It looks like the Eagles, bastions of 70's rock, have signed an exclusive long-term strategic marketing agreement with the
Great Satan itself:
The Eagles and Wal- Mart Stores, Inc. today announced an exciting long-term strategic marketing agreement that will encompass sponsorship, exclusive audio and video releases, and product visibility. As America's biggest supporter of the music business, this partnership will create significant additional holiday interest at Wal-Mart.
Ostensibly, it looks like the main reason for this agreement is that someone at Wal-Mart hypnotized one of the Eagles' business managers into thinking that Wal-Mart is a responsible ecological retailer:
The Eagles were attracted to a Wal-Mart partnership because of the retailer's drive to take a lead in sustainability and make a difference for future generations. In the past year it has unveiled simple and straightforward environmental goals -- to be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain the earth's resources and environment.
Unfortunately, it looks like the folks who handle business for the Eagles do not really use "the Google" - if they did, they would see:
- Giant "big-box" stores such as Wal-Mart often "destroy attempts to create pedestrian-oriented communities and a sense of place and pride in low-income neighborhoods by use of unattractive building architecture and site layouts featuring huge expanses of black-top parking lots," according to an October 2003 city of Los Angeles report on supercenters.
- in 2005, Wal-Mart paid $1.15 million in fines to the state of Connecticut for the improper storage of pesticides and other toxins that polluted streams near its stores there, according to the Web site WakeUpWalMart.com.
- Between 2003 and 2005, state and federal environmental agencies fined Wal-Mart $5 million.
- And, as Wal-Mart Watch Executive Director Andrew Grossman says:
We're very encouraged that Wal-Mart is hiring smart experts to evaluate their environmental practices and help build new programs to improve the health and wellness of its employees.
It is important to note that our environmental allies like Adam Werbach who are working with Wal-Mart are assuming an enormous amount of responsibility to ensure Wal-Mart actually implements the plans it's announcing. Hiring isn't change - change is change.
True `sustainability' is more than just environmental change. If Wal-Mart is serious about taking on its moral responsibilities and taking the leadership role Americans expect of its biggest and most important corporation, it will move to address workplace issues both domestically and along its international supply chain.
In short, the company is using its "green initiatives" as a cheap way to deflect criticism of its horrendous worker's rights record.
I believe Wal-Mart will become, in the words of its CEO H. Lee Scott Jr., a company that runs entirely on renewable energy and produces zero net waste as much as I believe Dubya has a brand spankin' new strategy for Iraq.
What is really disgraceful in this whole affair is that Don Henley, a real hero to the Environmentalist movement for all the great work he did in preserving Walden Woods, would be sucked into this agreement that makes the Eagles the poster boys for one of the biggest violators of environmental and labor law on the planet.
This is bad - take the Deadhead sticker off the Cadillac and put on the Eagles.