Walmart Government?

When I woke up yesterday I was treated to the following post on Facebook, along with an endorsement of the sentiments contained in the post.  Needless to say my liberal head nearly exploded, leaving me no choice but to blog about it...


Wal-Mart vs. The Morons

1. Americans spend $36,000,000 at Wal-Mart Every hour of every day.
2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target +Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people, is the world's largest private employer, and most speak English.
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only fifteen years.
8. During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought bankruptcy.
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had five years ago.
11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at Wal-Mart stores. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5 Billion.)
12. 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart.  

You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying the ground work for suggesting that MAYBE we should hire the guys 

who run Wal-Mart to fix the economy.

This should be read and understood by all Americans… Democrats, Republicans, EVERYONE!!

To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature, it is now official that the majority of you are corrupt morons:

a. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke.
b. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.
c. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke.
d. War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.
e. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.
f. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.
g. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 32 years to get
it right and it is an abysmal failure.

You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars.

AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM??

We're "broke" and can't help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans, Homeless etc. and the last months we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile, and Turkey and now Pakistan ( the previous home of bin Laden). literally, BILLIONS of DOLLARS!!!

Our retired seniors living on a 'fixed income' receive no aid nor do they get any breaks.

AMERICA: a country where we have homeless without shelter, children going to bed hungry, elderly going without needed medicines, and mentally ill without treatment, etc.

Imagine if the GOVERNMENT gave U. S. the same support they give to other countries. Sad isn't it?

*99% of the people receiving this message won't have the guts to forward this.

*I'm one of the 1% -- I Just Did BEING UNITED SAVES AMERICA!

My first issue was the Wal-Mart worship.  It doesn't take a lot of research to discover that Wal-Mart is pretty evil.  The documentary WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Prices is as good a place as any to start.

Wal-Mart have made their fortune on the backs of the poor.  Consider a pair of jeans as an example.  Someone had to create the denim, dye it, cut them to shape, sew them, rivet them, add buttons, quality control them, send them across the country to a port, send them half way around the world, offload them, drive them across America to a distribution center, drive them to the store, offload them, unpack them, add them into inventory and place them on a hanger in a Wal-Mart store near you.  And they have jeans for under $10!

Consider how many people got screwed in the process.  Don't believe me?  Go to a local taylor and ask them to make you some jeans.  Get back to me if anyone will do it for less than $200.

The savings didn't come from bulk purchase, buying power, or any other accounting magic.  The savings came from using slave labor in a sweat shop where they can get people to work for pennies an hour.  In fact at every point along the way people got screwed, right up to the staff at the Wal-Mart store.  Wal-Mart is famous for their militant efforts to ensure no unions are ever formed.  They exploit loopholes in the law that allow companies to treat part time workers like garbage.  Typically, they will hire people and give them the maximum hours needed to constitute a part time employee, but will then encourage them to work unpaid overtime, which the staff are willing to do in fear of losing their jobs.

By keeping their workers under the thumb in this way Wal-Mart saves a fortune in 'benefits,' that interesting American word for allowing people semi-reasonable access to health care.

In fact by paying poverty wages instead of a livable full time income Wal-Mart saddles the tax payer with around $2.66Bn a year in food stamps and more in other low income assistance programs.

Keep in mind as our original poster, and Wal-Mart fan, pointed out the company makes over $20K in profit every minute of every day, while expecting their workers to work an entire year to earn less than that.  Meanwhile the CEO makes more money in an hour than the average worker will earn in a year.

Our Wal-Mart fan wants us to apply this same logic to running our country!

We already live in a country where children go hungry, poverty is a rampant and serious problem, and our infant mortality figures are an embarrassment.  Yet we should apply some of this Wal-Mart logic to our government?

The most disturbing thing is that the people who post this kind of nonsense and agree to it, are very often low income people themselves.  This isn't the rich telling us this, but low information voters pass this kind of drivel around as if it was common sense.

They love to harp on about us giving 'aid' to other countries despite the fact that it is right around 1% of our Federal budget.  You never hear them whining about the 15% of our budget that is spend on defense.  But hey, what's a trillion dollars if it buys you an awesome big bomb?

Later this post starts banging on about how the government can't be trusted to run health care, even though that's not been proposed.  I guess it's the same logic as gun nuts equating a discussion about gun violence to Obama taking everyone's guns next week.

Ultimately the big problem that America has is that rather cunningly the Republicans have managed to use religion, guns and simplistic black and white wedge issues to garner support.  Then they get into office and shit on the 'little people' from a great height, slashing government assistance programs, investments in people, and leaving corporations to exploit their workers in any number of ways (your waitress still makes $2.13 an hour FYI).

Amazingly after all this abuse, the poor of America keep coming back for more and voting for Republicans, while distributing the kind of nonsense shown above among their friends, and calling it common sense.

I swear, if common sense were really that common, Republicans would have less votes than the Green Party.