I wish I had seen this sooner. I can see all kinds of misperceptions advanced by readers that Wal-Mart no doubt finds delicious especially knowing they, Wal-Mart had a hand in planting those. If Wal-Mart didn't invent propaganda and misleading ideas they certainly have perfected them.

Andy Young wasn't just hired for show and free press. It did look good putting him in charge of the astroturf group and it made Working Families for Wal-Mart (put together and funding by Wal-Mart) seem legit rather than a way for Wal-Mart to sign up unsuspecting shoppers with the lure of free coupons so they can send out their political garbage instead. Promising money for nothing also allowed Wal-Mart to claim thousands had voluntarily signed up when almost none had a clue how they were being used and manipulated.

Working Families spokesman Kevin Sheridan confirmed that Crosslink is launching its grass-roots effort in metro Atlanta and Denver. The campaign eventually will go nationwide.

In an e-mailed response, Sheridan said the goal is "to sign up citizen spokespeople — leaders in their communities who can give voice to the millions of Americans who believe Wal-Mart is good for working families."

Sheridan said the group may contact members to urge them to write letters to editors or call talk-radio shows to defend Wal-Mart whenever controversies arise.

Officials at Crosslink did not respond to requests for an interview.

Starting last month, Crosslink hired temporary workers to staff sign-up tables in front of Wal-Mart stores in metro Atlanta.

On a recent Saturday, four such workers were posted outside the two entrances to a Wal-Mart in Marietta, Ga. As shoppers entered the store, they were encouraged to join Working Families for Wal-Mart.

Their immediate reward was to be enrolled in a drawing to win an expense-paid party, one of a series to be offered for Memorial Day, July Fourth, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve.

Shoppers were not told who was paying for the operation. The postcards they filled out said only: Yes, I will join Working Families for Wal-Mart because I support lower prices for working families and more jobs for my community.

The cards did not explain how their contact information would be used or what their duties might be.

Wal-Mart has advanced the idea that neighborhood grocers are a rip-off and care only about themselves for years, long before Andy came on board. My goodness, Wal-Mart can claim as an achievement that "Mom & Pop" are now evil words to be avoided as shysters instead of the contributing members of our towns and communities and the taxpayers they are; who are also propping up Wal-Mart with the breaks Wal-Mart pressures onto municipal governments, state and federal coffers in numerous ways that small businesses can't access.

I'm positive the idea of the neighborhood grocer ripping off minorities was fed to Andy by Wal-Mart as an important talking point to bring up to the press and public. There's no doubt in my mind. I'm just chuckling over how it backfired on Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart's business with Andy was not just as propaganda front-man in regards to minorities (who Wal-Mart and the Waltons have misled many times and will again). Andy runs Good Works International and Wal-Mart is a client. GWI is involved in getting business into Africa and the Caribbean where so far there is no Wal-Mart.

Rob Walton, who still essentially runs Wal-Mart, is already involved in Africa, with the cover being environmentalism but in reality is privatizing parks like what they wish to do with public schools in the United States.

Wal-Mart, the Waltons, and privatizing public schools is something that should be uncovered and publicized. Their involvement isn't just in trying to advance the idea but deeply political, fraudulent astroturfing, getting public schools taken down to atrociously poor funding levels so those schools appear to be failing, along with constant attacks on Teacher's unions while publicly pretending to celebrate teachers.

Together with the Bradley Foundation of Milwaukie (Causes supported: affirmative action reversal, reform of Social Security, welfare reform, privatization of public education through school vouchers), the Waltons started a group called Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) via the Institute for Transformational Learning at Marquette University, led by Howard Fuller who's wife, Deborah McGriff, is Edison Teachers College president and BAEO board member for the Edison Project aka Edison Schools and Edison Corporation.

[As superintendent of Milwaukie public schools] Fuller considered contracts from two for-profit school management firms, the Edison Project and Education Alternatives Inc. – the latter a company owned and operated by BAEO funder John Walton – to run school-to-work programs. No deal, however, was ever finalized. Fuller also invited RAND Institute researcher and privatization advocate Paul T. Hill to speak to MPS administrators. Hill’s 1995 RAND report, “Reinventing Public Education,” details how to replace “the entire existing public education governance system” with a contracting system.

[emphasis mine]

This astroturf group of the Bradley and Walton Family foundations has been able to get at least $1.5 dollars in tax payer money from the Department of Education while Bush has been in power.

Realize too that Michael Joyce, then executive director of the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation was also promoting other things:

Joyce also channeled at least $1 million to Charles Murray, author of "The Bell Curve," the book that gave academic respectability to the theory that Blacks are intellectually inferior to whites. Joyce left Bradley in June to devote full time to his Washington lobbying firm, Americans for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprise. He has permanent access to George Bush's ear, having been the principal architect of Republican social policy over the last decade. It was Joyce who inspired the GOP's faith-based initiatives strategy and the party's most restrictive welfare "reforms," as well as the vouchers offensive among Blacks.

[emphasis mine]

This memo on who's behind the voucher movement is revealing especially since so many are also behind the repeal of the estate tax (aka Paris Hilton tax) and yes that includes the Waltons with their Wal-Mart fortune that brings them around an extra billion each year just from their stock holding dividends.

Black Commentator has many articles revealing the influences of the Bradley Foundation and Wal-Mart.

While Wal-Mart pretends to be interested in issues of race and class Wal-Mart is in reality far worse than those Andrew Young attempted to classify and divert blame onto as ripping the African American community off. Wal-Mart wants the money and to use the group but doesn't want to give back to the community members.  2 percent to 3 percent of Wal-Mart's highway drivers are black, compared with 15 percent of highway truck drivers over all. That's just one of many.

As Liza Featherstone points out:

You know, it's just so difficult to find black men in the South.

What about the massive press coverage of the feel good backing by Wal-Mart of the Voting Rights Act that many outlets printed word for word of the press release straight from Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas?

Let's go back to BAEO and New Jersey.

The Right’s systematic assault on the Black body politic is dramatically evident in heavily Black and Latino northern New Jersey, a focus of Wal-Mart heir John Walton’s inner city pro-voucher “philanthropy” and Karl Rove’s machinations among Black ministers. The two paths intersect at the Newark-based voucher outfit Excellent Education for Everyone, or E-3. The hyper-aggressive political front can count on about a half million dollars a year from the Walton Family Foundation ($400,000 in  2003) and also benefits from federal Education Department  grants to the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (HCREO), another pro-voucher outfit. HCREO shares funding links (Bush’s Education Department and rightwing foundations) with the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), one of whose founding directors, former and future Newark mayoral candidate Cory Booker (see “Fruit of the Poisoned Tree,  April 5, 2002), was also a founder of E-3. (Booker received campaign financing from the Waltons, as well.)

This isn’t conspiracy theory; rather, it’s the result of strategic planning and funding by the Bush regime, the Waltons and, especially, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which invented both the “Black” voucher “movement” and faith-based initiatives in the mid-Nineties.

...

[Lionel Leach, Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund-NJ} Leach is also a member of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) Commission. “New Jersey has the most voter suppression in the country,” he says. The GOP has “done everything possible to suppress the Black and Latino vote.” In what appears on the surface like a kind of political schizophrenia, Republicans use every legal and illegal means available to keep Blacks from voting en masse, yet spend vast sums to gain the overt or covert support of Black ministers.

Just because Wal-Mart doesn't say it outright, doesn't mean Wal-Mart isn't doing it. Outright.

Wal-Mart absolutely should be a Democratic Party concern. The left is a huge target of Wal-Mart's.

We need to see Wal-Mart has already engaged the left in battle for years.

Jim, John, Alice, Sam and Helen may carry the world’s most dangerous genetic markers. They are the Waltons, heirs to the global destructive force called Wal-Mart.

With more than $100 billion in personal assets between them, the five Waltons occupy positions six through ten in the Forbes billionaires rankings, twice as rich as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the guy at the top. Collectively, they are anti-social malevolence with a last name. These spawn of Bentonville, Arkansas harbor an abiding hatred for the public sphere: business regulatory controls, nondiscrimination laws, wage and workplace safety standards, the social safety net – all of it – as expressed through the operations of their retail empire, which is both the largest employer in the United States and biggest importer of goods made in China; a planetary presence.  As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) put it, “Wal-Mart is more than just a participant in the low-wage economy: it is the most important single beneficiary of that economy. It uses its economic and political power to extend the scope of the low-wage economy and threatens to extend its business model into other sectors of the economy, undermining the wages of still more workers.”

~~~

The circles of resistance become larger, because the Wal-Mart model attempts to diminish and weaken us all. Wal-Mart wants more than blood – it covets every inch of social space, the places where human civilization lives.

Soon the diabolical Walton family will pump a billion more dollars a year into its offensive against public education, seeking to saturate African American politics with paid flunkies, drive a wedge between Blacks and labor, and cripple the people’s ability to resist.

We must build a bigger circle.

[emphasis mine]

Wal-Mart jobs, no matter how many there might eventually be (and for every two the company creates three are lost elsewhere) are not jobs that power the economy or the community.

We also might want to think what are the consequences of putting our food supply in total control of corporations and what our costs will be then.