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Walton Family Members Claim Four Slots on Forbes’ List of Top 10 Richest Americans
Ah, to be a Walton. While most of America struggles to keep their houses, afford basic food items and preserve their dwindling retirement funds, the Waltons have made a big leap up on Forbes’ list of the top 400 richest Americans and now comfortably reside in slots four through seven on the list of top ten wealthiest people in the country. That’s up from their rank last year - when Jim, Rob, and Christy were tied for 12th place, with their sister Alice coming in right after them at 15th.
Sam Walton’s four children aren’t the only Walton family members on the list: E Stanley Kroenke and his wife Ann Walton Kroenke also make an appearance, as does Sam’s niece, Nancy Walton Laurie. Taken together, the family is worth over $100 billion.
That’s more than an average Wal-Mart worker could earn in ten thousand lifetimes. Many of Wal-Mart’s hourly employees live in near-poverty, often earning so little that they qualify for government assistance. Basic life needs - housing, food, health care - are often out of reach, even for employees working full time. The Walton family’s wealth is obscene in comparison.
Wal-Mart executives have refused to raise wages for the company’s lowest earning employees, stating that such increases would cut in to company profits. Obviously, profitability is not a problem. As Wal-Mart sees record sales and the Walton family climbs to the top of America’s economic ladder, the company should be ashamed for not sharing its wealth with its lowest-earning workers.
The 400 Richest Americans [Forbes]
Posted by Alex Goldschmidt on Thursday, September 18, 2008
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COMMENTS
Hey, I like Rich People! I just don’t like abusive arrogant rich people. The Walton Family doesn’t have normal people working for them, they have minions. The may have money but they are morally bankrupt.
Bobby in someplace else
Thursday, September 18 at 12:25 PM
Take a good luck at these Walton family faces all you Walmart workers.
Walmarts business model is to have 4 people share in the spoils of over 100 billion. Yet these pigs at the trough, nickle and dime families who are just trying to provide food, shelter and clothing for their members. Each and every member will not be remembered for any good they did but for the greed they displayed. That will be the Waltons legacy.
R E M E M B E R’
J O N Q U I E R E
Q U E B E C
Home of Walmart Worker Abuse
R E M E M B E R
J A C K S O N V I L L E
T E X A S
Home of Walmart Worker Abuse
Alex in Ontario, Canada
Thursday, September 18 at 12:41 PM
This article appears in the January 23, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Wal-Mart’s Walton Family:
The Beasts of Bentonville
by Richard Freeman
The Walton family, which founded and today controls Wal-Mart, lives on blood money. Operating jointly with the City of London-Wall Street bankers, it became the world’s wealthiest family by decimating the U.S. and world physical economies, and by applying ferocious austerity, driving wages and living standards beneath the level needed for existence. Forbes magazine places the worth of the family at greater than $100 billion.
The threat posed by the Waltons is not merely in the size of their fortune. Older monied families such as the Mellons, Rockefellers, and the corrupted Ford family fortunes have been more powerful politically and financially, as have also been the much smaller family nest-eggs of George Soros and Michael Steinhardt. But the danger today is that the Waltons, with such a storehouse of wealth available to them, will use it, for one thing, to build even more Wal-Mart stores, with even more devastating effects on the world economy! But not only that:
The Waltons are using their enormous leverage to carefully construct a banking empire, under tight family control.
They are bankrolling a vast neo-conservative political network. For example, John Walton, who is worth more than $20 billion himself, was the largest single individual contributor to Gov. Jeb Bush in the 2002 Florida gubernatorial race.
They are the principal financial force in the effort to privatize the public school system, through school vouchers, which would wreck public education. They would create a School-Mart.
Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche has launched a national and international boycott of Wal-Mart, to expose and shut down the company. LaRouche has shown that under Wal-Mart’s policy of demanding that its suppliers supply goods to Wal-Mart at ridiculously low prices, the only way the suppliers can accomplish this is to shut down production in the United States, and ship it to sweatshop facilities overseas, which has caused the exodus of 1.5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs. Wal-Mart pays its workers below subsistence wages, and destroys communities. This is applied as a leading edge of a Roman Imperial-type policy, in which the American physical economy, no longer able to reproduce its own existence, sucks in a huge volume of imported goods from around the world. The more the United States feeds its import addiction, the more that destroys the U.S. physical economy, while driving the current account deficit to new and dangerous heights.
The campaign of LaRouche and , is drawing blood. Wal-Mart’s national spokesperson, Mona Williams, lashed out on Nov. 28, 2003, “There’s definitely a negative buzz out there. A lot of folks have started taking shots at us.” One magazine noted the shift: “Wal-Mart kicked off the year in the media as the nation’s ‘most-admired company,’ but it looks like it will wrap up 2003 as the ‘Beast of Bentonville’ “ (Bentonville, Arkansas is Wal-Mart’s headquarters). Last Christmas, Wal-Mart registered very slim sales growth, partly due to the faltering economy, but partly due to what the media is now highlighting as a Wal-Mart “image problem.” In the retail industry, if sales are not rising year on year, there is a problem.
To counterattack, Wal-Mart’s officers, led by chairman Rob Walton, made a strategic decision to bring out their ultimate weapon—the Sam Walton myth—in the hope that this will dazzle and disarm people. The myth has two components. First, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton (1918-92) is portrayed as a folksy, ol’ country boy, concerned about the welfare of his workers. According to this myth, Sam drove around in a pick-up truck, when he could have been chauffeured in a limousine. Mr. Sam, as he liked his underlings to call him, didn’t care a hoot about money, but only about following his dream.
The second part of the myth is that Mr. Sam disdained Wall Street, building his company through his own native genius and hard work.
By extension, this myth is stretched to cover the rest of the Walton clan. They are a chip off the block of ol’ Mr. Sam. They use their money to help people. Their savage amassing of a $100 billion fortune hasn’t changed them; they’re just like you and me.
No one should be dazzled by this myth. The truth is that Wal-Mart made its money by crushing its employees, its competitors, its suppliers, and foreign nations. It grew only through the aid and massive funding of Wall Street, which admires Wal-Mart as the paradigm of what it wants to achieve in a post-industrial society. Two examples of this—the 1970 financing when, Wal-Mart went public to pay off its debts; and the “Wal-Mart decade” (actually 1990 to 2002), when Wal-Mart grew to unprecedented size—make the point.
Bobby in someplace else
Thursday, September 18 at 04:46 PM
Good for the Waltons.
Big Tex in Rogers
Thursday, September 18 at 05:02 PM
Looks like ol’ “Robbie boy” will be joining “Lee” on the rock pile! “Bubba” will now have two bitches.
Hill Billy Deluxe in
Thursday, September 18 at 05:32 PM
my Friends I’m having a good time while the morons running the Us Economy are scratching their heads.... Enjoy!
Bobby in someplace else
Thursday, September 18 at 08:12 PM
Each family member looks like they have evil inside them.
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