Walmart Movie - Nov 19

Since tonight seems to be Walmart night...

The makers of Outfoxed have spent thousands of hours pouring over mountains of documents and interviewing workers from Missouri to China to expose the damage mass production and mass retail is doing to people all over the world. Wal-Mart, The High Cost of Low Price will be premiering at “6,000+ homes, churches, family businesses, schools, living rooms, community centers, and parking lots across the country” on Nov 19. Even my very small town has arranged a free showing, so be sure and check the database for an opportunity to view this important film.

LINKS & MORE:
http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/?view=plink&id=1436

They provide jobs, low prices to the poor, and they do nice things in the community.

Oh wait, I guess I saw too many of their commercials :)

WalMart had potential for being good to people, the US as a whole, and the economy. Seems to me thay squandered that in a rush for profits over people.

If the right wants to talk about anti-americanism WalMart is a good place to start IMHO. POP (profit-over-people) seems to dominate them these days.

The few take advantage of the many, instead of the few helping build up the many. NAFTA and such things talk about building up the 3rd world so that they will grow and want more from us and tell us how that will help us - the idea is to build up the 3rd world so that they need more from us and create jobs here. Well....what is good for the goose is good for the gander they say - why does not walmart pay their people more and do more them so that those people can shop somewhere other than walmart and build up the base?

I dunno - it all seems awfully weird to me......

Also a good rule of thumb, if you think about it, is this, the food chain, so to speak, works like this. The Middle class shop at Wal*Mart, and Wal*Mart associates shop at Goodwill, believe me I did, and food pantries and soup kitchens worked as well.

They're showing it free in my little town of 7000. I bet it's showing in your town too!!

My only regret is that they didn't interview me, Wal*Mart associate from Feb. of 1997 to Dec. of 2000 for this movie, maybe for a follow up though, I got some stories to tell! :)

i would be interesting in reading about it.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5340646&mesg_id=5340646

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5330026&mesg_id=5340567

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5337560&mesg_id=5340197

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5330099&mesg_id=5330887

I only wrote a little. :)

i look forward to reading them. i haven't looked too much into the walmart cart protest threads much but knew it was a bad idea.

and get others to do the same.

3:00 & 7:00...I'll be there, Please, be there too!!!!

With little fanfare, Robert Greenwald has become one of the most incisive activist filmmakers in America. Like his superb eve-of-the-election docs, Uncovered: The War on Iraq and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is an investigative outcry driven by stringent reporting rather than attitude. Mixing statistics and employee testimony, Greenwald details business practices that provoke a gathering outrage: the coerced unpaid overtime, the foreign sweatshop labor, the health-insurance packages (now being upgraded) that have left thousands of employees to rely on Medicaid, the sucking dry of mom-and-pop stores. Greenwald floats the vital issue of whether Wal-Mart should be restrained by antimonopoly regulations, but his real question is cultural: Even with its rock-bottom prices, is Wal-Mart in the best interest of American consumers? - Entertainment Weekly


You probably know most of the information that appears in Greenwald's film by now -- a laundry list of anti-Wal-Mart indictments has been aired in the news media over the past few years -- but it remains a powerful experience to see it gathered together and supported by witness after witness. On various levels, "Wal-Mart" is a more effective and impressive film than either Greenwald's "Uncovered: The War on Iraq" or "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism." The target is more elusive, arguably more dangerous and definitely less well-understood, so Greenwald and his team have had to dig deeper and weave together many different strands of research and reporting. Knowledgeable critics of the Bush administration or Fox News are relatively easy to find. Whistle-blowers who know about the inside workings of Wal-Mart are few and far between, and this film will make you appreciate their courage and convictions...

For me, the crippling moment arrives when Greenwald takes his cameras to a factory in China, where workers toil 14 hours a day, seven days a week, to make toys for Wal-Mart. They're paid roughly 30 to 40 cents an hour (with rent for the factory's dormitory, with its triple-decker bunk beds, deducted) and perhaps an economist could convince me that's a decent wage in that context. But for me these workers and their painful, hopeful stories recalled the righteous anger of Chapter 4 of Marx's "Capital," with its descriptions of the Industrial Revolution's workday that began long before dawn and went deep into the night, of women locked in sweatshops and 8-year-old children fed their lunches inside the machinery. I started anxiously reading the labels on my shirts and asking myself questions: Where did I buy this -- I'm hoping the answer is the Salvation Army -- and where did it come from before that? And am I really willing to buy a shirt at a price that would pay the person who made it a decent wage? - Salon

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2005/11/03/btm/

"buy a shirt at a price that would pay the person who made it a decent wage?"

I'm sure the writer wrote with all good intentions. But this is the biggest load of the whole thing. A pair of shoes is $10 at Walmart. Slap Nike on it and it's $100. Has NOTHING to do with wages and EVERYTHING to do with investors. This has been going on for 30-40 years.