The New York Times runs a report on Wal-Mart eliciting bloggers to paraphrase spoonfed canned PR for Wal-Mart. After all, if one pro-Wal-Mart blogger was caught writing exactly what another one was writing, the public would get suspicious, wouldn’t it?
Brian Pickrell of the Iowa Voice blog is one such individual, using his blog “to attack state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance.”
I especially like this.
…he has written at least three postings that contain language identical to sentences in e-mail from Mr. Manson. In one, which Mr. Pickrell attributed to a “reader,” he reported that Wal-Mart was about to announce that a store in Illinois received 25,000 applications for 325 jobs. “That’s a 1.3 percent acceptance rate,” the message read. “Consider this: Harvard University (undergraduate) accepts 11 percent of applicants. The Navy Seals accept 5 percent of applicants.”
Hahahaha. Yeah, we’re all in real good shape when Wal-Mart gets 25,000 applications for 325 jobs. There’s just so much wrong there we can let slide for the moment that Pickrell is boosting Wal-Mart, as a blogger, for no compensation. I guess that means Pickrell is honorable? No, he’s an idiot. If Wal-Mart wrote and asked me to boost them, I’d ask what they were going to do for me.
Hahahaha. Comparing Wal-Mart to Harvard and the Navy Seals. Valor and brains. That’s supposed to be your association. Instead of reading and thinking, “Gee, our country sucks big time unemployment-wise,” you’re instead supposed to nod a ponderous head and conclude that somehow Wal-Mart is more selective when it comes to patriotic valor and Ivy League brains.
Wal-Mart’s blogging initiative is part of a ballooning public relations campaign developed in consultation with Edelman to help Wal-Mart as two groups, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, aggressively prod it to change. The groups operate blogs that receive posts from current and former Wal-Mart employees, elected leaders and consumers.
Edelman also helped Wal-Mart develop a political-style war room, staffed by former political operatives, which monitors and responds to the retailer’s critics, and helped create Working Families for Wal-Mart, a new group that is trying to build support for the company in cities across the country.
Working Familiies for Walmart, huh? Its website has a page titled, “What’s at stake”:
Working families choose to shop at their neighborhood Wal-Mart stores to save money, save time and to get everything they need in one convenient place. And associates choose to work at Wal-Mart because it offers good wages, solid benefits and a chance at a career. But some union leaders in Washington, D.C. don’t want working families to benefit from Wal-Mart. These union leaders want to tell us — America’s working families — where to shop and work…working families everywhere know what the unions won’t acknowledge: Wal-Mart is good for America’s working families. Working families continue to shop at Wal-Mart and line up by the thousands for jobs at Wal-Mart stores because Wal-Mart continues to save working families money and provide good jobs with competitive pay and affordable health care. It really is time for the union leaders to let working families decide where to shop and work.
Their big proponent, splashed all over the home page is Civil Rights leader Andrew Young.
Andrew Young says,
“Those who have committed their lives to helping the poor believe that if more companies followed Wal-Mart’s lead, and provided opportunity and savings to those who need it most, more Americans who are battling poverty would be able to ascend the rungs of the ladder that leads to the American dream.”
What? But yes! One reads right. Indeed, it was announced on 2006 Feb 27th that Andrew Young is to “head” Working Families for Wal-Mart, their public face, giving interviews and “publishing opinion articles defending Wal-Mart.”
Andrew Young is head of GoodWorks International, of which Wal-Mart is the largest financial backer.
Andrew Young was a former mayor here.
Not that I’m one who goes aound talking up American Dreams–I don’t–but, man, makes me wonder what kind of American Dream Andrew Young has on his mind. If Andrew Young was stripped tonight, in his sleeep, of everything he possessed, and found himself in dreamland working as a Wal-Mart stock person, casheir or greeter, what do you want to bet he’d wake up screaming?
My head hurts.
The Black Commentator writes,
Black History Month 2006 ended on a jarring note. Andrew Young, a former member of Dr. King’s inner circle at SCLC, who went on to serve three terms in Congress, a stint as UN ambassador and two terms as mayor of Atlanta before cashing out his Freedom Movement chips for a lucrative career as an international “business consultant,” decisively spat upon the movement for human rights and economic justice that he spent his early career helping to build. Young announced on February 27, 2006 that he would chair Working Families for Wal-Mart, a media sock-puppet for the ruthless multinational firm. The cynical misuse of his stature as an icon of the Freedom Movement, preacher, former elected official, and honored elder in black America to mask and obscure the crimes of his corporate client marks Mr. Young as nothing more nor less than a corporate whore.
The article is well worth reading.
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