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| Clinton was once a lawyer for Wal-Mart | | Submitted by mlwadd01 | 2004-04-02 08:42:23 | | | Edit |
| Hillary Clinton served on Wal-mart's Board of Directors for 6 years | | Submitted by chompergirl | 2005-11-26 08:25:59 | www.villagevoice.com/news/0021,harkavy,15052,5.html
Excerpt from Village Voice article below:
They would have dropped their forks if they had heard that Hillary served for six years on the board of the dreaded Wal-Mart, a union-busting behemoth. If they had learned the details of her friendship with Wal-Mart, they might have lost their lunches.
She didn't mention Wal-Mart. Instead, she praised the Teamsters and other unionized workers as a "key movement in creating the middle class," and she pledged to "prevent anyone from turning the clock back," reminding them that "the Republicans are trying to do away with collective bargaining."
As she was leaving the dais, she ignored a reporter's question about Wal-Mart, and she ignored it again when she strode by reporters in the hotel lobby.
But there are questions. In 1986, when Hillary was first lady of Arkansas, she was put on the board of Wal-Mart. Officials at the time said she wasn't filling a vacancy. In May 1992, as Hubby's presidential campaign heated up, she resigned from the board of Wal-Mart. Company officials said at the time that they weren't going to fill her vacancy.
So what the hell was she doing on the Wal-Mart board? According to press accounts at the time, she was a show horse at the company's annual meetings when founder Sam Walton bused in cheering throngs to celebrate his non-union empire, which is headquartered in Arkansas, one of the country's poorest states. According to published reports, she was placed in charge of the company's "green" program to protect the environment.
But nobody got greener than Sam Walton and his family. For several years in the '80s, he was judged the richest man in America by Forbes magazine; his fortune zoomed into the billions until he split it up among relatives. It's no surprise that Hillary is a strong supporter of free trade with China. Wal-Mart, despite its "Buy American" advertising campaign, is the single largest U.S. importer, and half of its imports come from China.
Was Hillary the voice of conscience on the board for American and foreign workers? Contemporary accounts make no mention of that. They do describe her as a "corporate litigator" in those days, and they mention, speaking of environmental matters, that she also served on the board of Lafarge, a company that, according to a press account, once burned hazardous fuels to run its cement plants.
Wal-Mart, though, was the crown jewel of Arkansas, the state's First Company fit for a first lady. During her tenure on the board, she presumably helped preside over the most remarkable growth of any company until Bill Gates came along. The number of Wal-Mart employees grew during the '80s from 21,600 to 279,000, while sales soared from $1.2 billion to $25.8 billion.
And the Clintons depended on Wal-Mart's largesse not only for Hillary's regular payments as a board member but for travel expenses on Wal-Mart planes and for heavy campaign contributions to Bill's campaigns there and nationally. According to reports in the early '90s, before Bill and Hillary moved to D.C., neither was raking in the big bucks, but prominent in their income were her holdings of between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of Wal-Mart stock.
A press report on the Clintons' finances during the early stages of Bill's 1992 run for the presidency showed that most of their income came from her $109,719 annual salary from the Rose Law Firm and tens of thousands of dollars in fees she received from serving on corporate boards. (She was on two others besides Wal-Mart's.) Her honoraria and director fees grew almost as fast as Wal-Mart's profits during the '80s—rising from $111 in 1980 to $6500 in 1986 to $64,700 in 1991, according to the same source.
During the same period, small towns all over America began complaining that Wal-Mart was squeezing out ma-and-pa stores and leaving little burgs throughout the Midwest and South with downtowns that featured little more than empty storefronts.
But selected small companies were doing quite well, thanks to the Clintons' friendship with Wal-Mart. The Boston Globe reported in January 1992 that Bill Clinton had introduced a brush company's executives to Wal-Mart executives, hoping that the two could do bidness. Executives of the brush company had been rebuffed in previous attempts to sell their products to Wal-Mart. Lucky for the company, it happened to be located in New Hampshire, where Clinton was trying to win a presidential primary. At the time, Hillary Clinton was still on Wal-Mart's board, and the retail giant was still resisting the unionization of any of its workers.
Last week, Hillary was wearing a different hat. She stood in solidarity with the elderly Teamsters as Local 237 president Carl Haynes greeted her warmly, endorsed her, and then left early on what other union officials described as "AFL-CIO business."
But the AFL-CIO was thinking of other business only a few months earlier when the union's leaders, including its chief, John Sweeney, marched specifically against Wal-Mart's oppression of its meat-market workers. According to a Web site run by activists at the AFL-CIO affiliate United Food and Commercial Workers, Wal-Mart "has profited by pushing its workers to the bottom of the wage scale." The union points out that hourly wages "average $2 to $3 per hour less than at unionized supermarkets." More grave for workers everywhere in the United States are these figures spouted by union activists: Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the country, "yet fewer than 40 percent of its workers are covered by the company's health plan."
The union notes that Wal-Mart's "hometown" judge in Arkansas issued a nationwide temporary restraining order against the UFCW, barring anyone associated with the union from entering Wal-Mart facilities to educate workers about their legal rights in the workplace. The union, however, successfully appealed the order—noting that the judge holds more than $500,000 in Wal-Mart stock. The case remains in litigation.
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart's first lady, who also benefited from Wal-Mart stock, solicits support from union workers.
Which makes her words to the elderly Teamsters last week especially poignant: "You can count on me to stand up for the right to collectively bargain!"
Right on, sister!
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| Comments (2) |
| Hillary Clinton was once on Wal-mart's board of directors, probably when Bill was governor of Arkansas. | posted by Anonymous
2005-05-17 01:07:08
| | you know i am tied of people putting down wal-mart. i would be willing to bet that most people who diss wal-mart have never even worked there. i have been with this company for over 8 yrs. i have great benefits and i get paid very well. and most important it pays my bills. i personally don't think wal-mart should be defending themself's so hard to ingorant people. i DON'T want a union in this company.the only one's crying about benefits are the one's who want something for nothing. i think waht wal-mart should do is tell everone to go to ----. yet what makes all of this so funny is that everyone complaining are still shopping at wal-mart and it shows every year in there sales. what a bunch of hippocrits. including hillary clinton. | posted by Anonymous
2006-03-28 05:35:03
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| Vote to delete | | Submitted by masters1122 | 2004-08-28 18:45:15 | No she was not!!! Hillary is the devil in disguise and there is no way she could have worked with a saint like Wal-Mart! Besides, Wal-Mart largely supports Republican causes!!! This connection is completely invalid!!!
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| Vote to delete | | Submitted by jesus_h_christ | 2008-02-07 23:54:21 | this is baby jesus coming at you from 30-thousand feet.
first of all, please ignore the ignorant rant of the other "delete" poster. she was to have been aborted by her mother, but i was busy influencing the outcome of various sporting events--as is evidenced by the abundance of thanks i receive in post-game interviews--and i let her slip through. obviously, she can barely work a keyboard and should not be taken seriously.
anyway, make no mistake about it: wal-mart is evil. if wal-mart were in a jk rowling book it would be called "the mart who must not be named." if wal-mart were a guitar it would be a banjo. wal-mart sucks like mary magedline backstage at a van halen concert. and so does hilary, except not literally. she actually doesn't go down at all, but that's another matter.
obama is the man who deserves your vote in '08. my dad and i are totally voting for him, early and often, and we know how to work the dangling judas.
i hope you understand my point. i could go on and on, but i have to start paying attention to spring training. it's the cubbies this year, ladies and gents, or i'm not jesus h christ.
~baby j
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| Vote to keep | | Submitted by mlwadd01 | 2004-04-09 12:07:48 |
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| Vote to keep | | Submitted by 320111 | 2004-09-07 16:25:27 | First, she is the devil, but she previously worked for the Devil Inc.
Born Hillary Diane Rodham in Chicago, Illinois and growing up in Park Ridge, Illinois, she attended Wellesley College and later Yale law school. She became a successful lawyer, and amongst other charity work chaired the Children's Defense Fund. She was a junior legal member of the Watergate investigation team and is a former lawyer for Wal-Mart. Just as her husband was the first President from the Baby Boom generation, she was its first First Lady. She is the first First Lady to hold the Master of Science degree (the second being Laura Bush).
URL www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipedia/h/hi/hillary_clinton.html
A little bit about the Devil Inc.
Businesses around the country, large and small, are cutting jobs and benefits on the seemingly unassailable rationale that they "have to stay competitive." It's the labor practices of Wal-Mart that are setting the standard, and it's fast becoming a race to the bottom. The only way to "stay competitive" with Wal-Mart, ultimately, is to emulate Wal-Mart's business model which necessarily relies on a constellation of aggressive, predatory and, evidently, illegal practices.
In October 2003, The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement executed Operation Rollback, raiding 61 Wal-Mart stores across 21 states. They arrested more than 300 janitors, all of them undocumented immigrants, most of whom originated in Eastern Europe. According to an unnamed federal law enforcement official, some Wal-Mart executives had direct knowledge of the scheme.
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| Vote to keep | | Submitted by howrealisreal | 2005-11-09 20:00:21 | Hillary Clinton was on the Board of Directors of Wal-Mart from 1985 to 1992. It says so at en.wikipedia.org, and in the November 21st issue of The Nation magazine.
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| Vote to keep | | Submitted by chompergirl | 2005-11-26 08:26:51 | Hillary spent 6 years on Wal-mart's Board of Directors
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| Vote to keep | | Submitted by Old Crow | 2006-03-10 19:59:38 | verified by numerous sources.
Village Voice: May 24 2000.
ABC news: Feb 03 2006.
NY Sun: Feb 06 2006.
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| Vote to keep | | Submitted by MikeWolfe | 2006-09-12 02:38:02 |
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