This Satirical piece from The Spoof is well worth a read. It's funny because, like all good satire, it's based on the truth. This paragraph in particular rings true:

"Indeed, with well over 2,000,000 associates spanning the globe, and growth figures leaving industrialized nations in the dust, Walmart is shaping up to be a formidable new player on the international scene. 'We never gave too much of a crap about all those OSHA safety regulations, health codes, SEC rulings, Labor law bs, etc.', said WalMart's Mike Duke, 'But now that we're our own nation, we are the law - and I assure you that we are in full compliance with that law!'"

The article goes on to describe Walmart's loss prevention team as a burgeoning private army which will deal with any nation trying to regulate it and Unions, presumably the biggest threat to a nation of Walmart.

"While not so visible to the public, their fifty thousand strong Loss Prevention Specialists are expected to make up the nucleus of one of the world's largest private armies. Augmented by Nigerian mercenaries and ex-pats from Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan, it is expected to be one of the most formidable ever seen. 'Our forces will purely be for self defense, to repel any attacks from rivals like Target or K-Mart. Of course, they are also expected to come in handy if any small nation tries to regulate us, or start up any 'union nonsense'. We are working closely with Coca Cola for tips on that.', said El Presidente Duke."

Go read the full article here.

What a joke.

Right Wing media outlets (think Limbaugh) spent much of Monday harping on the NEA conference call "controversy". Coincidentally, former WakeUpWalmart.com staffer Buffy Wicks was present on the call.

That "connection" lead conservative bloggers to believe all kinds of outlandish things (AKA lies) about WakeUpWalmart.com. Now our campaign is a target of the radical-right's rumor mill, complete with all the lies, smears, horrible research, and syntax-mangling half-truths we've come to expect from the far right.

What are they saying, you ask? Well, none of it makes much sense. In fact, most of the smears are so blatantly fabricated, we had to laugh. I can't recount them all, but here are my favorite new right-wing lies about WUWM.

The White House orchestrated our Glenn Beck campaign (Planet Freedom)

This is bizarre. Let me try to follow that logic. a) Buffy doesn't work here anymore. b) Buffy works for the Administration. Therefore, c) The White House created our Glenn Beck campaign.

Cool! Let me try that: a) Kal Penn quit his Kumar gig, b) Kal Penn works for the Administration. Therefore, c) Barack Obama wrote the screenplay for "A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas".

Personally, I like buffy. But, I thought we took on Glenn Beck because Walmart funded his race-baiting and hate. Just a crazy thought.

We are both sponsored by ACORN and entirely funded by the UFCW. (The American Spectator)

Why not throw in a connection to super duper "evil" ACORN? Who cares if you directly contradict that claim a few sentences later? Hold on, there is even more ACORN fun to come.

Wake-Up Walmart is just a front for ACORN and a copy of their WARN project (The American Spectator)

We get it. Nothing gets the far-right more angry than ACORN. That's ironic, because nothing makes the far-right happier than lying about ACORN. If you feel like making something up AND you're really conservative, you'll probably be talking about ACORN in less than 5 minutes.

I admit... reading the American Spectator piece got me a little worried. I began to wonder, "do I really work for ACORN?" and "just how long have I been showing up at the wrong office?"

Luckily, I checked my last pay stub and could find neither "ACORN" nor "Vast Left-wing Conspiracy" at the top. Then I remembered that the Spectator article is full of BS.

For the Factually Inclined

WakeUpWalmart.com isn't a secret department of the White House. We have worked with ACORN. We are not a project of ACORN. We are not a cheap copy of their work.

We are a group of activists working to change Walmart for the better. 470,000 joined our cause online because they believe in what we do. That is 470,000 more than the number of reasonable people who believe the latest round of far-right smears.

Filed under "humor."

Darrin Bell, creator of Candorville daily comics, a nationally syndicated comic strip, has just released a truly hilarious series titled "Gall-Mart". The series pokes fun at a massive corporation named "Gall-Mart," which busts unions, tells its workers how to vote, and is just plain mean. We suspect that, just maybe, Candorville is making fun of Wal-Mart, given the similarity between the names and business practices of the fictitious Gall-Mart and the real life Wal-Mart. But don't believe me, check out the comics below and decide for yourself!

From Monday

From Tuesday

From Wednesday

From Thursday

And last but not least, Friday!

Ridiculopathy.com's feature story right now is a satirical look at Wal-Mart and the Olympic games. In the "story" they suggest that the IOC votes to give Wal-Mart country credentials to compete in the Olympics and that the "world's only publicly traded nation" is doing incredibly well in the medal count. The article suggests that Wal-Mart's winning streak is due to the team's ability to recruit a huge worldwide team by "luring athletes away from their home countries with false promises of overtime pay and limited healthcare coverage" and "the fact that they can procure as many medals as they want from cut-rate manufacturers just a few miles outside of the Olympic Village."

Like all good humor, this article is hilarious because it is rooted in truth. Whether it is the fact that Wal-Mart is large enough to be a country (over 2 million employees at their stores not to mention the workers who manufacture the goods sold), the fact that 70% of Wal-Mart's goods are made in China, or the fact that Wal-Mart doesn't offer overtime pay or affordable healthcare.

But like all good Satire, in addition to making you laugh, this piece should make you think. The truth behind the joke that Wal-Mart's Olympic athletes compete "as a display of Wal-Mart pride- and to keep their hours from being cut," is disturbing.

Enjoy the article, posted in full below:

Obligatory Olympics Report: Wal-Mart Now Leads Medal Standings

BEIJING, CHINA- In its very first Olympics since receiving official IOC permission to compete as a sovereign nation, Wal-Mart is cleaning up in the Medal standings at the 2008 Summer Games. Much to the surprise of traditional powerhouses such as the U.S. and China, blue-smocked associates are tearing their way through one event after anther, earning piles of bronze, silver, and gold medals. This remarkable success is partly due to Wal-Mart's ability to pull talent from the four corners of the globe, not to mention the fact that they can procure as many medals as they want from cut-rate manufacturers just a few miles outside of the Olympic Village.

For even the most jaded among us, it is difficult not to get excited about the Olympics. It's a time when, if only for one brief and glorious moment, the world stands united- a global village with a giant super-store on the outskirts of town homogenizing culture and artificially depressing wages.

"Olympics and genocides are pretty much the only times Americans pretend to care about other countries," said President Bush. "So, it's nice to all the people marching around in their funny colorful hats. It's just like I imagined Epcot would be."

Wal-Mart's surprisingly strong showing has become one of the top stories fueling the drama and spectacle of this year's Games. On Monday, for example, a 24-year-old stock clerk from store #1427 ran the 100 meter hurdles in an impressive 12.9 seconds and then sold 150 vinyl shower curtains to people in the nearby grandstands. In many ways, performances like these harken back to the original Olympiad in ancient Greece. Unlike other athletes who compete for love of country or the lure of lucrative endorsement deals, the men and women who represent the world's only publicly traded nation go out there and give it their all as a display of Wal-Mart pride- and to keep their hours from being cut.

If the giant retail chain can keep up this pace, they stand a good chance of coming out on top- as long as they can find a way to halt the advance of the legendary U.S. swim team.

"Now I finally have something in common with mark spitz," said Wal-Mart President H. Lee Scott. "We're both rooting against Michael Phelps."

Like most quadrennial global sporting events, there is an element of controversy to all of this, especially the setting. Many of the American and European attendees of this year's Olympic Games have openly grumbled about China's smog-choked skies and poor human rights record, but Wal-Mart's athletes don't seem bothered by it at all.

"I don't think anyone would dispute that China is a terrible bully that throws its weight around to further its own aims and distract the public from the terrible way in which it treats its own people," said champion shot-putter and Wal-Mart greeter Wayne G. Slaive. "In other words, we're right at home here."

Several countries have filed a protest with the IOC over Wal-Mart's presence at the Games, particularly their recruiting practice of luring athletes away from their home countries with false promises of overtime pay and limited healthcare coverage. For Wal-Mart's top brass, however, the decision to participate in the Games has nothing to do with medals or records but rather the company's sincere desire to celebrate the ideals for which the modern Olympics stand: ruthless competitive practices and the slow erosion of the human spirit.

When Walmart set out to redesign their logo, one imagines that they were going for a new look, something to update their image and distract people from their greedy ways of doing business. One also imagines that, since Walmart is a massive corporation oft in the public eye, they were going for something pretty bland and basic, and generally not easy to mock or distort or photoshop in to something embarrassing. After all, they're a mega-retailer that is just starting to figure out the web, not some new fangled website or blog that needs catchy graphics. It turns out, however, that Walmart has failed at the modest task of creating an unmockable, bland logo.

As soon as the logo came out there was a lot of buzz about what the new logo meant or symbolized. Some suggested that it was supposed to look organic, others that it was simply boring. But what has created the most discussion is that Walmart's new 'sunburst' logo reminds many readers of a picture of (excuse the language) a drawing of an asshole in Kurt Vonnegut's book Breakfast of Champions shown to the right.

Here are some of the blogs that have been talking about the connection to Walmart's new logo and Vonnegut's picture:

This New Walmart Logo Looks AWFULLY Familiar [Consumerist]

What's missing from Wal-Mart's new logo? [AdFreak]

Walmart's New Logo [Dead Programmer's Cafe]

In 2001 Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel and Dimed. The book is mostly an account of her own experience working minimum wage jobs and trying to get by. Now she has a new book out called This Land is Their Land about the drastic gap between rich and poor in this country. She was on The Colbert Report last night and talks quite a bit about Wal-Mart. She discusses her experience working there, and Wal-Mart's negative impact on the poor. Most importantly, however, she fingers Wal-Mart when asked how we got into this situation, "we've got too many employers, say like Wal-Mart, who make huge amounts of money by squeezing down their workers, not letting them form unions, for example, holding down their wages..."

It's a great interview, I encourage you all to watch it!

It was reported today that a group of individuals from the Spring Hill Wildlife Ranch in Texas were attempting to sell 6 tiger cubs in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. The buyers were in a van with Mexican license plates and were, apparently, going to bring the tigers down to Mexico. Neither the buyer nor the seller had the proper licenses to transport the animals across the border. While this has nothing to do with Wal-Mart, except for the location, it was simply too good a story not to share.

Enjoy the full article from The Monitor:

Police investigate sale of tigers in Wal-Mart parking lot

McALLEN - Police and federal authorities are investigating the sale of six Bengal tiger cubs in a Wal-Mart parking lot Sunday afternoon.

The animals appear to have been bound for Mexico and neither the buyer nor seller had the permits needed to legally transport the endangered species across national borders, a federal agent said.

A group from Spring Hill Wildlife Ranch in Bryan was selling the cubs - four white ones and two orange ones - in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart near Jackson Avenue and Expressway 83.

Authorities believe the Spring Hill employees were selling the tigers to a pre-arranged buyer via an intermediary, and that the animals' final destination would be in Mexico.

"The people who were picking up the tigers and taking possession of them... were Mexican nationals in a Mexico-licensed vehicle," said Special Agent Alejandro Rodriguez of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He said tigers have been smuggled into Mexico through the Rio Grande Valley before.

Rodriguez said some people involved in the transaction said the tigers were to be taken to a Mexico City zoo, while others said they would be going to Roma.

Under federal law, it's illegal to transport an endangered species across national borders unless both buyer and seller have what is known as a CITES permit.

Those involved in the transaction could face federal conspiracy charges if authorities determine the animals were, in fact, Mexico-bound.

Police said ranch employees were selling the white cubs for $5,500 per animal, and the orange ones for $900 per animal. The buyers' vehicle lacked air conditioning, police said, which also raised concern about the animals' safety.

Rodriguez said the cubs are healthy and would be transported to the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville as authorities continue their investigation.

The orange tigers are about 10 weeks old, Rodriguez said, and the white ones are about two weeks old.

Rodriguez said it appears Spring Hill has sold tigers in the Rio Grande Valley at least two other times in the last 18 months.

Police arrested the co-owner of Spring Hill Wildlife Ranch for interfering with public duties, authorities said.

The woman, whose name police have not released, attempted to barricade herself in the truck containing the tigers after Monitor staff began photographing the animals from the parking lot. She is expected to be arraigned Monday.

Two people who had been questioned by the police about the transaction declined to comment on the case to The Monitor.

Police learned of the transaction when a McAllen Police Department patrol officer became suspicious of the truck with Mexican license plates in the Wal-Mart parking lot, police said.

When the officer approached, the group moved to the parking lot of the nearby Mervyn's department store, prompting him to follow and ultimately discover the tiger cubs.

"The basic premise of this transaction in a parking lot - it doesn't seem right," said McAllen Police Sgt. Eddie De La Rosa.

Bengal tigers can grow to 9 feet long and weight more than 550 pounds. There are about 2,000 Bengal tigers living in the wild. The cats can be found in Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar and Nepal.

Jerry Stones, facilities director at Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, said Bengal tigers are an endangered species. There are thousands of large cats including tigers, leopards and lions owned privately - and legally -in Texas, Stones said.

He said he thinks some tiger owners may not realize the effort that goes into caring for the cats. "They buy them as babies," Stones said. "They don't realize it's going to get to be hundreds of pounds, eat an awful lot of food and become dangerous."

Forget flowers or a phone call, don't bother with breakfast in bed, or a nice card; Wal-Mart thinks your mom wants Wii Fit for mother's day. That's right, Wal-Mart is betting that mothers out there want a video game. Is it me, or does this sound like one of those sitcom moments when the husband buys a gift for his wife that he really wants, and doesn't get why she's so upset (what? I thought you really might like a table saw with laser precision). Walmart.com is plastered with ads for the Wii: console, games, extras, and of course, Wii Fit.

Here's an article from Reuters explaining the marketing strategy:

Walmart.com using Wii Fit to boost Mom's Day sales

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Forget the flowers and candy -- Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS: Quote, Profile, Research) highly anticipated "Wii Fit" video game will debut in the U.S. later this month, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc's (WMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) online division is trying to persuade shoppers to order the game as "a perfect gift" for Mother's Day.

This weekend, the Walmart.com homepage will be dominated by the Wii Fit -- a physical exercise program that uses a pressure-sensing board as a controller -- including a link to order the product now, ahead of its May 19 U.S. launch.

Through May 11, shoppers who "pre-order" the $89.74 game, or pay in advance to guarantee delivery when the game launches, will also get a $10 online gift card to use for a future order at Walmart.com.

"Initial response is extremely strong, and we're feeling really good about Nintendo Wii Fit dominating the home page," said Kelly Thompson, Walmart.com's chief merchant, of early shopper demand for the game. "... We really like the angle of marketing it to Mom."

The move comes as retailers look for creative ways to entice shoppers to keep spending amid the economic downturn.

Many U.S. consumers are shunning discretionary purchases as more of their budgets go toward rising food and fuel costs, and they have run out of access to easy credit to fund their shopping sprees.

Retailers now see holidays, like Mother's Day on May 11, as potential bright spots when cash-strapped shoppers may be persuaded to spend some of their limited cash.

According to a National Retail Federation Mother's Day survey, consumers, on average, intend to spend $138.63 on the holiday -- down from $139.14 last year.

But the survey also found that consumers will shell out $1.2 billion this Mother's Day on consumer electronics like digital cameras, digital photo frames and video cameras.

In addition, while U.S. consumers have pulled back on many discretionary purchases, video game hardware and software continue to post strong sales growth.

U.S. sales of video game hardware and software rose 57 percent in March from a year earlier, according to market research firm NPD.

Sales of gaming hardware, software and accessories hit $1.7 billion in March, led by Nintendo's Wii console, which posted its biggest nonholiday month ever. Wii Fit, to be played using the Wii console, has already has sold more than a million units in Japan.

Walmart.com is seeing a trend toward consumers buying more tech-related gifts, like digital photo frames or cameras, for mothers, Thompson said.

With Wii Fit, Nintendo is trying to appeal to new video game users, like women and older consumers.

"You'll see our marketing programs really reach out to both genders and a range of ages," said Cammie Dunaway, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo's U.S. operations, in an interview with Reuters in February.

Dunaway said such gamers will still be drawn to the novelty and sophistication of Wii Fit and its bathroom scale-sized controller, which uses sensors to detect subtle shifts in a person's stance.

Thompson said Walmart.com has worked with Nintendo on the Wii Fit promotion and ensuring it has a strong inventory position to fill the pre-orders. There also will be a link on the site to buy the Wii console, as well as other games and accessories.

Thompson said consumers can give the $10 gift card to mothers on Mother's Day since the Wii Fit will not ship until after the May 11th holiday.

After being fired from her Wal-Mart position, a Clemson, South Carolina woman apparently returned to the deli counter where she worked and started throwing chickens at customers. Apparently she also
destroyed some merchandise, including 2 sets of dishes worth $400 each, at least according to the incident report.

We're not totally sure which is the funnier fact, that chickens were thrown at customers, or that Wal-Mart is claiming to be selling plates at their "always low prices" price of $400. According to their website, the most expensive set of plates they sell ring in at $79.97 (shown right).

Here's the article from IndependantMail:

Clemson woman allegedly acts out during Wal-Mart termination process

ANDERSON — A Clemson woman is facing charges of going “postal” at Wal-Mart in Anderson, causing $2,800 in damage when store managers terminated her from her job in the store's delicatessen.

Shanay Buie allegedly became upset about 3:30 p.m. Friday at 3812 Liberty Hwy.

“She returned to the deli and threw 2 chickens at 2 customers,” according to the incident report. “At that time, she also threw on the ground 2 printers worth about $1,000 each. She also threw to the ground 2 sets of dishes worth about $400 a set.”

An arrest has not been made, according to records at the Anderson City Jail.

Here's a story about Wal-Mart suing people on the lighter side:

According to the Iceland Review, an Icelandic artist named one of his pieces "Wa1m-ART" and after it came down started a web site, www.Wa1mart.com. Now Wal-Mart is taking the artist to court. Perhaps they are worried about the similarity of their website, www.Wal-Mart.com to his site, as they claim, or maybe they just didn't like his art, or the fact that he used their name to make a comment on consumerism. What ever the reason, it certainly is humorous.

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.”

Saturday Night Live took on "Sale-Mart" last weekend. Click below to watch it:

Jay Leno this week on Wal-Mart's new sales numbers:

Here’s some bad news: Wal-Mart has reported that its pre-Christmas sales were down in November. Well, thank God that doesn’t affect anything made in America.

From American Rights at Work:

The Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board is poised to issue decisions that could strip millions of workers of their right to have a union at work—all without holding public hearings.

On July 18, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report"—a show satirizing Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor"—host Stephen Colbert took on the National Labor Relations Board and the potentially disastrous impact its rulings could have on workers.

Wal-Mart costs tax payers up to $2.5 billion in the form of federal assistance programs each year. In failing to provide its workers with affordable health care, Wal-Mart has already cost American taxpayers $210 million. It's time for Wal-Mart to offer reasonably priced health coverage to all of its workers.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click for larger image

Today's dose of humor comes to us from The Onion:

JibJab, makers of infamous satirical cartoons during the 2004 Election, have taken on a new target in an animated piece they call "Big Box Mart."

You can see the video by visiting the JibJab website:

http://jibjab.com/

Add Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to the list of people taking Wal-Mart's name in vain:

Since the disclosure last year that a Pakistani scientist sold nuclear designs to Libya and other countries, ElBaradei has become increasingly alarmed about what he calls a “Wal-Mart of private-sector proliferation.”

In the town of Umiat, Alaska (population 16), a sign has been posted by a resident that I think you might enjoy. Here is a snippet from an article about the town:

Prolonged downtime can breed creativity. Last winter, Mr. Hoyle made a sign that said: "Wal-Mart Coming Soon to Umiat." "It was a 50-degree-below day and he was bored," Mr. Lewis said.

The image comes from the Umiat web cam, located here.

From The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night:

“Wal-Mart says they plan to open 90 stores in China by the end of next year. 90 stores. Well, that makes sense. I guess they figure they might as well open stores in China. That's where all the stuff is made.”

Here's a satirical op-ed from the Janesville Gazette (WI):

Dear Briar Crest resident:

For months, you've resisted, objected and even battled us in court over our plans to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter and Sam's Club adjacent to your subdivision on Janesville's northeast side.

This letter is to inform you that we've found a solution. The good news is we're changing our selected site. The bad news is we've reached agreement with the city of Janesville to acquire your property by eminent domain.

That's right. We no longer will have to listen to your whining.

How can we do this? Well, maybe you missed last week's Supreme Court decision. Led by the liberal wing, the court ruled in a 5-4 decision that cities may bulldoze people's homes to make way for shopping malls or other private developments, such as our Wal-Mart stores.

So you thought property ownership was among your most cherished and protected rights? Guess again. Since our country's founding, government has had the power of eminent domain to condemn land for public projects such as highways and schools. Local governments can take land even if the owners aren't willing to sell, as long as the owners are fairly compensated.

The Supreme Court has expanded that to commercial development in a case involving New London, Conn., homeowners. Liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, said New London could pursue private development under the Fifth Amendment. That will allow a government to take private property for a private project if the development promises to produce jobs and revenue.

We aim to bring more jobs, even if we can't provide all our employees with health care benefits. And our stores will send more property tax revenue to city coffers.

Sure, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor argued that the decision bowed to the rich and powerful at the expense of the middle class. Tough. Sam Wal-Mart's heirs, minus John T. Walton, who died in a plane crash Monday, demand more and more money. And some of you in the middle class may even want to shop our stores once you see our always low prices-always.

So you have 60 days to pack up and leave before we flatten your home. On second thought, we've waited long enough. Make that 30.

Sincerely,
I. Gotcha Nau
Vice President of Property Acquisitions
Wal-Mart Corp.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This letter is satire, but it illustrates the absurdity of last week's Supreme Court decision. We are confident that city officials would not consider using eminent domain for the Wal-Mart project, and we would oppose it if they tried.

This week's dose of humor comes courtesy of The Simpsons. Click here to view [Windows Media Player File]

Enjoy

-Brendan

At the UFCW Local 99 Stewards Conference in Phoenix earlier this week, we showed a clip from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and everyone erupted in laughter. So I figured why not share the clip with you all as well.

Click here to view the movie [30 MB] (Windows Media Player File).

Dennis Miller's quote about the Vatican yesterday morning on CNN:

"The Vatican is a lot like Wal-Mart. They like to hire people late in life so they don't have to pay their benefits."

And a wonderful cartoon from Carol Simpson:

Did anyone catch Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday? Check out this clip (Windows Media File).