Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Attention, Wal-mart shoppers!

Do you shop Wal-mart? Just love those low, low prices? Love those Made in America labels? Oops! That was only in the start-up years.

Ever think about the Wal-mart employees? The ones who scrape by because Wal-mart refuses to pay decent wages? The ones with no health insurance? Wal-mart has an ingenious health care plan: stick the tab to the taxpayer. (This shouldn’t be a surprise because Wal-mart also sticks the taxpayer with the bill for feeding its employees: every Wal-mart job application comes with an application for food stamps.) Hope you have Wal-mart stock.

More and more employers are choosing the Wal-mart health care model. Working families have been forced to rely on public health care, exploding Medicaid costs and breaking state budgets. Three states have enacted the Health Care Disclosure Act requiring them to report which employers’ workers are relying on taxpayer-funded health care programs to cover their families.

As a result of public pressure, 23 states have issued public reports, which uniformly show that Wal-mart employees rely on public-funded health care more than employees from any other business sector.

Without citing further shameful statistics, suffice it to say that Wal-mart, the nation’s largest employer, enjoys profits at a rate of $21,000 per minute! Its CEO earned $17.5 million last year, and five members of the Walton family are on the list of the 10 wealthiest Americans.

Read the Wal-mart success story. No, not the one Sam Walton envisioned.
Sam probably didn’t see fascism coming to America. Not convinced yet? Review the definition of fascism, which was posted recently on my blog. Now compare the rise of Wal-mart’s unparalleled success with the economic conditions pervading our America today. Hear that loud sucking sound? It’s the sound of wealth being sucked from the states and relocated to the credit side of Walton family balance sheets — wealth being sucked from the pockets of the poor and middle classes into the already fat pockets of the rich. Scary, isn’t it? I hate the connect-the-dots analogy, but, in this case, all the dots connect and lead straight to fascism!