“China; Oops, My Bad - Walmart Is Taking Over”

PR Day 6 – Walmart ‘s PR Good Guys Campaign

Small businesses around America are dropping like flies at a pace of 3 billion dollars in retail wages every year. Another Walmart here, another Walmart there. Another new ghost town here, another new ghost town there. That’s the trend building up in small towns all over the country. Why? Cheap Chinese products! According to the AFL-CIO, "Wal-Mart is the single largest importer of foreign-produced goods in the United States", their biggest trading partner is China, and their trade with China alone constitutes approximately 10 percent of the total US trade deficit with China as of 2004. As of 2004, 60% of products sold at Wal-Mart were imported into the United States from other countries. But how? Communism is the evil, right? Conservatists have been trying to liberate us from these bad guys for generations or at least make us believe those are their intentions. WRONG! Communism, or should I say? The watered-down version of it, namely social capitalism (such as the type of societies run in countries like China and Cuba. Lets not confound it with pure Marx-Engels communism, because that does not exist just yet) is feeding Americans with cheap items that promote laziness and conformity in the American population. Why would I go to school and strive for a better job, if I can get a cheap Chinese product for a dollar at Walmart? The answer is a very politically involved system built by the American government, namely the neo-conservatists. China has the perfect social environment to abuse his population and to create cheap products that the capitalist countries die to get their hands on. And so Walmart has become the perfect feeding tube of social capitalist’s items into this country. What does that mean for the American population? An increasingly poor living situation.

Walmart has been known in the last decade as a company that every single year breaks its own records on sales and profits (For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2006, Wal-Mart reported net income of $11.2 billion on $316 billion of sales revenue (3.5% profit margin). As of January 04, 2007, revenue was $33.3 billion higher than it was one year ago); however, at the same time, they have been known as a company that pays its employees extremely low wages and expensive health care benefits that six out of ten employees cannot pay for. Wal-Mart's health insurance covers 44% or approximately 572,000 of its 1.3 million U.S. workers and spends 27% less than the retail-industry average on these benfits. Thus, these uninsured employees look for welfare and Medicaid benefits from the government. Who pays for that? Every hard-working American that pays taxes to the IRS. So, how is it possible that a company that every year grows at a tremendous pace cannot share its profits with its employees, namely the persons that actually do the job involved in order to make those same profits? Let’s give a thunderous round of applause to the Capitalist system and the neo-conservatists presently running it!

Wal-Mart has been criticized for their policies against labor unions. In North America, the company has largely thwarted unionization through anti-union tactics such as managerial surveillance and pre-emptive closures of stores or departments who choose to unionize.

In August 2006, the company announced that it would roll out an average pay increase of 6% for all new hires at 1,200 U.S. Wal-Mart and Sam's Club locations, and at the same time would institute pay caps on veteran workers. While Wal-Mart claims the measures are necessary to stay competitive, critics claim the salary caps are primarily an effort to push higher-paid, veteran workers out of the company.

Today, I present this video in order to help you understand these and other points from the perspective of these employees and the small-business owners that are losing their war against Walmart, the world's largest retailer and second largest corporation (behind Exxon Mobil). Walmart has tried to hide this and other truths for quite some time now and presently are running an enormous public relations campaign in order to convince the American population that they are the good guys. Have you seen those commercial on TV about Walmart that say NOTHING about the products and services they sell at their stores? That’s PR at its best.

Walmart - High Cost of Low Prices

A facts summary video.



For the entire video, please follow this link