A few snippets don't really give the full impact of this corporate greed-is-good, screw-the-workers diatribe, so read the whole nasty mess at:
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2006/12/28/opinion/02suttonwalmart.txtMy LTTE follows.
MP
Wal-Mart doesn't give its employees adequate health benefits, and this creates expenses for society.
On a huge scale, this falls into the "healthcare crisis" we're told we're suffering from. But since 1975 the average lifespan of all US citizens has gone from 73 years to 78 years. That trend's been happening for decades. With everybody.
That's why life insurance premiums have dropped. Everybody's living longer. White women live longest, but their longevity is growing the slowest. Black males die the soonest, but their life spans are increasing fastest. While wailing about the ER's being impacted by so many uninsured patients, the wailers forget that this, by itself, is universal healthcare. It's just not called that.
That's the big picture. Looking closer, Wal-Mart doesn't give benefits to match their shrinking competitors, like Sears and K-Mart. (You older readers might remember when Sears was viewed as the evil predator.) Sears and K-Mart, of course, are shrinking today because they can't offer competitive pricing. And switching industries, McDonalds doesn't lavish the benefits on their employees the way Starbucks boasts about.Here is my LTTE response:
The 7 (Mostly Funny) Wal-Mart Objections by Gary Sutton caught my eye because I thought it would actually be funny. But as I read, it became more like trying to not look at a grisly car crash.
By about the fifth paragraph I had given up on the idea of responding with a point-by-point refutation since the writer contradicts himself several times. Instead I was wondering why he is blaming so many ills of the world on labor unions while at the same time trying to come off as the champion of the working stiff.
The answer lay at the very end of the page; “Gary Sutton is a retired CEO”. Of course!
A corporate executive who writes an anti-union screed and then tries to make the reader believe his motivation is some altruistic concern about consumer choice is simply displaying his intellectual dishonesty.
Sutton’s thin veneer of concern about those who need to save money on a pencil is lost to his abhorrence of anything that might interfere with those all-important corporate profits. To the CEO it doesn’t matter one whit who or what they destroy in their quest for more and more money.
I have recently come to look to the Voice as a viable alternative news source, but I can certainly do without the same right-wing greed-is-good drivel that can be found every day in the U-T. 
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