On Wal-Mart - The Bully of Bentonville - How the High Cost of Everyday Low Prices Is Hurting America

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In "Wal-Mart: The Bully of Bentonville - How the High Cost of Everyday Low Prices Is Hurting America," Author Anthony Bianco made an argument about the predicament that Wal-Mart is in.... Should we agree with his argument? Agree or not, Bianco's argument painted an interesting future of American society? Interestingly, 'interesting future' in Chinese figure of speech usually denotes "people living in hard times (e.g., the Great Depression or the Russian Revolution).

In a nutshell, Bianco is arguing that Wal-Mart's bullying tactics of ensuring 'everyday low prices produces a high cost that is hurting America.' The remedy he offered can be interpreted as the need for Wal-Mart to replace its present business model with a new business model; stop squeezing employees and suppliers, and charge customers a little more (Businessweek.com, 2007).

Alas, Mr. Bianco portrayed Wal-Mart as 'a leopard that cannot (in this case, will not) change its spots.' In basketball parlance, Wal-Mart lives or dies by its jump shots. Quoting Bianco, "it simply knows no other way to compete and seems no more capable of altering its path now than a hammer can avoid the nail it was made to pound" (Bianco, 2007, p. 289).

As a matter of fact, Wal-Mart knows it is at a crossroad in its development as a corporation. However, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott thinks that his company doesn't need a new business plan instead the U.S. Government needs a new public policy plan. In deed, Scott "declared Wal-Mart's support for an increase in the federal minimum wage of $5.15" (Bianco, 2007, p. 288). At first glance, an observer would speculate that Wal-Mart is pulling something new out of its nefarious bag of tricks. It would be like the Neo-conservatives adopting the golden rule, 'the meek shall inherit the earth,' than the iron rule, 'might make right.' What is the reason for Scott's paradoxical position? Let's hear it from Scott, himself: "We can see first-hand at Wal-Mart how many of our customers are struggling to get by.... Our customers simply don't have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks. There are global forces at work flattening pay scales" (Bianco, 2007, p. 288).

Bianco's view is that Wal-Mart is one (the most powerful) of the global forces that is at work flattening pay scales because of its low-price, low-wage image - an image that sets the standard for the world economy (Bianco, 2007).

I'm in total agreement with Bianco's argument about Wal-Mart's predicament and the crossroad it finds itself. Hopefully, Wal-Mart will tinker (for the better) with its business plan as it tries to sell more organic food and fashionable apparel to capitalize on their higher margins profit. Thus, it will have an incentive to stop squeezing its employees since it will be charging (actually, it is at the current moment) more for the high-end products (Businessweek.com, 2007).

If Wal-Mart should adopt my recommendation given in the preceding paragraph, it will impede the global forces that are at work flattening pay scales. In fact, Wal-Mart would remake (for the better) its low-price, low-wage image into a fair-price, fair-wage image - an image that will set a new standard for the world economy (Bianco, 2007).

If not, the future of American society will witness a Wal-Mart self-destructing like General Motors and the Steel Industry. Verily, the self-professed unsinkable Wal-Mart would crash into the iceberg (the need for a new business plan) of reality. Unfortunately, American society will be a passenger on Wal-Mart's sinking Titanic, and like the employees of General Motors and the Steel Industry they will suffer the consequences of Wal-Mart's hubris.

In conclusion, I described Bianco's argument that Wal-Mart has to make the change that matters - the need to replace its low-price, low-wage image with a fair-price, fair-wage image - in order to get itself out of its predicament. In turn, I produced arguments of my own that agrees with Bianco's conclusion, and the importance of Wal-Mart's compliance to ensure a better future for American society.

In the role of a devil's advocate, I once entertained the thought that Wal-Mart's present business plan might be a benefit to the pharmaceutical industry. For example, American society would benefit from the low prices that a Wal-Mart would force upon its pharmaceutical suppliers. After all, the pharmaceutical industry notoriously shares a spot in 'the axis of evil (including the healthcare industry)' that tries 'to squeeze the blood out of the turnip.' (For example, Michael Moore's Sicko provides great documentation on the preceding sentence). Then, I asked myself wouldn't the Wal-Mart induced pharmaceutical low prices produce a high cost that would in turn hurt America?

Home Made Energy Guide

Home Made Energy is a guide that will teach how to make solar panels and wind turbines for under 200$! I researched this product quite a bit, and a high percentage of people are fully satisfied. With the recession and the growing energy costs this could come in handy. If you are like most people in America paying outrageous prices for energy, or just want to help the environment, this a something to buy.

I'm one of those people who wants to help the environment and all that jazz, but I can't afford to buy all of the expensive solar panels and other energy helping devices. I was looking for "green" things i could get instead of the less "green" items that do the same thing when I ran into this. I read through the sales page then searched for some user opinions. As I said above, a high percentages (not sure of exact numbers, 80-95%) of the people who have bought this don't regret it one bit and are saving tons of money. These weren't the responses you see in ads, I actually sent messages to a few of the people. On top of that I spent most of my free time since i was 10 on the internet so I've learned to recognize fakes.

This guide is really easy to understand. I read it was written so a 10 year old would be able to understand. All of the materials you need you can buy at a local hardware store for 200$ (total). Once again, this product would be a great buy and will save you plenty of money of energy.

'The First National Bank of Dad' Book Review

This book is sub-titled, "A Foolproof Method for Teaching Your Kids the Value of Money," and to my mind it delivers on that promise. At 190 pages it is an easy read, written in a very relaxed and humorous style, and full of personal anecdotes.

As parents, we are often conflicted about teaching our children to handle money. We want to give them practice at it, but we usually accomplish that by taking away their responsibility and forcing them to save. Large birthday or festive gifts of cash from generous relatives get whisked away from them and deposited in their savings account, out of their control, because we don't believe they will spend the money wisely. A child finds it hard to appreciate the need to save for college or a car or some other event way in their future, and the amount of money they earn on their deposits is so small as to be irrelevant (why is it called 'interest' when it is so uninteresting?).

It was while thinking about these problems that the author hit upon the idea of The First National Bank of Dad. This bank pays its depositors 5% interest a month on unused cash balances, which when compounded would equate to a 70% annual return (he does make it clear that he doesn't accept deposits from adults, or from anyone who didn't receive half their chromosomes from him!). The children's accounts were funded with an initial $25, their allowances were deposited on the first of the month, and after that they were completely in control, to spend or save, no questions asked. Not surprisingly, once they could see the advantages of letting their money 'charge up for a while', they voluntarily saved a good part of their income. They realized that, if they deferred consumption for a while, they would eventually be able to consume more.

As the children became older, the author eventually opened the Dad Stock Exchange to teach them about stock market investing. Once again, the 'rules' were easy to understand and implement but they were very effective in achieving their learning objectives. However, I won't spoil the plot by explaining them here - you'll have to read it!

Do whatever you have to do to get your hands on this wonderful book. My only regret is that it was published too late for me to use the excellent, easy-to-implement ideas on my kids. However, now that they're grown and have kids of their own, this book will be top of my present list for them to read and, hopefully, put into practice.

Mick Brooks is an educator, a public speaker, and an avid stock market investor. As a UK-qualified CPA, he thought making money in the stock market would be easy, but his 'education' cost him around $30,000, so now he makes it his goal to help others to avoid replicating the more obvious mistakes. Visit his website, http://www.beginning-investing.net/ for more advice and information, and don't forget to pick up your FREE copy of the 'Investing Secrets - Day Trading' report!
If you would like to teach your children how to invest, and give them a gift that will last them a lifetime, visit http://www.stocks-for-kids.com/ for information and resources.

Review of The Spirit Level - Why Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

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Sex education for potential teenage mothers; free gym membership for the obese; cognitive behavioral therapy for badly behaved children - all are inadequate, piecemeal solutions to the symptoms of a wider social malaise - inequality - says a new book by UK researchers.

The Spirit Level argues that the difference in earnings between richest and poorest in developed societies is the source of a catalog of social problems.

What is more, the authors insist, these problems cannot be solved without first addressing the underlying structures of inequality.

Richard Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham and his co-author Kate Pickett at the University of York argue that throughout human history the most effective way of increasing well-being has been to increase material wealth.

But we have reached "the end of that historical journey".

The starting point of The Spirit Level is the suggestion that when average income levels reach a certain level - comparable to earnings in countries such as Chile or Poland - increases in wealth cease to have any impact on well-being.

The book charts how inequality, not average income, is the more accurate predictor of signs of distress in developed countries - poor mental health, drug abuse, obesity, low educational performance, teenage parenting or violence.

Thus, in the US, one of the world's most unequal societies, one in four people have mental health problems. By comparison, in more equal societies such as Germany, Japan and Spain, the rate is lower than one in ten. This is just one of countless examples, backed up by compelling data. Across the 50 US states the pattern is the same: more equal states do better.

The common explanation for this is that unequal societies have proportionally more poor people. But Wilkinson and Pickett argue that although these problems affect the poor more seriously, the rich still suffer. This is why the super rich in the US, UK and Portugal - three unequal societies - do not live as long as the rich do, for example in Sweden, which has a more equal income distribution.

And this applies across the board. A rich child in the UK will not achieve as much educationally as children do in more equal European states like Belgium or Finland. On the face of it, the message is clear: we all suffer from inequality.

Wilkinson and Pickett draw on a range of evidence and theory, hypothesizing that more inequality leads to greater "status anxiety" - our concern about our standing in the world, whether we are going up or down, if we are winners or losers. Our self-image is forever in need of external praise to accept ourselves. Greater status anxiety leads to negative reactions like stress and violence, and their knock-on effects.

In offering a solution, Wilkinson and Pickett consider how some countries may have succeeded in achieving more equality. It seems that there is no single solution. Sweden and Japan for example, two of the most equal societies, operate by entirely different models.

Sweden has high taxes and redistributes wealth through a large welfare state; Japan, with some of the lowest public spending in the developed world, achieves the same by having much greater income equality before tax.

They also look to solutions already flourishing within unequal market democracies, turning to the success of the not-for-profit sector and workers co-operatives for inspiration.

Almost an outcomes agenda for the economy

A chapter is dedicated to suggesting how this philosophy can link up with current debates about environmental sustainability. Discussing the reduction of carbon emissions, they advocate a system that would make the rich - who inevitably expend more through greater consumption - pay their fair share.

But a more radical approach is needed. They question the entire ethos of consumerism and never-ending economic expansion that, they claim, is fueled largely by status competition. According to their research, cutting economic growth does not mean reductions in real quality of life. It almost sounds like an outcomes agenda for the economy.

Publishing of the book coincides with social activism in the form of The Equality Trust to carry the findings further. The trust is promoting employee-owned businesses; it commissions research on equality issues, lobbies politicians and policymakers, and engages with the media.

Were they to be widely corroborated, the conclusions of The Spirit Level would have potentially far-reaching implications for prevention and early intervention efforts. The authors acknowledge that governments can dampen the impact of some of the privations of growing up in poverty, for instance through social housing, health care and high quality early childhood education.

However, they are forthright in their criticism of interventions to tackle social problems one-by-one, on an individual basis.

"The unstated hope is that people - particularly the poor - can carry on in the same circumstances, but will somehow no longer succumb to mental illness, teenage pregnancy, educational failure, obesity or drugs." They are in no doubt that tackling inequality should be the priority before turning to intervention programs.

They question how far we can go by assisting the poor financially, without reining back the earnings of the rich. Far from being an asset, it appears the super rich are actually a burden on the rest of us. Salary caps and more progressive taxation are one way forward. Although this may horrify supporters of neo-liberal economics, Wilkinson points out that, in a curious twist of logic, equality is actually in everyone's own self-interest.

Addressing inequality is, in some ways, far simpler. It provides a universal remedy for many of society's ills. But it implies a much grander task. Rolling out a program of parenting classes for kids with conduct disorder is hard enough. Taking on inequality implies altering the values of entire societies.

The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett is published by Allen Lane. It is also available as an ePub and an eBook.

Prevention Action (http://www.preventionaction.org/) is an online news publication reporting internationally on prevention and early intervention programs for improving children's health and development.

Comprehensive
The focus of the website extends to physical, behavioral, emotional, social and intellectual development. Daily stories, comment and blogs look at the potential causes of impairments to children's health and development, such as poverty, poor housing, genes and gene-environment interactions, and family dysfunction.

We are also interested in public policy, professional practice and public behavior that bears on the success of prevention.

International
Coverage takes a determinedly broad view by reporting on initiatives from all over the world, among developed and developing societies.

Reliable
Prevention Action is intended to provide a high quality resource - as readable as a quality newspaper and as reliable for its high scientific standards as an academic journal.

We are an independent online publication managed by The Social Research Unit at Dartington in the UK http://www.dartington.org.uk/

Jubilee! Church and Community Support For Local Economic Growth in a Book That Matters to All of Us

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Why Historians and Americans Are So Worried About Socialism - Read This Book!

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There is a lot to be said about the economics of socialism, and how the ramp up of converting a capitalist society into a socialist one can bring good times temporarily, as a socialist leader can seize a nation by becoming a populist and wreak havoc on a nation. We've seen this in recent periods in Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Many in the United States warn we are indeed, headed in the wrong direction with our current leadership, in fact I am one of those who don't like the direction we are headed.

But rather than me get into a long debate on the subject, why not do yourself a favor and read a little history on the topic. Here is a good book to read, I highly recommend it to you:

"Lords of Finance," by Liaquat Ahmed, Penguin Press, New York, NY, (2009), 536 pp, ISBN: 978-15942-01-820.

The book discusses the end of WWI and the demented inspiration of Hitler, and how the NAZIs came into power quickly from a very small group to one of the major parties in only a year and a half. Also discussed are the chaos of war, appeasement, gold Standard, Banks of England, and New York at the time and of course the Great Depression.

The Author suggests we are in the same place today, and he's got a great argument in that the charts sure look a lot the same. Another good book review on this very excellent book can be found online. It was in the New York Times, the title of the article is;

"A Monetary Horror Story that Looks Like Today's," by Janet Maslin on January 14, 2009.

Indeed, I recommend reading both, because I don't want to burst your next bubble, but socialism does not work, read for yourself. Please consider all this.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes it's hard to write 20,000 articles; http://www.bloggingcontent.net/

Note: All of Lance Winslow's articles are written by him, not by Automated Software, any Computer Program, or Artificially Intelligent Software. None of his articles are outsourced, PLR Content or written by ghost writers.

Book Review - Flat World, Big Gaps - Economic Liberalization, Globalization, Poverty and Inequality

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The position advanced by the authors of this book represent a shift from the dominant view in neo-liberal economic circles that economic liberalization and globalization are good for economic growth, poverty alleviation and reducing inequality in society. The authors argue that instead of closing the gaps created by poverty and inequality between countries and within societies, economic liberalization and globalization have made the situation worse. To substantiate their arguments, the authors draw richly from various case studies ranging from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Middle East, East Asia to Africa. The plethora of case studies presented makes this book unique, and exciting to read as it offers the reader the opportunity to search for the evidence themselves to test the validity of the arguments posited. Furthermore, the inclusion of a useful list of tables and figures in the beginning of the book makes it easy to find information that the reader may be urgently looking for a specific use without having to browse through the pages e.g. rates of poverty per region, global Gini coefficients and other useful information.

The book shows that contrary to conventional neo-liberal wisdom that globalization creates opportunities and opens market for countries; it aggravates inequality which the authors attribute to inter-national (globalization) rather than intra-national disparities. The book further shows that the advent of globalization has not brought any improvement in terms of addressing inequality and poverty rates, instead the conditions appear to have worsened. Countries' commitment to social spending has been negatively affected as a result of slow economic growth associated with globalization.

Avoiding being trapped in theoretical deliberations, this book presents a realistic picture of a world which is supported by hard facts on the impact of economic liberalization and globalization. Worth noting is that the issues that the books raise are not necessarily new as other authors have raised them before. However, this book goes a step further to present comprehensive evidence from a myriad of authors. The book therefore gives the reader a sanctuary from which he/she can critical reflect on the developments in the world today without being clouded by neo-liberal propaganda which blindly accepts that economic liberalization and globalization are good for development and creating an equal world. The recent anti-globalization movements throughout the world symbolizes a rise of a giant wave of dissatisfaction among the economical marginalized.

Finally, it is clear that although globalization may have created a world with integrated systems which makes it easier for people to interact and conduct business, it has however created gaps in terms of poverty and inequality. In other words, economic liberalization and globalization has done nothing to close the gaps but instead they have 'globalize inequality'. It is a source worth reading, especially for those who want to understand the impact of globalization and economic liberalization on poverty and inequality.