Walmart May Be Finally Getting What It Deserves.

Earnings reports show that same store sales for Walmart have dropped for 5 consecutive quarters. One theory is that the slump is the result of wealth inequality and lower salaries for the bulk of Walmart’s customer base.

If so, it couldn’t happen to a better company.

Walmart began as the American flag-draped spawn of Sam Walton. For years, it advertised that its inventory was American-made even though the labels on its products clearly stated otherwise. Meanwhile, Walmart used predatory pricing to eliminate its competition. As a result, the retailer eviscerated small town America, forcing thousands of small retailers to close. When the competition had been eliminated, Walmart’s prices began to rise. At the same time, Walmart was putting such severe cost-cutting pressure on its suppliers that it caused the majority to outsource their production to nations that offered cheap labor with no labor protections and no benefits.

No company has had such a profound effect on the outsourcing of American jobs. A 5-year study found that, over that period, Walmart alone accounted for the loss of 133,000 American jobs!

In 1996, labor rights groups exposed the fact that a line of clothing sold by Walmart and endorsed by Kathie Lee Gifford was being made in sweat shops. Although Gifford had no control or responsibility for where Walmart chose to make her clothing designs, Walmart let Gifford take the criticism as it continued to wave the American flag.

More recently, labor rights groups have exposed the amount of corporate welfare given to Walmart in the form of tax write-offs, taxpayer-funded infrastructure for its stores and the taxpayer-funded benefits for its underpaid employees. A large percentage of Walmart employees are paid so little they need food stamps and Medicaid benefits to survive. Indeed, it has been reported that Walmart’s Human Resources department provides the government-assistance forms to employees the day they are hired.

The company has used its size and political clout to bully local governments to keep them from raising the minimum wage. It has demonstrated a pattern of suppressing employee hours in order to avoid providing benefits. Yet, while it forces a large portion of its labor force to live at or near the poverty level, Sam Walton’s heirs have become the wealthiest family in America.

Now, according to a report by Robert Greenwald published by Salon, Walmart says that it will spend $50 billion a year more on US-made products by 2022 in order to help build families. One suspects the retailing giant may have realized that, as a result of its policies, fewer and fewer Americans can afford to purchase what they once could. Nevertheless, let’s hope Walmart follows through on its pledge. But given the company’s past history, don’t hold your breath.

We Can’t Afford That Anymore.

Whenever someone proposes rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, improving schools, funding research for chronic diseases, helping the unemployed, treating the mentally ill, paying pension obligations to public employees, etc., our politicians are quick to say that we can’t afford those things anymore.

Say what? The richest nation on Earth can’t afford to meet the needs of its own citizens?

In reality, it’s not that the US lacks the money to do these things. The federal budget for FY 2014 is $6.3 trillion and, for most Americans, our tax rates as a percentage of income are near all-time lows! So it’s not a lack of money. It’s a matter of priorities. We always seem to have money for military hardware and military interventions around the globe. It’s estimated that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost $6 trillion. It costs us $2.1 million per year to maintain just one soldier in Afghanistan, and current plans call for leaving up to 20,000 troops in Afghanistan after our “withdrawal.” Yet, some of the biggest budget hawks in Congress are calling for a larger presence in Afghanistan, military intervention in Syria, as well as confrontation in Crimea and the Ukraine. Some even hint at war with Iran.

Is it any wonder that we can’t afford to maintain our own nation?

These same budget hawks voted to dramatically expand funding for the F-35 jet fighter which is years behind schedule and hopelessly over budget. They even added funding to build more Abrams tanks, despite the fact that neither the Army nor the Marine Corps want them. As a result of such decisions, we will spend $820.2 billion on defense in FY 2014, not including Homeland Security. This money is not needed to defend our nation. It’s needed to maintain the American corporate empire; to maintain US control of resources in remote corners of the world; to maintain US access to Middle Eastern oil deposits; to maintain corporate access to global markets and to open new ones; to maintain massive profits and executive compensation.

Yet studies show that most Americans would rather bring our troops home. They would rather rebuild our own nation than one we bombed into submission. So why don’t our Congressional representatives listen? Why do so many continue to vote against the will of the people?

The answer, in a word, is money.

Large corporate interests take money from ordinary, hard-working people through various forms of scams and corporate subsidies. (You’ll find a great example detailed in a Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi linked here.) This leads to increased profits. The corporations then give a portion of that money to the election campaigns of politicians in order to buy access and influence. In return, those politicians pass laws to benefit the corporations. And the cycle starts all over again.

On the rare occasions when the politicians take their hands out of the pockets of their corporate sponsors, they pass laws to deregulate industries; to render the EPA and other regulatory agencies impotent; to increase welfare for large corporations while cutting their taxes; to privatize prisons, schools and public pension funds; to cut funding for parks, mental health facilities, public universities and public schools; to redirect taxpayer money to Wall Street hedge funds. All the while, they blame the nation’s resulting economic problems on labor unions, the unemployed and the working poor. To distract the public from their crimes, these fraudster politicians tell us that their actions are necessary to cut debt and create jobs.

What they don’t say is that the only jobs they’re concerned with are their own.

The Tao Of Politics.

I am not a Taoist. Nevertheless, I have learned that the philosophy of Taoism has much to offer. The Taoist concept of Yin and Yang holds that nothing is ever entirely black or white; hard or soft; good or bad. Taoism teaches that good people can do bad things. It also teaches that those we consider bad can, on occasion, do good things.

This is particularly true as it pertains to politics.

For example, I know many who are otherwise caring, loving people who would deny food, shelter, health care and other human necessities to the unfortunate simply because their Republican Party preaches personal responsibility. They have become convinced that the poor are merely taking advantage of those of us who have been successful. They want to believe that the majority of the poor are lazy. Such thinking allows them to look the other way when they see someone who is in desperate need of help.

They cannot conceive that someone can work hard and still struggle to feed their families because they are underpaid by large, greedy corporations. They falsely believe that minimum wage jobs are entry level jobs that are the first step up the economic ladder. In past times, that may have been true. But in today’s economy, with many of our high-paying jobs now shipped offshore, for many people, the economic ladder has been pushed aside by greedy corporate executives.

Many Republicans refuse to accept that the American Dream no longer exists for many people; that the US is not the land of opportunity it once was; that no amount of hard work can pull many of the unfortunate out of poverty; that the US now has less upward mobility than most of the rest of the industrialized world.

As a result, many good Republicans cheered when the federal government cut $5 billion from the annual budget of SNAP (food stamps) – an amount equal to all of the charitable organizations in the nation (501c4 “charities” such as American Crossroads and FreedomWorks, not included). The same people who would gladly give food and money to a family member or neighbor are still clamoring to cut another $4-40 billion from SNAP at a time when 1 in 6 Americans and 1 in 4 American children are dealing with hunger.

These grinches are not bad people. They are simply uninformed or misinformed.

These champions of personal responsibility and faith are convinced that social safety nets are not only unnecessary. They believe that social programs are creating a culture of dependence. They believe that the minimum wage, labor unions and government regulation are threats to our economy.

They believe that subsidies and giveaways to large corporations are good. But that subsidies and giveaways to people are bad. Why? If it’s true that corporations are people, shouldn’t they both be treated equally? If a half dozen banks are considered too big to fail, shouldn’t group consisting of millions of poor Americans also be considered too big to fail?

Taoism teaches that all things are part of a greater whole – the great Tao – and that if you harm another, in reality you harm yourself. Caring Republicans would be wise to keep that in mind.

Subsidizing Millionaires And Billionaires.

For years, large corporations have whined that US corporate income taxes are “the highest in the world.” While it’s true that our maximum corporate tax RATE is the highest in the world, the EFFECTIVE tax rate paid by US-based multinational corporations is much, much lower.

In fact, as a percentage of GDP, US corporations pay the second lowest taxes in the developed world! And that doesn’t even include the many ways US taxpayers subsidize large corporations through the creation of specialized infrastructure, tax incentives, relocation incentives, government research grants and sweetheart rates on loans.

Those are just the direct subsidies. Indirect subsidies are often even more costly!

Consider the study recently released by Congressional Democrats which found that a single Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin could cost taxpayers up to $900,000 a year as a result of Walmart’s notoriously low wages and minimal benefits. According to the study, most of Walmart’s employees qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, low-income housing assistance, energy assistance, and other forms of public assistance.

The authors of the study summarize the findings this way, “When low wages leave Walmart workers unable to afford the necessities of life, taxpayers pick up the tab.”

Of course, Walmart responds by saying that its policies benefit all Americans through lower prices. But Costco, another big box chain that competes with Walmart, offers low prices. It also offers full benefits to its employees and pays them an average annual salary of $45,000. There are millions of Americans like myself who try to never set foot in a Walmart store. So why should we be forced to subsidize Walmart’s bad behavior? What is the benefit to us?

There are approximately 4,000 Walmart stores in the US. If each of those cost taxpayers $900,000 a year, Walmart is costing US taxpayers a total of more than $3.6 billion per year!

And that doesn’t include other indirect costs such as the company’s impact on the environment, the impact on independent small businesses that are forced to compete with Walmart, lost revenue in personal income taxes from those forced to accept Walmart’s low wages…the costs are many. There’s also a moral and ethical cost created by Walmart relying on sweatshops in undeveloped countries like Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, the Walton family that owns Walmart enjoys undeserved profits through taxpayer subsidies. For 2011, the company’s net income was $15.4 billion.

Walmart is not alone in unfairly profiting from subsidies and loopholes. A recent study found that 18 of America’s largest corporations, including Abbott, Apple, Citigroup, GE, Google, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Microsoft, Nike and Pfizer, have stashed profits in off-shore tax shelters in order to avoid paying $92 billion in US income taxes!

We should demand more of corporations. We should demand that they pay all of the costs associated with doing business. We should stop the subsidies. We should require that they pay employees a living wage. And we should require them to pay their fair share of taxes.