It Ain’t John Boy’s Waltons

For those of you old enough to remember (or those of you who watch Nickelodeon), the CBS TV drama, The Walton’s, depicted a hardworking, Depression-era family who was willing to give everyone a fair shake.

Their namesakes in the ruthless word of Big Business don’t share this kind of egalitarian outlook at all. The real-life Walton family – the ones who lord over the ubiquitous Walmart empire – possess a “take no prisoners” kind of mentality.

As reported in the March 14 edition of In These Times, “Walmart Canada announced that it is closing its first North American outlet where workers successfully unionized”. Yes, rather than deal with their employees on equal terms, this behemoth simply decided to stick out their slimy corporate tongue in deviance.

I hate to admit it, but I was once a big cheerleader of the Walmart leviathan. Back in the 70s and 80s, I called Arkansas – the Natural State – home. Since Arkansas was viewed by many across the nation as a the state in which “guys liked to go to family reunions to pickup girls”, we Arkansans relished the fact that one of the up-and-coming economic powers in the retail world hailed from our neck of the [back]woods.

I only developed genuine social consciousness after earning my Master’s degree in Social Science (political philosophy emphasis) from Pittsburg State University in 1992. It was then that the scales fell from my eyes and I came to realize that Sam Walton was nothing more than a very power-hungry and enormously greedy man.

He operated an empire that

• squashed its competition
• destroyed local business
• promoted urban sprawl
• paid the vast majority of his workers as little as legally possible
• provided little in the way of benefits and real job security
• suckled at the nipple of public subsidies
• detested unions AND
• pocketed billions and billions of dollars into his fat pocket.

Imagine how different Walmart would be today if its founder had been the fictitious John Boy Walton instead of malicious Sam Walton! I bet John Boy would have struck a deal with his UNIONIZED workforce.