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Which World Series Team Has the Less Obnoxious Owner, Giants or Royals?

by FloreneGKQN Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

Game 6 of baseball’s World Series is tonight in Kansas City, and the stakes are high: The San Francisco Giants could clinch their third championship in five years with a win, while the hometown Royals need a win to stay alive. Don’t have a rooting interest, or looking for another reason to tune in? Check out Mother Jones‘ report from last year on the political and business dealings of Major League Baseball’s owners. If you like Karl Rove, you may want to pull for the Giants—but if rationalizing child labor is more your taste, go Royals!

Here’s the dish on the Giants’ Charles B. Johnson:

Johnson, a mutual-funds baron and the 211th-richest person in the world according to Forbes, spent some $200,000 to try to defeat California’s Proposition 30, the sales and income tax increase that included elements of the state’s millionaire’s tax initiative. (Prop. 30 passed in November.) Other political expenditures: $50,000 for Prop. 32, which would have kept unions and corporations from using automatic payroll deductions to bankroll political activity, and $200,000 for Karl Rove’s American Crossroads.

And the Royals’ David Glass:

In 1992, when he was still president and CEO of Walmart, Glass was confronted by NBC’s Dateline with evidence of child labor at a T-shirt factory in Bangladesh. His response: “You and I might, perhaps, define children differently.” As Glass explained, looks can be deceiving—Asians are short. Then he ended the interview. Meanwhile, as the Royals’ owner he’s pocketed profits without making any discernible investment in the on-field product. He also once revoked press credentials of reporters who asked critical questions.

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Which World Series Team Has the Less Obnoxious Owner, Giants or Royals?

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Walmart is the Biggest Corporate Solar User. Why Are Its Owners Funding Groups That Oppose Solar?

by JanTearlelwk Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Walmart loves solar power—as long as it’s on their roof, and not yours.

That’s the takeaway from a report released today by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which found that between 2010 and 2013 the Walton Family Foundation has donated just under $4.5 million to groups like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which have worked to impede state-level policies that promote clean energy.

The list of groups that have received funding from the Walton Foundation reads like a who’s who of “the groups who are leading the charge against rooftop solar,” said Stacy Mitchell, who authored the report. Rob Walton, who sits on the Foundation board, is also the chair of Walmart’s board; his family are majority shareholders of Walmart and some of the richest people in America.

The funny thing is that Walmart, the world’s biggest company, is also the world’s biggest commercial solar user. Indeed, solar power is a key aspect of its much-touted green makeover. According to data released last year from the Solar Energy Industries Association, Walmart has 89 megawatts of installed solar capacity on its retail rooftops. That’s twice the capacity of second-ranked Costco and more than the total capacity of 37 individual states. Of course, those figures are less impressive when looked at in a light that better reflects the company’s mind-boggling size: Less than 3 percent of the company’s total power comes from renewables—including solar, wind, and biogas—according to EPA data.

Here’s the list of groups receiving funding from the Walton Foundation that have taken positions against state-level clean energy policies, according to the report:

Courtesy Institute for Local Self-Reliance

The dollar figures in the chart above come from the Walton Family Foundation’s last four annual reports. All the groups listed, Mitchell said, have opposed state-level clean energy policies like renewable portfolio standards or net-metering, both of which are key tools in helping more households go solar.

Clearly the groups listed here are involved in a host of conservative and free-market issues beyond energy, so there’s no direct evidence that the Waltons’ foundation donated to these groups because of their opposition to policies promoting renewables. Indeed, a foundation spokesperson said that the report is misleading because it ignores the foundation’s donations to environmental groups and instead “chooses to focus on a handful of grants none of which were designated for renewable energy-related issues.”

But backing groups like this has a direct impact on the growth of clean energy, Mitchell said.

The upshot, she said, is “not that their vision of the future doesn’t include some solar power. It’s just solar power they own and control.”

Walmart declined to comment on the report.

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Why you should be skeptical of Walmart’s cheap organic food

by LesliJZAuqcp Posted on April 12, 2014

Walmarts and all

Why you should be skeptical of Walmart’s cheap organic food

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Walmart

Out on the mean streets of the U.S. organic foods industry, Walmart has stepped onto the corner with both guns drawn. On Thursday, the superstore behemoth announced its plan to partner with Wild Oats (which you may recognize as a former subsidiary of Whole Foods) to offer a line of organic goods at unprecedentedly low prices in 2,000 of its U.S. stores. To start, the line will offer primarily canned goods and other pantry staples that will cost up to 25 percent less than those of other organic brands.

At first blush, this appears to be great news. Cheaper, more accessible organic food – isn’t that one of the prerequisites for the kind of healthy food system we’ve all been waiting for? The New York Times notes that Walmart’s big move could ultimately create a larger supply of organic goods, pushing down organic prices in the long run.

From The New York Times:

“We’re removing the premium associated with organic groceries,” said Jack L. Sinclair, executive vice president of Walmart U.S.’s grocery division. The Wild Oats organic products will be priced the same as similar nonorganic brand-name goods.

If that sounds suspicious to anyone familiar with organic growing practices, it should. For those not as well-versed, we’re here to help! We spoke with Coach Mark Smallwood, executive director of The Rodale Institute in Kutztown, Penn., about how Walmart could manage to offer such low prices, and what that might mean for organic farmers across the country.

Smallwood explains that the concept of a “premium” associated with organic food is misleading, because the price of an organic good reflects the true cost of its production.

“The issue is that there aren’t the subsidies available to organic farmers that there are [for conventional farmers.] So there’s a question in my mind about how Walmart is going to pull this off and be able to make profit,” Smallwood said. “And for them to even come out and make that statement before they’ve started is a huge question mark. Somebody’s going to have to pay, and my hope is that it’s not the organic farmer.”

Smallwood also shared his concern that if Walmart were to incentivize large-scale organic production, industrial organic practices would become more widespread. In this model, farmers adhere to just the bare minimum of organic standards and ultimately end up depleting soil health on a piece of land, abandoning it, and moving on to another.

“Will a large agricultural operation come in and buy up tens of small family farms and put them all under one name, and then create that slash-and-burn model?” Smallwood said. “That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s the [possible] downside.”

For the optimists in all of us, let us remember that it’s too soon to know exactly which approach Walmart will take. As Smallwood says: “The potential is there for [organic farmers] to be treated very well, and paid handsomely for the wonderful artisan stewardship of the planet. What is that worth to Walmart? We’re going to find out.”

We reached out to Walmart specifically to ask if the company was planning to source from small-scale farmers, and where its farmers would be located geographically. This was their response via email:

Regarding your questions, we are working with our suppliers to create a surety of demand which ultimately helps us pass along savings to our customers. We’re using our scale to deliver quality, organic groceries to our customers for less. When we do this, it’s a win, win, win situation for our customers, our suppliers and our company. Our customers can trust that they will save money at Walmart, our suppliers can count on us for the demand and we are able to offer innovative new products.

Hey — we didn’t say it was a good response. Since it provides exactly none of the specifics that we sought out, we’ll just have to wait and see, and hope for the best.


Source
Walmart to Sell Organic Food, Undercutting Big Brands, The New York Times

Eve Andrews is a Grist fellow and new Seattle transplant via the mean streets of Chicago, Poughkeepsie, and Pittsburgh, respectively and in order of meanness. Follow her on Twitter.

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Why you should be skeptical of Walmart’s cheap organic food

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Farm Workers Win an Extra Penny from the Ultimate Penny Pincher, Walmart

by CarolNXGmes Posted on January 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Before fast-food workers began agitating for a liveable wage, before Walmart employees began holding public demonstrations to demand better pay from the largest US private employer, there was the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida’s vast tomato fields.

Living in dire conditions, disempowered by their status as undocumented migrants from points south, making sub-poverty wages, subjected to often-violent repression and sometimes outright slavery—all depicted in detail in Barry Estrabrook’s Tomatoland—the workers rolled out an ambitious and quixotic-seeming strategy to improve their lot in the mid-2000s. Rather than continuing to knock their heads against Florida’s entrenched tomato barons directly, CIW instead brought battle to their case to the growers’ customers: massive fast-food chains.

Using boycotts and partnering with college-student activists, CIW demanded that the chains pay an extra penny per pound for their tomatoes, which would then be passed on directly to the workers. A penny per pound would represent the first major pay raise in years for the workers, and a minor dip in profits for massive chains like McDonalds. Yet the chains fought back, sometimes voraciously.

And then, one by one, they fell: first YUM Brands (Taco Bell) signed the penny-a-pound pledge, then McDonalds, then Burger King, and finally, after a long battle, Chipotle Grill. After that, CIW turned its attention to retailers, signing agreements with Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.

Late Thursday, CIW netted the biggest fish of all: Walmart, by far the largest private food buyer in the US. A company that muscled its way to the top of the US corporate heap by pinching pennies—squeezing suppliers and its own workers relentlessly—has now agreed to shell out an extra penny per pound for tomatoes.

CIW has shown yet again that scrappy workers, sufficiently organized, can win concessions from even the most ruthless companies. Barry Estabrook has more.

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Farm Workers Win an Extra Penny from the Ultimate Penny Pincher, Walmart

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Big corporations are getting ready for carbon taxes, even if we’re not

by bibw6a Posted on December 5, 2013

Big corporations are getting ready for carbon taxes, even if we’re not

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When a promising cap-and-trade bill failed in the Senate in 2010, oil and coal companies everywhere must have breathed a sigh of relief, then probably wiped the sheen from their collective brow with a spare Benjamin and got back to work.

It now looks like some of that work involved planning for a time when they would actually lose the battle over their climate sins.

In a report [PDF] released by the UK-based Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), 29 companies — including the five biggest oil-producers, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP, and Shell (not that we’re keeping track) — report that they are using carbon pricing estimates to plan for hypothetical future regulation in the U.S. This generally means that an estimated carbon price is applied to a corporation’s big-investment projects — new drilling rigs, for example — which will likely be subject to some kind of emissions tax in ten or twenty years.

For climate hawks and economists disappointed by the failure of carbon tax schemes in the real world, this may sound hopeful: At least SOMEONE believes that carbon-pricing stands a chance, and soon, too. But it’s also just good business: With California’s fledgling cap-and trade market getting under way, and public opinion on climate change swinging back toward sanity, carbon tax is looking less and less utopian and more like a plausible business expense.

The CDP claims that the usage of internal carbon prices demonstrates the “assumption that addressing climate change will be both a business cost and a possible business opportunity.” Basically, if companies start planning now, maybe our global economy won’t go into a tailspin when we wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Plus, lots of international companies, especially ones operating in regulated Europe or Australia, are already dealing with carbon taxes in some form. Australia prices all consumer fossil fuels at about $21 per ton of carbon; for European countries it falls somewhere between $5 and $80.

ExxonMobil, king of the big five, is no stranger to the carbon debate. Despite a sordid history of funding huge anti-climate-science campaigns to widen the consensus gap between scientists and the general public, the company publicly supported a carbon tax in 2009 (while lobbying against the actual bill in Congress). In the CDP’s report, ExxonMobil had the highest reported cost — $60 per ton of carbon, by 2030 — while BP and Shell were more tentative with $40 a ton. (The U.S. government, by comparison, has set a tentative “social cost” price between $37 and $57 for 2015 [PDF].)

Even companies like Google and Disney got in on the carbon-pricing action, using auction prices from California’s cap-and-trade scheme to help set the bar. Not everyone is as committed: Walmart claimed only that their estimated price is set “flexibly,” whatever that means.

One conspicuous absence (drumroll, please): everyone’s favorite climate-denying multinational conglomerate, Koch Industries! The multibillion dollar corporation, with its history of campaigning against all things climate-science-y, has not joined the herd of oil companies in budgeting for carbon tax. The Koch-funded American Energy Alliance has spent $1.2 billion this year alone in attacking candidates who allegedly support a carbon price.

Of course, no one can guarantee that any of the companies reporting internal carbon prices aren’t engaging in other forms of shenanigans, hanky-panky, or mustache-twirling in this and other environmental areas. Xcel Energy, one of the 29 companies, was recently embroiled in an attempt to restrict access to local, renewable energy in Boulder, Colo. ExxonMobil, with all its pinkie-promises to be more sustainable, has started investing in natural gas — which is a smart move if carbon starts being taxed, but still lets them get away with plenty of other environmental shenanigans. And planning for a future carbon tax is a long way from actually supporting one. Color us cynical, but we have a hard time believing any energy company is that gung ho to undermine its business model.

“It’s climate change as a line item,” Tom Rivett-Carnac, the CDP’s North American director, told the New York Times. “They’re looking at it from a rational perspective, making a profit. It drives internal decision-making.”

I guess it’s good that someone is looking at it from a rational perspective. Maybe U.S. lawmakers will follow suit.

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Big corporations are getting ready for carbon taxes, even if we’re not

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Why Are Big Retailers Trying to Kill Thanksgiving?

by s02xc3x Posted on November 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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Note: Some opening times may vary by region.

In case you haven’t noticed, Black Friday isn’t just on Friday anymore. The retail industry’s high-density mass of starry lights, Santa dioramas, and door-buster shopping deals really ought to be renamed the Black Hole—it just keeps sucking up everything around it. That holiday known as Thanksgiving? Pretty much gone. Especially if you work for one of the nation’s largest retailers.

In 2006, Bart Reed, Best Buy Co.’s consumer marketing director, told the Charleston Gazette that the company had decided not to open its stores any earlier than 5 a.m. on Black Friday because it wanted to give its employees a “work-life balance.” Then, five years later, Best Buy moved its Black Friday opening back to Thursday at midnight. This year, for the first time, it will open at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.

Best Buy is far from alone in its cold-hearted greed. The chart above shows how America’s biggest retailers have competed in recent years to appeal to crazed shoppers at the expense of their employees—not to mention the one holiday where we’re supposed to contemplate being grateful for what we’ve got, rather than just coveting more stuff.

The undisputed leader in the assault on Thanksgiving is cleary Kmart, which has opened its doors on Turkey Day for the past 22 years. Yet this sad legacy hasn’t stopped Kmart from finding ways to make its workers even more miserable. For Thanksgiving 2010, Kmart closed at the arguably reasonable hour of 9 p.m. In 2011, it closed at 4 p.m. and then reopened four hours later, before closing at 3 a.m. on Black Friday. That must not have been crazy enough, since this year Kmart will open at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day and stay open for 40 hours straight, not closing until 11 p.m. on Black Friday.

That sounds pretty bad, until you consider that for years many Walmart stores have been open 24 hours a day, including Thanksgiving. This year Walmart will roll out its Black Friday specials at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving, when it will presumably need to bulk up its stores with more associates who’d normally be eating turkey with their families. At least some 24-hour Walmarts used to close on Thanksgiving Day: “Local Wal-Marts open at 5 a.m. on Black Friday, with 24-hour stores closing for Thanksgiving and reopening then,” reads a 2006 story from California’s Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.

At least one mega-retailer has resisted the Black Hole: Costco. The unionized big box chain will remain closed on Thanksgiving and open on Friday at its regular hour of 10:00 a.m. The company wants it workers to be able to spend time with their families, Costco CFO Richard Galanti told me. “It’s pretty straightforward: It’s a major holiday with family and friends, our employees work hard, and it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Black Friday used to open at 6 a.m., then at 3 a.m., then at 12:01 a.m.—when does it stop?”

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Dreaming of a Majoritarian Congress

by MatthiasA Posted on November 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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Martin Longman wonders what the Senate will be like if, eventually, the filibuster on legislation is eliminated. First he notes that the Employee Free Choice Act got the support of every single Democrat in 2007, when everyone knew it was doomed anyway thanks to a Republican filibuster, but suddenly lost several votes in 2009, when a big Democratic majority and a Democratic president meant that it actually had a chance of passage:

This is the kind of dynamic that is altered by eliminating the filibuster. Hiding behind cloture votes enables you to support things your base wants but that you think are too politically perilous to support if they might actually become law. Blanche Lincoln (D-Walmart) was pro-union when it didn’t count, and the Waltons were okay with that…wink, wink, nod, nod.

In the new Senate, particularly if the legislative filibuster soon succumbs, there will many fewer of these free votes, and imperiled senators in the middle will need to break with their party more often and more openly, which should provide more opportunities for bipartisan coalitions in the middle to form to cover each other’s asses. Rather than joining together to block legislation, which wasn’t even necessary so long as the Republicans remained united in their opposition, these senators will have to join together to mitigate the damage that could be done to their political careers if legislation actually passed. If sufficient mitigation cannot be achieved, they will have to join together to vote the legislation down.

There will certainly be fewer chances for cheap grandstanding if the filibuster is eliminated, though as Longman points out, those chances won’t go away entirely. They’ll stick around in circumstances when you know the House won’t go along or the president has threatened a veto. In some sense, this is good: it means that parties are actually responsible for their rhetoric. If Republicans say they want to cut Social Security or ban abortion, then by God, they’ll have to do it if they win control of Congress. It can’t just be cheap rhetoric. Ditto for Democrats who say they want to pass labor-friendly bills or gun control legislation.

Will this mean that centrist coalitions will become more important? I’m not sure. I feel like we need to game this out a little more thoroughly to get an answer. But it might!

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Dreaming of a Majoritarian Congress

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Walmart Ads Target "Low Income" Consumers With Junk Food

by LynnePilkington Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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In 2011, Walmart pledged to offer healthier grocery options by reducing the sugar and sodium content of packaged foods, rolling out a “Great For You” food label, and making fresh fruits and vegetables more affordable. It has done that to an extent, but those are not typically the products that it markets to its “low income” shoppers.

A November 13 advertising circular specifically aimed at low income customers included discount coupons for a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, a 10-pack of Kool-Aid Jammers drinks, and a 9.5-ounce bag of Cheetos. Only 3 of the 36 discounted items in the ad were labeled “Great For You,” while 10 of them touted high-sugar, high-sodium, or high-fat junk foods. The ad did not include any coupons for fresh fruits or vegetables.

By contrast, coupons appearing at the same time in a separate, more broadly targeted “Grocery” advertising page included yellow onions, whole carrots, and Bartlett pears.

At some point after November 13, Walmart changed the name of its “Low Income” coupon page to “Stretch & Save.” Walmart did not respond to questions about why it changed the name and why its Stretch & Save customers don’t deserve healthier options.

Early this year, Michele Obama appeared at a Walmart store in Springfield, Missouri, to tout the retail giant’s move towards healthier offerings. “For years, the conventional wisdom said that healthy products just didn’t sell,” she said from a podium set up in the produce section. “Thanks to Walmart and other companies, we are proving the conventional wisdom wrong.”

But Walmart’s advertising strategy seems to suggest that the retail giant still isn’t willing to market fresh fruits and vegetables to the shopping demographic that most needs them. It’s hard to say why. Maybe Walmart has figured out that ads for Bartlett pears won’t get the poor through the doors. Or maybe its mediocre and low-margin produce just isn’t profitable enough.

Either way, one would hope Walmart, as a corporate citizen, could see value in marketing healthy foods to low-income shoppers, given that those shoppers are also its workers. Then again, controlling its employees’ healthcare costs typically hasn’t been a big part of Walmart’s business plan.

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A win-Winco situation: Grocery chain treats employees well and has low prices

by nowy24login12 Posted on August 14, 2013

A win-Winco situation: Grocery chain treats employees well and has low prices

By Claire Thompson

Alisha Vargas

There are eight WinCo grocery stores within 100 miles of where I live. So how had I not heard about the Boise, Idaho-based chain until now? Next time I find myself in need of groceries in Kent, Wash., I’ll be sure to swing by the chain that’s making headlines as “Walmart’s worst nightmare.”

Why should Walmart be wary of this company that’s virtually unknown to shoppers outside the seven states in which it operates (and apparently to some inside those states as well)? Because WinCo, employee-owned since 1985, has figured out how to keep prices low — like lower-than-Walmart low — while still managing to not screw over its employees. Anyone who works at least 24 hours a week gets full health benefits, and WinCo puts an amount equivalent to 20 percent of employees’ salaries into a pension plan. The store claims that more than 400 “front-line” workers — cashiers, clerks, and others working on the floor instead of behind closed office doors — have pensions worth at least $1 million. Maybe that’s why, according to the company, the average hourly worker stays for more than eight years.

How does WinCo do it? What is the magic formula that Walmart and McDonald’s can’t seem to grasp? Well, for one thing, WinCo is privately held, and thus free from the obligation to put shareholder profits before all else. “It keeps a low profile and rarely engages in self-promotion,” according to the Idaho Statesman. How quaint and modest!

Alisha Vargas

Balancing low prices and employee satisfaction should be natural.

WinCo saves a lot by maintaining low overheard. First and foremost, it cuts out the middleman by sending its trucks directly to manufacturers, where the store buys product in large quantities that can net it up to a 50 percent discount. Also in WinCo’s bag of tricks are simple strategies like not accepting credit cards (to avoid paying fees to card processors), requiring customers to bag their own groceries, and literally cleaning up after Walmart: Instead of building new warehouses of its own, WinCo will take over vacant big-box stores.

Unlike Costco, which also has a reputation for low prices, no-frills décor, and an investment in employee satisfaction, Winco doesn’t require a membership fee, making it even more accessible to budget shoppers. And it’s expanding. It started in 1967 as a single store in Boise. In 1985, when then-CEO Bill Long negotiated an employee buyout, there were 18 WinCo stores selling less than $11 million on average. By 2007, WinCo stores numbered more than 50, and today, its nearly 100 locations do about $55 million in sales each. It has plans to expand into Texas next.

New York retail analyst Burt Flickinger III, a grocery-market specialist, uses WinCo as an example in talks with university students, calling the regional chain “arguably … the best retailer in the western U.S.”

Of course, WinCo still has a long way to go before it truly presents a threat to Walmart’s 4,000 U.S. locations [PDF]. But it’s nice to be reminded that, no matter what the corporate bigwigs might tell you about how they just can’t possibly offer their employees a living wage, another way is possible.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Will Congress and Darrell Issa Kill DC’s Living Wage Bill?

by Bart Jameson Posted on July 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, the DC Council passed a bill that would force large retailers in the city to pay their workers a living wage—specifically $12.50 an hour, a bill widely seen as targeted specifically at Walmart, which has been planning to open no fewer than five stores in the city. Walmart has been playing hardball, and shortly before the vote on the bill, it threatened to pull out of deals to put three of its stores in poor neighborhoods in DC. But the council didn’t cave, and now the bill is sitting on the desk of DC Mayor Vincent Gray, who hasn’t said what he’s going to do with it.

Walmart is furiously lobbying the mayor to veto the bill, and Walmart haters and unions are furiously lobbying him to let the bill pass. Gray lives in one of the neighborhoods with a decrepit shopping center destined for a new Walmart and hopefully a new lease on life, so he is somewhat sympathetic to the retailer. On the other hand, Walmart isn’t very popular in DC, and Gray is up for reelection next year and facing a slew of challengers. DC residents are watching the fight closely to see if DC might become the first major metro area to win such a confrontation with Walmart. Sadly for those of us who live here, we will probably lose no matter what the mayor decides to do.

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