No wonder liberals are so easy to lampoon. Can you imagine the
donning of sackcloth and ashes that would have occurred if George W. Bush had
announced that his new budget director was a Walmart executive? Hands would be
wringing from Beverly Hills to Cambridge, MA. But I guess it’s okay when Barack
Obama does it, because I’ve heard nary a peep over his nomination of Sylvia
Mathews Burwell to succeed Jacob Lew as head of the Office of Management and
Budget (OMB), the agency that develops the president’s budget and evaluates the
effectiveness of executive branch programs.
To be fair, Burwell has only headed the Walmart Foundation
since 2010. Prior to then, she the president of the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation’s Global Development Program. She was briefly the chief operating
officer for the Gates Foundation, but she bolted to Walmart when she was passed
over for the CEO’s position. She also has some OMB experience; she worked with
the agency under–you guessed it–Bill “Bentonville” Clinton. It’s hard not to see the Clintons’ fingerprints
all over Obama’s choice to let her head the OMB.
Let’s cut through some major backpedaling. Surely Burwell’s
nomination is fine because she headed Walmart’s charitable arm, not its retail wing. No, it’s not. The Walmart
Foundation appears to be the nation’s largest corporate charity–until you parse
it. By total giving, maybe, but remember that Walmart is the world’s largest
retailer and, worldwide, its revenue stream is second only to Dutch Royal Shell.
One would expect someone with more revenue to give more in absolute terms, but
if we adjust for size, Walmart is as cheap and shoddy as the goods it sells. It
gives a parsimonious .5% of pretax profits to charity, about half of what its
retail competitors give, and cheapskate stuff by the standards of small fry
such as Ben and Jerry’s, the Body Shop, and Patagonia, which give 10% upfront.
The corporate average is around 5.0%. Walmart’s largess works out to about
$25,000 per store–hardly Santa Claus numbers.
Who gets the dough is also less than meets the eye. Walmart
occasionally does the right thing. It outshined the Federal Emergency
Management Agency during Hurricane Katrina. But let’s not get carried away;
that was an anomaly–and it happened before Burwell came aboard. All charitable donations
must be approved by Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and its list
of approved donors breaks down into benign groups such as the Red Cross, and
those that list rightward: the Salvation Army, evangelical churches, youth ministries,
abstinence programs, and rightwing think tanks and non-profits such the Cato
Institute, the Evergreen Freedom Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the
National Right to Work Defense Foundation. Walmart also spends much more freely on
non-deductible efforts such as Republican PACs, antiunion campaigns, and the
tawdry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that sandbagged John Kerry’s 2004
presidential bid. All of this is to say that Walmart is about as charitable as
an executioner granting a last cigarette to the man he’s about to shoot. Stay
tuned for Wednesday’s column to see why Walmart takes more out the economy than
it ever puts back.
Walmart is what’s wrong with the American economy, not part
of the fix. Liberals need to take the stars from their eyes and realize that
Obama is not on their side; he’s as big a fake as Bill Clinton (who ought to
play the Wizard of Oz in the new movie). Liberals–and those of us who’ve moved
beyond them–should stop pretending that Barack Obama is the next coming of
Martin Luther King, and vigorously oppose Sylvia Burwell’s appointment to the
OMB. Force Obama to appoint someone to the OMB post that will write a budget
that puts workers first–a task that can’t be accomplished by putting a sheen of
respectability on a corporation that exploits them.
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