If you get a chance, you should check out the new documentary, “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.” It's probably being screened in a church or living room near you.
I saw the film last weekend at the Community Church of New York. Though I've never shopped at Wal-Mart (no surprise there), I was motivated to get involved in the movement to stop the behemoth (and here) when I heard Leo Scott boast: “The Wal-Mart model works.”
Yeah, it works if you can get taxpayers to subsidize employee health care and other benefits (and here). But as Robert L. Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future recently observed:
Wal-Mart is the model ‘low-road’ corporation in the global economy. Its efficiency is celebrated, but its exploitation is caustic. But Wal-Mart doesn’t merely follow the low road; it drives its suppliers and its competitors into the same race.
Across America, people are starting to realize the stark reality: Wal-Mart’s triumph is the defeat of middle-class America. If Wal-Mart sets the pace, Americans will pay the price, in declining wages, rising health care costs, longer hours, worse workplace conditions and rising personal taxes to offset soaring corporate subsidies. America, as we know it, can’t afford Wal-Mart.
