Big business - profit over customers.

Really - do you think billionaires, like the Walton family that owns Wal*Mart, shops at Wal*mart? Yeah - me neither.

Yeah - it's Obama's fault - that's the ticket!

The "Walmartization" of America

I've addressed the negative impact of the huge box stores on our economy in this blog before, with special emphasis on Wal*mart, but there's always new evidence to support these allegations. They're great for the low prices of the products we need and use, but they play havoc with our ability to earn money to buy those goods.

From the Daily Kos.. (read more by following the link)

A study published in 2008 in the Journal of Urban Economics examined about 3,000 Walmart store
openings nationally and found that each store caused a net decline of about 150 jobs (as competing retailers downsized and closed) and lowered total wages paid to retail workers.

[...] These shifts may explain the findings of another study, published in Social Science Quarterly in 2006, which cut straight to the bottom line: neighborhoods where Wal*mart opens end up with higher poverty rates and more food-stamp usage than places where the retailer does not expand.

We subsidize Wal*Mart

It's time we made Wal*Mart pay a living wage so that we, the taxpayers, do not have to provide food stamps and other welfare program benefits to their workers. It's not right.

Wake-up to Wal*mart's practices

Wal*Mart

Walmart, never forget that this driver of the American economy has their own best interests at heart, just like all good conservative Americans. We can be very proud of them.

Supporting small businesses

If you want more small business in the U.S., then you've got to do more to support unions. If Wal*Mart was constrained by unions and was forced to provide a living wage and superior benefits, small businesses would have a chance to compete.

Just thinking about job creation

Has it ever struck you as odd that both Democrats and Republicans bray at the moon most every day about the need we have in the U.S. for small businesses because they are the job creators? And yet almost all tax breaks and incentives are designed to help out mega-corporations like Wal*Mart?

I live near a small community which was populated with a lot of small businesses - a small grocery, a small hardware store, a mom-and-pop drug store, a store that sold yard equipment (lawn mowers, snow blowers,etc.), a pet store and many others.  A super Wal*Mart moved in and all but one of those small businesses folded.

Now, instead of a lot of people making a living off of owning their own business, a few even hiring some others to work for them, lots of those people now work in nearly minimum-wage jobs at Wal*Mart, each of them pulling down food stamps, HEAP and other government handouts because we subsidize those low wages.

If the political parties were serious about supporting small businesses, they would make the BIG businesses pay a living wage so that we don't have to subsidize their cheap prices.

Bailing out the employeed because business is too cheap to pay a fair wage.

The results of a government bought and paid for by big business