Wal-Mart!

Wal-Mart has announced that it is going to hire, over the next five years, every veteran who needs a job who leaves the service during the first twelve months of active duty. We are not sure just exactly what that means but we got our information from reading a Huffington Post article on the subject and we would remind everyone that Wal-Mart refuses to cooperate with the Huffington Post on anything because of prior reporting by the Huffington Post that Wal-Mart has not, as a corporation, appreciated. Wal-Mart has stated that they are still trying to work out the details of this veterans hiring plan and this it will start around Memorial Day of this year.

We have heard of the devil being in the details before but, if true, we wonder just how many veterans leave the service in the first twelve months of active service!

And we wonder about a few other things along the way. We remember that Wal-Mart, unlike Dick’s Sporting Goods and some other gun sellers, refused to remove assault rifles from its stores and made untold millions when the run on those weapons occurred in the wake of the Newtown shooting. And, we remember how Wal-Mart had to be shamed into attending vice president Biden’s conference on proposed presidential actions that would take the form of certain executive orders that are still to be revealed. Wal-Mart claimed, at first, that it had sales meetings scheduled in Arkansas that time of the month and simply did not have anyone to send to the meeting. They did finally show up but we are not certain what they took away from the meeting except the knowledge that they had made a lot of money off of the aftermath of the shooting! And, we remember the fact that many returning veterans from the Middle East wars are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental problems and may not be the very best people to place in a retail environment. And, we are not sure if any of them might want to work in the sporting goods department around the semi automatic fire arms that not only killed twenty six and seven year olds in Newtown, but, also, of we have no idea how many children over in the Middle East throughout the careers of some of those who may still have nightmares about that fact whether they did the killing or were simply the silent witnesses to what may have gone on. All we would really need is some highly trained PTSD suffering vet to shoot up a Wal-Mart store!

We also wonder about Wal-Mart’s boast to spend fifty billion dollars over the next ten years on American made goods. When you are a corporation that made over four hundred billion dollars last year and you are committing to about five billion in additional U.S. sales per year, you do the math on that! It reminds us of the semi fiction that goes on with the spending reduction negotiations when they say that they will save one trillion dollars over the next ten years when that really translates out to one hundred billion dollars in any one year. As we said, the devil is in the details and there is some very devilish stuff going on all around!

And, then, we have the recent embarrassment in Mexico where Wal-Mart officials there spend some of the company’s corporate funds bribing Mexican officials into letting them build Wal-Mart stores in places where the zoning laws would not permit, like very near to sensitive archeological sites! We would point out that there are many places in picturesque New England that will still not allow Wal-Mart anywhere near their corporate limits! And then we have that Bangladeshi fire in that factory that supplies some of Wal-Mart’s non American made goods. And then, like Apple’s recent embarrassment, we have the specter of goods made by very cheap and near to slave like working conditions in China that finance part of that low price pledge.

We remember Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, old boast that Wal-Mart tried to buy American whenever they could. He put that boast up on signs all over his stores where often, underneath the sign, foreign made goods from China were featured at the company’s every day low price pledge. In our very humble opinion, Wal-Mart has done more to destroy pricing power with its low price pledge than any other corporation in America in the last forty years. And they have done that on the backs of slave labor in some places and on the often slave like minimum wages that they have all too often paid their employees right here in America. Has Wal-Mart ever backed an increase in the minimum wage in its history? We think that it would be very interesting to look at Wal-Mart’s lobbying practices in general.

Recent criticisms of Wal-Mart have included the fact that a significant percentage of its employees are either in poverty or are drawing things like food stamps that some have said that the corporation has taught them how to apply for. And we cannot begin to tell you about the fairly recent larger than life class action lawsuit that the Wal-Mart lawyers managed to get decertified in their on going battle with their female employees over equal pay and equal working conditions! As one of the three prongs of its announcement, Wal-Mart has stated that it will try to get as many of its part time employees into full time jobs as it possibly can over the next few years. In the face of the fact if it does do that, as we understand it, it must provide them all health insurance under Obamacare, we are somewhat skeptical of this aim. And, let us not forget that Walmart was one of the pioneering corporations in not paying benefits such as pension plans to so many of its workers who were not in management, substituting instead the now infamous 401K. It is interesting to note that a piece that came out in the last twenty four hours has stated that more and more workers are raiding their 401k’s to help pay their bills. Perhaps Wal-Mart has truly had an epiphany and has realized that with no 401k’s with any funding and no pension plans to finance the next generation of retirees, there might be no one left to buy their products!!!!!

We are truly sorry if we re less than enthusiastic about all of these wonderful changes that Walmart is making, however, we have seen this company in action before and we wonder how many of those working out at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas might be National Rifle Association members who, living in a deep red state, might, through their lobbying efforts, have tried to oppose so many of the things that President Obama and those trying to save the American middle class have proposed.

And, we hate to have to say this, but, using American service men to try to paper over a corporations misdeeds and failings is one of the most crass things that we have ever seen. We hope that Walmart is sincere in trying to change not only its image but also its underlying culture but that might simply be a bridge too far for them to make. But, as Barack Obama has been known to say: we can always believe in hope. But it seldom springs eternal in the middle of winter and that is precisely where we are! And, the one thing that always bothers us with corporations is the fact that you can usually only depend on them for the evidence of what they say that they have done! And we know that no corporation has ever lied before now don’t we!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.