As a result, the overwhelming majority of Walmart workers would no longer need to turn to food stamps to supplement their wages. Other observers have found <a href="http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/11/12/wal-mart-pay-raise/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">additional ways</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[6]</span> the company could substantially boost pay (and reduce reliance on food stamps) without increasing prices. Yet Walmart has made a decision to continue its dependence on food stamps and other public subsidies.

It's no surprise that Walmart itself works to obscure the pivotal role of its corporate decision making. David Tovar, Walmart's vice president of communications, told Marketplace that since Walmart is the nation's largest employer "its work force is bound to reflect the country's current economic realities, including growing rates of food stamp use." This statement passes the buck impressively, overlooking the role that Walmart has played in shaping the country's current economic realities -- in creating an America where millions of people who get up and go to work each day are nevertheless paid too little to feed themselves.

The truth is that Walmart and all the other large and profitable <a href="http://www.demos.org/publication/retails-hidden-potential-how-raising-wages-would-benefit-workers-industry-and-overall-ec" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">retailers</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[7]</span>, <a href="http://prospect.org/article/how-multi-billion-dollar-corporations-rely-public-feed-their-workforce" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">fast food companies</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[8]</span>, and other corporations that fatten their bottom line by letting the public feed their employees have made a business decision to shrink their payroll on the taxpayer's dime. It's up to us to decide whether to continue allowing them to do it.</p>

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<div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/walmart" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">walmart</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[9]</span>,</div>

<div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/food-stamps" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">food stamps</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[10]</span>,</div>

<div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/minimum-wage" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">minimum wage</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[11]</span>,</div>

<div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/economy-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">economy</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[12]</span></div>

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<div class="print-source_url" style=" font-size: small;"><strong>Source URL:</strong> <a href="http://www.alternet.org/labor/food-stamps-dont-keep-walmarts-prices-low-they-keep-its-profits-high" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">http://www.alternet.org/labor/food-stamps-dont-keep-walmarts-prices-low-they-keep-its-profits-high</a></div>

<div class="story_comments"><span class="small"><b>Food Stamps Don't Keep Walmart's Prices Low, They Keep Its Profits High</b></span></div>

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The name of the mammoth food stamp-reliant company is no secret: Walmart.

In reality, it's not Walmart's low prices that taxpayers are subsidizing -- it's the company's mammoth profits.

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<p>==

... salon

Amazon, like General Electric and <b>Walmart,</b> prides itself as a self-consciously ideological corporation, with Jeff Bezos and his senior executives proclaiming an “Amazon Way” that can illuminate the path forward for less innovative businesses. In December 2009 Mark Onetto, chief of operations and customer relations at Amazon and a close collaborator of Bezos, gave an hourlong lecture on the Amazon Way to master’s of business administration students at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Onetto is a disconcerting figure, because once he starts talking, style and substance are in sharp contrast. He is French born, and he still speaks with the rather faded insouciance of Maurice Chevalier and “Gay Paree,” and he makes much of this in his lecture. But there was nothing gay (in the traditional sense) or insouciant about the Amazon workplace that Onetto described for UVA’s MBA candidates.

Like most such corporate mission statements, Onetto’s uses a coded language that hides the harshness of his underlying message, which needs translation along with a hefty reality check. As with Walmart so at Amazon, there is a quasi-religious cult of the customer as an object of “trust” and “care”; Amazon “cares about the customer,” and “everything is driven” for him or her. Early in the lecture, Onetto quotes Bezos himself as saying, “I am not selling stuff. I am facilitating for my customers to buy what they need.”

Amazon’s larding of its customer cult with the moral language of “care” and “trust” comes with a strong dose of humbug because Amazon’s customers are principally valued by the corporation as mainstays of the bottom line, and not as vehicles for the fulfillment of personal relationships. There is still more humbug in the air because Amazon treats a second significant grouping of men and women with whom it has dealings—its employees—with the very opposite of care and trust. Amazon’s employees are almost completely absent from Onetto’s lecture, and they make their one major appearance when they too are wheeled in as devotees of the cult of the customer: “We make sure that every associate at Amazon is really a customercentric person, that cares about the customer.”

But as so often in Amazon’s recent history, it has been in Germany that this humbug has been stripped away and the true role of the “cult of the customer” has become clear. In its US and UK fulfillment centers, Amazon management is hegemonic. There is no independent employee voice to contest management’s demands for increased output unmatched by increases in real wages. But in Germany Amazon has to deal with work councils (<em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">Betriebsrat</em>); a powerful union, the United Services Union (Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft, or Ver.Di), with 2.2 million members; and high officials of the federal and state governments more closely aligned with labor than their counterparts in the United States and the United Kingdom.

When in December 2012 the Ver.Di representatives in Leipzig called on the management of Amazon’s local center to open negotiations on wage rates and an improvement of working conditions, and especially for temporary workers who are badly exploited at Amazon, management refused on the grounds that employees should be “thinking about their customers” and not about their own selfish interests. This was treated with derision on the union side, but at all Amazon’s centers, and especially those in the United States and the United Kingdom, the cult of the customer is a serious matter and provides the rationale for the extreme variant of scientific management whose purpose, as at Walmart, is to keep pushing up employee productivity while keeping hourly wages at or near poverty levels.

As at Walmart, Amazon achieves this with a regime of workplace pressure, in which targets for the unpacking, movement, and repackaging of goods are relentlessly increased to levels where employees have to struggle to meet their targets and where older and less dextrous employees will begin to fail. As at Walmart, there is a pervasive “three strikes and you’re out” culture, and when these marginal employees acquire too many demerits (“points”), they are fired.

Amazon’s system of employee monitoring is the most oppressive I have ever come across and combines state-of-the-art surveillance technology with the system of “functional foreman,” introduced by Taylor in the workshops of the Pennsylvania machine-tool industry in the 1890s. In a fine piece of investigative reporting for the London Financial Times, economics correspondent Sarah O’Connor describes how, at Amazon’s center at Rugeley, England, Amazon tags its employees with personal sat-nav (satellite navigation) computers that tell them the route they must travel to shelve consignments of goods, but also set target times for their warehouse journeys and then measure whether targets are met.

All this information is available to management in real time, and if an employee is behind schedule she will receive a text message pointing this out and telling her to reach her targets or suffer the consequences. At Amazon’s depot in Allentown, Pennsylvania (of which more later), Kate Salasky worked shifts of up to eleven hours a day, mostly spent walking the length and breadth of the warehouse. In March 2011 she received a warning message from her manager, saying that she had been found unproductive during several <em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">minutes </em>of her shift, and she was eventually fired. This employee tagging is now in operation at Amazon centers worldwide.

Whereas some Amazon employees are in constant motion across the floors of its enormous centers—the biggest, in Arizona, is the size of twenty-eight football fields—others work on assembly lines packing goods for shipping. An anonymous German student who worked as a temporary packer at Amazon’s depot in Augsburg, southern Germany, has given a revealing account of work on the line at Amazon. Her account appeared in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the stern upholder of German financial orthodoxy and not a publication usually given to accounts of workplace abuse by large and powerful corporations. There were six packing lines at Amazon’s Augsburg center, each with two conveyor belts feeding tables where the packers stood and did the packing. The first conveyor belt fed the table with goods stored in boxes, and the second carried the goods away in sealed packages ready for distribution by UPS, FedEx, and their German counterparts.

Machines measured whether the packers were meeting their targets for output per hour and whether the finished packages met their targets for weight and so had been packed “the one best way<em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">.</em>” But alongside these digital controls there was a team of Taylor’s “functional foremen,” overseers in the full nineteenth-century sense of the term, watching the employees every second to ensure that there was no “time theft,” in the language of Walmart. On the packing lines there were six such foremen, one known in Amazonspeak as a “coworker” and above him five “leads,” whose collective task was to make sure that the line kept moving. Workers would be reprimanded for speaking to one another or for pausing to catch their breath (<em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">Verschnaufpause</em>) after an especially tough packing job.

The functional foreman would record how often the packers went to the bathroom and, if they had not gone to the bathroom nearest the line, why not. The student packer also noticed how, in the manner of Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century panopticon, the architecture of the depot was geared to make surveillance easier, with a bridge positioned at the end of the workstation where an overseer could stand and look down on his wards. However, the task of the depot managers and supervisors was not simply to fight time theft and keep the line moving but also to find ways of making it move still faster. Sometimes this was done using the classic methods of Scientific Management, but at other times higher targets for output were simply proclaimed by management, in the manner of the Soviet workplace during the Stalin era.

Onetto in his lecture describes in detail how Amazon’s present-day scientific managers go about achieving speedup. They observe the line, create a detailed “process map” of its workings, and then return to the line to look for evidence of waste, or <em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">Muda, </em>in the language of the Toyota system. They then draw up a new process map, along with a new and faster “time and motion” regime for the employees. Amazon even brings in veterans of lean production from Toyota itself, whom Onetto describes with some relish as “insultants,” not consultants: “They are really not nice. . . . [T]hey’re samurais, the real last samurais, the guys from the Toyota plants.” But as often as not, higher output targets are declared by Amazon management without explanation or warning, and employees who cannot make the cut are fired. At Amazon’s Allentown depot, Mark Zweifel, twenty-two, worked on the receiving line, “unloading inventory boxes, scanning bar codes and loading products into totes.” After working six months at Amazon, he was told, without warning or explanation, that his target rates for packages had doubled from 250 units per hour to 500.

Zweifel was able to make the pace, but he saw older workers who could not and were “getting written up a lot” and most of whom were fired. A temporary employee at the same warehouse, in his fifties, worked ten hours a day as a picker, taking items from bins and delivering them to the shelves. He would walk thirteen to fifteen miles daily. He was told he had to pick 1,200 items in a ten-hour shift, or 1 item every thirty seconds. He had to get down on his hands and knees 250 to 300 times a day to do this. He got written up for not working fast enough, and when he was fired only three of the one hundred temporary workers hired with him had survived.

At the Allentown warehouse, Stephen Dallal, also a “picker,” found that his output targets increased the longer he worked at the warehouse, doubling after six months. “It started with 75 pieces an hour, then 100 pieces an hour. Then 150 pieces an hour. They just got faster and faster.” He too was written up for not meeting his targets and was fired.27 At the Seattle warehouse where the writer Vanessa Veselka worked as an underground union organizer, an American Stakhnovism pervaded the depot. When she was on the line as a packer and her output slipped, the “lead” was on to her with “I need more from you today. We’re trying to hit 14,000 over these next few hours.”

Beyond this poisonous mixture of Taylorism and Stakhnovism, laced with twenty-first-century IT, there is, in Amazon’s treatment of its employees, a pervasive culture of meanness and mistrust that sits ill with its moralizing about care and trust—for customers, but not for the employees. So, for example, the company forces its employees to go through scanning checkpoints when both entering and leaving the depots, to guard against theft, and sets up checkpoints <em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">within </em>the depot, which employees must stand in line to clear before entering the cafeteria, leading to what Amazon’s German employees call <em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">Pausenklau </em>(break theft), shrinking the employee’s lunch break from thirty to twenty minutes, when they barely have time to eat their meal.

Other examples include providing UK employees with cheap, ill-fitting boots that gave them blisters; relying on employment agencies to hire temporary workers whom Amazon can pay less, avoid paying them benefits, and fire them virtually at will; and, in a notorious case, relying on a security firm with alleged neo-Nazi connections that, hired by an employment agency working for Amazon, intimidated temporary workers lodged in a company dormitory near Amazon’s depot at Bad Hersfeld, Germany, with guards entering their rooms without permission at all times of the day and night. These practices were exposed in a television documentary shown on the German channel ARD in February 2013.

Perhaps the biggest scandal in Amazon’s recent history took place at its Allentown, Pennsylvania, center during the summer of 2011. The scandal was the subject of a prizewinning series in the Allentown newspaper, the Morning Call, by its reporter Spencer Soper. The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon’s ruthlessness—<b>ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital</b>. Despite the summer weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees.

On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10 OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: “I’d like to report an unsafe environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries.”

On July 25, with temperatures in the depot reaching 110 degrees, a security guard reported to OSHA that Amazon was refusing to open garage doors to help air circulate and that he had seen two pregnant women taken to a nursing station. Calls to the local ambulance service became so frequent that for five hot days in June and July, ambulances and paramedics were stationed all day at the depot. Commenting on these developments, Vickie Mortimer, general manager of the warehouse, insisted that “the safety and welfare of our employees is our number-one priority at Amazon, and as general manager I take that responsibility seriously.” To this end, “Amazon brought 2,000 cooling bandannas which were given to every employee, and those in the dock/trailer yard received cooling vests.”

With <font color="#ff0000">Walmart’</font>s and Amazon’s business model, the workplace practices that raise employee productivity to very high levels also keep employees off balance and thus ill placed to secure wage increases that match their increased output. The “cult of the customer” preached by both corporations is a scented smoke screen thrown up to hide this fact. Apart from the model’s intensive use of IT, there is not much to distinguish its methods from those of the primitive American and European capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On both sides of the Atlantic, these excesses were harbingers of the rise of the labor movement and the political Left, both revolutionary and democratic, with the movements strongly focused on relations between capital and labor as the central issue of politics and society.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the parties of the center Left, the Democrats and the Labour Party, have today lost this focus, and the labor movements in both countries are in long-term decline. But in Germany the labor movement remains strong, and on workplace issues the mainstream political parties, the Christian Democrats as well as the Social Democrats, are well to the left of their American and British counterparts. This became apparent following the scandal at Amazon’s Bad Hersfeld depot in 2012, when security guards allegedly forced their way into dormitories housing temporary Amazon employees and intimidated them. Amazon faced what Der Spiegel called a <em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">Shitstorm </em>and was strongly criticized by the federal minister of labor, the prime minister of the state government of Hesse, the head of the Labor Office in Hesse, as well as the Social Democratic Party opposition in the federal and state parliaments.

Amazon was on the defensive, and in an interview with Spiegel Online that followed the scandal, Amazon’s local CEO, Ralf Kleber, distanced himself from the managerial absolutism of Bezos and Onetto in saying that he would welcome the setting up of more work councils (<em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">Betriebsrat</em>) at Amazon depots. The services union, Ver.Di, was also a beneficiary of the Amazon <em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">Shitstorm</em>. The union’s goal is to organize the whole Amazon workforce in Germany, negotiate wage increases with Amazon management, improve the working conditions of temporary employees, and blunt Amazon’s more oppressive workplace practices. In a German political and social context, it has a good chance of succeeding. Such success would, however, raise issues of ethics and economics that apply equally in a US and UK setting.

Union success would unquestionably raise Amazon’s costs and slow the growth of employee productivity. Wages would begin increasing in line with employee productivity, and productivity growth itself would slow as the union and the <em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">Betriebsrat </em>together blunted Amazon’s practice of pushing employees to the limit and beyond. We can be sure that at this point, Amazon would play the “cult of the customer” for all its worth and would do the same in an American setting if faced with the same challenge. So customers would have to start paying more for their packages and could no longer be absolutely certain of receiving delivery of them the very next day.

But should these marginal benefits to customers really be purchased at the price of a system that treats employees as untrustworthy human robots and relies on intimidation to push them to the limit, while denying them the rewards of their own increased efficiency? This is not a choice to be made solely with the economist’s narrow calculations of monetary costs and benefits. In quantitative, monetary terms, the cost to Amazon customers of a benign reengineering of the company would far outweigh the monetary benefits to employees. But what is the real value of such customer inconvenience when set alongside the value lost with the millions of lives damaged by Walmart, Amazon, and their ilk?

<em style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none;">Excerpted with permission from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465018440/?tag=saloncom08-20" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; list-style: none; color: rgb(255, 0, 0); text-decoration: none;">“Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans”</a> by Simon Head.  Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. </em>

<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/07/walmart-heirs-waltons-wealth-income-inequality">http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/07/walmart-heirs-waltons-wealth-income-inequality</a>

2012  <span style=" font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Insitute </span><a href="http://www.epi.org/blog/inequality-exhibit-wal-mart-wealth-american/" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-decoration: none; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">points out</a><span style=" font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, the six Walmart heirs now have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined, up from 30 percent in 2007. Between 2007 and 2010, the collective wealth of the six richest Waltons rose from $73 billion to $90 billion, while the wealth of the average American declined from $126,000 to $77,000 (13 million Americans have </span><em style=" font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">negative</em><span style=" font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> net worth). Here's a chart of how many average Americans it has taken over time to equal the wealth of the Waltons:</span>

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spooky bis; robust intel inhouse? blackwater?  afraid of ACORN

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Michael Duke: Low Wages All the Time

This may well be Walmart CEO Michel Duke’s last hurrah in America’s most greedy. He’ll be stepping down as CEO early in 2014, after an embarrassing final year at Walmart’s summit.

The crowning embarrassment? At the company’s 2013 annual meeting, a glitzy affair that management packs with “loyal” employees, one Walmart worker <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/business/wal-marts-meeting-follows-the-script.html?_r=0" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">actually won cheers</a><span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[15]</span> when she denounced Duke’s $20.7 million 2012 paycheck.

Researchers have calculated that Duke <a href="http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/2013/466-hours-overtime-equals-hour-ceo-pay/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">is essentially making</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[16]</span> $6,898 an hour, 779 times the $8.86 average Walmart wage.

In the nation’s capital this fall, city council members tried to up that worker average. They passed a bill that would have required Walmart stores in D.C. to pay at least $12.50 an hour. Duke reacted swiftly. He had his company <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-council-approves-living-wage-bill-over-wal-mart-ultimatum/2013/07/10/724aab6e-e96f-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story_1.html" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">threaten to pull up</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[17]</span> stakes if the bill became law.

Washington’s mayor promptly panicked and vetoed the measure.

Duke took a PR pounding for that threat and still another pounding when the Demos think tank in New York <a href="http://www.demos.org/publication/higher-wage-possible" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">revealed</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[18]</span> that the $7.6 billion Duke had Walmart spend last year buying back company shares, if redirected to worker compensation, could have raised Walmart’s lowest wages by $5.83 an hour — and ensured all the company’s workers at least $25,000 for full-time work.

Poor Michael Duke won’t have to face any more pounding come his retirement this February. He won’t face any financial worries either. Duke is sitting on $113.2 million in retirement assets, thanks to a tax loophole that lets corporate execs annually set aside unlimited sums, tax-free, into their retirement accounts.

Duke’s retirement stash, <a href="http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/platinum_plated_pensions" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">notes</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[19]</span> the Institute for Policy Studies, “could yield him a monthly retirement check of $669,169.” The average Walmart worker 401(k), by contrast, will generate a monthly retirement check of $89.</p>

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<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title"><span style=" font-size: large;">5 Industries That Are Mercilessly Robbing the American People</span></h1>

</div>

<div class="story-date"><em><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-09-29T14:16:00-07:00">September 29, 2013</span></span></span></span> </em> |  </div>

<p>There are more than five ways, of course. There are numerous <em>product</em> ripoffs, as described in a recent article by<a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/product-rip-offs?paging=off" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Lynn Stuart Parramore</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[3]</span>, who identified textbooks and bottled water and print cartridges as a few of the ways Americans are duped into paying a lot more than reason and regulation would dictate.

And there are many industry-specific ripoffs, most notably in health care. We have the <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/04-0" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">most expensive</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[4]</span> health care system in the world, and yet we're <a href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_138575.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">falling behind</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[5]</span> other developed countries in numerous health measures.

Here are five more industry-specific ripoffs of the American people:

<strong><font color="#ff0000">1. The Retail Industry (Walmart): Building Owner Fortunes with Public Tax Money</font></strong>

A <a href="http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/sites/democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/files/documents/WalMartReport-May2013.pdf" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">study</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[6]</span> in Wisconsin by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce determined that a typical Walmart store costs taxpayers over $1.7 million per year, or about $5,815 per employee. A 2004 <a href="http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/retail/walmart.pdf" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">study</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[7]</span> in California put the cost per employee at $2,103.

For the year 2012, <a href="http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/104169/000010416913000011/annualreporttoshareholders.htm" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Walmart's pre-tax U.S. income</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[8]</span> was almost $18.7 billion. That's over $14,000 per U.S. <a href="http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/locations" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Walmart employee</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[9]</span>.

For the year 2012, the four Walton family members made over <a href="http://www.usagainstgreed.org/Forbes400_2011-12.xls" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">$20 billion</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[10]</span> from their investments. That's over $15,000 per Walmart employee.

<strong>2. The Financial Industry: Printing Their Own Money</strong>

Thanks in good part to the derivatives market, the <a href="http://www.thefinancialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-GlobalWealthReport-.pdf" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">world's wealth</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[11]</span> has doubled in ten years. Estimates of the speculative value of the financial derivatives market vary, from <a href="http://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy1111.pdf" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">$708 trillion</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[12]</span> to <a href="http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/10/the-economy-derivatives-market-a-1-2-quadrillion-time-bomb-2479924.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">$1.2 quadrillion</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[13]</span>. The <a href="http://www.cmegroup.com/investor-relations/annual-review/2011/financial-milestones.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Chicago Mercantile Exchange</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[14]</span> alone reported a 2011 trading volume of over $1 quadrillion on 3.4 billion annual contracts.

A quadrillion is a thousand trillion. A return to the financiers of just .1 percent (a tenth of a penny from every dollar) would generate $1 trillion, the total Adjusted Gross Income for <a href="http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-individual-income-tax-data-0" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">half of Americans</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[15]</span>.

<strong>3. The Private Prison Industry: Billing Taxpayers for Empty Cells, then Selling Inmate Labor and Paying Them Sub-Minimum Wages</strong>

Almost two-thirds of the private prison contracts analyzed by <a href="http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/sites/default/files/Criminal-Lockup%20Quota-Report.pdf" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In the Public Interest</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[16]</span> "included occupancy guarantees in the form of quotas or required payments for empty prison cells (a 'low-crime tax')."

Some private prisons, such as Corrections Corporation of America and G4S, <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/155061/getting_paid_93_cents_a_day_in_america_corporations_bring_back_the_19th_century" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">sell inmate labor</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[17]</span> to corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM, and pay the prisoners <a href="http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">less than a dollar an hour</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[18]</span>.

<strong>4. The Telecommunications Industry: Low Quality at High Prices</strong>

In the 1990s the FCC <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-27/u-s-internet-users-pay-more-for-slower-service.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">deregulated</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[19]</span> phone and cable and Internet companies, with the intention of promoting competition. But just a few companies -- Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and Time Warner -- have <a href="http://www.alternet.org/bill-moyers-why-us-internet-access-slow-costly-and-unfair" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">divided up the market</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[20]</span>, reducing competition as they remain poorly regulated.

So now <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/internet-speed-united-states-digital-divide_n_1855054.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">South Korea</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[21]</span> has Internet access speeds 200 times faster than us at half the cost. Same thing in Hong Kong. And in <a href="http://www.alternet.org/bill-moyers-why-us-internet-access-slow-costly-and-unfair" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Europe</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[20]</span> unlimited texting and voice from Verizon costs about a third of U.S. prices.

It gets worse, according to <a href="https://soundcloud.com/danahey/tim-danahey-show-david-cay" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">David Cay Johnston</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[22]</span>, who reports that regulations have been written that allow large corporations to add unsubstantiated charges to cell phones, cable TV, internet service providers and others that can cost American families over $2,000 per year.

<strong>5. The Drug Industry: Buy American...But Tax Us Like We're Foreigners</strong>

<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/09-7" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Bernie Sanders</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[23]</span> notes that pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have lobbied to keep Americans from buying cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe, but then they their shift drug patents and profits to offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Higher drug prices cost an average American family <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/23" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">over $1250 per year</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[24]</span>.

Drug companies also participate in <a href="http://www.alternet.org/drugs/where-does-it-say-supreme-court-has-constitutional-power-hike-medicine-prices-5x-their-cost" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">"Pay-for-Delay"</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[25]</span> deals, through which brand-name firms pay generic makers to keep their cheaper drugs out of the market for a number of years.

<em>That's capitalism.</em> Ripping a once-strong society into little pieces.</p>

</div>

<div class="tags"><em>See more stories tagged with:</em>

<div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/capitalism" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">capitalism</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[26]</span>,</div>

<div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">america</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[28]</span>,</div>

<div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/wages" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">wages</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[29]</span>,</div>

<div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/wealth" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">wealth</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[30]</span>,</div>

<div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/walmart" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">walmart</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[31]</span></div>

</div>

</div>

<div class="print-source_url" style=" font-size: small;"><strong>Source URL:</strong> <a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-industries-are-mercilessly-robbing-american-people" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-industries-are-mercilessly-robbing-american-people</a></div>

<p><strong>Links:</strong>

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/paul-buchheit-0

[3] http://www.alternet.org/economy/product-rip-offs?paging=off

[4] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/04-0

[5] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_138575.html

[6] http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/sites/democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/files/documents/WalMartReport-May2013.pdf

[7] http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/retail/walmart.pdf

[8] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/104169/000010416913000011/annualreporttoshareholders.htm

[9] http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/locations

[10] http://www.usagainstgreed.org/Forbes400_2011-12.xls

[11] http://www.thefinancialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-GlobalWealthReport-.pdf

[12] http://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy1111.pdf

[13] http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/10/the-economy-derivatives-market-a-1-2-quadrillion-time-bomb-2479924.html

[14] http://www.cmegroup.com/investor-relations/annual-review/2011/financial-milestones.html

[15] http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-individual-income-tax-data-0

[16] http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/sites/default/files/Criminal-Lockup%20Quota-Report.pdf

[17] http://www.alternet.org/story/155061/getting_paid_93_cents_a_day_in_america_corporations_bring_back_the_19th_century

[18] http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html

[19] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-27/u-s-internet-users-pay-more-for-slower-service.html

[20] http://www.alternet.org/bill-moyers-why-us-internet-access-slow-costly-and-unfair

[21] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/internet-speed-united-states-digital-divide_n_1855054.html

[22] https://soundcloud.com/danahey/tim-danahey-show-david-cay

[23] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/09-7

[24] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/23

[25] http://www.alternet.org/drugs/where-does-it-say-supreme-court-has-constitutional-power-hike-medicine-prices-5x-their-cost

[26] http://www.alternet.org/tags/capitalism

[27] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economy-0

[28] http://www.alternet.org/tags/america

[29] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wages

[30] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wealth

[31] http://www.alternet.org/tags/walmart

[32] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</p>

</div>

<div>

<div class="byline news-politics"><span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://alternet.org/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">AlterNet</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span></span></span></span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/stacy-mitchell" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Stacy Mitchell</a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[2]</span></em></div>

<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title"><font size="4">Walmart's Latest Scheme to Replace the Middle Class With an Underclass Forced to Buy its Shoddy Goods</font></h1>

</div>

<div class="story-date"><em><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-08-21T09:28:00-07:00">August 21, 2013</span></span></span></span> </em> |  </div>

<p class="p1"><i>This article was published in partnership with the </i><a href="http://www.ilsr.org/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="s2"><i>Institute for Local Self-Reliance</i></span></a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[3]</span><i>.</i>

<span class="s1">Almost 30 years ago, as the U.S. was bleeding jobs, Walmart launched a "Buy America" program and started hanging "Made in America" signs in its 750 stores.  It was a marketing success, cementing the retailer's popularity in the country's struggling, blue-collar heartland.  A few years later, NBC's <i>Dateline</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/24/business/wal-mart-disputes-report-on-labor.html" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="s3">revealed the program to be a sham</span></a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[4]</span>.  Sure, Walmart was willing to buy U.S.-made goods — so long as they were as cheap as imports, which, of course, they weren't.  <i>Dateline</i> found that Walmart's sourcing was in fact rapidly shifting to Asia. </span>

<span class="s1">This year, Walmart is back with a new "Buy America" program.  In January, the company announced that it would purchase an additional $50 billion worth of domestic goods over the next decade.  This week, Walmart is convening several hundred suppliers, along with a handful of governors, for a <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/article/2013-08-19/adchExfs5Uyg.html" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="s3">summit on U.S. manufacturing</span></a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[5]</span>. </span>

<span class="s1">This sounds pretty substantial, but in fact it's just a more sophisticated and media savvy version of Walmart's hollow 1980s Buy America campaign.  For starters, $50 billion over a decade may sound huge at first, but measured against Walmart's galactic size, it's not.<b>  An additional $5 billion a year amounts to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/business/walmart-to-offer-more-us-made-goods.html?_r=2&" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="s3">only 1.5 percent</span></a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[6]</span> of what Walmart currently spends on inventory.</b></span>

<span class="s1"><b><font color="#ff0000">Worse, very little of this small increase in spending on American-made goods will actually result in new U.S. production and jobs.  Most of the projected increase will simply be a byproduct of Walmart's continued takeover of the grocery industry.</font></b>  Most grocery products sold in the U.S. are produced here.  As Walmart expands its share of U.S. grocery sales — it now captures 25 percent, up from 6 percent in 1998 — it will buy more U.S. foods.  But this doesn't mean new jobs, because other grocers are losing market share and buying less.  What it does mean is lower wages.  As I reported earlier this year, Walmart's growing control of the grocery sector is<a href="http://www.ilsr.org/walmarts-death-grip-food-system-intensifying-poverty/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="s3">pushing down wages throughout food production</span></a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[7]</span>. </span>

<span class="s1">Groceries now account for 55 percent of Walmart's U.S. revenue, up from 24 percent in 2003.  The company is planning to grow that ratio even further, with about 100 Neighborhood Market stores (Walmart's new-ish supermarket format) <a href="http://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2012/10/10/walmart-reinforces-financial-priorities-growth-leverage-returns-company-lowers-fiscal-2014-capital-plan-from-current-year" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="s3">in the pipeline</span></a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[8]</span> this year alone, along with 125 new supercenters.  So we can expect that at least half of Walmart's new spending on U.S. goods will be for groceries, with no net gain in jobs and, very likely, a further decline in wages. </span>

<span class="s1">As for the rest, to a large extent, Walmart is simply taking credit for a shift that has already happened.  Over the last few years, U.S. manufacturing has undergone a modest revival, owing mainly to rising labor costs in China.  Unfortunately, it's not at all clear that this revival will do much to resurrect the American middle class, because a lot of the new production is highly automated and located in the anti-union South. </span>

<span class="s1">This is especially true for the companies supplying Walmart.  Take 1888 Mills, a Georgia towel maker that has a new (and much-publicized) contract to produce American-made towels for Walmart.  The company, which plans to maintain its overseas workforce of 14,000 for the bulk of its production, will be adding <a href="http://www.metroatlantachamber.com/news/items/2013/04/19/made-in-georgia-smaller-leaner-factories-lead-uptick" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="s3">only 35 jobs</span></a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[9]</span> at its U.S. factory to meet Walmart's multi-year purchase agreement.  The jobs pay $12-14 an hour.  </span>

<span class="s1">In a way, Walmart's Buy America program represents the home stretch of the economic transformation the company set in motion decades ago, when it set out to replace the American middle class, rooted in small business ownership and unionized jobs, with a vast underclass that has little choice but to rely on the <a href="http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-11-is-your-stuff-falling-apart-thank-walmart/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="s3">shoddy, short-lived products</span></a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[10]</span> sold at big-box stores to get by. </span>

The only way out of this is to curtail Walmart's continued expansion, particularly its planned takeover of urban markets, which threatens to cut off other viable economic development options.  Walmart's growth in cities, for example, could disrupt a small but promising corner of the manufacturing revival: a plethora of <a href="http://www.sfmade.org/" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="s3">new consumer goods manufacturers</span></a> <span class="print-footnote" style=" font-size: xx-small;">[11]</span> in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco that are responding to growing public demand for long-lasting, locally made products. These small start-ups need a diverse marketplace of independent retailers and small local chains to reach consumers — precisely the ecosystem that Walmart, buoyed by its Buy America marketing, aims to eradicate. </p>

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<div class="tags"><em>See more stories tagged with:</em>

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<div class="print-source_url" style=" font-size: small;"><strong>Source URL:</strong> <a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/walmarts-latest-scheme-replace-middle-class-underclass-forced-buy-its-shoddy-goods" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/walmarts-latest-scheme-replace-middle-class-underclass-forced-buy-its-shoddy-goods</a></div>

<p><strong>Links:</strong>

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/stacy-mitchell

[3] http://www.ilsr.org/

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/24/business/wal-mart-disputes-report-on-labor.html

[5] http://www.bloomberg.com/article/2013-08-19/adchExfs5Uyg.html

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/business/walmart-to-offer-more-us-made-goods.html?_r=2&

[7] http://www.ilsr.org/walmarts-death-grip-food-system-intensifying-poverty/

[8] http://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2012/10/10/walmart-reinforces-financial-priorities-growth-leverage-returns-company-lowers-fiscal-2014-capital-plan-from-current-year

[9] http://www.metroatlantachamber.com/news/items/2013/04/19/made-in-georgia-smaller-leaner-factories-lead-uptick

[10] http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-11-is-your-stuff-falling-apart-thank-walmart/

[11] http://www.sfmade.org/

[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/walmart

[13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</p>

</div>

<div>

<p style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 5px 0px; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: Arial; line-height: 16px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><em style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">by Michael Grabell, ProPublica</em>

<em style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://redstatedems.com/blog/2013/06/12/walmart-accepted-clothing-banned-bangladesh-factories/">http://redstatedems.com/blog/2013/06/12/walmart-accepted-clothing-banned-bangladesh-factories/</a></em></p>

</div>

<p>haunting foto

===

<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/the-expendables-how-the-temps-who-power-corporate-giants-are-getting-crushe">http://www.propublica.org/article/the-expendables-how-the-temps-who-power-corporate-giants-are-getting-crushe</a>

===

<em>"Wal-Mart Sets A Safety Plan In Bangladesh," The New York Times, May 15, 2013.</em>

<em>"Global Retailers Join Safety Plan For Bangladesh," The New York Times, May 14, 2013.</em>

<em>"Groups Press Big Retailers On Safety Oversees," The New York Times, May 17, 2013.</em>

<em>"Wal-Mart Sales Go Cold, and Its Shares Feel the Chill," The New York Times, May 17, 2013.</em>

===</p>

<h1 class="title-news">Walmart Pleads Guilty To Dumping Hazardous Waste, Will Pay $81 Million</h1>

<p><span class="bold color_1A1A1A">By PAUL ELIAS and GREG RISLING</span> 05/28/13 06:22 PM ET EDT <span class="ap"><img src="/d3f9568c-ff6b-55b8-ac89-57d9a5bba04f.png"/></span></p>

</div>

<p>SAN FRANCISCO — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will pay $81.6 million after pleading guilty on Tuesday to criminal charges of improperly disposing of fertilizer, pesticides and other hazardous products that were pulled from stores in California and Missouri because of damaged packaging and other problems.

The retail giant entered the plea in federal court in San Francisco to misdemeanor counts of violating the Clean Water Act and another environmental law regulating pesticides. The fine also settled Environmental Protection Agency allegations.</p>

<p>

In Kansas City, Mo., the company pleaded guilty to improperly handling pesticides.

The plea agreements ended a nearly decade-old investigation involving more than 20 prosecutors and 32 environmental groups that has cost Wal-Mart a total of $110 million.

Court documents show illegal dumping occurred in 16 California counties from Del Norte to Orange between 2003 and 2005. Federal prosecutors said the company didn't train its employees on how to handle and dispose hazardous materials at its stores.</p>

<p>

The result, prosecutors say, was that waste was tossed into trash bins or poured into sewer systems. The waste also was improperly taken to one of several product return centers throughout the U.S. without proper safety documentation, authorities said.</p>

<p>

In 2010, the company agreed to pay $27.6 million to settle similar allegations made by California authorities that led to the overhaul of its hazardous waste compliance program nationwide.

"By improperly handling hazardous waste, pesticides and other materials in violation of federal laws, Wal-Mart put the public and the environment at risk and gained an unfair economic advantage over other companies," said Ignacia S. Moreno, assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Justice Department.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said the company has fixed the problem and is "obviously happy that this is the final resolution."

She said employees are better trained on how to clean up, transport and dispose of dangerous products such as fertilizer that are spilled in a store or have packages damaged.

Workers are armed with scanners that tell them whether a damaged package is considered to contain a hazardous material, she said

Moreno said the fines against Wall-Mart "will, in part, fund important environmental projects in the communities impacted by the violations and help prevent future harm to the environment."

The state investigation began eight years ago when a San Diego County health department employee saw a worker pouring bleach down a drain.

In another instance, officials said a Solano County boy was found playing in a mound of fertilizer near the garden section of a Wal-Mart. The yellow-tinted powder contained ammonium sulfate, a chemical compound that causes irritation to eyes, skin and the respiratory tract.</p>

</div>

<p> 

big data: http://www.propublica.org/article/voter-information-wars-will-the-gop-team-up-with-wal-marts-data-specialist</p>

<p>The Republicans have <a href="http://growthopp.gop.com/RNC_Growth_Opportunity_Book_2013.pdf">admitted it</a>: They need to get serious about collecting and analyzing voter data.

Well, you can't get much more serious than talking to Teradata, the "data warehousing" company that helps Wal-Mart, Apple and eBay store massive amounts of information about the behavior of their customers.</p>

</div>

<p>Teradata is just one of the major data outfits with which leading Republican strategists are talking in their <a href="http://growthopp.gop.com/RNC_Growth_Opportunity_Book_2013.pdf">declared effort</a> to match Barack Obama's big data campaign tactics, according to one person with knowledge of the strategy discussions.

The Republican National Committee would neither confirm nor deny talking with Teradata, but was emphatic that no deal is in place. Teradata also declined to comment. There's unlikely to be any final deals until the RNC appoints a chief technology officer, which it has pledged to do by May 1.

But if Republican strategists are still shopping for formal partners, their goal is clear: a new, more open database that will make it easier for Republican candidates to share what they're learning about voters — and for the party to share voter information with technology developers in order to build apps for use in coming campaigns.

===

<font color="#FF0000">stood by alec, not defect: biggest seller of guns and ammo</font>

===

Here's more on lobbyist / top Romney advisor Jim Talent:

 </p>

<ul>

</li>

<li class="first">In June, Stephanie Harnett, a senior associate at Talent's firm Mercury, was <a href="http://www.republicreport.org/2012/walmart-sends-fake-reporter-spy-warehouse-workers/">caught posing as a reporter</a> and <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">spying on labor organizers at a Walmart</span> warehouse. At the time, Mercury represented Walmart. After the spying was disclosed, Mercury fired Harnett and claimed it didn't authorize her actions. Walmart then <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/25/local/la-me-0625-walmart-20120625">cut ties</a> with Mercury.</li>

</ul>

<p>==

gmo 180? <a href="http://grist.org/food/are-walmart-and-big-food-pushing-for-gmo-labeling/">http://grist.org/food/are-walmart-and-big-food-pushing-for-gmo-labeling/</a></p>

<p>

===</p>

<div class="byline environment"><span class="field field-name-field-sources field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org">AlterNet</a> <span class="print-footnote">[1]</span></span></span></span> / <em>By</em> <em><a href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/stacy-mitchell">Stacy Mitchell</a> <span class="print-footnote">[2]</span></em></div>

<h1 property="dc:title" datatype="" class="node-title">Walmart's Death Grip on Groceries Is Making Life Worse for Millions of People (Hard Times USA)</h1>

</div>

<div class="story-date"><em><span class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden"><span class="field-items"><span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-03-26T12:24:00-07:00">March 26, 2013</span></span></span></span></em>  |  </div>

<p>This article was published in partnership with the <a href="http://www.ilsr.org/">Institute for Local Self-Reliance</a> <span class="print-footnote">[3]</span>.

When Michelle Obama visited a Walmart in Springfield, Missouri, a few weeks ago to praise the company's efforts to sell healthier food, she did not say why she chose a store in Springfield of all cities. But, in ways that Obama surely did not intend, it was a fitting choice. This Midwestern city provides a chilling look at where Walmart wants to take our food system. 

Springfield is one of nearly 40 metro areas where Walmart now captures about half or more of consumer spending on groceries, according to Metro Market Studies.  Springfield area residents spend just over $1 billion on groceries each year, and one of every two of those dollars flows into a Walmart cash register.  The chain has 20 stores in the area and shows no signs of slowing its growth. Its latest proposal, a store just south of the city's downtown, has provoked widespread protest.  Opponents say Walmart already has an overbearing presence in the region and argue that this new store would undermine nearby grocery stores, including a 63-year-old family-owned business which still provides delivery for its elderly customers. A few days before the First Lady's visit, the City Council voted 5-4 to approve what will be Walmart's 21st store in the community. 

As Springfield goes, so goes the rest of the country, if Walmart has its way. Nationally, the retailer's share of the grocery market now stands at 25 percent. That's up from 4 percent just 16 years ago.  Walmart's tightening grip on the food system is unprecedented in U.S. history.  Even A&P — often referred to as the Walmart of its day — accounted for only about 12 percent of grocery sales at its height in the 1940s.  Its market share was kept in check in part by the federal government, which won an antitrust case against A&P in 1946.  The contrast to today's casual acceptance of Walmart's market power could not be more stark. 

Having gained more say over our food supply than Monsanto, Kraft, or Tyson, Walmart has been working overtime to present itself as a benevolent king. It has upped its donations to food pantries, reduced sodium and sugars in some of its store-brand products, and recast its relentless expansion as a solution to "food deserts." In 2011, it <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/us/21food.html?_r=0">pledged</a> <span class="print-footnote">[4]</span> to build 275-300 stores "in or near" low-income communities lacking grocery stores. The Springfield store Obama visited is one of 86 such stores Walmart has since opened.  Situated <a href="http://obamafoodorama.blogspot.com/2013/02/michelle-obama-talks-business-at.html">half a mile from the southwestern corner of a census tract</a> <span class="print-footnote">[5]</span> identified as underserved by the USDA, the store qualifies as "near" a food desert. Other grocery stores are likewise perched on the edge of this tract.  Although Walmart has made food deserts the vanguard of its PR strategy in urban areas, most of the stores the chain has built or proposed in cities like Chicago and Washington D.C. are in fact just blocks from established supermarkets, many unionized or locally owned.  As it pushes into cities, Walmart's primary aim is not to fill gaps but to grab market share. 

The real effect of Walmart's takeover of our food system has been to intensify the rural and urban poverty that drives unhealthy food choices.  Poverty has a strong negative effect on diet, regardless of whether there is a grocery store in the neighborhood or not, a major 15-year <a href="http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1106078">study</a> <span class="print-footnote">[6]</span> published in 2011 in the Archives of Internal Medicine found. Access to fresh food cannot change the bottom-line reality that cheap, calorie-dense processed foods and fast food are financially logical choices for far too many American households.  And their numbers are growing right alongside Walmart.  Like Midas in reverse, Walmart extracts wealth and pushes down incomes in every community it touches, from the rural areas that produce food for its shelves to the neighborhoods that host its stores. 

Walmart has made it harder for farmers and food workers to earn a living. Its rapid rise as a grocer triggered a wave of mergers among food companies, which, by combining forces, hoped to become big enough to supply Walmart without getting crushed in the process. Today, food processing is more concentrated than ever.  Four meatpackers slaughter 85 percent of the nation's beef.  One dairy company handles 40 percent of our milk, including 70 percent of the milk produced in New England.  With fewer buyers, farmers are struggling to get a fair price. Between 1995 and 2009, farmers saw their <a href="http://www.ilsr.org/infographic-walmart-food/">share of each consumer dollar spent on beef fall from 59 to 42 cents</a> <span class="print-footnote">[7]</span>. Their cut of the consumer milk dollar likewise fell from 44 to 36 cents.  For pork, it fell from 45 to 25 cents and, for apples, from 29 to 19 cents.  

Onto this grim reality, Walmart has grafted a much-publicized initiative to sell more locally grown fruits and vegetables.  Clambering aboard the "buy local" trend undoubtedly helps Walmart's marketing, but, as Missouri-based National Public Radio journalist Abbie Fentress Swanson <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/02/04/171051906/can-small-farms-benefit-from-wal-mart-s-push-into-local-foods">reported</a> <span class="print-footnote">[8]</span> in February, "there's little evidence of small farmers benefiting, at least in the Midwest."  Walmart, which defines "local" as grown in the same state, has increased its sales of local produce mainly by relying on large industrial growers. Small farmers, meanwhile, have fewer opportunities to reach consumers, as independent grocers and smaller chains shrink and disappear. 

Food production workers are being squeezed too. The average slaughterhouse wage has fallen 9 percent since 1999.  Forced unpaid labor at food processing plants is on the rise.  Last year, a Louisiana seafood plant that supplies Walmart was convicted of forcing employees to work in unsafe conditions for less than minimum wage. Some workers reported peeling and boiling crawfish in shifts that spanned 24 hours. 

The tragic irony is that many food-producing regions, with their local economies dismantled and poverty on the rise, are now themselves lacking grocery stores. The USDA has <a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-desert-locator.aspx%23.UVCXMb-i8W8">designated large swaths of the farm belt</a> <span class="print-footnote">[9]</span>, including many agricultural areas near Springfield, as food deserts. 

One might imagine that squeezing farmers and food workers would yield lower prices for consumers.  But that hasn't been the case.  Grocery prices have been rising.  There are multiple reasons for this, but corporate concentration is at least partly to blame.  For most foods, the spread between what consumers pay and how much farmers receive has been widening.  Food processors and big retailers are pocketing the difference.  Even as Walmart touts lower prices than its competitors, the company's reorganization of our food system has had the effect of raising grocery prices overall. 

As Walmart stores multiply, fewer families can afford to eat well.  The company claims it stores bring economic development and employment, but the empirical evidence indicates otherwise.  A <a href="http://www.socsci.uci.edu/%7Edneumark/walmart.pdf">study</a> <span class="print-footnote">[10]</span> published in 2008 in the Journal of Urban Economics examined about 3,000 Walmart store openings nationally and <font color="#FF0000">found that each store caused a net decline of about 150 jobs</font> (as competing retailers downsized and closed) and lowered total wages paid to retail workers.  Other <a href="http://www.ilsr.org/key-studies-walmart-and-bigbox-retail/%231">research</a> <span class="print-footnote">[11]</span> by the economic consulting firm Civic Economics has found that, when locally owned businesses are replaced by big-box stores, dollars that once circulated in the community, supporting other businesses and jobs, instead leak out.  These shifts may explain the findings of another <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2006.00377.x/abstract">study</a> <span class="print-footnote">[12]</span>, published in Social Science Quarterly in 2006, which cut straight to the bottom line: neighborhoods where Walmart opens end up with higher poverty rates and more food-stamp usage than places where the retailer does not expand. 

This year, Walmart plans to open between 220 and 240 stores in the U.S., as it marches steadily on in its quest to further control the grocery market.  Policymakers at every level, from city councilors to federal antitrust regulators, should be standing in its way.  Very few are.  Growing numbers of people, though, are drawing the line, from the Walmart employees who have led a string of remarkable strikes against the company, to the coalition of small business, labor, and community groups that recently forced Walmart to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/business/a-respite-in-efforts-by-wal-mart-in-new-york.html?pagewanted=all">step back</a> <span class="print-footnote">[13]</span> from its plans to unroll stores across New York City. 

Back in Springfield, as Michelle Obama was delivering her remarks, framed by a seductive backdrop of oranges and lemons, a citizens group called <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/300521090064564/">Stand Up to Walmart</a> <span class="print-footnote">[14]</span> was also at work, launching a referendum drive to overturn the City Council's vote and block Walmart from gaining any more ground in the city. </p>

</div>

<div class="tags"><em>See more stories tagged with:</em>

<div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/walmart" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel">walmart</a> <span class="print-footnote">[15]</span>,</div>

<div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.alternet.org/tags/poverty-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel">poverty</a> <span class="print-footnote">[17]</span></div>

</div>

<div class="print-source_url"><strong>Source URL:</strong> <a href="http://www.alternet.org/food/walmarts-death-grip-groceries-making-life-worse-millions-people-hard-times-usa">http://www.alternet.org/food/walmarts-death-grip-groceries-making-life-worse-millions-people-hard-times-usa</a></div>

<p><strong>Links:</strong>

[1] http://www.alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/stacy-mitchell

[3] http://www.ilsr.org/

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/us/21food.html?_r=0

[5] http://obamafoodorama.blogspot.com/2013/02/michelle-obama-talks-business-at.html

[6] http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1106078

[7] http://www.ilsr.org/infographic-walmart-food/

[8] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/02/04/171051906/can-small-farms-benefit-from-wal-mart-s-push-into-local-foods

[9] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-desert-locator.aspx%23.UVCXMb-i8W8

[10] http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~dneumark/walmart.pdf

[11] http://www.ilsr.org/key-studies-walmart-and-bigbox-retail/%231

[12] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2006.00377.x/abstract

[13] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/business/a-respite-in-efforts-by-wal-mart-in-new-york.html?pagewanted=all

[14] https://www.facebook.com/groups/300521090064564/

[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/walmart

[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/food-0

[17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/poverty-0

[18] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B</p>

</div>

<p>

<a href="http://www.alternet.org/print/food/walmarts-death-grip-groceries-making-life-worse-millions-people-hard-times-usa">http://www.alternet.org/print/food/walmarts-death-grip-groceries-making-life-worse-millions-people-hard-times-usa</a></p>

<p>

---

bribery in Mexico

===

bangl fire http://grist.org/business-technology/bangladesh-fire-shows-why-we-cant-trust-walmart-to-green-its-supply-chain/

http://grist.org/news/walmart-bribed-its-way-around-mexicos-environmental-rules/

===

Most people, if they think of the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/us/robert-h-bork-conservative-jurist-dies-at-85.html">recently departed and extremely conservative Judge Robert Bork</a> at all, think of his failed nomination by President Ronald Reagan to the Supreme Court (and maybe his natty facial hair). But <font color="#FF0000">Robert Bor</font>k deserves credit for more than just inspiring the term “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork%23Bork_as_verb">Borked</a>.” He actually deserves credit (or, more accurately, blame) for the domination of our food system by a handful of mammoth corporations. I’m talking about you, Monsanto, Cargill, Tyson, and Walmart.

As <a href="http://grist.org/food/smooth-as-silk-how-big-brands-milk-small-farmers-for-all-theyre-worth/">we noted</a> last month, farmers feel the brunt of his legacy:</p>

<p>According to <a href="http://www.foodcircles.missouri.edu/07contable.pdf">a 2007 study</a> [PDF] from the University of Missouri, the four largest companies controlled 82 percent of the beef packing industry, 85 percent of soybean processing, 63 percent of pork packing, and 53 percent of broiler chicken processing. In fact, so much consolidation has taken place throughout the food chain that it can be difficult for any one person to fathom the true effects.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>But consumers experience it, too. Walmart <a href="http://grist.org/food/how-walmart-is-devouring-the-food-system/">now earns</a> one out of every four dollars Americans spend on groceries and controls 50 percent of the grocery sales in some cities.

What exactly does Robert Bork have to do with any of this? <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/20/antitrust-was-defined-by-robert-bork-i-cannot-overstate-his-influence/">According to an interview</a> in the <i>Washington Post’s</i> Wonkblog with legal scholar Barak Orbach of the University of Arizona, Bork is considered the<font color="#FF0000"> father of modern antitrust law, whose influence, Orbach says, he “cannot overstate.” </font>Orbach observes that it was Bork’s legal work in the 1960s that transformed the way the government looked at monopolies and mergers, and led directly to the rise of the mega-corporations that dominate industry after industry.

===

<a href="http://walmart1percent.org/the-walton-family-foundation-how-much-do-they-give-and-to-whom/">http://walmart1percent.org/the-walton-family-foundation-how-much-do-they-give-and-to-whom/</a>

<a href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/">http://walmart1percent.org/education/</a>

 </p>

<h3 style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Oswald, arial, serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 22px; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><strong>Who’s involved? Who are they connected to?

</strong></h3>

<p style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Droid Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 22px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;">Through their foundation, the Walton family has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote charter schools and private schools, and family members are involved in many prominent national organizations pursuing this agenda. Get to know the family members most involved in this work:</p>

<li style=" margin: 0px 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: square;"><strong>John Walton:</strong> Until his death in 2005, John Walton coordinated the education work of his family and family’s foundation.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn3" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[3]</a> Most notably, he and the late Republican financier Ted Forstmann co-founded the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which funds private school educations for low-income children<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn4" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[4]</a>, and he assisted in the creation of the right-wing advocacy group Alliance for School Choice.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn5" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[5]</a>  He was also a shareholder in a for-profit school development company <a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn6" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[6]</a> that went bankrupt in 2006.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#_ftn7" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[7]</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0px 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: square;"><strong>Carrie Walton Penner:</strong> Penner, who graduated from a private boarding school and attended two elite universities,<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn8" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[8]</a> sits on the boards of the KIPP Foundation<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn9" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[9]</a>  (to which the Walton Family Foundation recently gave $25 million<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn10" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[10]</a>) and the California Charter Schools Association.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn11" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[11]</a> She is also on the boards of the Alliance for School Choice<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn12" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[12]</a>—a  voucher advocacy group—and its lobbying and political affiliate.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn13" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[13]</a> Penner has a degree from the Stanford University School of Education, but has apparently never worked on the front line of education as a teacher.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#_ftn14" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[14]</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0px 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: square;"><strong>Greg Penner: </strong>Greg Penner, Carrie Walton Penner’s husband, is on the National Board of Directors for Teach for America, and is a director of the <font color="#FF0000"><b>Charter Growth Fund</b></font>,<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn15" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[15]</a> a “non-profit venture capital fund” investing charter in schools.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn16" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[16]</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0px 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: square;"><strong>Christy Walton:</strong> Christy Walton is now the co-chair of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which her late husband co-founded.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#_ftn17" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[17]</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0px 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: square;"><strong>Annie Proietti:</strong> Jim Walton’s daughter, Annie Walton Proietti, works for a KIPP school in Denver.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#_ftn18" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[18]</a></li>

</ul>

<p style=" color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Droid Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 22px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 15px;">The Walton Family Foundation states on its website that it seeks to “infuse competitive pressure into America’s K-12 education system by increasing the quantity and quality of school choices available to parents, especially in low-income communities.”<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn19" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[19]</a> Between 2005 and 2010, the Walton Family Foundation gave nearly $700 million to education reform organizations.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn20" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[20]</a>  Specifically, the family provides lavish funding for voucher programs, charter schools, and policy and advocacy groups devoted to establishing and promoting alternatives to public schooling.

In addition, the Walton Family Foundation finances education studies whose findings reinforce the family’s positions on education reform. In January 2012, <em>The Washington Post</em> reported<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn21" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[21]</a> on a new study done by<font color="#FF0000"><b> Illinois-based IFF</b></font>, a “regional nonprofit community development financial institution”<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn22" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[22]</a> that identifies itself as a “stakeholder” in the charter school movement,<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn23" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[23]</a> and funded with a $100,000 grant from the Walton Family Foundation.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn24" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[24]</a>  Considering the source of this study, it is perhaps unsurprising that the study called for the closure of over 30 public schools in the city and the expansion of charter schools.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#_ftn25" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[25]</a>

While the family funds charter schools, it seems clear that its real interest lies with voucher programs, a mechanism for school privatization through which public tax dollars can be diverted to private institutions. The late John Walton, son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, was recognized by<em>Business Week</em> in February 2000 as “a leading advocate for using ‘consumer choice’ to reform America’s schools”—that is, through the use of taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn26" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[26]</a>Indeed, the family apparently began working on charter schools as a sort of compromise, only after it became clear that privatization of schools was a very controversial idea.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn27" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[27]</a>

The family is active in education policy outside of its foundation, too—for example, by injecting money into local political races, often far from where they live:</p>

<li style=" margin: 0px 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: square;"><font color="#FF0000"><strong>Wisconsin:</strong></font> Many of the Walmart heirs have furthered their interests in school privatization by funding Republican candidates for state office in Wisconsin, a state none of them lives in. As the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reported in September 2011, six members of the family were among the top 10 individual contributors to winning state legislative candidates in the 2010 elections that put Republicans in control of the state government. Under the first budget passed by Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-majority legislature, funding for public schools was cut by $800 million over two years, while funding for voucher programs that funnel public money to private schools increased by $17 million over two years. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has the first and largest voucher program in the country, and the Walton Family Foundation provides substantial funding to School Choice Wisconsin, the state’s primary advocate for vouchers.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#_ftn28" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[28]</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0px 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: square;"><strong>Louisiana:</strong> In October 2011, Carrie and Greg Penner, who live in California, each donated $5,000 to Kira Orange Jones, a candidate for the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn29" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;"><sup>[29]</sup></a> Orange Jones, the Teach for America head in New Orleans who was elected to the BESE in this fall’s election, is said to have “[run] as the embodiment of<b> post-Katrina</b> reform efforts in New Orleans”<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn30" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;"><sup>[30]</sup></a>—reform efforts that have been focused on charter schools and school privatization. Greg Penner is on the board of Teach for America.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#_ftn31" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;"><sup>[31]</sup></a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0px 0px 0px 30px; padding: 0px; list-style-type: square;"><strong>California:</strong> In 2006, Greg Penner contributed $250,000 to a <b>campaign against proposed Proposition 82.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn32" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[32]</a> The proposition, sponsored by actor and director Rob Reiner, sought to establish a universal preschool system in California for four-year-olds</b> by placing an additional income tax on individuals making more than $400,000 a year, and couples making in excess of $800,000.<a title="" href="http://walmart1percent.org/education/#ftn33" style=" color: rgb(232, 142, 5); text-decoration: initial;">[33]</a></li>

</ul>

<p>===

mar 2013 diane r

The big school board race is this week in Los Angeles, and we know that the billionaires have lined up behind their slate. We know that Eli Broad wants to own his hometown’s school board and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has tossed $1million into the race to help the same candidates that Eli wants.

What is less well known is that one of the biggest founders of school choice–AKA, privatization–is the Walton family of Arkansas. Sure, the natural connection between Arkansas and Los Angeles might escape you, as it does me. But consider this, from an <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/why-are-walmart-billionar_b_2779211.html?utm_hp_ref=@education123">article</a> written on Huffington Post by Peter Dreier of Occidental College:

In 2006, one member of the family gave $250,000 to a statewide initiative for universal preschool education.

<font color="#FF0000">“In Los Angeles alone, the Walton Family Foundation has donated over $84.3 million to charter schools and organizations that support them, such as Green Dot Schools, ICEF schools, and the Los Angeles Parent Union, as well as $1 million to candidates or political action committees</font> which support diverting tax dollars away from public schools. They believe in high-stakes testing, hate teachers unions, want to measure student and teacher success primarily by relying on one-size-fits-all standardized tests, but have an entirely different set of standards when it comes to judging charter schools.”

Furthermore, the Waltons generously support other organizations that promote privatization:

“The Waltons have long supported efforts to privatize education through the Walton Family Foundation as well as individual political donations to local candidates. Since 2005, the Waltons have given more than $1 billion to organizations and candidates who support privatization. They’ve channeled the funds to the pro-charter and pro-voucher Milton Friedman Foundation for Education Choice, Michelle Rhee’s pro-privatization and high-stakes testing organization Students First, and the pro-voucher Alliance for School Choice, where Walton family member Carrie Walton Penner sits on the board. In addition to funding these corporate-style education reform organizations, since 2000 the Waltons have also spent more than $24 million bankrolling politicians, political action committees, and ballot issues in California and elsewhere at the state and local level which undermine public education and literally shortchange students.”

You do understand what is going on, don’t you? It is the Walmart management style–deregulation, low-wage employees, cost-cutting over all–transported to education.

http://dianeravitch.net/2013/03/02/why-are-walton-billionaires-so-interested-in-los-angeles-schools/

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scotus tossed women class action, now going for regional approach

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Here's more on lobbyist / top Romney advisor Jim Talent:

 </p>

<ul>

</li>

</ul>

<p>===

<span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"7 billion" series logoCheck out our whole series on <font color="#FF0000">Walmart's greenwashing.</font> Among the top 10 state-level recipients of Walmart's cash during this period are three prominent climate-change-denying governors: Rick Perry (R-Texas), Mitch Daniels (R-Ind.), and Bob McDonnell (R-Va.). Also on the list are Pennsylvania's Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley (R), both of whom have been waging a veritable crusade on behalf of the natural-gas fracking industry.</span>

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In October 2005, Reuters reported that <font color="#FF0000">Edelman is to mount an aggressive campaign against Robert Greenwald's new documentary </font><i><font color="#FF0000">Wal-Mart: </font>The High Cost of a Low Price.</i> In what is reported to be a movie industry first, Edelman's representatives emailed reporters press kits containing a point-by-point rebuttal of the film's trailer, which Wal-Mart is demanding be altered or removed from the walmartmovie.com website. (The trailer is under fire because the documentary itself will not be released until November 1, 2005.) "The press kit includes snippets from negative reviews of Greenwald's earlier works - one dating as far back as 1980 - and three examples of what the retailer calls factual errors in the latest documentary." <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&s">[19]</a> SW

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<strong>Walmart</strong>

“The majority of people in our job carry three cards -- that’s our Walmart associate card, our discount card, and a welfare card. New York does not need a retailer that will take sustainable, quality jobs away from these neighborhoods by creating low-wage jobs,” Girshriela Green, a member of OUR Walmart (Organization United for Respect at Walmart), told United NY and ALIGN. It's a common refrain that you hear repeated from Walmart employees around the country— <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/156188/destroying_communities,abusing_workers:what%27s_%28still%29_the_matter_with_wal-mart/">AlterNet heard the same story</a> recently from workers in Los Angeles. Walmart is by far the country's largest low-wage employer, with a US workforce of 1,400,000 people, according to NELP. And last year its highest-paid exec took home $18.1 million, or $9,066 an hour.

But even that's not the most shocking Walmart statistic making the rounds these days. Nope, instead we've just learned that the<font color="#FF0000"> Walton family—just six family members of Walmart founder Sam Walton— <a href="http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/1034216/american_dynasty:_wal-mart%27s_walton_family_has_the_wealth_of_48.8_million_families_combined/#paragraph4">have as much wealth between them</a> as the bottom 48.8 million American families combined. That's over 41 percent of the country. Or at least, that's what they had in 2010. Considering that between 2007 and 2010, they went from having $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion, who knows what they've got now?  </font>

alternet

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Big-box stores have eliminated choice even further: The Supreme Soviet in Bentonville or Atlanta or Minneapolis has decreed what appears on the shelves of your local Walmart or Home Depot or Target store, with very little tailoring to local tastes and preferences. (Even our own tap water is being sold back to us by Coke and Pepsi.) You have exactly as many choices as they deign to devote shelf space to. Now that <a href="http://www.ecori.org/local-food/2011/7/26/wal-mart-aims-to-crush-food-deserts-small-farms.html">Wal-Mart is selling 25% of the groceries in America</a>, if you're looking for a specific brand that someone back in Bentonville decided Walmart will no longer carry, then you're just plain out of luck. And since the other grocers in town often close up when a Walmart opens, there's no place else to turn to find it.

This constriction of choice is most virulent when it comes to media. Big-box stores have very limited shelf space for each product category they carry; yet they are far and away the nation's biggest purchasers of things like toys and video games. For the past 20 years, this fact has dominated decision-making in both those businesses: manufacturers know viscerally that if the buyers at Walmart aren't interested in your toy or game, there's probably no economic point in even making it. So everything is made with these buyers' sensibilities, prejudices and cost requirements in mind. This became a de facto form of centralized control, where a handful of buyers in Bentonville ended up dictating what the entire country got to play with...<a href="http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/156311">http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/156311</a>

---

A few weeks ago, <em>The New York Times</em> ran a story on the front page of the business section under the headline “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/business/wal-mart-and-environmental-fund-team-up-to-cut-waste.html?_r=3">Unexpected Ally Helps Walmart Cut Waste</a>.” The retailer’s accomplice, readers of the article learned, is the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the largest and most influential environmental groups in the country. EDF has been working closely with Walmart on its sustainability efforts since 2005, and has even opened an office in Bentonville, Ark., where Walmart is headquartered.

<em>The Times</em> noted that EDF “does not accept contributions from Walmart or other corporations it works with.” EDF itself often mentions this when the subject of Walmart comes up, making note of it on its <a href="http://business.edf.org/projects/walmart">website</a>, as well as in blog posts and other communications about its work with the company.

But, while it’s true that Walmart does not fund EDF (either directly or through its internal, company-run <a href="http://www.walmartstores.com/CommunityGiving/203.aspx">foundation</a>), the environmental group does receive an awful lot of money from the <font color="#FF0000">Walton Family Foundation. Since 2004, the foundation has given EDF more than $53 million.</font> Last year, the foundation’s $13.7 million grant to the group amounted to about 15 percent of <a href="http://www.edf.org/finances">EDF’s budget</a>. After readers <a href="http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/nyt_obscures_wal-mart_edf_link.php">brought this to the attention of <em>The Times</em></a>, the newspaper amended its story and ran a correction noting the Walton foundation’s grants to EDF.

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<p>

life inc; provided sec for walmart post katrina

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Using OpenSecrets.org data, a <i>New York Times</i> <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/business/wal-marts-good-citizen-efforts-face-a-test.html?src=rechp">story</a> published today details how hard <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000367&cycle=2012">Wal-Mart</a> has worked to improve its image. Its network of relationships in Washington has been fertilized with generous backing to candidates on both sides of the aisle: Wal-Mart employees plus the company's political action committee gave $1.7 million to politicians, PACs and party committees in the 2010 election cycle, a dramatic increase from earlier in the decade.

Already in the 2012 cycle, individuals and PACs affiliated with the company have contributed <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000367&cycle=2012">$811,000 </a> -- and more has gone to Democrats than Republicans, though not by much.

But <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/">OpenSecrets.org</a> data also shows that money given by individual members of the Walton family -- whose fortunes have risen as the company has, and who still control almost half of the company's stock -- exceeds the contributions by employees and the PAC, and the family contributions favor the right decisively.

 </p>

<div style=" text-align: left;">With <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/business/at-wal-mart-in-mexico-a-bribe-inquiry-silenced.html?ref=business">allegations</a> that Wal-Mart engaged in massive bribery in Mexico -- and then tried to cover it up here at home -- the <i>Times</i> piece suggests that the giant Bentonville, Ark., retailer will turn to the friends it has worked hard to cultivate in Washington over the years: 

<div>

</div>

<div><i>With controversy building over its role in a Mexican bribery scandal, Wal-Mart’s desire to stay out of the limelight will now be put to a test. To help weather the fallout, Wal-Mart will rely on the relationships it has worked assiduously to develop in Washington during the last decade — relationships that its critics say have insulated it from political threats.</i></div>

</i></div>

</blockquote>

<div style=" text-align: left;">Giving by individuals associated with the company and its PAC reliably skewed to the right in the past, but that has changed in recent years, and in this election cycle, the contributions have actually gone in favor of Democrats -- <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgot.php?cycle=2012&cmte=C00093054">in both the House and Senate</a>. </div>

</div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">In fact, the senator who has received the most campaign cash from individuals or PACs affiliated with Wal-Mart is Sen. <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00027500&cycle=2012">Amy Klobuchar</a> (D-Minn.). Klobuchar was leading the discussion in the Senate about possible amendments to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, something favored by the <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000019798&year=2012">U.S. Chamber of Commerce</a> -- of which Wal-Mart is a prominent member. That said, donations to Klobuchar from individuals or PACs affiliated with Wal-Mart are a pittance compared to donations from Wal-Mart's arch-enemy, Minnesota-based <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00098061&cycle=2012">Target</a>. </div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">But the total amount spread by Wal-Mart's PAC and employees doesn't include the money contributed by individual members of the Walton family. In that realm, there is very little nuance -- the Walton family likes Republicans and is willing to spend to get them elected.</div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and (<a target="blank" href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/alice-walton/">according to Forbes</a>) the 10th-richest American, has given $200,000 to<font color="#FF0000"> <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00490045&cycle=2012">Restore Our Future</a>,</font> the super PAC backing Mitt Romney. So has her brother, Jim Walton (the youngest son of Sam Walton and the <a target="blank" href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/jim-walton/">ninth-richest American</a>). Jim Walton also gave $100,000 to <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00501098&cycle=2012">Our Destiny</a> super PAC - the organization backing former Republican presidential candidate <font color="#FF0000">Jon Huntsmann</font>. Christy Walton, the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.forbes.com/profile/christy-walton/">sixth-richest American</a>, and widow of John T. Walton (another son of Sam Walton), gave another $50,000 to Our Destiny. </div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">On June 30, 2011, Alice and Jim Walton, along with Jim's wife, Lynne Walton, all contributed $30,800 to the <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00027466&cycle=2012">National Republican Senatorial Committee</a>, and another $30,400 apiece to the <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00075820&cycle=2012">National Republican Congressional Committee</a>. </div>

</div>

<div style=" text-align: left;">In total, so far this cycle these three Waltons (and spouses), have contributed more than $813,000 to political campaigns or outside spending groups in this election cycle - every dollar to Republicans.

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/05/bentonvilles-influence-in-washingto.html

</div>

<p>===

 </p>

<p>

CMD's Executive Director Lisa Graves <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/04/11456/grassroots-campaign-makes-alec-try-stanch-bleeding-corporate-donors-alec-companie" title="reference on said" target="_blank">said</a>:</p>

<blockquote>ALEC's announcement is a partial victory for the power of grassroots citizen action, but for Americans concerned about brand-name corporations underwriting ALEC's extreme agenda to make it more difficult for American citizens to vote and to protect armed vigilantes, ALEC's PR maneuver to try to distance itself from its record of extremism is an empty gesture unless it and the corporations that have bankrolled its operations work to repeal ALEC-backed laws that have advanced the NRA's agenda and that will impede citizens from voting in the coming elections.</blockquote>

<h2>Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force</h2>

<p>As CMD has <a href="http://prwatch.org/news/2012/03/11366/alec-ratified-nra-conceived-law-may-protect-trayvon-martins-killer" title="reference on reported" target="blank">reported</a>, the NRA conceived the so-called <font color="#FF0000">Stand Your Ground </font>law in Florida, <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/files/Retreat_from_NRA%27s_force_St.Petersburg_Time.DOC" title="reference on promoted its passage" target="blank">promoted its passage</a>, then <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/files/NRA_2005.pn" title="reference on brought it to the ALEC" target="blank">brought it to the ALEC</a> in 2005, where the legislators and corporate lobbyists on the Criminal Justice Task Force voted unanimously to <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/files/ALEC_minutes_05.png" title="reference on adopt it" target="blank">adopt it</a> as a "model bill." At the time, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050810000953/http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/0805/08alec.html" title="reference on Wal-Mart was the Task Force co-chair" target="blank"><font color="#FF0000">Wal-Mart</font> was the Task Force co-chair</a>, and the NRA led the Task Force in subsequent years. Since becoming an ALEC model it has become law in dozens of other states, and the number of homicides classified as "justifiable" <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/stand-your-ground-laws-coincide-with-jump-in-justifiable-homicide-cases/2012/04/07/gIQAS2v51S_story.html" title="reference on has dramatically increased" target="blank">has dramatically increased</a> in many states (and jumped 300 percent in Florida). In 2009, members of the same Task Force <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/161969/rigging-elections" title="reference on approved the model " voter="" id="" target="blank">approved the model <font color="#FF0000">"Voter ID Act"</font></a><font color="#FF0000">, </font>versions of which were introduced in a majority of states in 2011.

While these bills have attracted the most attention in recent weeks, the Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force has been advancing a variety of other controversial policies since the late 1980s.

Members of the Task Force have included for-profit prison providers like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which has also served as the <a href="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/corrections/laws4.html" title="reference on co-chair" target="_blank">co-chair</a>. The ALEC Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force has created model bills that lengthen sentences, which have dramatically increased incarceration rates, and bills that privatize prisons, putting more of those inmates under the control of for-profit corporations, as well as many other policies.</p>

<h2>Walker's Ties to ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force</h2>

<p>Scott Walker was a proud ALEC member when he was in the state legislature, and introduced several ALEC bills approved by the Criminal Justice Task Force. Since becoming governor, he has continued to push these ALEC-supported "criminal justice" efforts.

In 1997, then-Representative Walker introduced (and the legislature passed) the ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force - approved <a href="http://alecexposed.org/w/images/1/19/7D11-Truth_in_Sentencing_Act_Exposed.pdf" title="reference on " truth="" in="" target="_blank">"Truth in Sentencing"</a> act, which requires inmates to serve their full sentence without options for parole or supervised release. The law takes away incentives for prisoners to reduce prison time through good behavior and participation in counseling, and eliminates the ability for judges and parole boards to decide that the financial and social costs of keeping a particular person incarcerated no longer furthers public safety goals.

The state estimated that the first 21 months after the law took effect would cost taxpayers an extra $41 million, as 990 inmates would have to be incarcerated for an additional 18,384 months. Wisconsin's prison population <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/13702846" title="reference on increased 14 percent" target="blank">increased 14 percent</a> in the seven years after the law took effect, with no correlative public safety benefit or <a href="http://www3.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=277059" title="reference on additional decline in crime rates" target="blank"> additional decline in crime rates</a>. The annual budget for the state prison system <a href="http://www.ehow.com/about_5449420_truth-sentencing-laws.html#ixzz1SO3yHDM5" title="reference on jumped" target="_blank">jumped</a> from $700 million in 1999 to $1.2 billion in 2009, becoming the third-largest expenditure in the 2009-2011 state budget.

During this period of growing prison populations, then-Representative Scott Walker introduced several <a href="http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/crime_and_courts/blog/article_34fb8f50-18ff-11e0-8ee0-001cc4c03286.html" title="reference on bills" target="blank">bills</a> between 1997 and 1999 that would allow private prisons in Wisconsin, including one to privatize state prison operations (see the ALEC bill <a href="http://www.heartland.org/budgetandtax-news.org/article/6263/Private_Correctional_Facilities_Act.html" title="reference on here" target="blank">here</a>), and another allowing private corrections companies to open prisons in Wisconsin to house inmates from other states (see the ALEC bill <a href="http://alecexposed.org/w/images/1/17/7N0-Housing_Out-of-State_Prisoners_in_a_Private_Prison_Act_Exposed.pdf" title="reference on here" target="blank">here</a>). Walker <a href="http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=MWSB&p_theme=mwsb&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EB82C2BCDFD0A5B&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM" title="reference on noted" target="blank">noted</a> in 1998 that CCA wanted to expand into Wisconsin. While those bills did not pass, some inmates were contracted-out to private prisons in other states, and CCA has registered lobbyists in the state ever since.

"Clearly ALEC had proposed model legislation," <a href="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/corrections/laws5.html" title="reference on Walker told American Radio Works in 2002" target="_blank">Walker told American Radio Works in 2002</a> (although there was no reference to ALEC when the legislature was considering the bill). "And probably more important than just the model legislation, [ALEC] had actually put together reports and such that showed the benefits of Truth-in-Sentencing and showed the successes in other states. And those sorts of statistics were very helpful to us when we pushed it through, when we passed the final legislation," Walker said.

Those statistics, though, were critiqued by criminologists as unreliable and intended to persuade rather than educate: Walker said that he and fellow ALEC members relied on an ALEC report crediting Virginia's Truth-in-Sentencing law with a five-year drop in crime, but crime dropped in ALL states in the 1990s, regardless of whether a state passed a tough-on-crime law like Truth-in-Sentencing.

<em>(See <a href="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/corrections/ccagraphic/index.html" title="reference on this graphic" target="_blank">this graphic</a> from American Radio Works explaining the CCA-ALEC-Wisconsin sentencing law connection)</em>.

The Wisconsin state legislature apparently recognized the folly of Truth in Sentencing and rolled-back aspects of the law between 2001 and 2009. When Scott Walker became governor, he reversed this progress and pushed for legislation fully restoring the ALEC Truth in Sentencing, despite the costs to taxpayers and despite claiming Wisconsin was <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2011/02/wisconsin-governor-scott-walker-were-broke-and-cant-negotiate.html" title="reference on " target="blank">"broke."</a> In early July, Governor Walker's office released a statement <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0711/58488.html" title="reference on supporting" target="blank">supporting</a> expanded use of prison labor, another idea <a href="http://alecexposed.org/w/images/4/4d/7N4-Prison_Industries_Act_Exposed.pdf" title="reference on promoted in ALEC bills" target="_blank">promoted in ALEC bills</a> approved by the ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force.</p>

<h2>ALEC Role in Arizona's SB 1070 Anti-Immigrant Law</h2>

<p>Another policy approved by the now-disbanded ALEC Task Force includes Arizona's controversial SB1070 immigration law, which is currently being challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court.

<a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/08/10947/brownskins-and-greenbacks-alec-profit-prison-industry-and-arizona%E2%80%99s-sb-1070" title="reference on DBA Press / In These Times" target="_blank">DBA Press / In These Times</a> documented how Arizona Republican Rep. Russell Pearce collaborated with CCA and other members of the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force in December 2009 to create the ALEC "model" immigration bill that became SB1070.

Before the ALEC meeting, for-profit prison operator CCA had identified immigrant detention as a profit center important for its future growth, stating it anticipated receiving "a significant portion of our revenues" from detaining immigrants. Even a hedge fund with a big stake in CCA was <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Bill-AckmanPresentation.pdf" title="reference on touting immigration detention" target="_blank">touting immigration detention</a> as proof CCA would be profitable.

An immigrant contesting their deportation can wait up to a year for a hearing, even though many of those detained have not committed a crime and have no criminal record. Immigrant detention can cost taxpayers $122 a day. Because for-profit corporations operate about half of all immigrant detention facilities, these taxpayer dollars flow into the pockets of CCA and other for-profit prison providers.

The for-profit bail bond industry's trade association, the American Bail Coalition (ABC), is an ALEC member and was also on the Task Force that passed the ALEC anti-immigrant laws. An immigrant facing removal in some cases may be released on bond, and will often pay a commercial bail bondsman for their release. Immigration bonds are usually between $5,000 and $10,000, and can be much higher, so a for-profit bail bondsman who accepts 10 percent of that bail as a nonrefundable fee can rake in significant profits for doing very little.

At the time ALEC approved the <a href="http://alecexposed.org/w/images/2/2d/7K5-No_Sanctuary_Cities_for_Illegal_Immigrants_Act_Exposed.pdf" title="reference on " no="" sanctuary="" cities="" for="" illegal="" immigrants="" target="_blank">"No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act"</a>, the chairman of the ALEC corporate Private Enterprise Board was ABC general counsel Jerry Watson. Watson was very familiar with the profits that can be made by collecting bail bonds from detained immigrants. His law firm biography lists him as "specializing in the field of ... immigration bonding."

ABC has called ALEC the industry's <a href="http://pretrial.org/Perspectives/ABC%20October%202010%20Newsletter.pdf" title="reference on " life="" target="blank">"life preserver"</a>. ABC pays for ALEC membership, and a representative sits on the ALEC <a href="http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Private_Enterprise_Board&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=15553" title="reference on " private="" enterprise="" target="blank">"Private Enterprise Board"</a> as well as ALEC's <a href="http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Private_Sector_Executive_Committee2" title="reference on Executive Committee" target="blank">Executive Committee</a>. The trade group <a href="http://pretrial.org/Perspectives/ABC%20October%202010%20Newsletter.pdf" title="reference on boasts" target="blank">boasts</a> that "during its two decade involvement with ALEC, ABC has written 12 model bills fortifying the commercial bail industry" that were passed by the Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force.

While the Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force is now dissolved, ABC will continue to work with the Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Force. The NRA's future relationship with ALEC is not known. It is also not known whether ALEC will disavow or repeal the bills approved by the Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force over the past three decades.</p>

<h2>ALEC Scrambling for Support</h2>

<p>ALEC has come under increased scrutiny over the past year after the Center for Media and Democracy released its ALEC Exposed Project, which revealed and analyzed more than 800 previously-secret "model" bills voted on by corporate or special interest lobbyists and politicians.

In response to the growing scrutiny in recent weeks, ALEC also <a href="http://www.alec.org/2012/04/statement-by-alec-in-response-to-the-outpouring-of-support-in-wake-of-intimidation-campaign-against-its-members/" title="reference on claimed" target="blank">claimed</a> that "America needs organizations like ALEC to foster the discussion and debate of policy differences in an open, transparent way." But <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/08/10939/journalist-kicked-out-alec-conference-threatened-arrest" title="reference on as CMD" target="blank">as CMD</a> and <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1102489--america-s-secret-political-power" title="reference on others have documented" target="blank">others have documented</a>, ALEC Task Force meetings are <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QADjOQIBUIg" title="reference on closed" target="blank">closed</a> to <a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/12517/alecs_arizona_escort_service" title="reference on the press" target="blank">the press</a> and public and <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1102489--america-s-secret-political-power" title="reference on take place behind closed doors." target="blank">take place behind closed doors.</a>

As more and more light is shining on the shadowy organization, ALEC is also recruiting allies like the Koch-funded <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Prosperity" title="reference on Americans for Prosperity" target="self">Americans for Prosperity</a> to <a href="http://www.kintera.org/c.5nJAJOPvEjKWE/b.6646029/k.8C6D/Action_Center/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=5nJAJOPvEjKWE&b=6646029&aid=517593" title="reference on come to its defense" target="blank">come to its defense</a>. And as more and more corporate members announce they will stop funding the organization, ALEC is also <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/04/11444/alec-desperate-dough" title="reference on begging for money" target="_blank">begging for money</a>.</p>

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=</p>

<p>

<b>Walmart spends big to help anti-environment candidates</b>

by Stacy Mitchell

7 Dec 2011 8:08 PM

hand with moneyWalmart steers its campaign cash to politicians who are far from green.In 2006<b>, Walmart made headlines when its vice president for corporate strategy and sustainability, <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Andrew Ruben, told a congressional committee that the company "would accept a well-designed mandatory cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases." Other major U.S. companies had spoken favorably of cap-and-trade, but Walmart made a bigger splash. Not only was it America's second-largest corporation; it also had deep roots in the country's coal-burning heartland.</span></b>

<b>But even as Ruben was delivering his testimony, Walmart's political action committee (PAC) was funneling a river of campaign cash into the coffers of lawmakers who would ensure that the U.S. did absolutely nothing to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. During the 2007-2008 election cycle, 80 percent of Senate campaign contributions that came from Walmart's PAC and large donors employed by the company went to <font color="#FF0000">senators who helped block the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill, </font></b>according to data on political giving published by the Center for Responsive Politics. (When the bill arrived on the floor in 2008, it came up 12 votes shy of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.)

<b>Over the last decade, <font color="#FF0000">Walmart has emerged as one of the country's largest funders of political campaigns</font>. Its dollars skew heavily in favor of candidates who routinely vote against the environment. Since the company launched its sustainability campaign in 2005, <span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">40 percent of the $3.9 million it has given to members of Congress went to those who have lifetime scores of 20 or less on the League of Conservation Voters' National Environmental Scorecard </span></b><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">-- meaning they vote against the environment 80-100 percent of the time. Another 19 percent went to those who vote against the environment 50-79 percent of the time.</span>

<font color="#FF0000">Walmart's largest donations have gone to some of the nation's most powerful climate-change deniers. Since 2005, Walmart's PAC has given $25,000 to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio ("the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical"); $30,000 to Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. ("there isn't any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth"); and $29,500 to Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark. ("you can look back at some of the previous times when there was no industrialization, you had these different ages, ice ages, and things warming").</font>

Walmart gets political

Walmart wasn't always a big political donor. Sam Walton, the company's founder and leader until his death in 1992, didn't believe in supporting campaigns. That view largely held through the 1990s, when Walmart's donations at the federal level never exceeded $250,000 during an election cycle. Then, in the early 2000s, facing increasing opposition and a spate of state and federal bills that could affect its bottom line, Walmart decided it had to curry favor. It sharply increased both its political donations and its lobbying. Over the last five election cycles, Walmart has contributed over $8.5 million to federal candidates and political parties, making it one of the largest corporate donors in the country.

Between 2000 and 2006, Walmart gave nearly 80 percent of its federal contributions to Republicans, but by 2008, that figure had dropped to 55 percent. Still, the company pushed hard to defeat Barack Obama, as revealed in an embarrassing front-page Wall Street Journal story in August 2008. The article described how the company was holding mandatory meetings for store managers and department heads to make it clear that voting for Obama was tantamount to welcoming<font color="#FF0000"> unions</font> into Walmart.

The exposé came at a bad time. Walmart had launched a sophisticated PR operation to persuade liberals in the Northeast and West Coast, where its expansion plans had run into roadblocks, that it was a changed company and had come to embrace their green and community-minded values. Turning out the vote against their preferred presidential candidate did not fit the script.

Since then, Walmart has made even more of a point of giving to<font color="#FF0000"> Democrats.</font> The Washington Post has reported that the company now provides as much support to Democrats as Republicans. In the 2010 cycle, 53 percent of Walmart's federal-level donations went to Democrats.

But a closer look reveals that Walmart's giving is not so even-handed. In the Senate, Walmart has continued to favor Republicans, helping them turn the chamber into a major roadblock preventing federal action on climate change and other pressing issues. More than two-thirds of Walmart's Senate donations in 2009-2010 went to Republicans.

In the House, more than half of Walmart's contributions went to Democrats in 2009-2010, but the company favored those who tend to vote more like Republicans on environmental issues. Walmart made donations to 46 percent of all House Democrats in 2010, but it funded nearly 70 percent of those who voted against the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009. <font color="#FF0000">Conversely, Walmart supported only 18 percent of the 119 House Democrats who had a perfect score on the LCV's 2010 scorecard.</font>

Lopsided at the state level

<font color="#FF0000">Less noticed has been Walmart's campaign funding at the state level, which remains sharply skewed. In 2009-2010, 77 percent of Walmart's donations</font> to state candidates and parties went to Republicans, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Since 2003, the company has given a total of $9.9 million at the state level, with almost 80 percent flowing to Republicans.

"7 billion" series logoCheck out our whole series on Walmart's greenwashing. Among the top 10 state-level recipients of Walmart's cash during this period are three prominent climate-change-denying governors: Rick Perry (R-Texas), Mitch Daniels (R-Ind.), and Bob McDonnell (R-Va.). Also on the list are Pennsylvania's Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley (R), both of whom have been waging a veritable crusade on behalf of the natural-gas <font color="#FF0000">fracking</font> industry.

<font color="#FF0000">One state attorney general also made Walmart's top-10 list: Wisconsin's J.B. Van Hollen</font>. His biggest environmental claim to fame came shortly after he took office in 2007, when he unilaterally decided to withdraw Wisconsin from a multi-state lawsuit challenging a Bush administration directive that relaxed rules on coal-burning power plants.

Walmart talks big about sustainability, but doesn't put its campaign money anywhere near where its mouth is. Whatever the company may say about the importance of legislative action on climate change or other environmental issues, its money is signaling the opposite, telling lawmakers that it's perfectly fine to vote against environmental protection.

Next up: Walmart controls a giant chunk of our food system, and is angling to control even more.

Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, where she directs initiatives on independent business and community banking. She is the author of Big-Box Swindle and also writes a popular monthly newsletter, the Hometown Advantage Bulletin. She lives in Portland, Maine, and has lately joined Twitter.</p>

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bcci <a href="http://">http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/Walton_Family_Foundation/grants</a>

shares 101 grant addr?ess w/ bradley

backs black toms? <a href="http://www.blackcommentator.com/poisoned_tree.html"> http://www.blackcommentator.com/poisoned_tree.html</a>

<a href="http://old.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=88">http://old.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=88</a> '05

A May 2004 study by the Washington, DC-based <em>Good Jobs First</em> titled <a href="http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/pdf/wmtstudy.pdf">"Shopping for Subsidies: How Wal-Mart Uses Taxpayer Money to Finance Its Never Ending Growth,"</a> found that the company has siphoned more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments across the country....

Through its philanthropic ventures, the Walton Family devotes a significant portion of its holdings to boosting conservative political candidates and a conservative social agenda centered on the privatization of public education.

Sometime in the near future, upon the death of the matriarch of the family, Helen Walton, the Walton Family Foundation could get an infusion of up to $20 billion, making it the largest foundation in the world.

As the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) points out in its recent report titled <a href="http://ncrp.org/press_room/index.asp?Article_Id=73">"The Waltons and Wal-Mart: Self-Interested Philanthropy,"</a>

"...philanthropic grantmaking and campaign contributions to political action committees (PACs), as well as to candidates, increasingly represents the surplus capital of the wealthy, which they can devote to promoting their sociopolitical worldview."...

The NCRP, looking into the WFF's penchant for spearheading the privatization movement asks: "Why is the richest family in the world so committed to education, and specifically to school choice, when they themselves mostly attended public school to apparently good effect?"

"Some critics argue that it is the beginning of the ‘Wal-Martization' of education, and a move to for-profit schooling, from which the family could potentially financially benefit. John Walton owned 240,000 shares of Tesseract Group Inc. (formerly known as Education Alternatives Inc.), which is a for-profit company that develops/manages charter and private school as well as public schools."</p>

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http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Controlling_Corporations/On_Wal-Mart_Trail.html</p>

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laropuche wacko?

<font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="-1">Walton and his eldest son, S. Robson (Rob) Walton (who is now chairman of Wal-Mart), figured that the only way they could come up with the money to pay their debts, was an Initial Public Offering (IPO), issuing shares of stock to the public.</font>

<font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="-1">But there was one catch: A commercial or industrial company cannot conduct an IPO by itself; it must be done by a financial institution. To handle the job, Sam Walton hired two of the world's most criminally-connected, dirty-money investment banks.</font>

<font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="-1">The first was the Little Rock, Arkansas-based Stephens, Inc., which is the largest private investment bank west of the Mississippi. Its founder was Jackson Stephens, who had worked intensively with such dirty operations as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), an intelligence cut-out for the financier oligarchy, which financed illegal weapons and drug trade. In 1990, the BCCI was convicted in Miami, of money laundering for the Colombia cocaine cartels. Published reports have also linked Stephens to work with the U.S. National Security Agency.</font>

<font face="Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular" size="-1">According to the Walton Family Foundation, Inc.'s annual tax returns (form 990-PF), it funds some of the leading forces of the neo-conservative movement, which are part and parcel of Vice President Dick Cheney's Synarchist apparatus: the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute (a Cheney base of operations), the Manhattan Institute, the Landmark Legal Foundation, the National Right to Work Legal Defense & Education Foundation, and others. It also funds environmental groups, which, though identified as liberal, seek to tear down modern industrial society, such as the National Wildlife Foundation and the Nature Conservancy of Arkansas and of California.</font></p>

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NYT said woamn from <font color="#FF0000">Pacif Inst </font>wrote for Walmart w/o disclosing her ties?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/business/08walmart.html</p>

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<a href="http://walmartwatch.com/issues/political_influence/">http://walmartwatch.com/issues/political_influence/</a>

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<h1>The Anatomy of the Walton Family’s Right Wing Agenda</h1>

<p>With over $12 billion in profits in 2007,<font color="#FF0000"> Wal-Mart is the biggest and arguably most influential corporation in America. </font>The majority owners, the Waltons, are therefore also one of the most influential families with a net worth of more than $100 billion. Over the past year, we have conducted an exhaustive study of public records related to political giving by Wal-Mart and the Walton family in order to determine how this influence is used to affect politics. The conclusion is clear. The Waltons are strong supporters of an extreme right wing agenda.</p>

<h3>Wal-Mart Profits Lead to Right Wing Influence</h3>

<p>The Walton family's political influence around the country is truly remarkable. They exert it through four primary mechanisms: private Walton family political contributions; Wal-Mart's Corporate PAC contributions; corporate lobbying; and the Walton Family Foundation giving. The Waltons use these tools to affect a wide range of policy decisions and regulations. They have used the Wal-Mart PAC and its lobbying efforts to avoid paying taxes, weaken or block environmental regulations, resist corporate transparency, hinder workers rights, block enhanced port security;<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/wal_marts_conservative_agenda#1"><sup>1</sup></a> and tighter regulations on food safety.<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/wal_marts_conservative_agenda#2"><sup>2</sup></a> Through their own private giving, the family has opposed the estate tax,<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/wal_marts_conservative_agenda#3"><sup>3</sup></a> and supported charter schools.<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/wal_marts_conservative_agenda#4"><sup>4</sup></a> Many of our lives are affected by these efforts.</p>

<p>

....

 </p>

<h2><em>Environmental Regulation</em></h2>

<p>With help from the DC-based PR firm<font color="#FF0000"> Edelman, Wal-Mart has been trying to boost the company's image as environmentally responsible. </font>But despite the company's "sustainability" initiatives, Wal-Mart is actively lobbying against the clarification of carbon offset guidelines. The company's hypocritical stance on the issue came to light in a hearing of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC is attempting to <a href="http://www.ftc.gov/opa/reporter/greengds.shtm">modernize the "Green Guides,"</a> guidelines issued for corporations by defining acceptable marketing claims regarding environmental products and initiatives. In January 25, 2008 response to the FTC's solicitation of retailer comment to guide the process, Wal-Mart's Director of Energy Regulation, Angela Beehler, expressed Wal-Mart's firm opposition towards the clarified scope and definition of carbon offsets saying "Although some may urge otherwise, the Commission should resist the temptation to define what constitutes an eligible offset or REC. Doing so would require the Commission to resolve highly technical environmental debates that are beyond its expertise..."<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/wal_marts_conservative_agenda#9"><sup>9</sup></a>

 </p>

<h3>Lobbying Expenditures from 1998 - 2008</h3>

<p>Since they began their operations in 1998, Wal-Mart's lobbying expenditures have been on a drastic rise. Gathering data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the Lobbying Disclosure Act Database, we have been able to generate trends and patterns that have emerged over the past decade in Wal-Mart lobbying:</p>

<ul>

<li>In 1998, Wal-Mart's lobbying budget for both in-house and external lobbying was less than $50,000<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/what_the_money_buys#8"><sup>8</sup></a></li>

<li>In 2008, Wal-Mart's in-house lobbying budget skyrocketed to $5.22 million<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/what_the_money_buys#9"><sup>9</sup></a></li>

<li>In 2007, Wal-Mart's external lobbying budget skyrocketed to $1.5 million<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/what_the_money_buys#10"><sup>10</sup></a></li>

<li>From 1999 to 2008, there has been a 3629% increase in Wal-Mart's lobbying expenditures for in-house lobbying.<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/what_the_money_buys#11"><sup>11</sup></a></li>

<li>From 1999 to 2007, there has been a 7425% increase in Wal-Mart's lobbying expenditures for outside firms<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/what_the_money_buys#12"><sup>12</sup></a></li>

<li>The key lobbying issues for Wal-Mart are banking/finance, healthcare, immigration, labor, and taxes.<a href="http://www.waltoninfluence.com/influence/pages/what_the_money_buys#13"><sup>13</sup></a></li>

</ul>

</div>

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