Discussion:Kill a Community, Then Bury It

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SmartSpending/blog/page.aspx?post=1342261&_blg=1,1342261

This puts a whole new meaning in a Christmas gift for Tiny Tim, would that Dickens was here to use the material.

(Though I have to admit I shop at Sam's Club (ahem).... So, full disclosure.)

Since so many of the Walmart workers draw foodstamps and are on Medicaid due to poor pay and meager health benefits (costing some states more than they collect in tax revenue from Wal-mart), it's no surprise that Wal-mart is selling cheap caskets for them to bury themselves in after they die penniless. Oh, and they're for you too, just in case you are a loser (winner?)as well in the race to the bottom.

By the way, if you will remember, it was Wal-mart that was secretly taking out life insurance on it's line employees to benefit from their death (note, to benefit not their families, but Wal-mart itself). I think this practice has been discontinued.

Of course, this is just what I've heard. I do not think and fine and upstanding company like Wal-mart would actually DO something like this.

don't know what it means but you are patrolling and it is welcomed to tell those silly enough to not know what it means

Wal-mart at this point creates it's own lower middle class. It creates it, and then it caters to it. It's a reflection of what WE have become in our race to the bottom. I agree that in the beginning, Sam himself only saw a growing need, and he filled it.

But why the growing need? That's the question. Why the growing need to cater to a poorer and poorer people, and where did the money go? The economy has grown bigger, SO, where did the money go?

(I would venture a guess that Anarchrist means he is an anarchist in the service of Christ. And I would add, in the paraphrased words of Price Charles..."Whatever Christ is". Whatever.

The Lord Jesus has been co-opted and (mis)used by so many nuts, fanatics, cranks and idiots, it's hard to know who he is anymore. Luke had some idea I think, though speaking to these modern lunatics, you'd never know there was a Gospel of Luke.

Luke conflicts so glaringly with the Capitalist Bible and the Prosperity Gospel they have been sold, and are misguided enough, and greedy enough, to believe, that one wonders if you can buy a New Testament at Wal-mart with the Gospel of Luke already ripped out of it.)

Of course, I could be wrong. He could be a dog lover, and merely misspelled anarchist (very comforting).

And Pastor Crow, you buy your armor at Wal-mart? The lady at Nordstroms told me that godly women carry only Prada.

Do your mitzvah anyway. And remind me to do mine.

As to dieing penniless, a fair number of Walmart people at low level retired as millionaires due to the profit sharing.

I never did understand the life insurance scheme. Is this a tax scheme? A company as large as Walmart would normally be self-insured. The premiums paid would almost assuredly equal benefits received unless a corporation can take a tax deduction for insurance premiums and the benefits are tax free. I don't have the resources to research this...

Enough fun, time to go to Walmart. Oh, would Jesus be a socialist?

OR, come to think of it, maybe I can take Ramsey's financial management class in the church basement, and he'll tell me. He can probably hook me up with a good deal on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage while I'm there.

Truly, I think my notions of socialism are about as quaint as your notions of capitalism.

I know where the money went. Since Reagan, we have passed thousands and thousands of little and big laws (and treaties) that have sent the money up to a few people at the top. It's not a fair economy, it's a rigged economy (and it's getting more rigged), and it's not hard work or education that gets you ahead in the new American capitalism. Why do all that hard work when you can accomplish the same thing at a weekend retreat at the Cedars?

Chasing the moneychangers from the temple? That's just removing the unfair competitive advantage provided to government (church) sanctioned enterprises to allow free market operation.

Shirley says it best. Love it!

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

I had to google "Jan and Paul" ... guess I am not up on latest theological doctrines.

Since you answered my theology question will you answer my tax question? Given IRC§265(a)(1) How did Walmart make money on life insurance policies on employees?

Life can't be based on sound bites. Even if it could, you would need to provide some evidence that Walmart is a cause of what you see as a race to the bottom. While they certainly aren't creating the lower middle classe, Walmart does help raise a lot of people into the lower middle class. All those lower class people they hire (the ones on food stamps) are eventually able to move from the lower class into the middle class thanks to gainful employment.

@Kevin - A quick superficial explanation is that it was something said in partial jest during a conversation w/ a friend years ago. I've used it as a screen name on internet forums ever since. To change the subject, in case you care, there are two colons after http in the url in your profile making the link unclickable.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/666837/posts

http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Insurance/P64954.asp

Or do a search on 'Dead Peasants' for more. Of course, these writers like Liz Pulliam Weston and others are probably Commies hiding in our woodwork.

And I would wager that most of the $8 an hour Walmart workers are middle age and older women and men. I base this on an unscientific survey of their stores on Rte 37 here in Toms River and their one on Rte 9 in Hudson NY. Maybe they are sent by the local welfare office. To quote a spokesperson: "Security Code 8"

The numbers on the growth of real income have been slipping since the 1970's. Now, you can choose to ignore it. Even the tricks to hide it don't work anymore. Tricks like using household income to hide the slippage (it's a trick because the household went from one, usually male worker who could bring home the bacon, to a whole village of family members who must be drafted into the effort to try to stay above water today).

Strangely, this slippage in the standard of wealth for most Americans mirrors the de facto destruction of the unions. Strangely, the destruction of the unions was completed and made possible by unrestricted free trade which brought the cheaper, overseas labor on online. AND it brought us cheaper clothes. Wow!

Strange thing about the clothes though: they should be even cheaper. Much cheaper. The money was not sucked southward, as Ross Perot predicted, it was sucked upward. That's why your clothes are cheaper, but NOT that cheap. The inefficient middle man, as Sam Walton saw him, has actually become king of the heap, and one of the biggest middle men is Walmart itself: exploiting overseas labor, bringing down the wages of Americans, selling cheap stuff to those same Americans who can now only afford cheap stuff, and putting their considerable cut of the difference in their pockets.

Walmart is just one player though. I don't mean to blame it just on Wal-mart. They've all worked together to prostitute and debase our legislative system to what it is today.

We've had a growing national income, but a declining per capita growth in real income (and for that matter, even household income!)....so where is the wealth going? Who has stacked the deck in their favor? Most people are so busy enabling this new wealth and it's tactics, they never stop to see what's happening.

The idea was hatched back in Arthur B. Langlie's successful campaign for mayor of Seattle in 1938. Really, it was not so much hatched as it was perfected. Business and politics is not corrupt anymore, but on the other hand, corruption is not ended: it's legalized.

P.S. We don't even have to go overseas for the cheap labor anymore. We just bring the labor over here to compete with our college kids by way of things like the H1B visa: God's gift to the computer and software industry, and all those promised middle class jobs for our hard working, educated kids go: poof, and the profits go: up (and upwards). But the software is cheap, and the shrinking middle class that can't afford a tax professional errr uses software to do his taxes. And the race to the bottom continues.

Thanks Great Almighty Omnipotent One for enlightening the rest of us. I will now accept everything you state no matter the complete lack of evidence.

You guys are on top of a tree, and the tree is being cut down, and you're enabling the guy with the chainsaw.

I don't follow any political party, nor do I see politics as a solution. The problem with your view is claiming Walmart is the one with the chainsaw.

The worst thing of this is your hypocrisy. To condemn others for supporting Walmart while you refuse to stop shopping there is sickening. So even if Walmart is the guy with the chainsaw, you're the one enabling him, not me. I don't shop at Walmart, there aren't any located near me.

http://lanekenworthy.net/2008/09/03/slow-income-growth-for-middle-america/

Also, speaking of median household income, I was wrong, it has has barely inched up over the years (though what it looks like in/after this recession can only be worse), HOWEVER, household income is in essense a fraud because what it took one man (usually) to take home until the mid-70s (the apple), is now what at least two people take home (the orange). You have to look at per capita to get a better sense of how middle class median income is diverging from our growth in GDP.

I think Reagan came along about 1980. What's so ironic is that Reagan, the pro-family, traditional values president who never got along with his own family, actually wrecked the American family because his policies so enabled and facilitated the greed at the top, that the stagnation of median wages forced women into the workforce so families could just stay even.

Clinton was just Reagan-lite though. He facilitated the passage of NAFTA (and set the stage for even more crooked trades deals) along with the considerable help of a Republican controlled Congress of the time.

WalMart is not the cause. WalMart is an inevitable result of Capitalism in an age of global finance and multinational corporations, organizations so huge that they don't even know who owns them. Marx' dark ideas about he future of Capital, while far from perfectly prescient, deserve to be read. He identified the inevitable consolidation of business and the ultimate failure of the free market that must come from the unrestrained invisible hand of Adam Smith.

Corporations owe their owners maximum profits. Corporations owe no duty to society at large. Through sheer size and immortality, a few corporations accumulate vast wealth and unlimited political influence while consuming or destroying smaller, less powerful competitors. In the absence of careful regulation, WalMart is what you get along with globalized markets and severely depressed wages for 95% of the populace. Then, since markets disappear due to spreading poverty, comes the collapse. Americans scoff at the hackneyed cant used by Communists (of which I am certainly not one) but there is such a thing as a fatal internal contradiction and global capitalism suffers from it.

No one reads Marx anymore because his economic theory (I am not talking collective verses private ownership) has been discredited. Marx considered labor as the only factor of production that yielded more than its own value as it was used, therefore exploitation of labor was the only source of profit. He considered capital (as in equipment) as only having the productive value of the past labor stored in it, therefore, as you noted, corporation could only increase profit by becoming bigger and bigger. For a better approach, look at Schumpeter's cycles of creative destruction where creativity and productivity replaces the old. Everyone wants to blame offshore for the lost of manufacturing jobs, actually offshore accounts for only 15% of the lost jobs, 85% is due to increased productivity. I tell the story in a different thread about the Amish furniture maker using CNC routers to make chair legs. It not low wages or pressure on suppliers that distinguishs Walmart from the competition, but the better they handle the inventory. My working career spans 40 years, go back 40 years and look at the Fortune 100, a lot of changes 1969

One of my real concerns is we are developing a bimodal distribution of income with education being the determing factor. How do we make the society more just? My concern is that we tend to consider all income as disposiable. Well Trick or Treaters are here so more later

I don't offer Marx as a prophet or even as a good economist. I offer him to provoke thought. The smug certainty that Americans have expressed throughout my entire life that corporate capitalism is the only answer is now being shaken to the ground. Low taxes and un-regulation is, as it has always been, a recipe for disaster.

Disasters will always happen whether strong governments or strong corporations "run things".

It seems that the US economy is not creating as much wealth as it used to. But is this a real problem, a reduction in what is really a superabundance of wealth? As "third world" countries develop it would seems that the economic wealth would leave the US instead of continually run to it. Is this a "race to the bottom", or a trek towards global equilibrium?

And if the US loses wealth it will be felt, in the US, mostly among those who are not wealthy, comparably. But those individuals still have a ways to go before reaching true poverty. Maybe the "American Dream" is not going to be achieved by as high as a percentage of US people as it used to be, maybe that was an irrelevant goal anyhow.