Like Their Falling Prices...

John Walton died yesterday after crashing his experimental, ultralight aircraft, otherwise known as billionaire-guy diversion toy. He's the middle son of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. Wal-Mart's PR guys are already in full gear talking about what a great guy he was and all he did for charity and his awards from Vietnam blah blah blah. And while the mainstream media buys into it and praises the life of a guy they didn't even know about before today, just remember a few things when wading through the bullshit on CNN and FOX.

The big thing they talk about is his work "to help to educate poor children" by pushing for school vouchers. Translation: He wanted to get rid of public schools.

Walton was the 11th richest person in the world, tied with his youngest brother behind his older brother and ahead of his mom and sister. And how did this Republican-loved family get to be this rich? Hard work? No. They inherited it, every single one of them. These are the people the conservatives want to save from the estate tax. And the capital gains tax.

While he had a net worth of $18.2 billion for doing nothing more than being born into the right family, most Wal-Mart employees cannot afford the company health insurance and many are poor enough to be eligible for food stamp assistance even though they work full time for the richest company on the planet.

A lot will be made in the press about what he has done for kids through the charity he runs for the Walton Family. What they won't mention is the fact that he sits on the board of a company that makes billions off of products made with child labor. If he really cared about kids he could have started with them.

They will talk about what a nice guy he was and march out some "regular employees" to talk about how nice and ordinary he was. They probably won't mention his company's efforts over the years to suppress workers' rights and wages, or all of the union busting so they won't have to pay people an extra 50 cents an hour. If this guy was so nice, why didn't he use his influence as a board member and one of the biggest stock-holders to help those regular employees? He could have stood up in front of the board and said "Hey, $8 billion net profit a year is good and everything, but what if we made $4 billion instead and used all that extra money to give our employees full benefits and a couple of more dollars an hour and made sure all of our suppliers paid fair wages and didn't use child labor? And we'd all still be rich as piss anyway."

He could've, but he didn't.

So while Wal-Mart employees around the world were plugging away for their measly paychecks and making him more billions, John-boy was goofing off with his dangerous rich-boy hobby on a Monday afternoon. The rest of us should be so lucky.

Fuck him.