There is a point where, if you do not deal with the devil to feed your child, you sit with the angels to watch your babies starve. The demonizing and demagoguery aimed at Hillary Clinton to bring attention to her position with Walmart in the 1980s is not at all convincing to anyone but the ignorant. There is much lacking in the narrative. Because I "was there," I would like to fill in the information that her attackers leave out.
(And to be sure, there are Clinton partisans who issue unfair attacks on Sanders, but the Biblical instruction about motes in eyes requires that I address my progressive brethren.)
I have been critical of Walmart and Arkansas economics since before many Sanders supporters were born. When Clinton was the Arkansas governor, and Oklahoma's legislature was voting on right-to-work, my original economic research on Arkansas and other RTW states surrounding Oklahoma was on the desks of the Oklahoma Senate the day right-to-work was defeated in 1986.
Right-to-Work Arkansas was at the time one of the top job creators in the nation, due to Governor Bill Clinton. In a state long mired in chronic, abject poverty, everywhere Clinton's programs were put in place, national headlines spoke about Arkansas progress.
Arkansas was making giant economic strides in many areas. It was also experiencing huge advances in public education, due to reforms initiated by the governor's wife, Hillary Clinton. She was also a governor's wife in a largely ceremonial position with Walmart, a company that was beginning to be an international economic powerhouse, and a dirty player in that arena.
But unemployment dropped in that hellhole Arkansas because of Walmart and Bill Clinton. Roads and schools improved. Poverty in some areas nosedived. Highways improved. Every thing in the state improved. Walmart was a needed shot in the arm of a very poor state.
Economic growth in Walmart's northwest Arkansas territory is what the fascists in the right-to-work movement touted as an economic miracle. My 1986 economic research made clear that Arkansas was no match for non-RTW Oklahoma, but northwest Arkansas was the anomaly in the state that had to be explained. During its RTW campaign, the National Right-to-Work Committee invited Oklahomans to visit northwest Arkansas, to see for themselves.
But right-to-work did not produce the boom in Arkansas. Right-to-work consistently failed Arkansas for 30 years. It was the work of Bill Clinton and his wife that did it.
Bill Clinton wasn't the governor of Vermont or Ohio or Oregon. And Hillary Clinton was not married to a governor of a vibrant, progressive state. She was married to the man who dragged his dirt-poor, Mississippi Delta home state a few notches higher than it was before he arrived.
The Clintons were not blue dog Democrats-in-name-only, either. Clinton produced laws and regulations to protect the environment, by stopping new coal-fired electric generation and by stopping the clear-cutting of Ozarks and Ouachita forests. Clinton raised taxes to pay for programs, especially new money for education reforms. Against the advice of conservatives, at President Carter's request, Clinton agreed to accept 18,000 Cuban refugees—a humanitarian move that cost him the election of 1980. He was re-elected in 1982.
Hillary Clinton was in the center of the education reforms. She headed a task force that made improvements in one of the worst education systems in the United States. She was and is a champion of children and children's education and well-being.
Yes, as Arkansas’ First Lady, she accepted a seat on the board of the corporation, regressive as it was, that provided much of the taxes and economic activity that funded that job growth and education reform and better outcomes in Arkansas. So sue her.
[Edit insert begins here] And be clear as well about how the money for the Clintons’ progressive programs was raised, beyond the typical economic-zone incentives that made northwest Arkansas boom. While Hillary Clinton was taking BS from Walmart thugs on the board of directors, her husband, the governor, was raising taxes on Walmart:
—Clinton raised the fuel tax on Walmart’s fleet by 95 percent, from 9.5 cents in 1985 to 18.5 cents in 1991.
—Clinton doubled the transfer-of-property tax on Walmart real estate purchase or sale transactions within in the state.
—With his wife on the Walmart board of directors, Gov. Clinton raised the corporate income tax 7 percent.
—Walmart’s increased tax burden contributed substantially to Clinton’s across-the-board pay raise for Arkansas public school teachers which Hillary Clinton lobbied to gain.
—Perhaps most telling, the taxes levied against Walmart and other business entities let Bill Clinton remove 113,000 low-income working Arkansans from the income tax rolls. By changing the tax code, raising the amount of annual income that would require paying taxes, millions of dollars of working-family income went to support working families.
So what did the governor’s wife on the Walmart board do with her time while she and her husband taxed the rich to aid the poor?
As Bob Ortega relates in “In Sam We Trust,” Ortega’s 1998 exposé of Walmart inner workings, Clinton, hired by Sam Walton to satisfy his wife’s wish that he put a woman on the Walmart board, raised a little hell where she could.
Ortega interviewed Bob Tate, Walmart’s acerbic, anti-union labor chief, who recalled that at Clinton’s third quarterly board meeting, she told the all-male board, “you can expect me to push on issues for women. You know that. I have a reputation of trying to improve the status of women generally, and I will do it here.”
No, when she left Walmart in 1992, Clinton had not convinced the 15 male board members to embrace feminism in their corporate leadership—when she left, there were none. But according to the New York Times, by 2007, 23 percent of Walmart’s top 300 corporate officers were women.
By 2015, according to Walmart’s annual diversity report to stockholders, four of its 16-member board of directors were women, as were 32 percent of Walmart’s top corporate officers, “compared with a Fortune 500 average of 15 percent, and retail industry average of 19 percent.”
If they were all women and Walmart was still doing what it is doing today, the company would still be an amoral rampaging bull in the world of commerce and labor.
I appreciate that you do not like Walmart. It is a suckass company, and since Sam Walton died, the purchasing decisions have further cheapened American products to the quality of a bad joke. Its reliance on virtual slave labor has only increased over the decades. Its predatory business model has made formerly-independent U.S. manufacturers wholly dependent on Bentonville, Arkansas for their survival, and entire U.S. communities dependent on their garbage goods.
The “Buy American” Program
The charge has been made that Hillary Clinton was part of a uniquely-Walmart conspiracy that flooded the USA with cheap foreign goods labeled “Made in America.” The flooding did happen. But when?
Again, understand that the governor’s wife showed up four times a year for board meetings, she addressed the hiring of women and the need for Walmart to be more environmentally responsible, and she went back to the governor’s mansion to her family. She was not a player in Walmart marketing strategies. She was a board member, not a working corporate lawyer.
That is number one. But during her tenure, 1986-1992, Walmart was not flooding the USA with the gully washer that came closer to Y2K, after Sam Walton died in 1992.
Clinton_and_Walmart_Board_1990_credit_Sam_Berquist.jpg The only woman on Walmart’s board in 1990. (photo credit Richard Berquist) Click and drag to move
In the outstanding 2004 PBS documentary, Walmart and China: A Joint Venture, Frontline also refers to Bob Ortega’s In Sam We Trust:
“By the early 1980s, Ortega reports, Walton ‘increasingly looked to imports, which were usually cheaper because factory workers were paid so much less in China and the other Asian countries.’
“According to Ortega, Walton himself estimated that imports accounted for nearly 6 percent of Wal-Mart's total sales in 1984.”
So. Six percent. Walton was no different than any of his contemporary competitors. Six percent of sales in his time does not predict the foreign market that Walmart is today. Further on, Frontline states:
“As one retired senior Wal-Mart executive explained: ‘Sam wanted everything possible [made] in the U. S., but he was not going to pay [extra] for it to stay. The main thing he asked was: “Is it good for our customers?' If not, we went and made it overseas."’. . .
”In this strategy, Sam Walton was playing catch-up. Sears, Kmart, Target, and JCPenney all had established procurement networks in Asia long before Wal-Mart arrived.”
Sam was mimicking the established pioneers, Sears, Target, Kmart, Penney’s, and surely Montgomery Wards, in trading with the slave-wage Asian labor enemy?
And his regional competitors, TG&Y, McCrory, Venture, Jupiter, too. All major stores were trading with Asia, and the farther into the bargain basement they went (K-Mart, TG&Y, McCrory), the more Asian goods they sold. And six percent of total sales in 1984?
Sam Walton, as far as has been reported, did not collude to flood U.S. markets with Chinese government-subsidized electronics, nor force bankruptcy on American companies like Rubbermaid if they did not lower their standards to meet his price goals, but his heirs did. That cost us Thompson Electronics, the manufacturer who produced much was what was branded as Panasonic, RCA, Toshiba, and many other brands on the shelves.
But your opinion of Hillary Clinton is deeply flawed, no less than that of Republicans who smear Sanders with the "commie" attacks. Hillary Clinton is not spotless in her political career, but she and her husband produced amazing, progressive good for the poorest of this nation, including the poverty-stricken women of Arkansas.
If she did not immediately change Walmart policies toward women, then appreciate that Walmart was the cash cow that improved schools, bettered social services, paved roads, and created jobs for women and their families in a struggling state where nothing grew before—all through the political leadership of the Clintons in Arkansas.
Incidentally, the history of Walmart is divided by the year 1992: the year Sam Walton died. Where Walton had been simply anti-union, but a caring man who shared a mutual respect for his employees, his heirs, according to all accounts, turned the company into the raging capitalist behemoth that swallowed competition, destroyed suppliers who would not cheapen their products to suit Walton’s heirs, and colluded with China to flood U.S. markets with Chinese government-subsidized goods that destroyed the last vestiges of made-in-America consumer electronics.
Yes, Walmart changed for the worse after Sam died in 1992. Coincidentally, that is also the year that Hillary Clinton resigned from her position with Walmart. That was a long, long time ago. It is an absolute truth: There is a point where, if you do not deal with the devil to feed your child, you sit with the angels and watch your babies starve. That is where Arkansas and the Clintons stood in the 1970s and 1980s.
It is so much easier to attack someone, as Republicans do, from a point of willful ignorance, than it is to understand, respect and honestly acknowledge the very good things that person has accomplished in a life. However, honesty and ethics require that libel and vicious gossip be left at the door of political discourse. To admit good is not to be defeated. It is to be moral.
Bernie Sanders himself says that both he and Clinton are “100 times better” presidential material than any Republican candidate.
Sanders partisans seem to be fair-minded people, much better than common Republican gossip-mongers throwing cheap shots over their back fences for the dogs to fight over. It would be good if the “Berniebots”—those who choose to fight like Republicans—would walk that walk that mature Sanders supports walk, if it is so. Hillary Clinton is by no means "the same as a Republican," or the lesser of two evils when compared to GOP candidates.
World War I gave us the phrase "in the trenches." Hillary Clinton was fighting the progressive war in the trenches of Arkansas, doing the work that good politicians do, with the weapons that war allowed. Because of Hillary Clinton, the state she left was better than the state she found when she arrived.
Truth is good; half-truths are evil. The time for honest, ethical people to end their demagoguery aimed at Clinton is now.
For those Bernie Sanders partisans who wish to continue their Republican tactic of concealing the good, cherry-picking facts to paint illusions, and living to win on lies about a good American: c'est la vie.
Thank you in advance.