WMT Way: Work their employees to death for minimum wage and part time hours! This is what we are battling for… Better wages, more hours and affordable benefits…

Walmart makes enough money to pay their employees a fair wage!

Until Walmart starts paying its workers a living wage including health benefits I will not shopping its stores!

I have a friend who works at Wal-mart and she has absolutely zilch for benefits, not enough hours to live on and made to unload semi’s while she weights about 99 lbs., Its basically slave labor.

https://www.facebook.com/tucson.jwj?ref=tn_tnmn

National Day of Action AGAINST Wal-Mart

Wednesday, April 24th at 4:30pm

Where: Walmart SuperCenter
1650 W. Valencia Rd. (Meet
at the Corner of Valencia
and Midvale), Tucson, AZ 85746

Who: OUR Wal-mart & Jobs with Justice
and YOU the community of Tucson!!!!

What: We act in solidarity with
workers and consumers of Wal-mart
AGAINST the bosses and owners of
Wal-mart who intimidate workers in the
stores, distribution warehouses,
and transportation lines.

Informational leaflets to be distributed
about Walmart’s history of worker
intimidation and the growing international
movement of Walmart workers and their
allied brothers and sisters in their
communities.

TOGETHER as a Community, Tucson let’s
struggle with our brothers and sisters
inside Wal-mart so that they as workers
can collectively take action to meet
their demands for justice, dignity,
fair wages, and safe working conditions.

SPREAD the WORD!!!!

Our presence let’s the workers know that
the Community supports their fight
against injustice.

Let’s continue to put the HEAT on Walmart!!!

Mattison,
1) Revolutions never turn out the way people think they will.
2) History is never as simple as people think it is.
3) Pre-Civil War America was not so truly free
4) The overwhelming vast majority of people living in America at the time of the Revolution were either slaves or bond servants. The Revolution did not change that
5) WalMart may be a corporation, but the empire the Koch brothers run is small business. “Small business” is a tax category. It has nothing to do with size. And size has little, if anything, to do with how repressive any particular employer might be

Timelines are of interest if we are to understand how we got to where we are. But we can’t go back. We can only go forward.
A couple of things that Kalle Lasn’s narrative leaves out is that 1) the growing power of American corporations and the growing economic power of the United States ran parallel to each other, and 2) ordinary Americans have more freedom and more political power than we did a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago.
We need to focus on how we managed to do that in spite of the growing power of corporations and the filthy rich.
Because that’s forward

Smetak.
Before 1886 before the USSC declared that Corporations have the rights of “Personhood”, States and communities could revoke their charter if they violated the rights of people. I found the following article very enlightening:

The Rise of the Corporation
The Enslavement of the Individual

Then there is this from God_Bless_America@yahoogroups.com:

The unofficial history of America
http://www.ziopedia.org/articles/new_world_order/the_unofficial_history_ofamerica/ Written by Kalle Lasn Friday, 11 July 2008

The history of America is the one story every kid knows. It’s a story of
fierce individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the service of a
dream. A story of early settlers hungry and cold, carving a home out of the
wilderness. Of visionary leaders fighting for democracy and justice, and
never wavering. Of a populace prepared to defend those ideals to the death.
It’s the story of a revolution (an American art form as endemic as baseball
or jazz) beating back British Imperialism and launching a new colony into
the industrial age on its own terms.

It’s a story of America triumphant. A story of its rise after World War II
to become the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world,
“the land of the free and home of the brave,” an inspiring model for the
whole world to emulate.

That’s the official history, the one that is taught in school and the one
our media and culture reinforce in myriad ways every day.

The unofficial history of the United States is quite different. It begins
the same way in the revolutionary cauldron of colonial America but then it takes a turn. A bit player in the official history becomes critically important to the way the unofficial history unfolds. This player turns out to be not only the provocateur of the revolution, but in the end its saboteur. This player lies at the heart of America’s defining theme: the difference between a country that pretends to be free and a country that truly is free.

That player is the corporation.
The United States of America was born of a revolt not just against British
monarchs and the British parliament but against British corporations. We
tend to think of corporations as fairly recent phenomena, the legacy of the
Rockefellers and Carnegies. In fact, the corporate presence in pre-revolutionary America was almost as conspicuous as it is today. There
were far fewer corporations then, but they were enormously powerful: the
Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the British East India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to pinch staples from remote breadbaskets and bring them home to the motherland. The colonials resisted. When the British East India Company imposed duties on its incoming tea (telling the locals they could buy the tea or lump it, because the company had a virtual monopoly on tea distribution in the colonies), radical patriots demonstrated. Colonial merchants agreed not to sell East India Company tea. Many East India Company ships were turned back at port. And, on one fateful day in Boston, 342 chests of tea ended up in the salt chuck. The Boston Tea Party was one of young America’s finest hours. It sparked enormous revolutionary excitement. The people were beginning to understand their own strength, and to see their own self-determination not just as possible but inevitable. The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans not only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations, and for a hundred years after the document’s signing, Americans remained deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful about the way they granted corporate charters, and about the powers granted therein. Early American charters were created literally by the people, for the people as a legal convenience. Corporations were “artificial, invisible, intangible,” mere financial tools. They were chartered by individual states, not the federal government, which meant they could be kept under close local scrutiny. They were automatically dissolved if they engaged in activities that violated their charter. Limits were placed on how big and powerful companies could become. Even railroad magnate J. P. Morgan, the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations must never become so big that they “inhibit freedom to the point where efficiency [is] endangered.” The two hundred or so corporations operating in the US by the year 1800 were each kept on fairly short leashes. They weren’t allowed to participate in the political process. They couldn’t buy stock in other corporations. And if one of them acted improperly, the consequences were severe. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a motion to extend the charter of the corrupt and tyrannical Second Bank of the United States, and was widely applauded for doing so. That same year the state of Pennsylvania revoked the charters of ten banks for operating contrary to the public interest. Even the enormous industry trusts, formed to protect member corporations from external competitors and provide barriers to entry, eventually proved no match for the state. By the mid-1800s, antitrust legislation was widely in place.

In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but
subordinate role. The people, not the corporations, were in control. So
what happened? How did corporations gain power and eventually start
exercising more control than the individuals who created them? The shift
began in the last third of the nineteenth century, the start of a great period of struggle between corporations and civil society. The turning point was the Civil War. Corporations made huge profits from procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. Corporations became the masters and keepers of business. President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble.

Shortly before his death, he warned that “corporations have been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed.”

President Lincoln’s warning went unheeded. Corporations continued to gain power and influence. They had the laws governing their creation amended. State charters could no longer be revoked. Corporate profits could no longer be limited. Corporate economic activity could be restrained only by the courts, and in hundreds of cases judges granted corporations minor legal victories, conceding rights and privileges they did not have before.

Then came a legal event that would not be understood for decades (and
remains baffling even today), an event that would change the course of
American history. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, a
dispute over a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed that a private
corporation was a “natural person” under the US Constitution and therefore
entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by the people, including the right to free speech.

This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same powers as private citizens. But considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more vigorously than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a single legal stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution — that all citizens have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates — had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it “could not be supported by history, logic or reason.”

One of the great legal blunders of the nineteenth century changed the whole
idea of democratic government.

Post-Santa Clara America became a very different place. By 1919,
corporations employed more than 80 percent of the workforce and produced
most of America’s wealth. Corporate trusts had become too powerful to legally challenge. The courts consistently favored their interests. Employees found themselves without recourse if, for example they were injured on the job (if you worked for a corporation, you voluntarily assumed the risk, was the courts’ position). Railroad and mining companies were enabled to annex vast tracts of land at minimal expense.

Gradually, many of the original ideals of the American Revolution were simply quashed. Both during and after the Civil War, America was increasingly being ruled by a coalition of government and business interests. The shift amounted to a kind of coup d’état, not a sudden military takeover but a gradual subversion and takeover of the institutions of state power. The US has since been governed as a corporate state.

In the post-World War II era, corporations continued to gain power. They
merged, consolidated, restructured and metamorphosed into ever larger and
more complex units of resource extraction, production, distribution and
marketing, to the point where many of them became economically more powerful than many countries. In 1997, fifty-one of the world’s hundred largest economies were corporations, not countries. The top five hundred corporations controlled forty-two percent of the world’s wealth. Today corporations freely buy each other’s stocks and shares. They lobby legislators and bankroll elections. They manage our broadcast airwaves, set our industrial, economic and cultural agendas, and grow as big and powerful as they damn well please. Every day, scenes that would have seemed surreal, impossible, undemocratic twenty years ago play out with nary a squeak of dissent from a stunned and inured populace.

At Morain Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois, a student named Jennifer Beatty stages a protest against corporate sponsorship in her school by locking herself to the metal mesh curtains of the multimillion-dollar “McDonald’s Student Center” that serves as the physical and nutritional focal point of her college. She is arrested and expelled.

At Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, a student named Mike Cameron wears a Pepsi T-shirt on the day, dubbed “Coke Day”, when corporate flacks from Coca-Cola jet in from Atlanta to visit the school their company has sponsored and subsidized. Mike Cameron is suspended for his insolence.

In suburban shopping malls across North America, moms and dads push shopping carts down the aisle of Toys “R” Us. Trailing them and imitating their gestures, their kids push pint-size carts of their own. The carts say, “Toys R Us Shopper in Training.”

In St. Louis, Missouri, chemical giant Monsanto sics its legal team on
anyone even considering spreading dirty lies — or dirty truths — about the
company. A Fox TV affiliate that has prepared a major investigative story on
the use and misuse of synthetic bovine growth hormone (a Monsanto product) pulls the piece after Monsanto attorneys threaten the network with “dire consequences” if the story airs. Later, a planned book on the dangers of genetic agricultural technologies is temporarily shelved after the publisher, fearing a lawsuit from Monsanto, gets cold feet.

In boardrooms in all the major global capitals, CEOs of the world’s biggest
corporations imagine a world where they are protected by what is effectively
their own global charter of rights and freedoms, the Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI). They are supported in this vision by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other organizations representing twenty-nine of the world’s richest economies. The MAI would effectively create a single global economy allowing corporations the unrestricted right to buy, sell and move their businesses, resources and other assets wherever and whenever they want. It’s a corporate bill of rights designed to override all “nonconforming” local, state and national laws and regulations and allow them to sue cities, states and national governments for alleged noncompliance. Sold to the world’s citizens as inevitable and necessary in an age of free trade, these MAI negotiations met with considerable grassroots opposition and were temporarily suspended in April 1998.

Nevertheless, no one believes this initiative will remain suspended for
long.

We, the people, have lost control. Corporations, these legal fictions that
we ourselves created two centuries ago, now have more rights, freedoms and powers than we do. And we accept this as the normal state of affairs. We go to corporations on our knees. Please do the right thing, we plead. Please don’t cut down any more ancient forests. Please don’t pollute any more lakes and rivers (but please don’t move your factories and jobs offshore either).

Please don’t use pornographic images to sell fashion to my kids. Please don t play governments off against each other to get a better deal. We’ve spent so much time bowed down in deference, we’ve forgotten how to stand up straight.

The unofficial history of America, which continues to be written, is not a story of rugged individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the pursuit of a dream. It is a story of democracy derailed, of a revolutionary spirit suppressed, and of a once-proud people reduced to servitude.

Source: Silent Nation
____________________________________________
Makes you think doesn’t it? – Will Mattison

Callahan,
I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.
Look. You are just one person among many posting here. You are nobody’s supervisor. You are nobody’s boss. We don’t work for you.
Maybe in your life off screen you can dictate what people can and cannot do and say. But not here. And you know why?
In a previous post you said “The only thing wrong was the word “assume”. In that environment, Walmart knows their slaves are stupid, I’ll informed and easily intimidated; because they condition them to be so” Maybe this should be a space where people get to stop acting like slaves.

ROFL. Can’t help it. Sorry boys can’t play the whose is bigger game which was why I didn’t want to go politics in the first place. It’s an Oreo cookie. Left side right side but a whole lot of stuff in the middle that’s just as important. So, try n play nice.

Mattison,
Not troll. Libertarian.
As for waking up the people with an economic collapse, I thought we were in one.
Ok, what’s your solution to the problem of employers like Walmart et al gaming the system by cutting worker hours in advance of ACA.
And don’t give me ideology or the 47% spiel ( “too damn lazy to take care of their own needs”). I want something practical and doable.
Walmart does offer employee health insurance but it costs more than employees can pay and turn-over is so high that many employees quit or are fired before they work long enough to become eligible for coverage. Cutting worker hours in anticipation of ACA kicking in is just Walmart gaming the system one more time.
Has nothing to do with Obamacare.
So how do we properly care for people who are sick or injured. Other than dismissing them as “too damned lazy”
Oh and Romney is not, and never has been, a die hard right winger. He’s an opportunist, He does, however, have a decent streak that is best expressed in charitable work through his church.

Melissa & Smetak – Don’t get me wrong Romney would have been no better than Obama. Obama is a die hard left wing of the bird that is driving us into bankruptcy. Romney is a die hard right wing of the bird that is driving us into bankrupcy. The bird is socialism (Big Government, little individual freedom) so it’s time we started looking to other polirical parties for answers like I have for decades now. The Republicans are bankrupting us with an expensive military spread all over the world and the Democrats are bankrupting us with a welfare state to take care of everyone’s needs, even the millions who are too damn lazy to take care of their own needs. Even Ron Paul, who never was very well liked in his own Republican party, predicts what it will take to wake the people of this country up is an economic collapse. I agree and the prospects of avoiding it look about as dim as a five watt light bulb with those two parties controlling the country’s economy.

Smetak I’ll bite, not only happy that you " have a dictionary " but the added ability to read it. And if will is a troll. So be it but me thinks he isn’t the only one…

Callahan,
Can you say “obfuscation”
Your “well said Christopher post” is a beautiful example of strung together clichés.
Mattison may well be a troll. I suspect he is. But the issue of the effect the Affordable Care Act is having on hiring decisions with regard to bottom feeder jobs needs to be addressed.
Telling people to shut up is not addressing the issue.

Well said Christopher.
Part of my point being… keep it at the level it belongs. Yes politics and political agendas play a big part but . Like it or not it takes 2 to tango. Don’t get so wrapped up in a certain political aspect that you lose your focus. Obamacare may cause issues for getting healthcare, I don’t argue that; but healthcare is only one of the issues and if you think that it is the reason for wm to not provide… sadly mistaken. I will admit that while I am not well versed in " obamacare " itself, I feel safe in saying that companies such as wm can very well afford better health care options. They choose not to because it lowers their profits.
I am a Democratic liberal I believe in most of the liberal ways. But firstly I am a humanitarian. I try to look at ALL sides of the issue and make a call. No one person or party is ever entirely to blame.

Aloha everyone,

I must say I love watching the energy on this forum. :). Being mindful of each others thoughts and personal space (physically and mentally) is important for a revolution of any kind. I encourage education and debates in my daily life. Here on this forum we have the rare opportunity to not only educate but also find common ground to build on each others strengths. Building on each others strengths will allow a more organized and targeted agenda of energy to where the real situation is, “Walmart”. The tactics of Walmart is very political. Politics has been corrupted by the biggest of corporations. Diversity of tactics is a beautiful and also and encouraged. We all have skills and interest, but finding where to apply your individual skills to be more effective as an individual or a team. :)

Mahalo for all your time, be safe out there,
Christopher Nova Smith

Callahan,
I get it. You respect the right of others to speak their mind but they should shut up anyway.
Although I agree that Obama bashers are a tiresome lot, I think it’s important to point out to people that it’s employers like WalMart that have made it imperative that we reform our health care system—-actually our health insurance system—-and cut the tie between health insurance and employment. The Affordable Care Act is the first step and every time employers like WalMart try to game the system, that’s another step toward cutting employers out of the mix all together. We’re likely heading in the direction of expanded Medicaid and Medicare with premiums paid on a sliding scale as is the case already with Medicare (mandatory Plan B).
Now if people like Mattison can come up with something other than blaming the wrong people for what cheapskate employers like WalMart are doing, then we can have a discussion.
I’m very sorry you don’t like political debates, but what’s going on with WalMart is political whether you like it or not.

Dear Will I above all else respect the opinions of others. But I am of the belief that repubs need to lighten up. But more so both political parties need to start remembering it’s about “We the people”.
More importantly this isn’t the forum for getting into a political debate.

Melissa – This is only the beginnings of Obamacare!