Wal-Mart's Political Profits
The first Wal-Mart opened in 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas and generated nearly $1 million in first year sales. Today Wal-Mart takes in $1 million every 100 seconds, twenty-four hours a day. More than 1.3 million people, one out of every 110 US workers, receive their paycheck from Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer. To the South, Wal-Mart employs 140,000 Mexicans, making it Mexico's largest private employer, with twice as many workers as Mexico's second largest employer. With $6 billion in food sales, Wal-Mart is Mexico's largest food retailer.
Wal-Mart has parlayed its enormous economic power into nearly unrivaled political power, which the corporation uses to tip the rules toward its favor and further boost its profits.
For nearly 30 years, Corporate Accountability International has been waging and winning corporate campaigns against irresponsible and dangerous corporate practices, including deepening influence by large corporations in the political process. Corporate Accountability International created Standards of Political Conduct for Corporations as our vision and goals for how corporations should function in the political arena--toward a safer, healthier, more democratic world. Below we see how Wal-Mart stacks up against several key standards.
Corporations must end financial contributions to political candidates, parties and referenda worldwide.
- Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton eschewed political contributions. In 1994--two years after "Mr. Sam's" death and four years after the corporation became the nation's largest retailer--Wal-Mart gave just $100,000 in federal political contributions. Ten years later, in 2004, Wal-Mart's political action committee gave $2.1 million, making it the nation's third largest corporate PAC.
- In 2004 Wal-Mart used California's citizen initiative process in an attempt to pave the way for Wal-Mart to operate in Inglewood, CA. Despite a $1 million investment by Wal-Mart in the initiative campaign, well-organized citizens voted down the measure by a nearly 3-to-2 margin.
Corporations must not trade favors with or buy access to local, national or international officials.
- In December, 2004, Wal-Mart Stores hosted a $1,000 a plate fundraiser for Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, who would later veto first-in-the-nation legislation requiring large employers to provide health insurance for employees.
- In California, Wal-Mart heiress Christy Walton provided Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger with a $250,000 campaign gift on the same day that the governor vetoed a health care benefit disclosure bill opposed by Wal-Mart.
Corporations must honor local control of natural and financial resources.
- Most shoppers who pay taxes at the Wal-Mart check-out register assume that those taxes go to the community and support local schools, parks and emergency services. But in several communities around the US Wal-Mart gets to keep the sales taxes paid by its customers to pay for site improvements around the Wal-Mart store.
- For instance at the Bullhead City, Arizona Wal-Mart Supercenter, the corporation is entitled to sales tax rebates of $1.2 million to pay for a highway turning lane, a traffic signal, sidewalks, curbs, gutters and drainage.
- This is but one of hundreds of subsidy deals collectively worth more than $1 billion that have been unearthed by Good Jobs First.
Corporations must accept policies that protect people, human rights and the environment and must not use trade agreements or governing institutions to preempt such policies or use them for private gain.
- "Wal-Mart is lobbying the World Trade Organization to lift government limits on size, height and number of stores that can be established in the country, a move that could make it easier for the giant retailer to expand into smaller communities over the objections of its residents," reported Lisa Sylvester on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight. If Wal-Mart succeeds, municipal laws giving preference to local stores or limiting the number of stores foreign retailers can operate would be struck down as illegal under free trade rules advocated by Wal-Mart.
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