Wal-Mart: High Costs... Always

Human Rights Watch has just released a 210 page report titled, "Discounting Rights:
Wal-Mart's Violation of US Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association". The report outlines the spooky tactics and propaganda methods employed by Wal Mart to prevent workers from organizing.

Human Rights Watch has also obtained a video which dramatizes Wal Mart's anti-union propaganda.

The crimes perpetrated by Wal Mart are numerous, heinous, and well-documented. Please consider the costs to Wal Mart workers, your community, and our country before shopping there. Read more here and here. And here is the website for the movie "Wal-Mart: the high cost of low prices". You can watch the trailer there.

Fun fact: a Zogby poll indicated that, prior to the 2004 election, 76% of voters who shopped at Wal-Mart once per week planned to vote for Bush, while only 23% planned to vote for Kerry. When measured against other similar retailers in the US, frequent Wal-Mart shoppers were rated the most politically conservative.

But Here's the point I'd like to make,

It's not Wal-Mart's fault.

Wal-Mart is the inevitable product of a system. There are no "good" corporations. There are only big corporations and small corporations. And there are a few corporations whose business plan is to be "good" in order to make more money. You see, corporations have a legal responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders. In other words, it is illegal for a corporation to behave responsibly if that behavior will diminish share-holder profits. Even if the governing members of a corporation are themselves nice folks, their behavior is defined by their role in that corporation. If they do not conform, they will be replaced.

Form is content.

So what are we, as a society, to do? Well for one thing, use the power of your wallet. When we refrain from patronizing businesses that engage in bad behavior, bad behavior becomes unprofitable. And secondly, we need to regulate corporations in such a way that will result in corporations serving the interests of the people, not the other way around, as is the current trend. For example, we don't need to give corporations tax breaks for taking jobs from working Americans and giving them to a kid making a dollar a day in Malaysia.