Miss

by Jimmy Flatbush

Created on: February 07, 2010

You may save a buck or two at Wal Mart. The cumulative savings may allow you to purchase a product that truly helps you live better. Consumers seem to embody the new Wal Mart slogan. Notwithstanding, Wal Mart’s low prices hurt many more people than they help, which means the slogan, “Save money, live better” is an outright lie.

The bulk of Wal Mart’s product line is produced, assembled, and packaged in China. Workers as young as five years old toil in conditions reminiscent of factories that dotted the American landscape before the turn of the twentieth century. The conditions are so horrific in the manufacturing plants that the Chinese government recently had to authorize unprecedented work safety codes in order to protect child laborers.

The children earn less than their adult counterparts, with an average wage estimated to be less than twenty cents a day. They are routinely beaten and intimidated by government sanctioned thugs who ensure productions runs unabated. The child slave labor employed by manufacturers that sell to Wal Mart is so appalling that the meager twenty cents a day is just the starting point for due outrage. The entire work force slaves away in unhealthy conditions without a modicum of health insurance. The Chinese buy our debt; we buy their slave labor made products.

How is it possible to live better when one of your young toddlers swallows a piece that falls off a defective Chinese made toy? The incidences of accidents such as this have become pervasive in America since China gained unbridled entrance into the American market. Children are not the only demographic to be affected by Wal Mart products. Adults have saved money by purchasing automotive and mechanical products that give new meaning to the term, “close call.”

Activists have excoriated Wal Mart for their shoddy labor practices for years. Low wages and lack of insurance to most employees tops the list. Every penny saved by an avaricious consumer is pennies lost for a worker paid at the lower end of the wage scale. How can the the low wages and lack of insurance be considered “living better?” It seems the only people who live better are those who trample through the front doors of Wal Mart at the outset of each Black Friday.

Wal Mart’s ultimate legacy will be how the corporate behemoth bullies municipal governments into implementing unconstitutional eminent domain policies. Buying real estate on the cheap, Wal Mart further manipulates weaker opponents into acquiescing to their land grab for pennies on the dollar. Coupled with cheap products made by children in China, Wal Mart becomes the standard for the new corporate business model.

My Uncle created a slogan that better encapsulates Wal Mart’s vision: “Here comes Wal Mart, there goes the neighborhood.”

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