Wal-Mart: Economic Destruction For Low Prices, Always!

Everybody has heard of the corporate giant known as Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has always offered low prices to all of its shoppers. They have become an iconic American shopping place due to the abundance of groceries, electronics, clothing, and personal healthcare products. But, Wal-Mart has began to receive a new negative light over the last few years. Over the past several decades, it has become painfully obvious what Wal-Mart has been doing to the economy. Wal-Mart is very widely known for being very inexpensive. But another thing they are cheap towards is the health insurance they provide to their workers, or should I say the lack there of. What Wal-Mart does is set their employees hours to the maximum they can without having to provide health insurance. They manage this by only hiring part-time employees and then just replacing them with other part-time employees. Another thing that Wal-Mart is helping to replace is small local business. These stores, also known as "Mom and Pop stores", just can't compete with Wal-Mart’s pressuring low prices and often have to sell out and close down forever. These are the types of stores that have been around for decades, often providing our great-grandparents with the everyday supplies they needed. I feel that Wal-Mart is to damaging for our own good. However, it is the most popular shopping center for a reason, its driving low prices and sheer size and quantity is to much to compete with and in most cases, you can depend on a local Wal-Mart to be open twenty-four/seven or at least most hours of the day. That’s why I just don’t see Wal-Mart going away anytime soon.

Nike:Sweating Out Fashion

I'm currently making a website about how Nike used sweatshops up until the 1990's. I felt this was a great topic for my second major project in one of my classes because I want to describe in full how Nike has been, for decades, producing major sweatshop factories in foreign third world countries. Sweatshops have been known for their dangerous environments for workers. These factories usually have fast moving open machinery, extreme temperatures, and ridiculous lengths of working hours. Nike had originally began sweatshop operations in countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, but after stricter labor laws were enforced they looked for other foreign third world countries to choose from. For many years Nike denied any accusations of running sweatshops in countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and China. Nike singled these countries out because of very cheap labor and laws that prevented workers from forming a union. Without these unions, Nike factory operators could set the wages they paid the workers which sometimes were only 70% of the workers basic living needs. No unions also ment that they were free to hire child labor and could set the amount of hours that the workers had to work, often exceeding 60 hour work weeks. Though Nike was wrong for what they had done to these workers for many decades, Nike is one of the few major shoe companies that has taken responsibility for sweatshop labor. To take action against the use of sweatshops, Nike as audited roughly 600 of its factories since 2002 to make sure they are not promoting illegal labor. If these companies don't meet the required score after they are audited, Nike threatens to shut-down the plants.

Offshore Oil Corporations Get Go-Ahead From Obama With No Environmental Review

  In response to last years tragic oil rig explosion, the United States Government has required stricter rules of action on offshore drilling rigs. This means being safer and more environmentally conscious. Isn't that a little cliché, big oil companies having to be environmentally conscious. Though you might not have seen it yet on popular broadcasting stations like CNN, Fox news, or MSNBC, there will be thirteen new oil companies in our oceans with no new environmental review. For that matter you might not ever see those types of headlines on many news stations seeing as how many of which are funded by corporations that this story pertains to. New rules for offshore drilling have been enforced since the oil-rig explosion early last year. But the reason that these companies, which include the likes of Shell and Chevron, didn't have to meet the new environmental review standards is because they had already started drilling before last years explosion. That sounds perfectly fine doesn't it? I don't think so. How the government feels that its OK that we just grandfather in these oil companies so they don't have to respect the rules that others pay baffles me to this day. But its apparently all clear to them. The reason it is all so clear to the government is that these corporations deceive our leaders into believing that things will be just fine and if they still aren't sure, they'll just stuff their pockets a little bit until they play along. Nothing new though, just remember that that's the corporation way of business. If these corporations weren't so strong, the probably wouldn't get the same “special benefits” that they are receiving now.

Honk If Your A Corporation

Corporations are always trying to find ways to get their dirty little feet in the door of any major public communication broadcasting station or political/financial office. It seems as if they look for the dirtiest ways to get the public’s money with as little to no negative feedback. The problem with this is that not only can they get most of what they want, but they try to make everything seem legit and legal. Well that's not right, Corporations should be held more responsible to their actions and be treated as corporations like they are rather than individual people. What can also be considered even sadder for the regular citizens is that these major corporations are backed by these large scale news broadcasters such as Fox. So whenever their is negative information about these companies, you may never get the full story, or for that matter the story at all. Companies such as Monsanto are such corporations that try to sway the news to their favor and push the media around with their oversized pockets. Even though the story about how Monsanto was passing illegal substances to the consumer was never aired, the public heard about all about it. But please don't feel any better that the truth prevailed this time. Even after the trials and the huge negative public speculation, Monsanto is still striving and sending out ads and commercials nation wide. So it just goes to show you, even if you are selling products with harmful effects to your consumers and you lie about the news on a broad scale to your viewers, don't worry, you'll be just fine. Assuming your pockets are deep enough.