The board of directors obviously felt that the 3500 U.S. stores just weren't paying the bills. This multi-national corporate conglomerate symbolizes the growing gulf between rich and poor. It is a toilet that systematically flushes good paying jobs and terrorizes employees who sympathize with unions. It is the largest U.S. employer, and has become so by selling cheap foreign-made merchandise, paying sub-standard wages, cutting benefits, and bombing the economic life out of entire communities with ruthless and relentless retail napalm.
Albertson's Markets were a recent casualty of the blue-vested Wal-Mart Army. Joe Albertson could simply not compete with an $8.00 an hour workforce while paying his employees a union scale $15.00 plus comfortable benefits. The downpull of Wal-Mart on the living standards of blue collar workers is now being felt throughout the world economy. Wal-Mart is not the only low-wage, non-union corporation on the landscape, but they are the best at what they do, and are an inspiration to others who hope to survive and compete with their particular brand of economic slavery.
In 1982, only 13 U.S. citizens could count their dollar assets in billions. Today, we are home to 374 billionaires. During the same 23 years the number of Americans without health insurance has doubled. After 5 years of Bushonomics, five million more of us are enduring life at the poverty level. The infant mortality rate in Washington D.C. is now higher than in Kerala, India. And, according to the CIA World Factbook; "Since 1975, practically all gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households." To ice this lopsided economic cake: Five of the top ten obscenely rich billionaires in the U.S.A. are from the Walton aka Wal-Mart family. How upwardly mobile do you feel? Please step aside! You're walking on the grave of the American Dream.
Back during my formative years in the Arizona desert, I was warned about the Red Menace, Stalin, and Communism. Russia! A horrible place where hope and freedom were dead. In the old Soviet Union there was only one major retail store: The state-run G.U.M. Department Store. It was the only shopping option, and a major employer of the peasantry. In Communist Russia, the G.U.M. only dreamed of being what Wal-Mart is. Wal-Mart has successfully taken its corporate agenda to the world stage. But history has shown that a pendulum can only swing so far. Wal-Mart and the politicians who make its success possible should be prepared for blowback.
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