Walmart's Friend in the Whitehouse

[In July of 2011] unions hit the White House with a triple-barreled shot for holding a major event with Walmart -- a company that was once a villain for Obama when he ran for office.

In this case, First Lady Michelle Obama praised the retailer for joining in her efforts to combat childhood obesity by opening hundreds of stores in "food deserts" -- neighborhoods that lack outlets that sell decent food or the basic ingredients for healthy eating.

"If parents can't buy the food they need to prepare those meals, if their only options for groceries are in the corner gas station or the local minimart, then all that is just talk," Obama said.

She added praise for Walmart's executives and others for taking the plunge. "They didn’t do this just as executives who care about their company’s bottom lines -- and I’ve met these people," Obama said. "They did it as parents and as grandparents who care about the health of our kids. They did it as leaders who care about our country’s future."

  HuffPo

Wal-Mart's business model of corrupting public officials, lying about job creation numbers, rampant sex and race discrimination, relentlessly low wage and benefit levels, and aspirations to monopoly control of local markets across the country make it a bad neighbor, a worse boss, an unfair competitor and sometimes a criminal enterprise.

Recent news reports that top Wal-Mart officers conspired to hide evidence of how their culture of official bribery operated in Mexico have thrown its practices worldwide and here at home under renewed scrutiny by the public, and even by the Department of Justice.

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Protecting black America against the ravages of corporate capitalism has never been the strong suit of today's black political class. In that class alone, Wal-Mart has many more players in its pocket than just Tavis Smiley. Former Atlanta congressman and mayor Andrew Young was a prominent early sellout to Wal-Mart. Since then the retail giant has acquired hundreds of local preachers and politicians like Chicago aldermen for example, often purchased for what look like embarrassingly small contributions to their churches, political war chests or favorite charities, unless there are other sums of money under the table which the records don't reflect.

Perhaps the biggest single black notable in the Wal-Mart pocket these days is the First Lady, Michelle Obama.

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As the White House's resident advocate for healthy eating and exercise, Ms. Obama has leveraged her image as a priceless asset to Wal-Mart, endorsing its drive to penetrate new urban markets, crush competition, and gobble up even more public tax breaks and subsidies.

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An aggressive federal campaign that lavished a fraction of the subsidies and breaks that big-box Wal-Marts get upon development of sustainable urban gardens on a scale that could eventually account for a significant share of the fresh foods and vegetables local city dwellers eat is a visionary project. [...] It's already been accomplished in Havana, Cuba, where a city of over a million is nearly self-sufficient in fruits and vegetables, solving a number of supply, pollution and transport problems, and providing thousands of local jobs for urban farmers.

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[If] the First Lady doesn't have the vision to advocate community gardens with guaranteed access to local land and funding to make them sustainable, why can't she at least suspend her relationship with Wal-Mart until the US Justice Department and various foreign governments complete their criminal investigations?

Nobody sensible believes recent reports of rampant corruption in Wal-Mart's board rooms are anything but the smallest tip of a glacier of bribery, conspiracy and criminality. There are competing visions in the land. One is the vision of our black political class, our black misleadership class, of which Michelle Obama is a prominent member. Their vision is about extending corporate power, not protecting us from it. Ultimately it's we who need protection from them.

  Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report