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John Walton, 58, died in a plane crash Monday. I suppose now’s not the appropriate time, out of respect of the recently dead and their grieving family, to say anything other than, “Condolences.” But his death just reminded me of the impending repeal on the estate tax, how 5 of the top 10 richest people in the US (in 2004) are Helen Walton and her four children, Jim, John (now dead), Rob, Helen and Alice, worth about $100 billion together, nearly twice as much as Bill Gates, and just how much money they contribute toward policy that impoverishes the America that has made them so bloody, obscenely rich.

We’re supposed to feel friendly with the Waltons because Sam Walton has been sold as not caring about money. He liked pick-up trucks and didn’t flaunt his wealth.

We’re supposed to feel friendly with Rob Walton who

One other thing about Rob Walton’s office: It’s about the size of a large supply closet. “Ten feet by ten feet,” he says proudly. “With no windows.” All the offices at Wal-Mart are small, but Rob’s is smaller than that of most other senior executives, for two reasons. First, it sends the message that even Mr. Sam’s son doesn’t get preferential treatment. Second, Rob isn’t in the office that much these days—only four or five times a month. He has other passions. From his home in the Colorado mountains Rob will take off in his jet to go cycling in France, or hunt geese in Canada, or go on bio-safaris in South America.
Source: mindfully.org

You don’t become an empire worth $100 billion by not caring about money. You can use that facade of down-home, just-like-you people however to bilk others and try to convince them that it’s fine if they make $15,000 a year because, by gosh, you only take a 10 by10 closet for your office, hey look I’m just as self-sacrificing as you.

You do this buy selling the company as the we’re-all-in-this-together jumbo love fest of merchandising, that it’s the people who shop and get the bargains who are Number One, rather than the hundred billion dollar family.

During the early to mid 1990s, my husband’s mother called nearly weekly to tell my husband that Wal-Mart was employing and that she was sure it was the nicest place to work, everyone was always smiling there. She had purchased the ad copy without question, which she was likely to do as a southern religious conservative. I know she had the idea that Wal-Mart was a Christian love fest and the fact it gave people jobs meant it was philanthropic. My husband, a musician, kept saying no, and she kept saying that she was sure he could work the music aisle, and he’d get off the phone saying he just wanted to shoot himself, because it was pretty depressing to be told over and over that Wal-Mart was hiring and you could probably work the music aisle. In a short period of time she turned her Wal-Mart recruiting efforts on one of his brothers as well. Her persistence would have made one think she was an official Wal-Mart recruiter, that Wal-Mart actually paid well and she stood to make a big bonus for each fish she hauled in. Instead it was only her faith in their cheaper than cheap merchandising and the smiling greeters in their blue vests who needed no union because Wal-Mart certainly had the two best unifiers around, the old red, white and blue and the bible club. Somewhere along the way it must have escaped her why her father was a union man in the paper mill and why when he retired he went to work for the union. Regardless of how low the pay was, it would be a regular paycheck, and the world wasn’t going to sit right with her until one of her sons was part of the Wal-Mart family.

Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they’re held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart “full time” is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year…Health-care benefits? Only if you’ve been there two years; then the plan hits you with such huge premiums that few can afford it-only 38% of Wal-Marters are covered.
Source: Bullying people from your town to China, April 26 2002

It’s no different now than when Sam Walton was alive either. Sam Walton is the individual who instituted its quality work program.

First, he resolved to pay his workers less, ferociously resisted any unionization, and restricted most of his workers to working no more than 28 hours per week, which would mean they would not qualify for employee benefits—and would never be able to earn a living wage. He offered some of them health benefits, but most did not earn enough to purchase the health insurance. Though the myth arose that this policy became prevalent only after Walton’s April 1992 death, the fact is that Mr. Sam enforced it from day one. Wal-Mart workers earn wage and benefit packages that are 12-30% below those paid to workers in comparable jobs at unionized companies, depending on the job classification. During most of Sam Walton’s reign, Wal-Mart had a worker turnover rate of an incredible 35-45%.
Source: Executive Intelligence Review, Jan 23 2004, The Beasts of Bentonville

And as for the low-cost merchandise:

Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche has launched a national and international boycott of Wal-Mart, to expose and shut down the company. LaRouche has shown that under Wal-Mart’s policy of demanding that its suppliers supply goods to Wal-Mart at ridiculously low prices, the only way the suppliers can accomplish this is to shut down production in the United States, and ship it to sweatshop facilities overseas, which has caused the exodus of 1.5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs. Wal-Mart pays its workers below subsistence wages, and destroys communities.
Source: Executive Intelligence Review, Jan 23 2004, The Beasts of Bentonville

As Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee reports, “In country after country, factories that produce for Wal-Mart are the worst,” adding that the bottom-feeding labor policy of this one corporation “is actually lowering standards in China, slashing wages and benefits, imposing long mandatory-overtime shifts, while tolerating the arbitrary firing of workers who even dare to discuss factory conditions.”
Source: Bullying people from your town to China, April 26 2002

We tried, back in the 90s, when the Waltons weren’t worth near what they are now, to talk to her about Wal-Mart’s part in reshaping the merchandise landscape, putting mom and pop businesses out of business, shutting down American factory jobs in pursuit of the cheapest product from places using virtual slave labor. We talked about the low wages and how no Wal-Mart wasn’t a friendly place. We told her about their hiring practices. She would say oh that was horrible about sweat shops and she’d heard about that but she continued buying real goods and trivial goods there. After several years she stopped the weekly plea to become one of the smiling fine faces at Wal-Mart, it one day sinking in that my husband meant it when he said he found this offensive, and she said she was sorry, but one rather had the feeling we’d denied her something. The commercials in the 90s concentrated on selling how happy the employers were as part of the Wal-Mart family. They were sold as normal, conservative employees and perhaps she would have liked for us to be more normal and Wal-Mart was the last stop on the train for my husband to be a 28 hour a week wage laborer. The commercials at times gave Wal-Mart the feel of a second chance spot where you could go to jump start your life again with a second “career”, like a merchandising half-way house, and that good wholesome gratitude just to be working translating into eager greeters I’m sure imparted a kind of fuzzy, cozy glow. Wal-Mart employees were also represented as no less than merchandise missionaries and the customers were missionaries as well, taking their business to Wal-Mart.

My husband’s mother is not a stupid woman. In her early 60s, returning to college to get her degree, she graduated Valedictorian.

She is a committed believer in church first and trusts a friendly conservative smile. Her brain shuts down when she smells a cross or a flag. That friendly conservative smile can stab you a hundred times in the back with a cross or flag pole and if it brings you flowers in the hospital she’ll say they just couldn’t have been nicer. You can say, “No, they’re not! They left us lying bleeding to death in the road!” And she’ll reply that well you might not care for them but they couldn’t have been nicer to her.

The people that snapped up Wal-Mart’s commercial flag-waving are the same who put Bush within close enough reach of the presidency that he could coast the rest of the way in on his illegal power slide. They voted like the Waltons wanted them to. I don’t watch television much but I’m sure if I got videotapes of Wal-Mart commercials I could find in every one the subtle presence of Bushdom somewhere. If only Reagan’s appeal to dig through the horse shit as hard as you can to get to more horse shit. The ads must reek of it.

Alice Walton, one of the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, is tied with her mother, Helen Walton, for the distinction of richest woman in the world. They are each worth about $20 billion. Helen is 86 years old. Shortly before the election, Alice Walton gave $2.6 million to Progress for America, which is the organization that funded the Swift Boat Veterans ads and is a big supporter of tax reform and private Social Security accounts. Walton also gave $1 million to the Bush-Cheney campaign, and she paid $1 million to a lobbyist to push for reform of capital gains and estate taxes. When someone can put down this kind of money, people listen.

John Walton was the largest single individual contributor to Jeb Bush in Florida 2002.

When Helen Walton dies, her estate could be subject to the tax. If the tax is repealed before Helen dies, the entire $20 billion goes to her heirs tax free. Now, you may say this is OK because, after all, Helen’s husband, Sam, earned this money and paid taxes on it already. That’s not really true.

Sam Walton started Wal-Mart with just $20,000. He built it into an empire worth $87 billion and still owned all of his shares when he died. He never paid taxes on the capital gains because that only comes due when you sell the property.

Since his death, this is shared between his children and his widow, Helen. Under the tax law, the “capital gains clock” starts over. If the heirs ever sell the property, they will only need to pay taxes on the amount above what it was worth when Sam died. If the family had sold all of their shares the day after his death, they would have paid no tax on the gain.

Helen’s share of the Wal-Mart fortune is $20 billion. If she dies, and her assets go to her children, they will again escape capital gains taxes on the amount gained since Sam’s death. If the estate tax is repealed, they will pay zero tax on billions of dollars.

That’s just the effect of the estate tax on this family. Let’s also look at the dividend tax repeal. The Walton family receives about a billion dollars per year in dividends from Wal-Mart. That’s currently taxed at 15% and will soon fall to 0%. So, there’s billions more tax-free. It’s pretty easy to see why Alice Walton wanted George Bush re-elected.

But, you say, won’t the Waltons take all of these tax breaks and invest them in the economy, creating new jobs? Please. They are shipping jobs overseas as fast as they can. (Most of what they sell is now produced in China). The more we give them in tax breaks, the more they create jobs in China and create job losses in the United States.

Source: Madison.com post 2005 April 16:

Bill Gates, in 2003, made 1.2 billion in grants. The Waltons made about 400 million in grants, 300 million being a one time grant to the University of Arkansas. I don’t consider Gates to be the most giving person in the world, but he has half what the Waltons do and gave out over twice as much in grants.

I don’t know if included in those grants is their funding the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute the Manhattan Institute, the Landmark Legal Foundation, the National Right to Work Legal Defense & Education Foundation, and others.

The first pair of jeans I ever got I believe were from one of Sam Walton’s stores. My father’s parents lived in southwestern Missouri, one county over from Benton County, Arkansas, where the evil empire of Walton has their base of operations in Bentonville. They had relatives in Benton County, Arkansas and would drive down to visit frequently, and would have been well familiar with the area. In 1967 jeans were not yet that popular for young girls, and I forget who decided I needed a pair, but boy was I excited because we were going to go buy me a pair of jeans and I so did want a pair of jeans. It was Fall and we drove a long ways through black night to get where-ever we were going, which they said was a new kind of store, big kind of store, has everything you could possibly want kind of store, which is why we were going there as they were certain they’d have jeans for me, and other shops around there didn’t carry them, they were sure. This was rather exciting too. A new kind of store. And I still remember driving up in front of it.

I felt disheartened rather than excited. I didn’t like the look of the store. A great big dismal, depressing box of a store that made no pretense of shopping for aesthetic enjoyment. We went inside and did manage to find a pair of boy’s jeans that fit me just right. And left. I remember my grandfather asking if she didn’t want to look around some and she said she’d seen all she needed to see.

My grandfather, as we drove away, said the store did seem to serve a need in areas where it was convenient for rural shoppers to be able to purchase whatever they needed in one place.

My grandmother was the penultimate bargain shopper who purchased just for reason of a bargain, whether she was in need or not, for which reason she had two large closets filled with clothing. I don’t remember her being very thrilled with Sam Walton’s big bargain store. Perhaps she was ecstatic over the bargains and I don’t remember it, but I do know that not once when I was staying with them did we ever return to it. She instead did her bargain shopping at the mom and pop dress stores where she was known and where she could tell people that she was also looking for a particular style in a particular color and they would say we have a new shipment coming in next week and we believe we have something like that and we’ll hold onto it for you so you can take a look at it first.

The Walton family is worth one hundred billion. They’re gearing up to be worth even more, pursuing banking. And I ask, how much money does a person need? What do you do if you end up with all the eggs in the basket? Where’s the fun?

Don’t tell me about how Mrs. Walton used to get up at 6:30 in the morning and cook grits for everyone. I don’t want to hear it. There’s nothing humble or normal about one family being worth one hundred billion dollars.

With shrewd investing, seems to me any family could get by on a measly one billion dollars.