Open warfare has broken out between Wake-Up Wal-Mart and the Wal-Flacks at Working Families. You probably don’t have to guess which side I’m on [I voted for Bob McAdam as my favorite Greedy Right-Wing Liar Who Works for Wal-Mart. He deserves more than a lousy 3% share], but this seems like a good time to remind everybody that the case against Wal-Mart is not necessarily political. Luckily, I’ve been sitting on a five-part series that makes precisely this point. I’ll start posting it here and follow it up each day whenever I can get to a computer.

Last month, a Democratic pollster named Thomas Riehle wrote an article for Real Clear Politics entitled “Democrats Make Wal-Mart an Issue at Their Peril.” Reporting the results of his own firm’s poll, Riehle wrote:

Democratic candidates hoping to gain politically by attacking Wal-Mart in this election cycle might want to rethink their strategy….By a 3-to-1 margin, 62% disapprove and only 21% approve of “Democratic candidates making Wal-Mart an issue in November’s elections,” in the RT Strategies poll conducted June 1-5 with a representative sample of 1,209 adults nationwide.

Riehle also noted that “84% of Americans shopped at Wal-Mart in the past year,” wording that is lifted almost verbatim from Wal-Mart’s own propaganda web site. Knowing this, it should come as no surprise to learn that Working Families for Wal-Mart, a pro-Wal-Mart group funded by Wal-Mart, paid for Riehle’s poll.

Despite this obvious breach of ethics (Riehle’s relationship with Wal-Mart was not mentioned in the first version of the article. Real Clear Politics apologized for the mistake), Democrats would be foolish to dismiss Riehle’s point without further consideration. After all, many Americans DO shop at Wal-Mart. While this does not necessarily suggest a great love for the company (Do you love your gas station or your hardware store?), attacking Wal-Mart just to give red meat to the Democratic base is not only bad politics but bad strategy.

Does that mean that concerned Democrats should do nothing and hope the Wal-Mart issue will go away? That’s certainly what Wal-Mart wants them to do. Why else would the company’s front group have commissioned that poll? No, the key to making Wal-Mart change its ways is to offer a detailed critique of the company that people of all political persuasions can endorse. That’s what I’m going to try to do in this series.

While many liberals are justifiably concerned about the company’s employment policies, the issues revolving around Wal-Mart go well beyond how the company treats its employees to other questions that ought concern a wide range of citizens from all political persuasions. For example, Wal-Mart’s relationship with the Chinese Communist regime is an issue for both human rights advocates as well as anti-Communist conservatives. Likewise, the market power Wal-Mart gets from its sheer size ought to concern anyone interested in preserving American free enterprise whether they are on the left or the right. And, of course, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, few people want the crime, traffic and pollution that living near a Wal-Mart store practically guarantees.

Why then has Wal-Mart become a left/right issue? Certainly labor groups like Wake-Up Wal-Mart have spearheaded efforts to bring many of the issues surrounding Wal-Mart to public attention. But to imply that “paid anti-Wal-Mart critics and the union bosses” are the only people “attacking the company,” as Working Families for Wal-Mart recently did is just silly. As Jeffrey Hollender of the firm Seventh Generation explains:

Wal-Mart has unintentionally succeeded in uniting a diverse collection of activists, from labor and environmental advocates to health care and women’s rights campaigners, that otherwise rarely even speak to each other.

Now I happen to be a Democratic and a big fan of trade unions. However, I am willing to make common cause with anybody – left, right or in between – if they are concerned about how Wal-Mart is affecting their community, their country and/or their world. While liberals are most often identified with anti-Wal-Mart efforts, they are hardly the only people affected by the company. If people understand the case against Wal-Mart in its entirety, opposition to Wal-Mart should transcend party lines.

I’ll begin the consensus case against Wal-Mart by discussing the store on a personal level. I’ll cover my experiences as a customer and why smart shoppers are better off not going there. After that, I’ll discuss Wal-Mart’s effects upon communities or, to put it bluntly, why Wal-Mart is a bad neighbor. I’ll continue with the consensus explanation of why Wal-Mart is bad for America. Then I’ll end by explaining why I think Wal-Mart is anti-democratic and a threat to the free market.

If you support Wal-Mart and shop there now, I hope you’ll give my case a fair read and not dismiss it out of hand because of who I am or what party I tend to support. If you are a Wal-Mart opponent already, I hope you’ll use my points to persuade Wal-Mart shopping friends and family to stand with us. While Democrats and Republicans alike ought to be concerned about the risks inherent in making Wal-Mart a political issue, I would argue that if they frame their critique of the company in the terms I will outline, they will have a lot more success than Riehle’s poll numbers imply.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 1928 by Jonathan Rees and is filed under Walmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.