Upworthy – by Carolyn Silveira
Hey you guys! Guys! OK, I have a new idea. Kind of radical, but just hear me out: What if we don’t pay Walmart’s employees … but Walmart pays them instead?
Well, what do you think? Still not sure? Listen to the smart man giving his testimony at 4:50.
http://www.upworthy.com/a-senator-asks-a-panel-of-experts-to-defend-walmart-it-gets-awkward
“corporate welfare of the worst kind” is allowing the highest grossing companies in the US to go w/o paying any net taxes such as GE among others.
This is bullshit! Way to spin the problem Mr Sanders. Its not walmarts fault that him and his cronies have devalued the dollar to the point that the wages walmart pays arent enough.
Do you work for Walmart? I don’t know how anybody could defend these multi-billion dollar one world seditious traitors. We already subsidize the wages through welfare, food stamps, and housing. They use these subsidies to drive the mom and pop stores out of business. The Waltons are traitors to our country. They should be stripped of their wealth, tried, and then hung, right behind the Koch brothers.
We just raised the minimum wage in 2009 and now five years later the poverty level is worse than ever, increases do nothing but increase the cost of goods and services for everyone. The U.S. was seeing a trickle of jobs coming back from China because of rising labor costs over there so what will happen to that situation because of rising labor costs over here now if we raise it again? China and Russia are slowly pushing the dollar off the global scene, we need to keep it strong, just giving it away to nations in need of cash is not going to cut it when they can no longer trade with it to other nations, it will become worthless.
Step back a bit to see the bigger picture. Maybe way back. (I mean back in time, as well as stepping back/far).
I’m old/young (50s) so my memory of my dawning awareness of some of this as it was happening, goes back about 30 years. I was fully indoctrinated at the time to believe that cheap goods and labor would be good for our country. But at the same time, I could see the shutting down of our industries (steel, textiles, auto, etc.) and exporting these offshore. We were told that we had an emerging “services” economy. Well, fine, BUT… people need to have disposable income to spend on services, in order to support a service economy (restaurants, dry cleaners, stores).
At the same time they started winding down the teaching of shop and home ec in our schools. And emphasizing college for everyone. At the time, the costs of college were rising but were still within reach of many. No longer. So here we have a requirement of credentials (expensive degrees) to get “good jobs” of which there are no longer any guarantees…. and lots of student debt…. and shrinking disposable income (what’s that? LOL) through a combination of rising expenses (rising faster than wages) and corporations like Walmart making deliberate decisions to pay workers less than a livable wage, because taxpayer-funded social services will make up the difference. Except that we have high unemployment and a shrinking tax base. And corporations that don’t pay sufficient taxes. And a vast, hidden drain on tax revenue by secret or black/shadow programs. And over-regulation of small businesses with so many hurdles to jump through. It is easier to start a small business than it is to keep it going. But even that is getting harder to do.
WalMart is certainly evil and the Waltons are certainly traitors. But they are just cogs in this slow erosion of our economic power (which supports independence). It’s much bigger than Walmart.
At first I believed it was simple incompetence and short-sighted greed. That was before I knew about the man behind the curtain.
We have been indoctrinated to trust that others are ethical — including these countries which now have our manufacturing technology and plants. These countries are NOT ethical! They have clear, government policies to steal technology, create inferior goods, and increase their economic domination at OUR expense! In addition to not supporting Walmart, we should not be supporting companies which produce goods overseas!
We Americans still have our ingenuity and creativity and work ethic, despite the dumbing down in the classrooms.
We need to bring manufacturing back to our shores before these skills are lost, but there is so much more than that which needs to be done.