Just like President Bush approved a secret program to eavesdrop on Americans, Wal-Mart has hired a group of former CIA, FBI and Justice Department officials to spy on its employees and maybe others.

Please join us now in calling on Congress to investigate the Wal-Mart spy scandal.

The Wal-Mart spy team, which Wal-Mart refers to as the Threat, Research and Analysis group, was using highly sophisticated counter-surveillance technology to eavesdrop on employees' phone calls, intercept text messages, and, according to a recent lawsuit, spy on an employee while he was traveling abroad. One of Wal-Mart's technicians even went so far as to record the conversations of a New York Times reporter.

Wal-Mart's big brother tactics and invasion of privacy are eerily similar to last year's Hewlett Packard scandal which drew Congressional review and resulted in high-level resignations and prosecution.

The Wal-Mart spy scandal, on top of recent attempts by Wal-Mart to smear several former high-profile executives, raises some serious questions about the extent to which corporations should be allowed to conduct surveillance on their employees.

While we still don't know the full extent of Wal-Mart's spy program and whether or not anything illegal was done, we do know that Wal-Mart was eavesdropping in order to identify the source of documents that were given to our campaign which exposed Wal-Mart's negative business practices.

These documents and the many courageous Wal-Mart employees who have spoken out have helped us tell the American people the truth about Wal-Mart's anti-family agenda which has hurt its employees, our communities and our country.

As a nation, we would hope companies like Wal-Mart would reflect the best of American values, instead of implementing eavesdropping programs, designed by former CIA and FBI officials, to spy on their employees.

Please join us now in calling on Congress to investigate the Wal-Mart spy scandal.

From the Wal-Mart spy scandal, to stopping the ‘Wal-Mart Bank,' to forcing Wal-Mart to give up on its plans to enter New York City, to having Wal-Mart's public relations' operation be exposed as a sham, our campaign to change Wal-Mart is in high gear.

Now, more than ever, we need your help, because, only by joining together, can we change Wal-Mart and change America for the better.

From the front page of today's New York Times:

The investigator flew to Guatemala in April 2002 with a delicate mission: trail a Wal-Mart manager around the country to prove he was sleeping with a lower-level employee, a violation of company policy.

The apparent smoking gun? “Moans and sighs” heard as the investigator, a Wal-Mart employee, pressed his ear against a hotel room door inside a Holiday Inn, according to legal documents. Soon after, the company fired the manager for what it said was improper fraternization with a subordinate.

Wal-Mart, renowned to outsiders for its elbows-out business tactics, is known internally for its bare-knuckled no-expense-spared investigations of employees who break its ironclad ethics rules.

Over the last five years, Wal-Mart has assembled a team of former officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Justice Department whose elaborate, at times globetrotting, investigations have led to the ouster of a high-profile board member who used company funds to buy hunting equipment, two senior advertising executives who took expensive gifts from a potential supplier and a computer technician who taped a reporter’s telephone calls.

The investigators — whose résumés evoke Langley, Va., more than Bentonville, Ark. — serve as a rapid-response team that aggressively polices the nation’s largest private employer, enforcing Wal-Mart’s modest by-the-books culture among its army of 1.8 million employees.

Wal-Mart is certainly not the only company, or even the first, to investigate its employees, a practice used widely in corporate America to guard against fraud and protect trade secrets. But despite the retailer’s folksy Arkansas image, few companies are as prickly — or unforgiving — about its employees’ wayward behavior, a legacy of its frugal founder, Sam Walton, who equated misconduct with inefficiency that would cost customers money.

No case better demonstrates the company’s prowess — or, former employees say, its ruthlessness — than the exhaustive investigation of Julie Roehm and Sean Womack, two former top Wal-Mart marketing executives.

After Ms. Roehm sued Wal-Mart for wrongful termination, the company disclosed the results of the investigation last week in a detailed and at times salacious countersuit. Investigators obtained records that they said showed the two married executives had engaged in a sexual affair, accepted free meals from an advertising agency vying to win Wal-Mart’s business and begun negotiating a deal to leave Wal-Mart to work for that agency.

Yesterday, Ms. Roehm called Wal-Mart’s investigation “a smear campaign” intended to destroy her reputation and, in a nod to Wal-Mart’s investigative firepower, said the company had outmanned her with “ex-C.I.A. operatives” and “former F.B.I. men.”

The Wal-Mart investigation was striking in its scope. Lawyers for Wal-Mart subpoenaed Mr. Womack’s wife, Shelley, compelling her to give sworn testimony about how she discovered a sexual relationship between her husband and Ms. Roehm. They prompted her to turn over dozens of embarrassing e-mail messages that her husband had sent to Ms. Roehm from a private account.

“I miss you ridiculously,” began one of the e-mail messages from Ms. Roehm to Mr. Womack. “I hate not being able to call you or write you. I think about us together all the time. Little moments like watching your face when you kiss me.”

Wal-Mart investigators also persuaded the top executives at a major advertising agency, Draft FCB, and its parent company, the Interpublic Group of Companies, to turn over hundreds of confidential e-mail messages, dinner receipts and notes from meetings. One revelation was that Ms. Roehm accepted a case of Effen vodka, valued at nearly $400, from the chief executive of Draft FCB, calling the gift, which violated Wal-Mart’s policies, “a HUGE hit” in a thank-you e-mail message.

Ms. Roehm and Mr. Womack have denied they engaged in a sexual relationship or did anything wrong. Mr. Womack did not respond to phone messages.

Kenneth H. Senser, a former top official at the C.I.A. and F.B.I. who runs Wal-Mart’s security department, said cases like these showed that Wal-Mart was determined to enforce consistently its employment policies, no matter how high the rank of the workers involved. Both Mr. Womack and Ms. Roehm, for example, were senior executives with six-figure salaries.

“It’s been very clear from these investigations that the company has taken a definitive stand,” said Mr. Senser, who interviewed both Ms. Roehm and Mr. Womack before they were fired in late 2006. “The chips are going to fall where they may. If it’s a senior vice president or cashier in the store, we are going to look at the allegations the same way — and not give somebody a pass.”

Mr. Senser, 47, and his staff of roughly 400, investigate allegations of misconduct, guard Wal-Mart executives and prepare for potential crises of all kinds, from hurricanes to terrorist attacks. (During Hurricane Katrina, they established an emergency response center inside Wal-Mart’s headquarters, filled with flat-screen televisions, that resembled one used by the F.B.I.)

Their backgrounds are impressive, if not slightly intimidating. Mr. Senser was a senior officer in the C.I.A.’s office of security, which was responsible for investigating agents considered a security risk. After that, he supervised the development of an internal security department at the F.B.I. when the agency discovered that Robert P. Hanssen, one of its agents, had spied for the Soviet Union and Russia.

Joe Lewis, who runs the internal corporate investigations unit at Wal-Mart, worked at the F.B.I. for 27 years, serving as acting assistant director for criminal investigations. He works closely with Thomas C. Gean, chief legal compliance officer, who was the United States attorney for the Western District of Arkansas.

In an interview, H. Lee Scott Jr., Wal-Mart’s chief executive, said that “it has reached the point where there are issues that take specialized skills to get to the bottom of.”

Mr. Scott conceded that the team has been unusually busy lately. “You almost have to laugh,” he said of executives engaging in egregious conduct. “You can’t make this stuff up.”

Three weeks ago, for example, Wal-Mart fired a computer technician, Bruce Gabbard, and one of his superiors, Jason Hamilton, after a two-month investigation conducted by Mr. Senser and his staff. They found that Mr. Gabbard, acting alone, had taped phone conversations between members of Wal-Mart’s media relations staff and this reporter of The New York Times. Using equipment he bought on eBay, he also intercepted text messages sent from his colleagues’ BlackBerries.

Mr. Scott, who personally apologized for the incident, said Mr. Gabbard had tried to uncover the source of leaked internal documents shared with newspapers like The Times “because he thought what was happening to his company was unfair and he was going to do something about it.” Mr. Gabbard has declined to comment.

Behind Wal-Mart’s response to such cases is a proud preoccupation with sticking to the rules. Inside Wal-Mart’s spare headquarters, large signs affixed to the doors of meeting rooms spell out a ban on gifts of any value from potential vendors, whether it is a free plane ticket or a cup of coffee.

No wonder, perhaps, that wasted money — from suppliers and Wal-Mart employees — is a recurring theme in the company’s investigations.

One of the company’s biggest investigations was of a board member and former vice chairman, Thomas M. Coughlin, whom it accused in 2005 of dipping into company funds to pay for CDs, beer, an all-terrain vehicle, duck-hunting boots and a customized dog kennel. His total theft, Wal-Mart said, was more than $500,000.

As with Ms. Roehm and Mr. Womack, Wal-Mart spared no detail in its case against Mr. Coughlin, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in the case. Investigators documented dozens of improper purchases that included fiber supplements and doughnuts and, in legal filings, described him as a rogue executive committed to defrauding the company.

But not all of Wal-Mart’s investigations involve money, or even high-stakes business matters, prompting employees to protest that the company’s investigative arm is, at times, used to intimidate employees who question authority or raise issues their bosses wish to remain secret.

James W. Lynn, a factory inspection manager at Wal-Mart, was fired in 2002 for fraternization with a subordinate after an investigation that extended across several countries.

During the investigation, a company investigator followed Mr. Lynn and a lower-level female colleague who worked in Costa Rica on a business trip to Guatemala City, where he spied on the pair for at least four days — even booking a hotel room directly across the hall from the female employee’s room to keep watch on the pair. (In the end, both Mr. Lynn and the woman did say they kissed.)

Mr. Lynn, in an interview and in a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart, claims he was singled out because he openly criticized the working conditions in the Central American factories he inspected.

“Wal-Mart is the ultimate Big Brother in corporate America,” Mr. Lynn said. He disputes Wal-Mart’s claim that it investigates every employee the same way. “They are very opportunistic,” he said. “If it is someone they want to get rid of, they will go all out. If it’s somebody whose career they want to save, they won’t.”

Sarah Clark, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the company “took the steps it deemed necessary to investigate the allegations of fraternization” and denied the company was motivated by Mr. Lynn’s criticism.

Mr. Senser, who arrived after the investigation of Mr. Lynn, said his staff knew its boundaries.

“We are not in the business of prosecuting people, or pursuing an allegation to find a violation of the law,” Mr. Senser said. “We operate for the benefit of our shareholders to make sure this company is being appropriately and ethically run. There is a difference.”

From the New York Times:

Wal-Mart to New York: fuhgeddaboudit.

Frustrated by a bruising, and so far unsuccessful battle to open its first discount store in the nation’s largest city, Wal-Mart’s chief executive said yesterday, “I don’t care if we are ever here.”

H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of the nation’s largest retailer, said that trying to conduct business in New York was so expensive - and exasperating - that “I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”

Mr. Scott’s remarks, delivered at a meeting with editors and reporters of The New York Times, amounted to a surprising admission of defeat, given the company’s vigorous efforts to crack into urban markets and expand beyond its suburban base in much of the country. In recent years, Wal-Mart has encountered stout resistance to its plans to enter America’s bigger cities, which stand as its last domestic frontier.

Much of the opposition to Wal-Mart in cities like New York is led by unions. Organized labor, fearing that the retailer’s low prices and modest wages will undercut unionized stores, have built anti-Wal-Mart alliances with Democratic members of city councils.

Yesterday, labor leaders, upon learning of Wal-Mart’s apparent retreat from New York - or at the very least Manhattan - returned Mr. Scott’s sentiment.

“We don’t care if they’re never here,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. “We don’t miss them. We have great supermarkets and great retail outlets in New York. We don’t need Wal-Mart.”

For Wal-Mart, New York City has long loomed as a tantalizing prize - the home of more than eight million consumers and attention-grabbing stores for just about every major retailer in the country.

But Wal-Mart, a cost-minded retailer known for its dowdy merchandise, and New York, a city of excesses known for cutting-edge style, have long had an uneasy relationship.

Wal-Mart executives have argued that low prices would be the universal language that bridged the gap. So far, they have not.

During the questioning, Mr. Scott repeatedly referred to New York, but after the meeting a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Mona Williams, called to say that Mr. Scott was referring to only Manhattan, not the entire city.

Wal-Mart, which has nearly 4,000 stores in the United States, has sought to open stores in Rego Park, Queens, and in Staten Island, but both plans fell through in the face of intense union, community and political opposition.

Mr. Scott said yesterday that the opposition to Wal-Mart in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles and other cities had a common thread: “The glue is the unions.”

Despite setbacks in each of these cities, Wal-Mart has had success in urban areas. In Chicago, for example, Wal-Mart opened a store last year that attracted thousands of job applicants and has, Mr. Scott said, performed better than expected.

He said that Wal-Mart executives have lobbied for a store in New York, but he said he remains unconvinced. “It’s too hard to make money here,” he said.

Late yesterday, Ms. Williams sought to amend Mr. Scott’s remarks.

“Entering New York has been difficult, but not something we rule out,” she said in an interview. “Lee said he personally didn’t care if we built stores there or not. It might be more trouble than it’s worth, but that he would leave that up to the real estate group that makes these decisions.”

As he does in many public appearances, Mr. Scott was quick yesterday to talk up the chief potential benefit of a Wal-Mart in New York City, particularly for its many struggling residents with modest incomes: lower prices because of the chain’s vast purchasing power and highly efficient distribution system.

Surveys have repeatedly shown that Wal-Mart’s grocery prices are typically 10 to 30 percent lower than those of its competitors.

But labor leaders assert that while Wal-Mart’s prices are low, its wages and health benefits are often so skimpy that they leave many workers below the poverty line and pressure competitors to reduce pay and benefits.

“We don’t like how they do business,” Mr. Ott, the New York union official, said.

But as Mr. Scott sees it, there is another reason Wal-Mart has such a hard time making inroads into some of the nation’s biggest enclaves. Speaking about what he sees as snobbish elites in New York and across the country, Mr. Scott added, “You have people who are just better than us and don’t want a Wal-Mart in their community.”

You've got to read this... The April 2 New Yorker includes an extremely witty and enlightening piece by Jeffrey Goldberg. We will continue to highlight various parts of it throughout the week:

On the second floor of Wal-Mart’s headquarters, in Bentonville, Arkansas, is a windowless room called Action Alley. In the Wal-Mart idiom, the term “Action Alley” usually refers to the main aisle of the company’s two thousand Supercenters—the stores that have upended the retail business by selling enormous quantities of groceries and imported goods at prices that competitors find difficult or impossible to match. At the “home office,” as Bentonville is known, Action Alley is the company’s war room, a communications center that was set up and is staffed by Washington-based operatives from Edelman, a public-relations firm that advises companies on issues of “reputation management.” Wal-Mart corporate culture is parsimonious except in the matter of executive compensation, but, according to a source, the company has been paying Edelman roughly ten million dollars annually to renovate its reputation.

Twenty years ago, Wal-Mart was widely viewed as a scrappy regional retailer, and its founder, Sam Walton, an Ozarks eccentric with a vision of super-discounting, was praised for intuiting the needs of his customers, and for maintaining high morale among his workers. When Walton retired, in 1988 (he died in 1992), the company had revenues of sixteen billion dollars. Today, Wal-Mart is the second-largest company in the world in terms of revenue—only ExxonMobil is bigger. Its revenues last year came to more than three hundred and fifteen billion dollars, with profits of more than eleven billion, and it has developed a reputation as a worldwide colossus that provides poor pay and miserly benefits to its 1.8 million employees. The image of the company is not helped by the immoderation of Sam Walton’s widow and children, who together control forty per cent of Wal-Mart’s outstanding shares, and who are worth roughly eighty billion dollars; they are, by a striking margin, the richest family in America. (They are worth more than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined.)

Wal-Mart is traditionally a Republican-leaning company (during the past fifteen years, more than seventy-five per cent of its political donations have gone to Republicans) and has become a favorite target of Democratic politicians. Hillary Clinton, who once served on Wal-Mart’s board, recently returned a five-thousand-dollar donation because of what a campaign spokeswoman said were “serious differences with current company practices.” Barack Obama and John Edwards have joined union-led campaigns to denounce the company for its wage-and-benefit policies. Wal-Mart is notably unfriendly to unions; in 2000, when meat-cutters at a single Wal-Mart in Texas organized into a collective-bargaining unit, Wal-Mart responded by shutting down its meat counters across Texas and in five neighboring states. It closed an entire store in Quebec, rather than see workers unionize.

The company has also been criticized for driving American jobs overseas, by demanding immense discounts from its suppliers. Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who is one of Wal-Mart’s main foes in Congress, says that the company, by forcing its suppliers to manufacture goods in China, shows that it “doesn’t stand for American values.” Wal-Mart has been the subject of numerous unflattering documentaries and books. Even Ron Galloway, the maker of a recent pro-Wal-Mart documentary, “Why Wal-Mart Works and Why That Makes Some People Crazy,” has turned against the company. Galloway told me that he now considers Wal-Mart to be a “heartless” employer. “They just instituted a wage cap for long-term employees—people making between thirteen and eighteen dollars an hour. It’s a form of accelerated attrition. They can’t expect me to defend that,” Galloway said.

Two unions—the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers—fund anti-Wal-Mart lobbying groups that catalogue what they see as the company’s diverse sins. Each month seems to bring a new, self-inflicted embarrassment. Most recently, Wal-Mart announced that it had fired a technician from its Threat Research and Analysis division (which combats industrial espionage) for eavesdropping on telephone calls made by the Times’ Wal-Mart beat reporter, Michael Barbaro. Wal-Mart claims that the technician acted alone; the U.S. Attorney in Arkansas is investigating.

In 2005, Barbaro and another Times reporter, Steven Greenhouse, cited an internal memo written by the company’s chief human-resources executive, M. Susan Chambers, in which she suggested that the company could control personnel costs by not hiring unhealthy people. (To keep the sick and the lame off the payroll, Chambers suggested that all jobs should include “some physical activity; e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering.”) In the same memo, Chambers noted that forty-six per cent of the children of Wal-Mart’s million-plus American employees were uninsured or on Medicaid.

More recently, the company experienced a run of bad publicity when it announced new scheduling policies for its store workers (known as “associates”). Under what critics call the “open availability” policy, workers must make themselves available for different shifts from month to month or risk losing hours. Kathleen MacDonald, a cosmetics-counter manager at a Wal-Mart in Aiken, South Carolina, explained to me, “It’s simple. They say you have to be there when the computer says the customers will be there. So if you have kids at home you can’t show up, but then your hours are being cut.”

The company is facing more consequential challenges over its treatment of women. A class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco in 2001 by six female Wal-Mart employees, alleging that the company has denied promotions and equal pay to women, is proceeding steadily to trial; by some estimates, the suit could cost the company as much as five billion dollars. Wal-Mart has denied that it discriminates against women. Kathleen MacDonald joined the suit after she learned that a male counterpart, who, like her, was stocking shelves, earned more than she did. When she raised the issue, she told me, “my immediate supervisor said, ‘Well, God made Adam first, and Eve came from him.’ I was, like, what? That’s when I decided enough was enough.”

Full-time hourly workers at Wal-Mart stores make an average of $10.51 an hour, according to the company. Wal-Mart’s most energetic adversary, a group called Wake Up Wal-Mart, which is sponsored by the food workers’ union, notes that $10.51 may be the average full-time wage, but the company won’t disclose the average hourly wage of part-timers. “We think the true average is probably less than nine dollars,” Chris Kofinis, the Wake Up Wal-Mart spokesman, said.

The company has had its bright moments, most notably in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Wal-Mart mobilized its truck fleet to deliver goods to the storm zone. But that was a rare instance of good public relations. Owing in part to its status as a retail behemoth, Wal-Mart has met with resistance in numerous communities (including New York City) when it has tried to open stores. And its recent business performance has been less than stellar; sales have slowed, and the stock price is stagnant. Problems like these have concentrated the minds of Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s C.E.O., and his top executives. “We used to be the David and now we’re seen as the Goliath,” John Fleming, the company’s chief merchandising officer, told me.

The job of the Edelman people—there are about twenty, along with more than three dozen in-house public-relations specialists—is to help Wal-Mart scrub its muddied image. Edelman specializes in helping industries with image problems; another important client is the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington lobbying group that seeks to convince Americans that oil companies care about the environment and that their profits are reasonable. Edelman does its work by cultivating contacts among the country’s opinion élites, with whom it emphasizes the good news and spins the bad; by such tactics as establishing “Astroturf” groups, seemingly grass-roots organizations that are actually fronts for industry; and, as I deduced from my own visit to Bentonville, by advising corporate executives on how to speak like risk-averse politicians.

It became clear to me in Bentonville that Wal-Mart’s senior executives had been tightly scripted. When I talked with John Menzer, a company vice-chairman, a spokeswoman named Sarah Clark, my official escort there, told me that the conversation would be limited to the company’s new Jobs and Opportunity Zones concept, which is designed to help smooth the arrival of new stores in urban areas. (A company source told me that the Zones idea was intended by Edelman as a public-relations maneuver to soften Wal-Mart’s image among minority communities; the entire budget for the program is five hundred thousand dollars over two years.) Menzer, a slender man with a thin smile, explained the company’s attraction to underemployed inner-city residents, saying, “One of the biggest opportunities a person has at Wal-Mart is to be part of this growth company. There are always opportunities for promotion, learning, and education, and people know they can build a career here.”

When I asked about the “open availability” policy, Clark interrupted, while Menzer stared at me. “I can certainly take that one,” Clark said. “I’ll make a note of that. We’ll talk about that later. We don’t have ‘open availability.’ ” Menzer continued as if the question had not been asked. “Now we’re expanding outside our four walls to invest in the community, so let me add that in as another step we’re taking,” he said. (Sometime later, Clark suggested that I interview an employee about flexible scheduling, and she provided the name and number of one who would talk to me: Latoya Machato, a cashier at a Texas Supercenter. I called the store and asked for Machato, but was told that “cashiers can’t come to the phone during work.” I called later and was told that Machato could speak to me on her break, but would not be allowed to call long-distance from a company phone. I asked Clark if Machato could talk to me after her shift, but Clark said that that would be impossible, because the store would have to put her “on the clock,” and thus file the paperwork to get her paid an extra hour’s wage.)

The Edelman team assigned to Wal-Mart, I learned, is divided into three groups: “promote,” “response,” and “pressure.” The Jobs and Opportunity Zones notion came from the promotions team. The response-team members—veterans of political campaigns—are supposed to quickly counter criticism in the press or on the Web. The pressure group works on opposition research, focussing on the unions and the press.

There is great mistrust of the press at Wal-Mart headquarters. The chief spokeswoman for the company, a former A. T. & T. executive named Mona Williams, keeps on a shelf a framed cover of a 2003 issue of Business Week featuring a story titled “Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?” The story asked tough questions about Wal-Mart’s influence on the American economy. “I keep that there to remind me never to trust reporters,” she said, without smiling. Sarah Clark was friendlier, but similarly suspicious. It was Clark who, without enthusiasm, brought me to Action Alley for a brief glimpse inside.

Before opening the door, she instructed me not to write down anything I saw—the third time that this particular directive had been issued. In some ways, the home office is not unlike the headquarters of the National Security Agency—both contain a large number of windowless rooms and both are staffed by people who are preoccupied by the movement of strangers in their midst. The N.S.A.’s headquarters, though, seemed to me more aesthetically appealing; the Wal-Mart home office resembles a poorly funded elementary school. Wal-Mart executives take pride in their ostentatiously shabby surroundings. “When I was working internationally, I got to be friends with Henry Kissinger, and so I invited Henry to have lunch with us,” Menzer told me. “We had lunch in the Quail Room, and it’s got pictures of Sam Walton and all his bird hunting, and we handed out Subway sandwiches and said, ‘Well, you’re very special, so we threw in a bag of chips,’ and I daresay I don’t know if he ever saw a Subway sandwich before, but he was actually so impressed that we live our culture.”

I pointed out to Menzer that his salary would allow him to purchase something more elegant. His face clouded over. “I’m just not going to talk about that,” he said. In 2005, Menzer earned six and a half million dollars in salary, bonuses, and options.

Clark opened the door of Action Alley to reveal a dark, threadbare room, its walls, like most of Wal-Mart’s walls, painted battleship gray. Six desks were clustered at the center of the room, and at these desks sat five Edelman executives.

When the presence of a reporter was announced, three of the executives looked away and two stood up to greet me. One was Greg St. Claire, at the moment the senior Edelman employee there. St. Claire, who is about forty and is a former Republican congressional staff member, got Wal-Mart in some trouble last year, because of a group called Working Families for Wal-Mart, which advertised itself as a “grass-roots” organization. St. Claire was one of the forces behind Working Families for Wal-Mart, which paid for his sister, Laura St. Claire, to travel across America in a recreational vehicle and keep a blog about visits with Wal-Mart employees. Everyone she talked to was delighted with Wal-Mart. At about the time that the trip came to an end, Business Week revealed that Wal-Mart had financed the journey. When I asked Richard Edelman, the company’s chairman, about this rather blatant example of Astroturfing, he said, of Working Families for Wal-Mart, “I do believe that it is a real group of real people, as far as I know.” Working Families for Wal-Mart is housed in Edelman’s Washington office; its steering-committee members, some of whom have business ties to the company, were recruited by Edelman. They include the singer Pat Boone, who told me by e-mail that he volunteered his public-relations services to Wal-Mart several years ago, and Wal-Mart passed his name on to the group.

Greg St. Claire was not interested in talking to me, but the other Edelman executive stood up and said hello. He was a man of about thirty named Fred Baldassaro. I was surprised to see him. We had last crossed paths more than a year earlier, in a union hall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At the time, Baldassaro was working for the Democratic National Committee chairman, Howard Dean, as his top travelling aide. Dean had spoken about democratic values at a rally, and said, “When you see that you’re putting in as many hours as the C.E.O. of your company, and he’s making five hundred and thirty-eight times what you’re making, do you think capitalism works for you?”

Down some stairs from Action Alley is the office of Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s president and C.E.O., who last year earned $15.7 million in salary and bonuses. Early this month, the company announced that it was granting him an additional twenty-two million dollars in stock. In the past year, Scott earned roughly two thousand times the salary of the average Wal-Mart worker.

Sarah Clark was eager to move along, but I asked Baldassaro why he went from Dean’s Democratic National Committee to Scott’s Wal-Mart.

“Well, it’s interesting here,” he said. “I’m getting married soon, anyway, and, you know . . .” He trailed off, as Clark invited me to leave.

Later that day, I drove to a Wal-Mart Supercenter in the nearby town of Rogers with one of Clark’s deputies, a young New Yorker named David Tovar, who, before joining Wal-Mart, spent nine years as a spokesman and lobbyist for Philip Morris, including a stint arguing against government regulation of cigarettes. He explained his position: “It’s a legal product that adults can choose to use, or not use, as they see fit. I learned a lot by doing that sort of work.” As we drove out of Bentonville, I asked Tovar if he thought it odd to find ostensibly pro-labor Democrats at the headquarters of Wal-Mart. In fact, he said, it would be quite normal for Democrats to join Wal-Mart’s “cause,” because Wal-Mart’s customers are the Party’s natural constituency.

Wal-Mart’s executives are angry about Democratic attacks on the company. Tovar’s boss, Mona Williams, told me, “Wal-Mart is taking care of the people the Democratic Party says it represents—the poor, the middle class. The Democrats are not taking care of them. We’re like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”

Tovar offered a more self-interested explanation for his service in the public-relations industry: “Why did I go work for Philip Morris? Because I wanted to get out of my parents’ house. Why do people take jobs? It’s like in ‘Thank You for Smoking’ ”—Christopher Buckley’s satire of the Washington public-relations industry. “What do they all say in that book? ‘I’ve got to pay the mortgage.’ You know, everybody’s got to pay the mortgage.”

In another novel, Buckley devoted a chapter to the exploits of a fictional White House advance man named Leslie R. Dach. “His motto was ‘Get the fuck out of my way,’ ” Buckley writes of Dach. “Leslie was serene in his contempt for fools, a category which in his view included most of humanity.”

Buckley borrowed Dach’s name from an actual Leslie Dach, who was his roommate at Yale, and who, thirty years later, remains a close friend. The real Dach also worked in Presidential politics—first as an advance man for Senator Edward Kennedy in his failed run for the nomination in 1980, and, later, as communications director for Michael Dukakis’s campaign in 1988 (a campaign that is still recalled for the moment when Dukakis was photographed, and ridiculed for, wearing a helmet as he rode in a tank). Today, Dach is Wal-Mart’s executive vice-president for corporate affairs and government relations. Last year, Lee Scott hired Dach away from Edelman, where, among other duties, he was vice-chairman, and where he managed the Wal-Mart account. “Fresh from his triumph in staging Michael Dukakis’s tank ride, it’s on to Bentonville,” Buckley said to me earlier this month. When I mentioned Buckley’s comment to Dach, he demurred: “I was thousands of miles away in my office at that famous moment.”

Dach, who is fifty-two, is the son of Holocaust survivors and grew up in Queens. He is wiry, with wavy graying hair and a pointed sense of humor—an improbable addition to the ranks of Wal-Mart’s senior managers. He is not as impolitic as his fictional counterpart, although Buckley told me that Dach’s friends are “bemused that he ended up in public relations, because, roughly speaking, he was the least tactful person on the planet.”

Upon graduating from Yale, Dach worked for a time for the National Audubon Society, and then for the Environmental Defense Fund, and he became involved in Democratic politics. (He has worked in seven Presidential campaigns.) After the 1988 race, the public-relations expert John Scanlon, who was volunteering on the Dukakis campaign, recommended Dach to Edelman. He went to work there and stayed for seventeen years, interrupted quadrennially for campaigns. In 2000, he managed the program at the Democratic National Convention for the Gore campaign. At Edelman, he did public relations for a range of corporate interests, along with Michael Deaver, Ronald Reagan’s former image-maker, who also works for Edelman in Washington.

One of Dach’s first big clients was Starkist, a division of Heinz, which was being accused by environmentalists of slaughtering dolphins during tuna harvests. Richard Edelman told me that Dach worked to bring the two sides together, and helped create the dolphin-safe tuna campaign. Dach maintained his ties with the environmental movement throughout his career at Edelman. In 1995, he helped to plan a seminar for petroleum-industry executives on ways to counter the bad publicity that comes with oil spills, while at the same time serving on the board of the National Audubon Society.

Ethical ambidexterity is no barrier to success in the public-relations field, particularly in Washington. Many prominent Democrats spend the years between national elections representing corporate clients: the political consultant Carter Eskew, who has worked for such Democratic politicians as Al Gore and Christopher Dodd, also worked for the tobacco industry; Mike McCurry, the former Clinton White House press secretary, represents the telecommunications industry in its fight against, among others, Democratic bloggers on issues of Internet access. Democrats and Republicans frequently come together to build bipartisan lobbying firms that seek corporate clients; Clinton’s onetime counsel Jack Quinn, who had as a client the international fugitive Marc Rich, for whom he helped arrange a Presidential pardon, built a successful firm with Ed Gillespie, the former Republican National Committee chairman.

Dach and Edelman have been innovators in their field. A press release issued in 2000 outlines a strategy that Dach has used repeatedly to good effect. “You’ve got an environmental disaster on your hands,” the document reads. “Have you consulted with Greenpeace in developing your crisis response plan? Co-opting your would-be attackers may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense when you consider that N.G.O.s (non-governmental organizations) are trusted by the public nearly two to one to ‘do what’s right’ compared with government bodies, media organizations and corporations.” The document goes on to describe Amnesty International, the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund as “brands” that the public believes “do what’s right.”

Edelman’s co-option policy may already be on display at Wal-Mart. Greenpeace has talked with the company about the issue of environmentally sound product packaging, and earlier this year Lee Scott joined Andy Stern, the leader of the Service Employees International Union, in a coalition of businesses and unions calling for quality health care to be made available to all Americans by 2012. Stern, whose union pays for the activities of a group called Wal-Mart Watch, which regularly criticizes the company, told me he did not believe that he had been co-opted by Wal-Mart, but his allies in the labor movement weren’t so sure. “Anyone who wants to take health-care lessons from Wal-Mart,” Chris Kofinis, of Wake Up Wal-Mart, said, “needs to have a serious reality check.” Government-sponsored universal health coverage would, of course, free Wal-Mart and other companies of the burden of providing health insurance for their employees.

Dach declined to take credit for Wal-Mart’s foray into the health-care-policy debate, but Richard Edelman suggested that he is seeing Dach’s influence on the company. Edelman called Dach an “idealist” who has carried to Wal-Mart his fervor for such traditional Democratic causes as universal health care and environmentalism. “I feel very strongly that Leslie Dach is making a very real contribution to Wal-Mart,” he said. “When he left, I didn’t get weepy, but I said, ‘Go and make a great contribution.’ ”

Wal-Mart, in turn, is making a great contribution to Dach: he was given three million dollars in stock and a hundred and sixty-eight thousand stock options, in addition to an undisclosed base salary. He and his wife, a nutritionist, recently bought a $2.7-million house in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington. He commutes to Bentonville during the week, to an apartment furnished out of a Wal-Mart store.

Dach’s decision to join Wal-Mart has brought him, by his own admission, some mockery, most recently at a seventy-fifth birthday party for his former boss Edward Kennedy. (Dach said that, for each person who teased him, “two others asked if they could do business with us.”) It has also strained relations with some friends. Joseph Sellers, a prominent civil-rights lawyer who is one of the lead attorneys in the Wal-Mart sex-discrimination lawsuit, said that his relationship with Dach has become awkward. “There’s no question that his profession views reality as malleable,” Sellers said. “I’m in the reality business.”

Even Andy Stern, the president of the service-employees’ union, who maintains a diplomatic relationship with Lee Scott, suggested that Dach is a turncoat. Lee Scott, he said, pursues harsh labor policies but is not a hypocrite about it, while Dach, an ostensible progressive, has, by declaring his allegiance to Bentonville, abandoned core principles of Democratic activism. “I would respect him if he said, ‘Listen, I’m just trying to get rich,’ ” Stern told me. “If that was your goal, you did really well. If your goal is to say you’re a progressive, then you’re full of it.”

In a recent conversation, Dach wanted to emphasize that he was not doing this for the money. He added, “I think I’ve been a person who has cared about issues over my entire professional career, and through seven Presidential campaigns I’ve tried to make a difference in my own limited way, and I firmly believe Wal-Mart’s core proposition of saving people money so they live better, working on sustainability, being part of the solution, moving these policies forward.”

Dach knows how to divert an unfriendly question with a flood of words, few of which address the subject at hand. I asked him whether it was moral for a self-styled progressive Democrat to work for a company that, among other things, maintains a mobile squad of union busters who can be dispatched by corporate jet to any store that gives off the faintest rumblings of union activity.

“I think that, first of all, morality is not the right language,” he said. “I think the more than one hundred and thirty million people who shop at Wal-Mart each week, who are saving money so they can live a better life, who save money there, they’d be insulted by that frame. Some of these issues are complex, and the debates are complex.”

Like the best P.R. men, Dach seems to find joy in spin. One day, while we were having lunch in the Wal-Mart cafeteria, I asked him why all the televisions in the building seemed to be tuned to Fox News. The television in the main lobby was on Fox, as were the televisions in the P.R. wing of the building and in the cafeteria, including one that was ten feet from his head.

“Is that true?” he said. After I assured him that it was, he said, “What about in the mornings? Do you know if they’re on Fox in the mornings?”

Such matters, he said, are sideshows. The important thing, he told me, is that Wal-Mart is making changes that even the most loyal Democrat would have to acknowledge are beneficial to the working poor and to the environment. Dach mentioned Wal-Mart’s newly instituted plan to provide its customers with generic drugs for four dollars a prescription. The program has been a success, even though, so far, a relatively small number of drugs—about three hundred—are on the four-dollar list. The program is being marketed as a way for Wal-Mart to “give back to the community,” as Dach put it. It, too, has its critics. Charlie Sewell, a senior vice-president of the National Community Pharmacists Association, a lobbying group, called the Wal-Mart plan a “classic bait-and-switch,” adding that most of the drugs on the list are older, less prescribed drugs.

Wal-Mart’s executive vice-president responsible for pharmacies, Bill Simon, told me that the company is making large profits on the program. “It’s not like these are twenty-dollar items that we’re selling for four dollars as a loss leader,” he said. By applying the Wal-Mart model to the generic-drug industry—pressuring manufacturers to sell to Wal-Mart for less—Simon said, the company has been able to make “more money” in pharmaceuticals “than we made last year.” Wal-Mart’s cost for some generics, he said, is as low as thirty-two cents. Not far from Simon’s office is a wall covered with exhortations to the company’s workers. One reads, “If you aren’t working on sales or the things that enhance the profitability of this company, then you are working on the wrong things.”

The generic-drug program has taken some public pressure off the company on the subject of its medical benefits. According to one study, Wal-Mart spends an average of thirty-five hundred dollars per employee per year on health benefits; the average for the retail industry over all is forty-eight hundred dollars. Recently, the company offered employees a “value plan” for health insurance, at a monthly premium as low as eleven dollars in some areas. But a family on the plan would have a three-thousand-dollar deductible, which would make it functionally unaffordable to a worker making seventeen thousand dollars a year. When I asked Linda Dillman, the company’s vice-president for benefits, about this potential financial strain, she said, “Well, that’s the problem we all have.” Dillman was a strong defender of Wal-Mart’s benefits plan, and said that the Susan Chambers memo that called for Wal-Mart to cease hiring unhealthy people had been misinterpreted. “The fact that we have to apologize because we want our associates to be healthier is absurd to me,” she said.

At the core of Dach’s campaign to prove that Wal-Mart is changing is the new “green” campaign—the company’s efforts to cut fuel and electricity consumption and make its stores eco-friendly. The green campaign has won some important allies. John Flicker, the president of the National Audubon Society, told me that he is pleased to see Dach at Wal-Mart: “He truly believes in the cause, and at a company the size of Wal-Mart he can truly make a difference.” Dach gives credit to Wal-Mart. “All of this began way before I got here,” he told me. “The passion for change is widespread throughout the company. I’m just a helper.”

As part of the green campaign, Wal-Mart has committed itself to cutting the fuel consumption of its truck fleet, the second-largest in America, and to reducing its electricity bill—Wal-Mart is one of the largest private consumers of electricity in the world—by twenty per cent in the next five years. Dach arranged for me to visit a recently opened Supercenter near Bentonville that was built to conserve energy.

For any number of reasons, this Wal-Mart seemed different from other Wal-Marts I’d been to. The prices were still low, but the workers appeared to be more enthusiastic, and I was impressed, in particular, by the store’s environmental innovations. Skylights allowed so much natural illumination that the fluorescent lights were switched off. The lights in the vast freezers were controlled by motion sensors, so they switched on only if someone walked nearby. “In this store alone, we’ll save more than a hundred thousand dollars in electricity this year,” Charles Zimmerman, a Wal-Mart vice-president who showed me around, said. “What we’re trying to do is make sustainability sustainable,” Dach said.

Even doubters in the environmental movement acknowledge that Wal-Mart is attempting to lower its energy consumption. “The energy-efficiency piece of this is real,” Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, told me. “They will deliver on it. But it’s a straight-out business call.” Pope, who worked with Dach while he was at Audubon—“He was very good at what he did,” he said—is now a member of the coalition that makes up Wal-Mart Watch. “The third and by far the most intriguing initiative is that they’re going to green their supply chain”—to press their more than sixty thousand suppliers to embrace conservation as well. “They, and perhaps only they, have the market power to do it,” Pope said. “It will be phenomenally important if they actually did it.”

Pope acknowledged that Wal-Mart’s liberalizing environmental strategy will win it new supporters, but he is skeptical of the company’s motives. “You can’t be a good progressive and support Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart is saving money on energy—that’s all they’ve done so far,” he said. On Dach, he was acerbic: “One of the remarkable things about the environmental movement is how rarely people from our side end up on the other side, and Leslie is on the other side.”

Environmentalists, he said, should not be swayed by cost savings alone. “You can’t say that they have a good business model. Their model is efficient. Henry Ford used efficiency to raise standards, to bring his workers into the middle class. Wal-Mart has that choice. Their game is to say that there’s no other way to be efficient. But they’ve driven down wages across the retail industry, and they don’t have to, in order to be profitable.” Pope cited Costco, the chief rival to Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart’s membership warehouse. “Costco pays their workers well”—the average wage at Costco is $17.46 an hour—“and we know they’re profitable.”

Mona Williams, the chief spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, disagreed. When she was asked why the company could not simply give two-dollar-per-hour across-the-board raises to its store employees, her reply was free of obfuscation. “Wal-Mart’s profit per associate is six thousand four hundred dollars,” she said. “If we were to pay two dollars more an hour to associates, that would cut four thousand dollars out of our per-employee profit. If anybody ever stopped to do the math, they’d see this. It would take two-thirds of the profit if we gave everyone two dollars more.” She added, “You could raise prices, but what about the woman who is shopping for Easter shoes for her kids? We can’t raise prices on her.”

Dach told me, “Wal-Mart pays competitive wages everywhere we have a store or club. We’re one of the only companies to support an increase in the federal minimum wage. We have many more applicants than we have jobs, and we have more than one million people on our health care.”

Dach, whose 1988 candidate for President, Michael Dukakis, called for “good jobs at good wages,” said that “it’s too early to tell” if he will work on the 2008 campaign. (He would not say which candidate he favored, or whether he would remain on the Wal-Mart payroll.) The company, Dach said, is handing out political donations in a more “evenhanded” manner now than it did before his arrival.

“It was very smart of Wal-Mart to appoint him to this job,” Kenneth Adelman, the former Reagan Administration arms-control official and one of Dach’s former colleagues at Edelman, said. “He’s brilliant at what he does. He’s a great advocate for Democratic causes.” Each election year, Adelman recalled, he and Dach would stage a mock debate before employees in the Edelman office. “It would always start out seriously, and then get funny,” he said. “I would argue the Republican line, and Leslie played the part of the Democrat.”

From the Wall Street Journal:

DALLAS -- A union-backed group on Thursday began airing a commercial in 16 U.S. cities alleging that Wal-Mart Stores Inc. does not support comprehensive scanning of cargo containers at U.S. ports.

WakeUpWalMart.com, operated by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, accuses Wal-Mart and the Retail Industry Leaders Association trade group in the 30-second television spot of lobbying against legislation to scan all incoming port containers.

Such scanning, the ad says, would "help stop the next 9/11" by avoiding the scenario of "a nuclear weapon in the hands of Osama bin Laden, shipped through an American port." The ad incorporates visuals of Mr. bin Laden, regarded as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Wal-Mart, Bentonville, Ark., disputes the union ad's allegations but does not plan to counter the offensive with its own ads. "The union-funded ad is in poor taste and an irresponsible attempt to avoid the facts, play upon people's fears and disparage our company," said Robert Traynham, Wal-Mart's director of federal media in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Traynham denied that Wal-Mart has lobbied against screening of all containers at U.S. ports. "In theory, we support 100% scanning of cargo coming into this country," he said. "It becomes an issue of how do you do that in terms of manpower and from a funding standpoint? But we do support it."

The container-screening provision is among several security-tightening measures contemplated in legislation now being molded in conference after the House and Senate in recent weeks passed differing bills on the matters. The House measure would require radiation screening of all incoming containers at U.S. ports. The Senate version would not.

The UFCW's WakeUpWalMart.com has spent a sum "in the six figures" to produce and air the ads, spokesman Chris Kofinis says. Rarely short on hyperbole, the group in a release issued Thursday accused Wal-Mart of the opposition lobbying it denies. "As the leading opponent of 100% scanning and as the nation's largest importer of containers, Wal-Mart has a moral responsibility to stop its lobbying campaign and join with us, the American people, and our elected leaders to help stop the next 9/11," WakeUpWalMart.com campaign director Paul Blank said in the release.

The Retail Industry Leaders Association, a group of major retailers, released a statement pointing out that its members already are helping the Department of Homeland Security study port security as part of legislation passed last year. It added that technology for 100% scanning is not yet ready for use in foreign ports.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer by sales, posted sales of nearly $345 billion and a net of nearly $11.3 billion in its fiscal year ended Jan. 31.

From CNNMoney.com:

A new TV ad from Wal-Mart critic WakeUpWalMart.com features images of a nuclear explosion and Osama bin Laden to suggest that the retailer is putting America's security at risk by opposing scanning of cargo containers at the nation's ports.

The 30-second ad, due to begin airing this week in 16 cities, claims that Wal-Mart's opposition to 100 percent screening "leaves America's ports and cities vulnerable to a terrorist nuclear attack."

The spots, entitled "America's risk," are to air in New York, Houston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit, San Jose, Calif., and other markets, the union-backed group said.

The campaign is meant to pressure Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer and the nation's biggest importer, to "help stop the next 9/11" and reverse its lobbying effort against 100 percent scanning of cargo containers, the group said.

Watch the ad and forward it to your friends here.

Wal-Mart spokesman Robert Traynhman said the ad's claims were "factually incorrect."

Asked if the company opposes 100 percent screening, Traynhman said, "We are proud of our efforts to ensure a secure supply chain and Wal-Mart continues to play a leading role to enhance cargo security."

He said the ad was in "poor taste" and called it an "irresponsible and desperate attempt to avoid the facts and play upon people's fears and disparage our company and its 1.8 million associates."

Traynhman did not specify how the company would respond, but said Wal-Mart "was exploring all of its options."

The ad's voiceover starts saying, "One of the greatest threats we face since 9/11" is terrorists like Osama bin Laden acquiring nuclear weapons and shipping them into the United States for a terrorist attack. Its opening images are of bin Laden and a nuclear explosion to suggest the catastrophic consequences if port security fails.

The group said the ad can be viewed on its Web site and on YouTube.com.

Wal-Mart remains a lightning rod for groups like WakeUpWalMart.com and Wal-Mart Watch that have attacked the company over its pay, hiring and healthcare policies.

For its part, Wal-Mart has initiated some reforms over the past year. The company has cut by half the waiting time for its part-time workers to get health insurance. On Tuesday, the company announced anew bonus plan for its workers. The retailer has also taken steps to become more environmentally friendly.

From the USA Today blog:

How'd you like to see your family's annual income soar by more than $350 million? Just go back in time to 1962 and start a small discount store in Arkansas' Ozark mountains. Work hard. Take your company public. And voila! You're a member of the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame.

The widow, three surviving children and a daughter-in-law of founder Sam Walton will earn $1.48 billion in dividends over the next 12 months, based on the 31% jump in the annual dividend approved by the company's board of directors earlier this month. That's a gain of $353 million over what the Waltons earned before the dividend hike.

For those of you working for $7-$9 in hourly wages (hello, Wal-Mart workers!) the Walton family's dividend income in the coming year will average about $169,000 an hour -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The market value of the Waltons' 40% stake in the chain, meanwhile, is worth about $78 billion, keeping them high up in the recent Forbes magazine list of the world's billionaires.

You won't believe this!

From KTVK in Phoenix, AZ:

Three shoppers say they used their camera phone to take a picture of a rodent in a doughnut case at the Wal-Mart near 16th Avenue and Bethany Home Road.

They say there were at least three rodents in the case.

"What I thought I was going to spend $200 in groceries, I ended up leaving with nothing other than pictures of rats and doughnuts," said one of the shoppers.

Photo from FOX 10:

It was Saturday night, at the Wal-Mart when the three shoppers with a sweet tooth hit a sour note.

"Like a big cinnamon bun looking thing, there's like chunks eaten out of it," said a shopper.

They ratted on what they believed to be rats in the doughnut case. But the Wal-Mart employees, they shoppers say, were rude.

"They said this is normal with construction," said a shopper. "We're like, 'normal?' You're just going to let a rat eat your food and leave it out for people to buy?"

David Ludwig is the Maricopa County Environmental Health Division Manager.

"I don't think anyone wants to have urine, mouse droppings or even rodent hair on their food," Ludwig said.
Ludwig's office is now investigating the case. He says this isn't the first time he's received complaints of rodents at this specific Wal-Mart.

"(This Wal-Mart location has the) highest number of complaints I've seen in one area," he said.

According to county records, someone said they saw a huge rat run from behind a partition and crawl into a display case in February. That complaint, however, wasn't verified. They found nothing.

Health inspectors didn't find anything in December of last year when someone called to say there was a severe problem with rats and mice.
And last June, health inspectors didn't find anything after someone saw a rat or mouse crawling from the cash register into a deli case.
"We can take five business days to follow up on a complaint," Ludwig said. "I made sure our inspectors will go out there later today to go verify and see this case."

In a statement to be released Monday, Wal-Mart contends, "We take this allegation quite seriously and are thoroughly investigating it. We have a consistent record of food safety in our Phoenix stores from the Department of Health and have pest-control services performed regularly."

The statement goes on to say, "In an abundance of caution we have sanitized and cleaned the bakery area and have scheduled additional pest control. We immediately discarded all bakery products in the case in question.

From the Associated Press via the South Bend Tribune:

NEW YORK -- Wal-Mart's disclosure that an employee was tapping phone conversations and text messages is drawing attention to a growth industry within corporate America -- the business of keeping things secret.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. fired the employee, Bruce Gabbard, maintaining he acted alone and didn't receive authorization to eavesdrop. Federal authorities are investigating.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gabbard said he worked in an amply staffed unit whose mission was to shore up the walls around Wal-Mart's internal data and communications, protecting them not just from Internet hackers but from leaks to company critics. He declined further comment when contacted this week by The Associated Press.

Corporations are increasingly using James Bond tactics and employing security specialists with FBI, CIA or private investigation backgrounds in an effort to safeguard proprietary information and any internal dealings that, if made public, could hurt a company's image and stock price, said Ken Springer, a former FBI agent and president and founder of Corporate Resolutions Inc., which conducts character and integrity checks.

In the past, Springer said, the biggest fear in corporate America was theft, but now the concern is anything that poses a threat to a company's reputation -- including having information leaked to outsiders such as the media and, in the Internet era, bloggers. Wal-Mart said Gabbard, a systems technician, had monitored phone calls and text messages of employees and nonemployees, including a New York Times reporter.

The growth of the corporate intelligence business is no secret. Last month, Cofer Black, vice chairman of the security company Blackwater USA and a former CIA counterterrorism expert, announced he had formed a new company called Total Intelligence Solutions, which focuses on providing intelligence gathering to companies. Its services will include rooting out insiders who are causing harm.

"With all this new technology, there are new challenges. Companies need to take proactive steps to protect trade secrets," Springer said. "Reputation is everything. Companies have to use technology to stay ahead of employees' hurting the company or outsiders who gain access to proprietary information."

Russell Corn, senior managing director of intelligence broker Diligence LLC, whose advisory board member includes former CIA and FBI Director William Webster, agreed, saying the corporate intelligence business is fast expanding. He estimated that it's about a $500 million industry now; it was about one-fifth that amount back in 2000.

Diligence's business, meanwhile, has tripled to $20 million over that time. "It used to be a hard sell," Corn said, adding that Diligence's focus is on intelligence gathering for companies seeking to do business in emerging markets like Khazakstan.

Diligence has been caught doing its own spying: The accounting and consulting firm KPMG sued the company in 2005 for allegedly sending people posing as government spies into KPMG's Bermuda office to coax an employee into giving up proprietary data about an ongoing probe. The suit was settled in 2006.

At Wal-Mart, the head of corporate security is Kenneth Senser, a former FBI and CIA agent. In the interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gabbard said he was a member of Wal-Mart's Threat Research and Analysis team, and that Senser instructed him and another team member to find the source of the leaks of internal memos. Gabbard said Senser told him he was tired of telling Wal-Mart Chief Executive Lee Scott Jr. that he didn't know the source.

It's not known yet whether Gabbard's orders ultimately came from the upper levels of Wal-Mart management. But if snooping did involve top management, Wal-Mart conceivably could find itself in a position like that of Hewlett-Packard Co., whose ill-fated effort last year to find the source of boardroom leaks to the news media led to the indictments of Patricia Dunn, the company's former chairwoman, another executive and two private investigators. A California judge dismissed charges against Dunn Wednesday and the other defendants pleaded no contest, but the episode remains an embarrassment.

Wal-Mart, which has been under pressure to change its employee and other policies by union-backed groups like WakeUpWalmart.com, is perhaps more anxious about leaks than other companies these days. Over the last year and a half, internal memos have been leaked to the media about a range of issues from health care benefits and wages to attendance policies. Negative headlines have depressed its stock -- which three years ago traded at $60 but is now in the $45 range -- and harmed the retailer's reputation.

Patricia Edwards, a portfolio manager and retail analyst at Wentworth, Hauser & Violich in Seattle, said she doesn't know whether Gabbard acted alone, but she said: "I am getting the feeling that Wal-Mart is becoming more sensitive and more paranoid. I understand their paranoia."

Wal-Mart has declined to comment further on the eavesdropping case after it announced on March 5 that Gabbard recorded phone messages between Times reporter and members of the retailer's public relations team. He also intercepted pages and text messages from other employees and non-employees, using his own personal equipment.The company fired Gabbard last week as well as his direct supervisor, Jason Hamilton. A third person was put on disciplinary action.

Gabbard declined to comment in a text message sent Monday to an AP reporter. Hamilton said at his home in Springdale, Ark., on Tuesday that he hadn't been contacted by any federal investigators. He declined to comment further.

Wal-Mart's uneasiness about security also follows years of being shrouded in secrecy in the backwoods of Arkansas. This is a company that has a reputation for gathering sophisticated information about its consumers -- and lets employees know it is monitoring their computer and Internet usage.

Senser, whom Wal-Mart hired in 2003, had helped create a new unit at the FBI focusing on security. The Threat Research and Analysis team, where Gabbard worked, is relatively new, and focuses on overseeing security of Wal-Mart's information systems; it's still unclear whether it was also charged with finding the source of leaks, as Gabbard said. Dave Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman, declined to give out any information about the team.

Wal-Mart said it believes the unauthorized recording of telephone conversations by Gabbard did not violate any applicable federal or state laws because Wal-Mart policies subject all employees' communications to possible monitoring or recording. Still, the company said that Gabbard's recording of the calls was against company policy; Wal-Mart has maintained that it only records associate phone calls in compelling circumstances and with written permission from the company's legal department. Federal law prohibits intercepting wireless communications without a court order, according to Jim Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert with Counterpane Internet Security Inc., said the situation is complicated, adding that "we don't know a lot of the details of the (Gabbard's) motivation."

The real reporting relationship between Senser and Gabbard and whether Senser knew of Gabbard's activities aren't clear.

In a huge victory for WakeUpWalMart.com grassroots movement, Wal-Mart has withdrawn its ILC banking application.

In response, Chris Kofinis, WakeUpWalMart.com's communications director, issued the following statement:

“Yesterday, WakeUpWalMart.com called on Wal-Mart to withdraw its ILC banking application, and in less than 24 hours Wal-Mart did just that.

Truth be told, today is a huge victory for our grassroots movement and our allies who have worked endlessly to expose Wal-Mart's true banking ambitions, as well as to stop a ‘Wal-Mart bank’ from endangering our nation's economy.

As we, and so many others, have long argued, a Wal-Mart bank would have posed a dangerous and unnecessary risk to our nation's economy, and could not be permitted to proceed.

In the end, Wal-Mart bears the blame for their failed bank application. Wal-Mart’s continued unwillingness to be honest and direct with the American people and their less than truthful testimony to elected leaders and the FDIC created a growing political firestorm that erupted yesterday on Capitol Hill.

As a result, because of the incredible outpouring of grassroots and political pressure, Wal-Mart did the only responsible thing and once again withdrew its banking application.”

You can read a Bloomberg article about the withdrawal here.

From the AP via USA Today:

NEW YORK — Wal-Mart's disclosure that an employee was tapping phone conversations and text messages is drawing attention to a growth industry within corporate America: The business of keeping things secret.

Wal-Mart Stores fired the employee, Bruce Gabbard, maintaining he acted alone and didn't receive authorization to eavesdrop. Federal authorities are investigating.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gabbard said he worked in an amply staffed unit whose mission was to shore up the walls around Wal-Mart's internal data and communications, protecting them not just from Internet hackers but from leaks to company critics. He declined further comment when contacted this week by The Associated Press.

Corporations are increasingly using James Bond tactics and employing security specialists with FBI, CIA or private eye backgrounds in an effort to safeguard proprietary information and any internal dealings that, if made public, could hurt a company's image and stock price, said Ken Springer, a former FBI agent and president and founder of Corporate Resolutions, which conducts character and integrity checks.

In the past, Springer said, the biggest fear in corporate America was theft, but now the concern is anything that poses a threat to a company's reputation — including having information leaked to outsiders such as the media and, in the Internet era, bloggers. Wal-Mart said Gabbard, a systems technician, had monitored phone calls and text messages of employees and non-employees, including a New York Times reporter.

The growth of the corporate intelligence business is no secret. Last month, Cofer Black, vice chairman of the security company Blackwater USA and a former CIA counterterrorism expert, announced he had formed a new company called Total Intelligence Solutions, which focuses on providing intelligence gathering to companies. Its services will include rooting out insiders who are causing harm.

"With all this new technology, there are new challenges. Companies need to take proactive steps to protect trade secrets," Springer said. "Reputation is everything. Companies have to use technology to stay ahead of employees' hurting the company or outsiders who gain access to proprietary information."

Russell Corn, senior managing director of intelligence broker Diligence LLC, whose advisory board member includes former CIA and FBI Director William Webster, agreed, saying the corporate intelligence business is fast expanding. He estimated that it's about a $500 million industry now; it was about one-fifth that amount back in 2000.

Diligence's business, meanwhile, has tripled to $20 million over that time. "It used to be a hard sell," Corn said, adding that Diligence's focus is on intelligence gathering for companies seeking to do business in emerging markets like Khazakstan.

Diligence has been caught doing its own spying: The accounting and consulting firm KPMG sued the company in 2005 for allegedly sending people posing as government spies into KPMG's Bermuda office to coax an employee into giving up proprietary data about an ongoing probe. The suit was settled in 2006.

At Wal-Mart, the head of corporate security is Kenneth Senser, a former FBI and CIA agent. In the interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gabbard said he was a member of Wal-Mart's Threat Research and Analysis team, and that Senser instructed him and another team member to find the source of the leaks of internal memos. Gabbard said Senser told him he was tired of telling Wal-Mart Chief Executive Lee Scott Jr. that he didn't know the source.

It's not known yet whether Gabbard's orders ultimately came from the upper levels of Wal-Mart management. But if snooping did involve top management, Wal-Mart conceivably could find itself in a position like that of Hewlett-Packard, whose ill-fated effort last year to find the source of boardroom leaks to the news media led to the indictments of Patricia Dunn, the company's former chairwoman, another executive and two private investigators. A California judge dismissed charges against Dunn Wednesday and the other defendants pleaded no contest, but the episode remains an embarrassment for H-P.

Wal-Mart, which has been under pressure to change its employee and other policies by union-backed groups like WakeUpWalmart.com, is perhaps more anxious about leaks than other companies these days. Over the last year and a half, internal memos have been leaked to the media about a range of issues from health care benefits and wages to attendance policies. Negative headlines have depressed its stock — which three years ago traded at $60 but is now in the $45 range — and harmed the retailer's reputation.

Patricia Edwards, a portfolio manager and retail analyst at Wentworth, Hauser & Violich in Seattle, said she doesn't know whether Gabbard acted alone, but she said: "I am getting the feeling that Wal-Mart is becoming more sensitive and more paranoid. I understand their paranoia."

Wal-Mart has declined to comment further on the eavesdropping case after it announced on March 5 that Gabbard recorded phone messages between a Times reporter and members of the retailer's public relations team. He also intercepted pages and text messages from other employees and non-employees, using his own personal equipment.

The company fired Gabbard last week as well as his direct supervisor, Jason Hamilton. A third person was put on disciplinary action.

Gabbard declined to comment in a text message sent Monday to an AP reporter. Hamilton said at his home in Springdale, Ark., on Tuesday that he hadn't been contacted by any federal investigators. He declined to comment further.

Wal-Mart's uneasiness about security also follows years of being shrouded in secrecy in the backwoods of Arkansas. This is a company that has a reputation for gathering sophisticated information about its consumers — and lets employees know it is monitoring their computer and Internet usage.

Senser, whom Wal-Mart hired in 2003, had helped create a new unit at the FBI focusing on security. The Threat Research and Analysis team, where Gabbard worked, is relatively new, and focuses on overseeing security of Wal-Mart's information systems; it's still unclear whether it was also charged with finding the source of leaks, as Gabbard said. Dave Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman, declined to give out any information about the team.

Wal-Mart said it believes the unauthorized recording of telephone conversations by Gabbard did not violate any applicable federal or state laws because Wal-Mart policies subject all employees' communications to possible monitoring or recording. Still, the company said that Gabbard's recording of the calls was against company policy; Wal-Mart has maintained that it only records associate phone calls in compelling circumstances and with written permission from the company's legal department.

Federal law prohibits intercepting wireless communications without a court order, according to Jim Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert with Counterpane Internet Security, said the situation is complicated, adding that "we don't know a lot of the details of the (Gabbard's) motivation."

The real reporting relationship between Senser and Gabbard and whether Senser knew of Gabbard's activities aren't clear.

Schneier said it may be difficult to prove that Gabbard had pressure from superiors — if in fact he did. In the HP case, board member Thomas Perkins and his attorney demanded information from HP about the methods used to identify another board member as a leaker.

"One of the board members said, 'this will not stand,"' Schneier said. "That is how it broke."

Rep. Paul Gillmor (R-Ohio), a leader of Congressional efforts to "draw a strict line between commerce and banking," released a Wal-Mart e-mail today detailing lease terms with banks that rent space for branches inside hundreds of Wal-Mart stores.

While Wal-Mart claims the email "is nothing new," Gillmor and others point out the difference with this new email.

The lease terms in the e-mail say Wal-Mart can offer future services including mortgages, consumer loans, home equity loans, investment and insurance products and any other type of service or product that Wal-Mart might develop.

Wal-Mart said the e-mail was nothing new and reflected similar language it has used in leases with outside banks for at least five years.

But that language was not included in other leases Gillmor has seen, his spokesman Bradley Mascho said.

One Wal-Mart lease with a community bank, obtained last year by The Associated Press and confirmed as authentic by Wal-Mart, also did not contain the same specific language.

Wal-Mart's denials aside, their words and actions prove once again that Wal-Mart's banking ambitions are real and, if not stopped, would pose a dangerous and unacceptable risk to the nation's economy.

Read the entire AP article after the jump.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. may be eyeing a larger role in banking than it has previously disclosed, according to lease details made public Thursday by a congressman who accused the world's largest retailer of hiding plans to become a retail bank.

Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) is seeking federal approval to open a limited-purpose bank for processing credit card and other payments. Its executives have pledged in testimony to regulators that they have no plans to open bank branches or start consumer lending.

Wal-Mart's bank effort caused so much furor last year that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. held a public hearing, the first ever on a license application. Critics say even a limited banking role for Wal-Mart would vest it with too much economic power.

Supporters, however, say it could help reduce fees and costs for consumers and that the industry is in need of more competition.

Rep. Paul Gillmor, R-Ohio, a leader of congressional efforts to draw a strict line between commerce and banking, released a Wal-Mart e-mail detailing lease terms with banks that rent space for branches inside hundreds of Wal-Mart stores.

The terms reserve Wal-Mart's right to offer an array of future financial services in its stores.

The lease terms in the e-mail say Wal-Mart can offer future services including mortgages, consumer loans, home equity loans, investment and insurance products and any other type of service or product that Wal-Mart might develop.

Wal-Mart said the e-mail was nothing new and reflected similar language it has used in leases with outside banks for at least five years.

But that language was not included in other leases Gillmor has seen, his spokesman Bradley Mascho said.

One Wal-Mart lease with a community bank, obtained last year by The Associated Press and confirmed as authentic by Wal-Mart, also did not contain the same specific language.

The lease obtained by The Associated Press refers to Wal-Mart accepting various kinds of cards and offering credit cards and "other financial or investment products and services," but does not specify consumer services laid out in the new e-mail, like mortgages and loans.

The e-mail from Larry Ellis, Wal-Mart's leasing manager for in-store banks, said new services could be offered "in the checkout lanes, at the Customer Service Desk, through automated delivery channels, kiosks, or devices, or in any other location or format within the Store".

Gillmor said the lease terms showed Wal-Mart is secretly planning to move into retail banking despite assurances to the contrary in testimony last year to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

"The only reasonable explanation of Wal-Mart's recent plan to revise its leases is that it plans to enter into full-scale banking," Gillmor said at a news conference in Washington. "This latest information is the smoking gun of Wal-Mart's dishonesty and deception."

Wal-Mart told the FDIC last year that it wants to open an "industrial loan corporation" for the sole purpose of saving money that it now pays outside banks that process millions of payments in Wal-Mart stores by credit card, debit card or electronic check.

"The Bank has made repeated public commitments that it will not branch, and its business plan includes neither lending nor retail deposit gathering," the retailer said in written testimony.

One of Wal-Mart's most vocal critics, union-funded WakeUpWalMart.com, said the new e-mail proved that the retailer plans to compete with community banks across the nation if it can win FDIC approval for its limited-purpose bank.

"Wal-Mart's denials aside, their words and actions prove once again that Wal-Mart's banking ambitions are real and, if not stopped, would pose a dangerous and unacceptable risk to the nation's economy," the group said.

The FDIC in January extended for one year a moratorium on considering nonfinancial companies' applications to establish or acquire banks, including the Wal-Mart application.

Critics say the growth of industrial loan corporations could blur the line between banking and commerce, concentrate assets in the hands of a few big companies and stifle competition.

Shares of Wal-Mart closed up 27 cents on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday at $46.

From The New York Times:

An Ohio representative is planning to release information today that suggests Wal-Mart’s ambitions into consumer banking may extend beyond what the retail giant had previously disclosed.

The information, in the form of an e-mail message sent by a Wal-Mart employee, suggested that the company was laying the groundwork to offer its own banking products. Wal-Mart has long insisted that it was not interested in branch banking but was looking to use the bank as a way to save money.

But Representative Paul E. Gillmor, an Ohio Republican, said last night that he was concerned that the undated e-mail message suggested that Wal-Mart was telling its tenants, some which are retail banks, that it was reserving the right to become a full-service bank, including the underwriting of mortgages.

A Wal-Mart spokeswoman confirmed last night that the company had updated some of its tenant leases late last year to include the language in question but implied that it had been an option all along.

“There is nothing new here,” the spokeswoman, Mona Williams, said. “While we recently updated language in our leases, similar language has been in our agreements for at least five years.”

The new information comes as the House Financial Services Committee gears up for hearings next week on a closely watched law that would bar non-financial institutions, like Wal-Mart Stores and Home Depot, from operating a bank.

Wal-Mart submitted an application in 2005 with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for an industrial bank in Utah that it said would be used to process its own credit and debit card transactions for its 3,500 United States stores.

The application almost immediately ignited opposition from lawmakers, consumer groups and financial companies who worried that the company would use its reach to become a retail banking powerhouse. The legislation, and next week’s hearing, are fallout from the application.

In an interview last night, Mr. Gillmor said the Wal-Mart was including a clause in some tenant leases that would allow the company to some day expand its banking operations. Wal-Mart currently offers branded credit cards, check cashing and other services through partnerships with financials institutions.

“We simply became more specific late last year,” Ms. Williams said, referring to the additional term related to the mortgages.

But Mr. Gillmor, who is co-sponsoring legislation that would prevent Wal-Mart and other non-financial institutions from expanding into retail banking, disagreed.

“If they were not going to go into full-service banking, why in the world would they do that? There is no other reason,” he said. “They want to be prepared in case they get their way.”

Mr. Gillmor would not say who provided him the e-mail document, but a person briefed on the situation said that it came from a banking industry group and was probably three or four weeks old.

The e-mail message comes as Congressional lawmakers engage in the latest round of debate over whether non-financial companies, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, should be allowed to buy or charter so-called industrial loan companies that are operated like banks.

Along with Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Mr. Gillmor recently introduced the legislation that would prevent such companies from starting an industrial bank and restrict some existing ones from expanding.

Mr. Gillmor said yesterday that he believed he had enough votes to pass the bill in the House and that there was a “very reasonable” chance of winning Senate approval.

Wal-Mart’s application for an industrial loan company charter has been a hot-button political issue with banking industry groups aligning themselves with regulators and some of the company’s fiercest critics. The Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a speech earlier this month that if Congress was interested in keeping banking and commerce separate, “it should take note of this problem.”

The F.D.I.C. said last month that it would extend a one-year moratorium on new applications for the industrial bank charters to allow lawmakers more time to weigh in on the issue. It first imposed a temporary ban in July. Besides Wal-Mart, Home Depot, DaimlerChrysler and Cargill have applications pending.

Industrial banks have been around for about a century, initially appearing as small, state-charted banks that offered loans to low-income workers who were turned away by traditional banks.

Their special status allowed them to remain exempt from laws barring commercial companies from owning banks. Even though only a handful of states offer charters, their growth has exploded.

Today, they are a $177 billion industry, with about 60 companies from General Motors and General Electric to Target and Merrill Lynch operating industrial banks.

From MSNBC:

Debbie Brinkman didn't plan on being an anti-Wal-Mart activist. In fact, as a Republican, she felt it was "kind of against my politics to be fighting this."

But when the Littleton, Colo., resident heard there were plans to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter across from a large and popular park - and within sight of her own front door - she felt she had little choice but to get involved. So Brinkman became one of the early members of Littleton Against Wal-Mart, fighting a store planned for the Denver suburb.

Her story isn't unusual. Across the country, dozens of community efforts are emerging to block new Wal-Mart development, provoking drawn-out battles that have proven costly and time-consuming for the world's largest retailer and occasionally hindered its expansion plans.

But in some communities, the campaigns are also provoking internal squabbles, with community members divided over whether to welcome or spurn the big-box developments.

The reasons behind the efforts vary widely. Some activists, like Brinkman, say they don't oppose Wal-Mart in general - they just don't think Wal-Mart belongs in that particular spot in their community. Others, like Carole Heerman of Woodland, Wash., worry that a Wal-Mart will hurt the town's other businesses, including her own. Still others, like Michael Funke of Bend, Ore., oppose Wal-Mart because they think its workers should get better wages and benefits.

Experts say the groups are having an impact. Retail analyst C. Britt Beemer said it may be only a few percent of people who boycott because of the negative publicity, but that could still be meaningful for a company beginning to struggle with potential limits to its domestic growth.

By one closely watched measure, same-store sales, Wal-Mart's U.S. growth was anemic last year. Sales at U.S. Wal-Mart stores open at least a year rose a meager 1.9 percent in the company's latest fiscal year.

That's not to mention the delays, added legal fees and other obstacles that come when Wal-Mart faces opposition to its development plans - even if the company ultimately succeeds in building the store.

"I'm sure these issues have hurt them all financially," Beemer said. "In the last few years, it's gotten to be a bloody mess out there."

In fact, the Bentonville, Ark.-based company often does succeed in opening its doors despite community outcry. But opponents also have prevailed in efforts to hinder Wal-Mart development in some cities, such as the California communities of Long Beach, San Diego and Turlock, and areas in Florida.

In early March, city council members in Concord, Calif., turned down a project to build a Wal-Mart and other stores in a largely industrial area, citing traffic and environmental concerns. Kevin Loscotoff, Wal-Mart's senior manager for public affairs in California, said the company is evaluating what to do next. A spokeswoman for the group that opposes the store, Allie Gramm, said she expects the fight to continue.

Company officials in both California and Florida insist the setbacks haven't hindered the company's overall growth plans in those states and say they continue to look for ways to draw shoppers from areas where they've had trouble building new stores.

In many cases, the battles can drag on for months or even years, proving costly and time-consuming for the opponents as well.

In Bend, Wal-Mart was denied an initial application for a Supercenter and lost subsequent appeals, but opponents expect the fight to continue. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Jennifer Holder said the company plans to submit a new application.

In Littleton, the city council narrowly approved Wal-Mart's plans, but opponents are gathering signatures for a proposed referendum that would require the council to change its decision or leave it up to voters.

Gray McGinnis, Wal-Mart's director of public affairs for the mountain region, said the company plans to rally its supporters to turn out in favor of the Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart officials paint many of the battles as representing niche groups with specific agendas, such as those fighting to unionize Wal-Mart workers or get the company to pay its workers more and offer better benefits.

Some community organizers have accepted money from union labor groups and other anti-Wal-Mart interests, such as grocers who stand to lose business from Wal-Mart competition. Still, many communities also say they received substantial backing from individual members of their communities, and note that individual citizens have devoted hours of volunteer time to the cause.

In Littleton, for example, Brinkman said the group received money from a local food workers union but also did plenty of independent fund-raising.

"There's not one of us that hasn't written a substantial amount of personal checks to cover the cost of this fight," she said.

She insists the community group is concerned about local impact, not someone else's national agenda.

Gramm, who helped oppose Wal-Mart in Concord, Calif., said many volunteers stayed up late into the night for a city council meeting, only to get up early the next morning to commute to their jobs.

"People thought that we were paid people who do this, and we're not," she said.

However, there are some larger organizations that have had a hand in many Wal-Mart disputes. Those include ACORN, which represents low- and middle-income families and was involved in a failed Chicago effort. The Florida-based activist group WARN, which is a coalition of labor unions, environmentalists and others, said it is or has been involved in 26 Wal-Mart disputes.

In many towns, anti-Wal-Mart groups hasten to point out that they aren't necessarily against development, or even other chain stores. Some Wal-Mart opponents say they regularly shop at its main competitor, Target. Others favor wholesale club operator Costco, which is known for paying above-average retail wages. Both cater to a higher-end clientele.

"Costco has been an example for us of what we would like Wal-Mart to do," said Funke, of Bend.

Regardless of the ideology behind the fight, the actual dispute often comes down to whether the project will create untenable traffic concerns, increase police expenses or cause environmental harm - areas where experts say they often see the best practical chance of fighting Wal-Mart development.

"Wherever it's a problem getting them to be accountable around corporate citizenship in the community, we'll look for whatever handles are available," said Wade Rathke, chief organizer for ACORN, which says its primary goal is to work for things like higher wages.

Funke, a longtime labor organizer who helped lead the charge in Bend, said he personally opposes Wal-Mart for ideological reasons but insists he wouldn't have taken on the retailer's development effort if he hadn't seen a groundswell of community support. When 150 people showed up for a meeting, he felt he could fight for what he believes in and also respect the town's wishes.

Still, Funke said he quickly dropped efforts in neighboring Redmond, Ore., after sensing there was little broad opposition to a planned Wal-Mart there. A Wal-Mart Supercenter is currently under construction.

Other organizers have started tweaking their approach based on community response.

WARN, which stands for WalMart Alliance for Reform Now, counts victories including a Wal-Mart site in St. Petersburg, Fla., in which the company eventually withdrew its plans.

But at another site in Sarasota, Fla., Rick Smith, Florida director for WARN, said his group is working with community members who want the bargains a Wal-Mart will bring. In that case, Smith said the group is pushing for Wal-Mart to provide things like better wages.

Eric Brewer, director of public affairs for Wal-Mart's southeast operations, says the company withdrew from the St. Petersburg site because it couldn't resolve traffic concerns.

"WARN's involvement, while eye-catching, wasn't the basis for our withdrawal of that application," he said.

Brewer said citizens do have legitimate concerns when a Wal-Mart comes to town, such as how it will look and how traffic will be affected. But he accuses WARN of "just out-and-out attack using full-time campaigners," instead of truly trying to meet a community's needs.

Still, Brewer concedes that efforts by WARN and others have proved time-consuming and costly for the company's Florida operations.

"We have certainly hit our targets of growth, but we have had to match their efforts (with) our own," he said.

In some communities, citizens have been divided over whether to welcome or spurn Wal-Mart.

When a developer purchased a closed-down Kmart building in coastal Marina, Calif., many local residents expected the property would be used for a cluster of shops meant to appeal to tourists and visitors. Some were outraged when the developers disclosed that they had struck a deal with Wal-Mart.

"Visitors come to Marina for the natural beauty and the outdoor recreation opportunities. They don't come to Marina to shop at Wal-Mart," said Steve Zmak of Citizens Against Wal-Mart in Marina.

Still, Zmak said that his group faced opposition from others locals who remembered when the town was much worse-off financially and felt they should welcome any development. Some older residents on fixed incomes were eager for the bargains.

"We found that there's sort of a division in Marina," Zmak said.

In the end, the city approved the Wal-Mart, and it opened in November. Zmak has now turned his attention to trying to prevent Wal-Mart from expanding to a larger Supercenter.

Similarly, in the small town of Woodland, Wash., opponents argue that a proposed Supercenter on the north end of town will snarl traffic in an already congested area, potentially backing up access to a nearby industrial district. A traffic mess could prove devastating to a local trucking business and manufacturing operations that rely on easy highway access.

"I don't know why you should trade one business for another," Darlene Johnson, president of Woodland Truck Line Inc., said at a daylong public meeting this year about the proposed Wal-Mart.

Opponents in Woodland also say the Wal-Mart will hurt longstanding efforts to revitalize the small downtown, and worry that the combination of big trucks and Wal-Mart traffic will prove dangerous when a proposed high school is built nearby.

But others complained that they currently have to drive as far as 20 miles to get things like kids' sports uniforms, and said their cash-strapped families could use the bargain prices.

"Why not let Wal-Mart come in, and those who don't want to shop there can go somewhere else that they like?" resident Shirley James asked.

Holder, the Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said the company has operated Wal-Marts near schools elsewhere in the country, and argued the benefits Wal-Mart would bring to Woodland would outweigh any potential harm to direct competitors.

A decision on Wal-Mart's Woodland plans is expected later this month.

Brian White over at bloggingstocks posts some interesting questions about CEO Lee Scott's recent $22 million bonus.

If you're a Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. shareholder who has watched WMT shares sit around for the past five years without much movement, you'll be interested to know that Wal-Mart has awarded CEO Lee Scott a stock bonus worth $22 million for reaching revenue targets.

That's all well and good -- but after glancing at the five-year stock performance chart [see chart here], Scott certainly has not had a positive effect on the price of WMT shares in that timeframe, even though Wal-Mart itself may have met revenue goals set by upper management or the board. In fact, who set those revenue goals? ...

The details: Scott's regular salary and bonus for 2006 was $5.23 million, and his total compensation was $15.7 million, not counting restricted stock awards for performance. The $22 million bonus was for Wal-Mart's 2007 fiscal year revenue targets being beat.

Workers, shoppers and all Americans concerned about out-of-control CEO compensation should be alarmed at Scott's recent bonus. Wal-Mart shareholders should be incensed.

UPDATE: This post on White's blog sums up what I said about the bonus yesterday:

Wow, As a Wal-Mart associate my wages got capped! No wonder Wal-Mart sales are lackluster. Associates just don't care anymore! We have lost the basic core values that built this company. It's a real shame.

From the AP:

BENTONVILLE, Ark. -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has awarded it chief executive officer a stock bonus worth $22 million for reaching revenue targets, the retail giant disclosed Friday in a regulatory filing.

The compensation committee of Wal-Mart's board voted Wednesday to make the award to Scott and also grant shares to other executives.

Scott's salary and bonus for 2006 was $5.23 million. His total compensation for that year was, excluding restricted stock awards, was $15.7 million. The $22 million bonus was for Wal-Mart's 2007 fiscal year.

The filing Friday says Scott was awarded 459,348 Wal-Mart shares, which will be fully vested in five years. The award brings Scott's total Wal-Mart holding to 1,185,002 shares, worth $56.8 million.

Let me get this straight. In 2006, Wal-Mart tallied its worst same-store sales growth in 27 years. The company's stock price has remained stagnant for years. And, public opinion has taken a serious turn for the worse.

The company has slashed labor costs by capping the salary if its employees, reduced the number of its employees receiving company health care and implemented a series of additional business practices to cut labor costs.

Given all that, the company's board rewards Scott with a $22 million bonus? Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

From the AP via Business Week:

NEW YORK (AP) -- A Bank of America Securities analyst on Friday said union campaigns against Wal-Mart are beginning to hurt the world's largest retailer's operations. In a note to investors, Bank of America analyst David Strasser said Banc of America spoke to representatives from the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union to discuss why Wal-Mart is a focus for unions.

The three groups sponsoring a campaign to force Wal-Mart to make changes including improving pay and benefits, include Change To Win, a group of seven unions including SEIU and UFCW, WakeUpWalMart.com, a project of the UFCW and Wal-Mart Watch, an independent non-profit.

The groups have said that Wal-Mart is "the proverbial 800-pound gorilla, and therefore they get the highest return on investment by focusing on Wal-Mart," Strasser wrote.

"This union fixation has cost Wal-Mart real estate sites in key locations, adversely impacted comp store sales to some degree, and has distracted management from focusing on its retail strategy," Strasser wrote. "Additionally, (Chief Executive) Lee Scott now spends a large amount of time improving Wal-Mart's image domestically and abroad, and Wal-Mart has been forced to focus advertising dollars on defending their brand.

"This is surprising considering the positive impact (Wal-Mart) has on its low income consumers and the broader U.S. economy."

Strasser, who rates Wal-Mart "Buy," added that the degree of impact was difficult to quantify. However, because having to fight the campaign has forced a change in advertising strategy to improve its corporate image, the campaign might be ultimately good for the company.

"We believe that Wal-Mart has an advertising budget that approximates $580 million, which is increasingly being allocated to brand image marketing to fight these attacks," Strasser wrote.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. shares fell 49 cents to $47.40 during afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

From the Wall Street Journal:

A Wal-Mart Stores Inc. employee fired this week for allegedly intercepting and recording calls from a news reporter and others said he felt pressured to uncover who at the retail giant was leaking embarrassing information to outsiders.

Bruce Gabbard, a 44-year-old employee of the company's information-security operation, said he wanted to tell his side of events for the first time. Mr. Gabbard and his supervisor were dismissed this week after the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas told the retailer he was looking into possible violations of federal law in the alleged wiretapping.

After a flurry of articles about Wal-Mart's employment and benefit practices appeared in the New York Times newspaper and elsewhere, Mr. Gabbard said, he took it upon himself to find out if any of the newspaper's information was coming from internal sources.

"Our job was to plug any information hole," Mr. Gabbard said. "That was the primary reason for our team to be there."

Mr. Gabbard had worked for Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart for 19 years and was a member of its Threat Research and Analysis team, a group of about 20 employees in its information-systems division. He and others would sweep rooms for electronic-listening devices and do "forensic" data gathering for use in court cases.

Mr. Gabbard and his supervisor, Jason Hamilton, were dismissed after the company accused Mr. Gabbard of violating corporate policies and Mr. Hamilton of failure "to carry out management duties." Efforts to reach Mr. Hamilton via phone and email were unsuccessful.

Mona Williams, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said, "We have absolutely no evidence that someone else was asking him or directing him" in the electronic intercepts. Wal-Mart said it contacted the U.S. Attorney's office in early January after another employee came forward to disclose the electronic intercepts.

Mr. Gabbard said the Threat Research and Analysis Team began looking internally for leaks a year and a half ago after internal documents were leaked to anti-Wal-Mart groups and the media.

The company was widely criticized after a memo written by Executive Vice President M. Susan Chambers, then head of its benefits group, appeared in the Times in November 2005 detailing options the company was considering to control health-care costs. The memo proposed that the retailer cut such costs by discouraging unhealthy people from applying for jobs. It was sent to the company's board of directors, and it proposed incorporating physical activity in all jobs to discourage the infirm from applying. For example, it suggested that Wal-Mart arrange for "all cashiers to do some cart gathering."

Kenneth H. Senser, a senior vice president who heads Wal-Mart Global Security, instructed Mr. Gabbard and another member of his team to find the source of the leak, Mr. Gabbard said. He swept Ms. Chambers' office for bugs to no avail, he said, and then they examined the computers of the people who had received and written different iterations of the Chambers memo.

Mr. Gabbard contributed a report saying that, in his estimation, the memo was probably leaked by a consulting company hired to help Wal-Mart work on its declining reputation and which helped draft the memo.

Mr. Gabbard said Mr. Senser recently told him he was tired of telling Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. that he didn't know the source of the leaks. "I wanted to get ahead of the problem," Mr. Gabbard said.

Mr. Gabbard, who began taping the Times calls in September, said almost all the calls were placed to Wal-Mart's public-relations department, and no sensitive company information was shared. He also said he was trying to protect the company by intercepting workers' pages. He said workers frequently shared sensitive information, such as company passwords, over paging devices.

From MarketWatch:

NEW YORK -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Thursday that February same-store sales rose moderately, missing Wall Street's expectations, hurt by weakness in clothing, home merchandise and hardlines.

For March, the world's largest retailer expects sales at stores open at least one year to rise 1% to 2%, and it expects the softness in clothing and home goods to remain through spring.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, said February total U.S. same-store sales rose 0.9%. Total company sales for the four weeks ended March 2 rose 8.1% to $26.79 billion.

At Thomson Financial, analysts were looking for same-store sales to rise 1.5% compared with last year's 3.7% increase.

Same-store sales are the industry's key growth metric, determined by receipts rung up at stores open longer than a year.

Same-store sales at Sam's Club warehouse stores rose 3.9% and Wal-Mart stores eked out a 0.4% same-store sales gain.

At the Wal-Mart stores, they had pegged a 1.3% gain while Sam's Club same-store sales were targeted at 3% higher.

This is the first month that Wal-Mart has not pre-released its same-store sales results.

During the four-week February reporting period, the strongest same-store sales performances continued in the grocery, consumables and pharmacy areas, the company said. Seasonal sales at Wal-Mart stores were strong in gift items for Valentine's Day.

The weakness in home and apparel sales that hurt the company, cited in its fourth-quarter earnings report, continued in February and is expected to remain through spring, Wal-Mart said. Hardlines, which usually include items such as electronics, tools and appliances, were impacted by unfavorable weather.

For the Wal-Mart Stores division U.S., average ticket drove the February same-store sales increase. Traffic in comparable stores was down, and the impact on same store sales from last year's hurricane-related sales continues to decrease, Wal-Mart said.

Yesterday, Consumerist leaked "what appears to be an internal" Wal-Mart PowerPoint presentation detailing its classification of the "Shopper Universe" into three core segments. The New York Times reported on this "new" strategy last week.

The Consumerist leak shows all 29 slides from the PowerPoint. Lots of great nuggets in the internal presentation. Like that fact that Wal-Mart's "price value shopper" loves playing dominoes and reading "Better Home & Garden." Or that Wal-Mart's "brand aspirational shopper" is an image-conscious, computer un-savvy Fox Sport Net watcher.

But, what struck me the most was the lack of information about the largest growing segment of the "Shopper Universe," the "Conscientious Objector." The slides don't provide much information about this shopper, but I have a pretty good idea of what this shopper looks like: A moral shopper who believes in affordable health care, liveable wages and ethical business practices.

What about you? Are you a "Conscientious Objector"? What is your profile?

From the Associate Press via BusinessWeek:

Two of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s most vocal critics -- the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which backs WakeUpWalmart.com, and Wal-Mart Watch -- are putting pressure on the world's largest retailer to disclose if it has monitored its workers' communications.

The moves come amid a federal investigation after Wal-Mart said a systems technician monitored text messages and phone calls of other employees and non-employees, including a New York Times reporter. In a conference call with reporters Monday afternoon, Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said the technician "acted alone" and used his own personal equipment to intercept text and pager messages.

Wal-Mart said Monday it had fired the technician and his immediate supervisor. The company has taken disciplinary action against a manager, also.

Williams declined on Monday to identify who the targets were besides the Times reporter, but said they did not include union-backed WakeUpWalmart.com or Wal-Mart Watch. No other journalists' calls or messages were tapped, she said. The systems technician, who was not identified, intercepted messages over a four-month period starting in September 2006. Wal-Mart has maintained it did not authorize the technician to do such monitoring. Wal-Mart on Tuesday reiterated what it told reporters during the conference call.

"In light of new information, we are deeply concerned that the Wal-Mart spying scandal may have directly targeted WakeUpWalMart.com communications and staff, and we will be considering all legal options as we move forward to get to the truth of what Wal-Mart knew, who knew it, and when," said Chris Kofinis, spokesman at WakeUpWalmart.com, in a statement.

WakeUpWalmart.com has been furnishing internal documents to Michael Barbaro, the New York Times reporter and to other news organizations leaked from Wal-Mart employees.

Kofinis was referring to an article in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal saying the probe focused on the technician's search for those who had leaked memos to the media about health care and wage benefits. The report attributed the information to unidentified sources familiar with the case.

UCFW sent a letter late Thursday to Thomas A. Mars, Wal-Mart's general counsel, asking if communications were monitored, that Wal-Mart identify the participants and the dates and times. It is also demanded that Wal-Mart produce all recording and copies of the communications and all notes describing or referring to them.

From the New York Times:

Federal investigators are looking into the actions of a computer systems technician at Wal-Mart Stores who, over a period of several months, intercepted pager and text messages and also secretly taped telephone conversations between Wal-Mart employees and a reporter for The New York Times, the company said yesterday.

The United States attorney’s office for the Western District of Arkansas and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are assessing the actions of the employee and others inside Wal-Mart to determine whether federal and state laws were broken and whether they have jurisdiction in the matter, according to spokesmen for the investigators’ offices.

Wal-Mart said the technician was not authorized to monitor and tape the conversations between members of its media relations staff and Michael Barbaro, a retail reporter for The Times.

The company did not say what led the technician to make the recordings or why Mr. Barbaro’s conversations were the target.

Over the last year, Mr. Barbaro has written dozens of articles about Wal-Mart, including some that were based on internal company documents that were given to him by union-financed groups that were critical of Wal-Mart’s business practices.

Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, which is based in Bentonville, Ark., said the company fired the technician and a supervisor yesterday. A third manager in Wal-Mart’s information technology group was disciplined. Ms. Williams declined to identify the technician or his supervisors.

H. Lee Scott Jr., Wal-Mart’s chief executive, called the chief executive of The New York Times, Janet L. Robinson, early yesterday to explain the situation and apologize, Ms. Williams said.

Ms. Williams added that she contacted Mr. Barbaro and personally apologized to him, as well.

Wal-Mart said it began an internal investigation into the matter on Jan. 11 after executives were notified by an employee about the recordings. It then notified the United States attorney’s office two days later.

Over the course of a two-month internal investigation, Wal-Mart discovered that the technician had used a program that identified calls coming in from, or made to, Mr. Barbaro at The Times’s New York headquarters from last September to mid-January, Ms. Williams said. The inquiry involved an outside technology firm that scoured more than 100 computer drives and other devices, she said.

Members of the media relations group, including Ms. Williams, were unaware they were being taped, Ms. Williams said.

“No one knew he was recording these conversations,” Ms. Williams said in a conference call with reporters yesterday afternoon. “As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure he knew whose conversations he was recording. He simply programmed in the reporter’s phone number and captured those calls.”

It is unclear whether the technician was able to sort Mr. Barbaro’s calls from those other Times reporters might have made to Wal-Mart since all calls from the newspaper’s New York office register on caller ID screens as a series of numeral 1s.

The technician told investigators of some motives for his actions, Ms. Williams said, but she declined to say what they were because of the continuing investigations.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for The Times, Diane C. McNulty, said: “We are troubled by what appears to be inappropriate taping of our reporter’s conversations. At this point, we don’t know many of the key facts, such as what the purpose of this taping was and the extent, if any, to which the action was authorized.”

Mr. Barbaro declined to comment.

At first blush, it does not appear that the taping of the conversations was illegal.

Under federal and Arkansas state law, a telephone conversation can be recorded if one party has given consent. Wal-Mart said that under its policy, all employees give their consent to the monitoring and recording of their calls made through Wal-Mart systems and equipment.

Wal-Mart said, however, that calls were monitored only in cases of suspected criminal activity or fraud and only with written consent from the company’s legal department. No approval for the recordings was sought or given, the company said.

Ms. Williams added that in the course of the investigation only one person — a “senior-level lawyer” at Wal-Mart — listened to parts of the tapes between Mr. Barbaro and the media group.

The focus of any criminal investigation might be on the text messages and the pages transmitted near company headquarters by people who were not Wal-Mart employees; the technician made those interceptions using his own personal radio-frequency equipment.

“He captured all of the text messages that were within a range of his equipment,” Ms. Williams said. “Some of those messages had key words in them that he was watching for. Those were captured and put into a separate file or bucket from the others.” She declined to provide details of the messages or motives for those actions by the technician.

Federal and most state laws forbid the unauthorized interception of messages, said Rodney Smolla, dean of the University of Richmond Law School.

On Friday, our campaign, along with 30 members of Congress including Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, challenged Wal-Mart to put America’s security first by publicly reversing its opposition to strengthening our nation’s port security.

Unfortunately, Wal-Mart’s silence means America’s ports may be left vulnerable to another terrorist attack.

That is simply unacceptable to us and every American.

So, this week, our campaign will be announcing a full-scale television advertising campaign to pressure Wal-Mart to do the right thing and help protect America.

But, before we launch, we wanted to give you a sneak peek. Check out the new TV-ad and be sure to forward it on to all of your friends.

From the Financial Times:

Wal-Mart is being accused of failing to respond to anti-union violence at one of its supplier’s factories in the Philippines, in a case that could undermine its drive to improve its reputation on a range of social and environmental issues.

The Worker Rights Consortium, a group backed by leading US universities, says the retailer has “failed to do anything to correct severe violations” at the Chong Won Fashion factory outside Manila, which produces clothing for One Step Up, a Wal-Mart supplier.

The Maquila Solidarity Network, which has been involved in dialogue with the retailer over supply-chain conditions, has also accused the company of “delaying taking the necessary steps” to fix the problems at Chong Won.

The WRC launched a detailed investigation into conditions at the factory in November, after its management dismissed 116 striking workers.

Its 49-page report details violence and intimidation used against workers who went on strike in a bid to force the management to bargain with their union. The union had been overwhelming approved in a vote and recognised by the Philippines’ department of labour.

Both the WRC and the MSN have attacked Wal-Mart’s decision to launch a new investigation into the union dispute at the factory by Verité, a respected not-for-profit monitoring group.

The retailer, which conducted four monitoring visits to the factory last year focused on working conditions, says it wants to “a balanced view” on the dispute that would be mutually acceptable to all the parties involved.

“We need to give them adequate time to thoroughly investigate and find viable solutions,” said Amy Wyatt, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, who said the Verité report should be delivered “very soon”.

Wal-Mart has traditionally been bitterly opposed to unions in North America, although it negotiates with the GMB union in Britain. In 2005, it added a requirement to its suppliers’ code of conduct saying they must respect workers’ rights to freedom of association and not attempt to obstruct legal activities.

Over the past five years, Wal-Mart has significantly expanded its monitoring of conditions at its suppliers’ factories. It has also adopted the broadly-accepted industry approach of working to resolve problems, rather than immediately taking away its business. In the Philippines, the company has also held discussions with local labour groups.

“Wal-Mart has had a habit of cutting and running from a factory where there are significant risks of bad publicity,” said Bob Jeffcott, MSN’s policy analyst. “In this case they’ve engaged with us. But we’re extremely disappointed that they haven’t done more to stop the violations.”

Scott Nova, the WRC’s executive director, complained that Wal-Mart’s response to the problems at Chong Won “is about the worst we’ve seen”.

“This is a cut-and-dried case of the breaking of a code of conduct, and they have dragged their feet for half a year,” he said.

One of the greatest dangers we face in America is a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists being shipped through an American port. But, did you know, we only inspect about 5% of the cargo containers coming into America.

That is why the U.S. House of Representatives passed a 9/11 bill to strengthen America's port security by scanning 100% of the cargo containers being shipped into the U.S. from abroad.

But, yesterday, Wal-Mart's special interest lobbyists defeated the 100% scanning portion of the 9/11 bill in the U.S. Senate.

Why?

Because, even though 1 Wal-Mart container arrives at a U.S. port every 45 seconds, Wal-Mart fears that inspecting 100% of these containers might slow down its imports from countries like China which could hurt Wal-Mart's profits.

Are Wal-Mart's profits really worth the cost of leaving America vulnerable to another terrorist attack?

Please write your U.S. Senator today and tell him/her to put America's security first and support 100% scanning of all cargo containers as passed by the U.S. House.

If you really want to grasp how dangerous Wal-Mart's opposition to 100% scanning is for our country, think about it this way...

Would you get on an airplane where the airport security officials only screened 5% of the passengers?

Of course not, so why shouldn't we scan 100% of the cargo containers bound for the United States? There is only one reason - because big corporations like Wal-Mart will do anything, even lobby against protecting America, to protect their profits.

We must stop Wal-Mart now and make sure the U.S. Senate puts America's security first.

Please write your U.S. Senator now and tell him/her to put America's security first and support 100% scanning of all cargo containers as passed by the U.S. House.

From shipping good-paying American jobs overseas to opposing expanding health care for working families, Wal-Mart has a long record of lobbying against the best interests of America.

But, this time, Wal-Mart has totally crossed the line.

With 324,000 Americans in all 50 states, we have the power to change this company and this country for the better, but it is up to us to act.

From the Journal-Inquirer in North-Central Connecticut:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., with 28 discount stores, four "supercenters," and three Sam's Club warehouses in Connecticut, for years has lowered its state taxes by essentially paying rent to itself and deducting that cost as a business expense, a company official confirmed Wednesday.

The controversial and complex strategy has saved the world's biggest retailer several hundred million dollars in taxes in 25 states, according to the Wall Street Journal, which last month reported that on average Wal-Mart paid only about half of the statutory state tax rates for the past decade.

The company spokesman, John Simley, said he didn't immediately know how much money the arrangement may have saved Wal-Mart in Connecticut, but said it had been used for just over 10 years and is currently employed in connection with all but two of the company's 35 properties here...

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Tuesday that he was launching an investigation of "whether Wal-Mart and other companies are exploiting a loophole in our law that may need to be closed legislatively, or whether the current law can be enforced against them to collect money that clearly should go to Connecticut taxpayers."

Click here to read the full article.

From Pulse of the Twin Cities:

Darlings! You’ll be ever so pleased to learn that a new, high-fashion super store has opened in America. It’s called Wal-Mart. Yes, the stodgy old downscale store has gone upscale, offering hip new clothing lines like Metro 7!

If you think anything has really changed, however, you might check the labels on these new glam goods to see if any are made in Bangladesh. If so, they might have come from a factory there by the name of Harvest Rich, which produces clothing for Wal-Mart and others.

There’s nothing at all hip about Harvest Rich—it’s a sweatshop that uses child labor. In a new investigative report, the National Labor Committee, a diligent watchdog group, has documented conditions in Harvest Rich that are grotesque, even by sweatshop standards. Approximately 200 children between 11 and 14 years old work in this factory, sewing garments under contract to the Wal-Marts.

The children are forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, with some shifts going 20 hours. In all of September, these child laborers got just one day off. For the grueling long shifts, they are allowed only about four hours of sleep on the factory floor before being awakened and put back on the machines, sometimes collapsing from exhaustion. Their wages are as low as six cents an hour. They are routinely slapped or beaten if they don’t meet their production goals, make mistakes or even take too long in the bathroom.

Wal-Mart washes its hands of this by asserting that it has a “code of conduct” for its contractors, supposedly enforced by apparel industry monitors. Yet, Harvest Rich, which is certified by this group, shows yet again that corporate self-monitoring is an abysmal failure even at stopping the most disgusting practices.

Click here to learn more about Wal-Mart and child labor.