Walmart has made several attempts to invade NYC. Each and every time, whether they were aiming to screw Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island, New Yorkers fought back and kept them out.

Well, they're at it again, even starting a website to try and head off opposition. Bloomerg and the right wing New York Post have been pushing for Walmart to open up in NYC even though Walmart has been shown to deliberately destroy small businesses, use illegal immigrant labor paying them slave wages, and treating their workers badly.

I don't mind big chain stores. I like IKEA and CostCo and Trader Joe's in particular. But Wal-Mart has been shown to be bad for communities they open up in. Walmart will be BAD FOR NYC too. Destruction of small businesses, replacing them with low-paid jobs that Walmart often fills with illegal labor to cut costs...AND sucks at taxpayer money to do it. They KILL jobs in the long run.

Learn about Wal-Mart’s Dismal Record on Worker and Customer Safety (PDF)  read more »

Remember that Mike Bloomberg keeps pushing for a WalMart in NYC...and community after community has fought back. Even Staten Island. The fact that WalMart destroys local businesses like the Borg destroying a Starfleet armada is one of the main reasons even Staten Island fought back against the Bloomberg/WalMart push.

But I think in many communities the fact that they lost one of the biggest sexual discrimination suits is another factor. That court decision is under appeal in the Supreme Court, and WalMart's case isn't that they didn't discriminate. It is simply that they are "too big to fail."

From the National Organization of Women:

On Dec. 6, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear retail giant Wal-Mart's challenge to a class-action lawsuit against the company involving more than 1.5 million women. Wal-Mart did not ask the high court to review the actual charges that the company routinely discriminated against its women employees. Instead, the challenge seeks to halt the largest-ever discrimination case in the country before it even gets to trial.  read more »

crossposted to Daily Kos and MyDD and Albany State Project

My friends at Wake-Up Wal-Mart and I have seen something remarkable:

In what we might presume to be the most bone-headed, most egregious iteration yet of the right-wing media's effort to convince us all itself that Wal-Mart = America, and that those who fault the company are in fact terrist sympathizers who no doubt also hate baseball and apple pie, this weekend the New York Post provided us with a nearly three thousand-word manifesto on Wal-Mart's unassailable decency, penned by intrepid regurgitator Charles Platt.  read more »

Well into his fourth decade of song-crafting prowess, and his third of life as a household name, Bruce Springsteen now stands at the pinnacle of singer-songwriter achievement: first sharing a stage with the Father of American Folk Music at the We Are One Concert on the National Mall, then rocking out a set of blue-collar anthems a scant two weeks later at the Super Bowl.

The Boss has earned it. From his rebuff of Reagan’s ham-fisted “Born in the U.S.A.” co-opt, to his protest of Amadou Diallo’s sanctioned murder by performing “41 Shots” in Madison Square Garden, Springsteen has made it clear that his is the music of the oppressed, the dissatisfied, the American underdog— making his misstep with Wal-Mart all the more confounding.  read more »

A lot of discussion has taken place on liberal blogs following the brutal death of Djimytai Damour at a New York store on Black Friday.

At MyDD, folks asked what the event meant about our culture, or pondered what Wal-Mart might have done to prevent the man's death, while over at Daily Kos there was a spirited debate over whether Wal-Mart was even responsible.

I do some work with Wake-Up Wal-Mart-- what they did was raise money to relieve Damour's family. We've been following this story pretty closely. Now it's taken another turn.

Now Leana Lockley, the pregnant woman whom Jdimytai Damour died saving, is telling her tale:

"There were so many people on top of me it just went silent," Lockley said. "I started hearing my teeth grinding in my mouth and my body being crushed. I really thought I lost my baby."  read more »