Wal-Mart Left Politics
by John Carlisle

Wal-Mart has begun a national television ad campaign to counter allegations from union-funded activists that it mistreats its workers. Less visible is a separate Wal-Mart campaign to co-op some of its critics by embracing and funding liberal political and social causes. Over the last three years, the company has become a booster of environmental alarmism, racial preferences, and special rights for homosexuals.

Supporting these controversial policies is not likely to buy Wal-Mart the peace it desperately seeks. The corporation is finding out the hard way that the more it tries to appease activist groups, the more they demand.

In October 2005, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott unveiled Wal-Mart's sweeping environmental agenda in a speech at the company's headquarters. Declaring that the planet was confronted with stark ecological challenges such as the scientifically unproven threat of man-made global warming, Scott announced that Wal-Mart plans to invest $500 million annually in technologies to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent.

Wal-Mart recently donated $75,000 to Al Gore's "Climate Project" which aims to train 1,000 activists to frighten the public into supporting drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions that could cost over a million American jobs - and put a mighty big hole in the pockets of Wal-Mart customers.

Important environmental groups are also lending their support to Wal-Mart, including the World Wildlife Fund and Environmental Defense, a recent beneficiary of a $1.1 million donation from the Walton Family Foundation.  But the Sierra Club and other environmental activists keep up a drumbeat of criticism.

Jesse Jackson is an especially strong critic of Wal-Mart. In an apparent attempt to quiet Jackson, Wal-Mart placed African-American businessman Christopher Williams on its board in 2004. Williams is a longtime Jackson associate who was a founding member of the Wall Street Project, the Rainbow/PUSH corporate shakedown operation.

Wal-Mart also implemented a de facto quota system that gives preferences to promoting women and minorities. At Wal-Mart, if 50 percent of applicants for management positions are women, then 50 percent of those promoted to management must be women. Wal-Mart goes so far as to cut the bonuses of executives by up to 15 percent if they fail to meet their hiring quotas. Jackson has repaid this concession with even more strident criticism of the company, even calling it a "Confederate Economic Trojan Horse."

Likewise, Wal-Mart's effort to placate the homosexual lobby by endorsing its goal to legitimize same-sex marriage, an idea large majorities of voters have emphatically rejected, is backfiring. In 2005, Wal-Mart took an incremental step in recognizing same-sex partners as a legitimate family when the company filed an employee conflict-of-interest policy with the Securities and Exchange Commission that included homosexual couples in its definition of "immediate family."

The Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual lobbying group, applauded the decision but insisted that the retailer needed to extend the same healthcare benefits to homosexual couples that it offered to regular families. Wal-Mart's refusal to do so has angered homosexual activists, squandering any goodwill it thought it had won.

Wal-Mart's surrender to the Left is simply bad politics and bad business. The liberal constituencies Wal-Mart is trying to co-opt cannot be won over. The company would do better to steer clear of noisy activists lest it risk alienating the "Middle America" shopper that has made it so successful.

John Carlisle is the Director of Policy at the National Legal and Policy Center, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to promoting ethics in public life. He is the author of a just-published Special Report on Wal-Mart.