Archives for December 2006

By Kris Hudson 
First published by The Wall St. Journal, December 7, 2006

Over the last year, Lee Scott has appeared on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show, talked about pro-environment policies and given speeches that repeatedly state his organization’s devotion to “working families.”

If Mr. Scott, the chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., seems like he’s running for office, it’s no accident. For the last 15 months, the Edelman public-relations firm, led by seasoned political operatives, has been directing a campaign it calls “Candidate Wal-Mart.” The goal: Rescue the battered image of the world’s largest retailer.

Edelman’s bipartisan team has been behind the curtain during Wal-Mart’s most visible recent initiatives — and some of its public stumbles. When Wal-Mart decided to sell an array of generic drugs for $4 a prescription, Edelman orchestrated a 49-state rollout, lining up local dignitaries in 79 places for publicity events. The PR giant also organized a grass-roots group called Working Families for Wal-Mart. But it had to scramble when the leader it helped recruit, Andrew Young, made derogatory comments about ethnic shopkeepers and was forced to resign.

Wal-Mart badly needs a boost. Its sales growth has waned in recent years and an effort to reach out to higher-earning shoppers has sputtered, partly because of the company’s beleaguered image. Sales at stores open more than a year fell 0.1% in the four weeks ending Nov. 24 — only the second monthly drop in 27 years. This year Wal-Mart scaled back expansion plans amid pressure from investors and political opposition in New York, Massachusetts, California and elsewhere.

As Edelman and Wal-Mart see it, image is crucial for drawing customers, smoothing the way for new stores in urban areas and beating back legislation that would raise costs. “This is not a public-relations campaign,” says Michael Deaver, a former chief of staff for President Reagan who is now helping to oversee the Wal-Mart account as an Edelman vice chairman. “It’s a win-or-lose campaign. And if you’ve been involved in a presidential campaign, that’s the way you look at things.”

Leslie Dach, a former adviser to Democratic politicians, led the campaign’s first year as an Edelman vice chairman. Now Mr. Dach is a Wal-Marter in full: In July, the retailer hired him as an executive vice president for communications and government relations, reporting directly to Mr. Scott, the CEO.

For years Wal-Mart did little to promote itself as a positive social force, believing its low prices would speak for themselves. But as it mushroomed to become one of the world’s biggest companies — with 6,700 stores and $312 billion in sales last year — it increasingly felt the sting of public criticism and pressure to fight back.

The pressure grew last year when unions started two organizations to hammer Wal-Mart: the Service Employees International Union’s Wal-Mart Watch and WakeUpWalMart.com, funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers union. At Wal-Mart’s annual meeting on June 3, 2005, Mr. Scott said: “Your company is the focus of one of the most well-organized and well-financed corporate campaigns in history…A coalition of unions and others are spending over $25 million this year alone to try to do damage to this company.”

A few weeks later, on June 28, two dozen Wal-Mart executives sat behind tables at a community-college conference center in Bentonville, Ark., Wal-Mart’s hometown. They heard pitches from three PR firms chosen as finalists — Edelman, APCO Worldwide and DCI Group.

War Room of Publicists 
In their “Candidate Wal-Mart” pitch, Messrs. Dach and Deaver of Edelman described a campaign with all the trappings of a U.S. presidential bid. A war room of publicists would respond quickly to attacks or adverse news. Operatives would be assigned to drum up popular support for Wal-Mart via Internet blogs and grass-roots initiatives. Skeptical outside groups, such as environmentalists, would be recruited to team up with Wal-Mart. Edelman won and quickly put its plan into practice, with three dozen staffers working on the account in Washington, D.C., and Bentonville.

Wal-Mart had been mulling the $4-per-prescription program before Edelman’s arrival, but the firm saw it as a chance to promote Wal-Mart as a catalyst for health-care change. In late September, Wal-Mart executives gathered with Florida officials, including Gov. Jeb Bush, to announce the program’s introduction in the Tampa area. That generated national coverage, despite Wal-Mart’s initial statements that it wouldn’t expand the program beyond Tampa until 2007. Then the company rolled it out in rapid-fire succession to 48 other states, declaring that the low-cost pills were so popular it didn’t want to keep people waiting.

The acceleration of the program earned new national coverage, but even more important were local news outlets. The 79 news conferences arranged by Edelman across the country helped the effort win notices from The Dallas Morning News, Vermont ‘s Burlington Free Press and others.

Privately held Edelman is the largest U.S. public relations firm with 2005 revenue of $254 million and clients such as Microsoft Corp. and Pfizer Inc. (Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has also been a client.) Both Wal-Mart and Edelman decline to disclose Edelman’s fee, but outside estimates put it in the millions of dollars annually.

Mr. Dach, a slightly built 52-year-old, was born and raised in the New York City borough of Queens, son of a homemaker and a small-business owner in Manhattan ‘s garment district. He studied neurobiology at Yale but quickly was drawn to politics, working on the advance teams of Sen. Edward Kennedy and President Carter during their 1980 presidential bids.

He went on to play prominent advisory roles for Democrats in five of the next six presidential campaigns. He prepared Al Gore for debates in 2000 and handled publicity for Democratic efforts in 2004 to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot in several states. In between campaigns, he spent 17 years at Edelman advising clients such as a Fujifilm Corp. division and the Nature Conservancy.

Mr. Dach believes his experience trouble-shooting for political candidates can be applied to the corporate world. “Every crisis is an opportunity,” he said in a recent interview. “The American people understand imperfection. But what they want to see is a company taking responsibility and then moving forward.”

Soon after getting hired by Wal-Mart, Edelman found an opening. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Wal-Mart rushed to reopen its stores and speed supplies to the storm-damaged areas. Edelman helped Wal-Mart get coverage for its efforts and spotlighted Jason Jackson, the retailer’s emergency-planning director. Mr. Jackson gave interviews, spoke on a conference call with reporters and gave some a peek into his command center for tracking weather and routing supplies.

After the storm, evacuees and local officials proclaimed in the news that Wal-Mart had outhustled the federal government. Also, Wal-Mart quickly made a $15 million donation to the hurricane-relief fund organized by former Presidents Clinton and Bush. The two ex-presidents praised Wal-Mart’s generosity.

Another early Edelman initiative was Working Families for Wal-Mart, the grass-roots organization. The idea was to allow Wal-Mart’s defenders to strike back against critics without requiring the company’s own PR staff to enter the fray. Wal-Mart provided the group’s funding and Edelman staffed it.

Edelman executive Greg St. Claire played a leading role in recruiting Mr. Young, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as the group’s chairman, according to people who spoke with Mr. St. Claire. They say Mr. St. Claire told colleagues how Mr. Young had praised Wal-Mart in public comments. Wal-Mart says its diversity department came up with the idea of bringing in Mr. Young. Mr. St. Claire declined to comment and Mr. Young’s office didn’t return phone messages.

Others recruited by Edelman for the group’s 14-member steering committee include Wheelchair Foundation vice president Chris Lewis, the son of entertainer Jerry Lewis, and singer Pat Boone. In its first year, Working Families for Wal-Mart reports amassing 150,000 supporters and assembling steering committees of local dignitaries in six states.

Yet the Working Families group has produced some of Edelman’s worst fumbles, too. Union-backed Wal-Mart Watch swooped in to claim the workingfamiliesforwalmart.com Web address, and posted statements there mocking the company-backed group as artificial. In August of this year, Mr. Young raised a stir when he told an African-American newspaper in California that Jewish, Korean and Arab shopkeepers overcharged inner-city African-Americans for stale food. He had been asked about Wal-Mart’s impact on mom-and-pop businesses. Mr. Young apologized and resigned from Working Families for Wal-Mart.

Faux Pas
In October, bloggers and mainstream media criticized Working Families for Wal-Mart for not disclosing the full identities of two people — one the sister of Edelman’s Mr. St. Claire — whom it enlisted to write a pro-company blog. The two drove an RV around the country and posted happy accounts of the Wal-Mart customers and employees they encountered. Edelman’s chief executive, Richard Edelman, apologized on his own blog for the lack of disclosure.

The faux pas had union groups crowing. “Edelman stumbled badly on the Wal-Mart account, and the fake-blog episode is fast becoming a case study on the importance of PR transparency,” said Wal-Mart Watch spokesman Nu Wexler.

In its pitch for the account, Edelman had warned Wal-Mart that Google results for a “Wal-Mart” search yielded mostly unflattering material, potentially overshadowing the company’s own sites. Edelman sought to balance that equation by funneling positive information about Wal-Mart to bloggers. For example, news that 24,500 people applied for 325 jobs at a new Wal-Mart outside of Chicago made its way onto some blogs.

Edelman has also tried to help Wal-Mart gain some control over the issue of health care. In October 2005, Wal-Mart Watch distributed an internal Wal-Mart document detailing strategies for cutting health-benefit costs by discouraging unhealthy job applicants. In January, Maryland enacted a law targeting Wal-Mart that required large employers to spend certain amounts on health-care benefits for workers in the state. The law spurred similar bills prompted by labor groups in more than two dozen states.

Mr. Dach pushed Mr. Scott to discuss health in a February speech to the National Governors Association. “Everybody was telling Leslie, ‘We can’t do health care now. We don’t want to talk about health care.’ But Leslie just kept at it,” says Mr. Deaver. Mr. Scott took Mr. Dach’s advice, announcing in his Edelman-drafted speech that Wal-Mart would improve health benefits for its workers by such steps as loosening eligibility requirements for part-timers.

Company officials are heartened that none of the bills modeled on Maryland ‘s law survived this year, although that may have more to do with a federal judge’s decision in July to strike down the Maryland law because he said it encroached on federal authority.

In Mr. Scott’s speech at this year’s annual meeting, he used an Edelman-inspired line with political echoes: “This company is committed to working families.” In all, Mr. Scott used the expression “working families” 10 times in that speech, which Edelman wrote, and 11 times in two other talks around the same time. Since Edelman’s hiring, Wal-Mart has issued at least 44 press releases mentioning working families to describe its customers and employees.

Later in the summer, Edelman booked Mr. Scott in several unfamiliar forums, such as Mr. Sharpton’s radio show, where the CEO fielded questions from listeners. In July, Mr. Dach arranged for former Vice President Al Gore to speak about environmental issues and screen his global-warming movie “An Inconvenient Truth” at a quarterly meeting of Wal-Mart employees and environmental groups. Mr. Gore’s camp initially had concerns about Wal-Mart’s sincerity on the issue, but Mr. Dach helped allay them. “Leslie brings some credibility and integrity,” said Roy Neel, Mr. Gore’s chief of staff.

This summer, Wal-Mart decided to bring Mr. Dach in-house. Mr. Dach was already so intimately involved in planning that he sometimes heard of key developments within Wal-Mart prior to the company’s own senior PR staffers, according to people familiar with the situation. Yesterday, Robert McAdam, who has been a top Wal-Mart PR executive since 2000, told colleagues he is leaving the retailer. In an interview, Mr. McAdam said his departure has nothing to do with Mr. Dach’s arrival.

In hiring Mr. Dach, Wal-Mart granted him stock then valued at $3 million and nearly 169,000 options. The retailer allows him to split his time between Bentonville and Washington , D.C., with Washington remaining his primary residence. He also gained oversight of the $1 billion Wal-Mart Foundation, a charitable group. “I’m convinced Wal-Mart is changing and the change is real,” Mr. Dach wrote in an email to friends announcing the move.

© 2006 Wall St. Journal

• See our huge collection of articles, studies, internal documents and more on Wal-Mart and big box stores.
• Visit our Merchandise Page to see anti-Walmart stickers, buttons, and more.
• Please help support this work – make a tax-deductible donation to ReclaimDemocracy.org today!

Critics question company’s motives

With a combined fortune of more than $90 billion, the Waltons–the immediate heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton–are the richest family in the world. Five of the country’s ten richest individuals are members of Sam’s immediate family: his wife, Helen, and their three surviving children–Rob, Jim and Alice–as well as his late son John’s widow, Christy (John Walton died in June when his private plane crashed). Until recently, however, they gave away little of their fortune. As Sam Walton explained in his 1992 autobiography, Made in America, he didn’t believe in giving “any undeserving stranger a free ride.” Nor did he believe in being generous with company profits. “We feel very strongly,” he wrote, “that Wal-Mart really is not, and should not be, in the charity business.” Money that Wal-Mart donated to charity, he reasoned, would only come out of the pockets of “either our shareholders or our customers.” (He didn’t mention workers, perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that picking their pockets was just business as usual.)

As for politics, Sam couldn’t stand the stuff. At a 1988 Mother’s Day “toast and roast” honoring Helen Walton, then-Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas quipped that waiting for big campaign contributions from the Waltons was like “leaving landing lights on for Amelia Earhart.”

All that has changed. Since Sam died in 1992, both the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company and the family have dramatically escalated their charitable giving, becoming far more influential in the worlds of philanthropy and politics. It is hardly a coincidence that this transformation occurred after Wal-Mart became the nation’s largest private employer and a flytrap for much-deserved criticism. The company is battling numerous employee rights lawsuits in court, the biggest of these being Betty Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, a sex-discrimination class action representing 1.6 million women. Communities around the nation, charging that the company is a stingy low-wage employer with an arrogant disregard for local and national laws, are battling to keep Wal-Mart from opening or expanding stores. Several labor unions have made fighting Wal-Mart a top priority. This year two major national organizations, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, formed to lead a citizens’ movement to pressure the company to change its ways.

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), a watchdog group, released a report in September, The Waltons and Wal-Mart: Self-Interested Philanthropy, detailing the recent increase in Wal-Mart and Walton philanthropy and noting its likely relationship to the company’s image problems. Indeed, the increase has been staggering. The Walton Family Foundation (WFF) gave away $106.9 million in 2003–the most recent year for which data are available–twice as much as in 2000. Wal-Mart’s company PAC, now the third-largest corporate PAC and the second-largest corporate donor to the GOP, gave away $2.1 million in 2004, compared with just $100,000 in 1994. The Walton family, too, has greatly increased its political giving; in 2004, for example, Alice donated $2.6 million to the influential Republican PAC Progress for America, which supported the sleazy Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gave Bush a critical push in the election’s final months. Since 1999 the Wal-Mart Foundation (WMF)–a company-controlled entity with no direct connection to the WFF–has tripled its giving and by the end of this year will have doled out more than $200 million in cash and merchandise, according to spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien.

The company also donated $20 million in cash and merchandise to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, garnering extensive–and partially justified–praise. To antigovernment zealots like New York Times columnist John Tierney and the wing nuts running the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Wal-Mart’s impressive response to the hurricane showed that the private sector is simply more effective than the government. It is true that when you starve government by draining its resources and electing officials who don’t believe in it, nothing seems to work. But Wal-Mart played a major role in that eviscerating process. Much of Wal-Mart’s philanthropy (as well as that of the Walton family) has been directed toward promoting anti-government politics, whether by lobbying against high taxes for the rich or contributing to Republican candidates, conservative think tanks and efforts to privatize education.

Jeff Krehely, who co-wrote the NCRP report, says that for his organization, such a sharp increase in giving, coupled with the company’s obvious desire to spin itself as a better corporate citizen, “raises red flags. We wonder, What’s the agenda here? What’s happening?” The WMF’s Melissa O’Brien told The Nation that criticisms of the company come from “special-interest groups” and do not influence its giving. She also told the New York Sun that the NCRP report was funded by Target, a charge Krehely calls “ludicrous.” (Dayton Hudson, Target’s former parent company, contributed to the NCRP in the 1990s. In 2000 the company reorganized as the Target Corporation and hasn’t contributed to the watchdog group since.)

Each Walton heir has philanthropic projects of his or her own–Alice, for example, is building a world-class art museum in northwest Arkansas–but the family fortune should be considered as one because most of the money is managed together. The giving is also largely administered together, through the Walton Family Foundation, as well as through close communication among its family members. (At least twice a year, the family meets to talk about how to spend its money.) The Waltons own about 40 percent of Wal-Mart’s stock, making Wal-Mart essentially a family business–highly unusual for a large multinational company. (Both the Wal-Mart Family Foundation and Walton Enterprises–the company that represents the Walton family’s interests–declined to cooperate with this article, or to make any of the notoriously press-shy Waltons available for interviews.)

Philanthropy obscures the often unseemly process by which the money was made–and for Wal-Mart that’s at least part of the point. Stephen Copley, a United Methodist Church pastor who serves on the board of the Arkansas Single Parents Scholarship Fund, a Springdale, Arkansas, charity that has benefited from Walton dollars, says that the program has “an incredible success rate. One lady even got a PhD. [The Walton money] does a tremendous amount of good.” However, he adds, “it’s great to help single parents go to school, but those same single parents might be working for Wal-Mart, and they can’t afford health insurance.” Copley, also head of the Arkansas Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, is troubled that in his home state, Walton and Wal-Mart generosity “gets great media…they look so good even though in reality their business practices are very bad.”

The Wal-Mart Foundation gives a staggering number of gifts, apparently in order to buy goodwill in as many communities as possible, rather than, as Krehely points out, “giving to sustain organizations.” The WMF’s 2003 IRS 990 form is 2,239 pages long, far longer than that of the Ford Foundation, which has billions more in assets. That’s because most WMF gifts are tiny: thousands or even hundreds of dollars to churches and Lions clubs and Boys and Girls clubs, $500 to the YMCA of Nashville and Middle Tennessee and to the Tulip Trace (Indiana) Girl Scouts Council and so on. Communities where Wal-Mart faced a particular battle over opening a new store–Inglewood, California, or New York City–enjoyed especially generous largesse. Like the flowers and other tokens of courtship from a suitor who later becomes a wife-beater, such gifts are often followed by demands for public subsidies and tax breaks. In this way Wal-Mart is repeating the strategy that has served it so well in Arkansas, where Wal-Mart and the Waltons’ charitable gifts are many and company critics are relatively few. Says Lindsay Brown, president of the Central Arkansas Labor Council, “It’s a hell of a plan, and it works.”

We are supposed to applaud philanthropy–the very word connotes altruism and “giving back”–but Walton and Wal-Mart giving serves as a reminder that philanthropy provides an alternative to taxation, a way for rich people and corporations to decide what to do with their extra money, as opposed to letting the rest of us decide through our elected governments. Since charitable donations are a tax write-off, as Krehely points out, “they are supposed to benefit the public good.” He thinks it is reasonable to ask whether a family’s–or a company’s–philanthropy serves the common good, or at least enough good “to make up for the public revenue that we’re losing.”

Funny he should mention taxes: Wal-Mart and the Waltons have, after all, been notably reluctant to pay them. Not only has the company lobbied for tax breaks in communities all over the nation, the Waltons–the family that former Wal-Mart board member Hillary Clinton has called “the best America has to offer”–have campaigned vigorously against the estate tax. They have donated money to its opponents, Republicans like John Thune of South Dakota and David Vitter of Louisiana, and enlisted one of Washington’s top lobbying firms, Patton Boggs–a leading anti-estate tax lobbyist–to represent their interests.

Chuck Collins of Responsible Wealth, a group of well-off people who strongly favor the estate tax, observes that the Waltons sometimes say the estate tax is not a priority for the family. “That may be true from their perspective,” he says, “but it’s a bit like an elephant saying it’s really not interested in stepping on anthills. When you’re America’s wealthiest family, you are a philanthropic and lobbying heavyweight even on your minor interests.” For instance, Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, one of a handful of Democrats who draw checks from the Waltons, supports estate-tax repeal (or crippling “reform”). “Senator Lincoln will wax eloquent about the small farmers of Arkansas,” Collins says, “but what’s really on her mind is Walton.”

In addition to campaigning specifically against the estate tax, the Waltons also give money to groups that generally favor tax giveaways to the rich, like Americans for Tax Reform. And the Waltons have already reaped the benefits of tax policies enacted by the conservatives they helped put in office: This year Bush’s dividend tax cut will save the family $51 million, according to Lee Farris, an estate-tax expert with the Boston-based United for a Fair Economy.

The Waltons’ philanthropy–and their hostility to paying their fair share of taxes–also needs to be viewed in the context of tax subsidies Wal-Mart has received for building new stores, which Good Jobs First places at more than $1 billion, an estimate that does not include the many other ways taxpayers subsidize Wal-Mart stores, for instance, through numerous forms of public assistance–Medicaid, Food Stamps, public housing–that often allow workers to subsist on Wal-Mart’s low wages. A report by the House Education and Workforce Committee conservatively places the latter at $420,750 per store; the Wal-Mart Foundation’s per-store charitable giving is just 11 percent of that amount ($47,222).

In addition to spending on Republican candidates, the Waltons have lavished funds on right-wing ideological institutions–organizations that serve the interest of wealthy individuals and lawless antiunion companies like Wal-Mart. From 1998 through 2003 the WFF contributed $25,000 to the Heritage Foundation, $15,000 to the Cato Institute, $125,000 to the Hudson Institute, $155,000 to the Goldwater Institute, $70,000 to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, $300,000 to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, $185,000 to the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy and $350,000 to the Evergreen Freedom Foundation.

Both the family and the company have made education a major funding priority. Many of the WFF’s education gifts have a distinct ideological tilt, emphasizing a “free market” approach to education reform, a vision the late John Walton embraced with particular enthusiasm. The WFF funds advocacy groups promoting conservative school “reform”–otherwise known as privatization–like the Center for Education Reform and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, as well as the actual programs these groups champion: charter schools and voucher programs. (The BAEO did not return calls for this article.)

Among such projects, the Waltons tend to fund the most mind-numbing and cultish, giving in 2003 alone nearly $3 million to Knowledge Is Power (KIPP) schools and millions more to other schools using the KIPP curriculum, which emphasizes regimented recitation rather than critical or creative thinking. Particularly widespread in low-income neighborhoods, such schools seem bent on disciplining and exhorting the poor rather than developing human potential (much like Wal-Mart as a workplace, with its relentless company cheers and dead-end jobs). Several years ago the principal of New York City’s John A. Reisenbach Charter School, which uses the KIPP curriculum and received $118,000 from the Waltons in 2003, told me proudly, as we watched fidgety second graders chant meaningless slogans, “We are getting them ready for business.”

The WFF has become the single largest source of funding for the voucher and charter school movement. Walton funding allows some charter schools to spend more per pupil than “competing” public schools. The ironic result is that while these projects are supposed to demonstrate to the public the wonders of a marketized approach to education, the WFF’s money gives its grantees an advantage over other schools, allowing them to perform better than they would otherwise. “[The Waltons] claim to support competition and the free market,” says Paul Dunphy, a policy analyst for Citizens for Public Schools, a Boston-based coalition, “but actually they are manipulating the market, conferring advantage on their pet projects.”

It’s a fitting paradox, since the Wal-Mart economic model, like almost anything held up as an example of the beauty of the free market, contains so many contradictions (yes, it’s extremely profitable, but look at all those tax subsidies). Because so much Walton and Wal-Mart philanthropy is crudely self-interested, it’s tempting to find an equally crude motive for the Walton family’s interest in education; many Wal-Mart critics have assumed that the Waltons must be planning to reap several more fortunes through for-profit education companies. That’s not completely baseless: John Walton was briefly involved in such a venture. However, he backed out, realizing such profiteering was hurting the credibility of his education reform efforts. And so far, for-profit education is still not a very profitable industry–especially when compared with retail.

The Waltons’ motives for supporting the privatization of education seem–at this writing, anyway–to be ideological, even idealistic, rather than an elaborate backdrop to a new money-making scheme. Like many rich Americans who have helped to finance the far right’s rise to power, they have embraced a worldview in which what’s good for the wealthy is good for everyone else. And greater cultural acceptance of the unfettered market–through an increasing tolerance for privatization of all kinds–will certainly make the world safer for a family business that thrives on weak government and lack of regulation. But it’s also likely that the Waltons, like most right-wingers, sincerely believe that their ideas have the potential to improve people’s lives. Why wouldn’t the Waltons genuinely believe in the free market? Look how well it has served them.

Helen Walton, now 85 and in poor health, is expected to donate almost all of her personal fortune–worth $18 billion–to the WFF upon her death, which, as the NCRP points out, will make that entity the richest foundation in the world. This should disturb progressives, since so much Walton money goes to support conservative causes. Yet although the current direction and political leanings of Walton “philanthropy” are clear, the future is a mystery. As Krehely observes, nothing is known about the politics or interests of Sam Walton’s grandchildren. This matters in a family foundation; this fall the Olin Foundation closed its doors, having spent down its endowment because the older generation did not trust the younger Olins to carry on the family’s right-wing traditions. Since the Waltons don’t say much about their future plans, or about their internal family politics, it’s unclear what lies in store for this–currently–right-wing fortune.

“The Waltons could be an enormous force for good,” says Responsible Wealth’s Chuck Collins. “As the company’s biggest shareholders, they could decide that Wal-Mart could pay a living wage. They could use their charitable dollars not to undermine public education but to boost educational opportunity. They could become major contributors to social good. But they’re not.”

One item in the Walton Family Foundation’s most recent IRS filing shows how uninterested this family is in true social responsibility: a measly $6,000 to something called the Wal-Mart Associates in Need Fund. Contrast that with the millions the family spends promoting right-wing causes, and it becomes painfully clear that the Waltons value conservative ideology far more than they value the human beings who have made them the richest family on earth. Told about these figures, Kathleen MacDonald, a Wal-Mart candy department clerk in Aiken, South Carolina, responded bluntly, “All I have to say about that is, it doesn’t surprise me. Like Bush, they don’t have a clue what working families go through.” MacDonald would like to see The Simple Life do a show about working at Wal-Mart. “I could see Paris Hilton on a register at Christmastime, or stocking shelves,” she says. Or perhaps Alice Walton as a greeter, on her feet all day, thanking us for shopping at Wal-Mart.

© 2005 The Nation

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. Thanks to Laura Starecheski, who contributed reporting, and to Meleiza Figueroa, a researcher on Robert Greenwald’s film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, who, with the generous consent of her employers, shared her findings.

•  See our huge collection of articles, studies, internal documents and more on Wal-Mart and big box stores.
• Visit our Merchandise Page to see anti-Walmart stickers, buttons, and more.
• Please help support this work — make a tax-deductible donation to Reclaim Democracy today!