Wal-Mart Cuts Off Health Insurance for 30,000 Part-Time Workers: That's How the Company's Owned By America's Richest Family (The Waltons) Shows Its Appreciation

America's richest family doesn't give a damn about the Americans who helped make mfabulously rich.

Rob Walton (CEO of Wal-Mart) and his wife have plenty
to smile about.  His family is worth $150 billion.

By Anne D'Innocenzio
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for some of its part-time U.S. employees in a move aimed at controlling rising health care costs of the nation's largest private employer.

Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that starting Jan. 1, it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move affects 30,000 employees, or about 5 percent of Wal-Mart's total part-time workforce, but comes after the company already had scaled back the number of part-time workers who were eligible for health insurance coverage since 2011.

The announcement follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to completely eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees. It also comes a day after Wal-Mart said it is teaming up with an online health insurance agency called DirectHealth.com to help customers shop for health insurance plans.

"We had to make some tough decisions," Sally Welborn, Wal-Mart's senior vice president of benefits, told The Associated Press.

Welborn said she didn't know how much Wal-Mart will save by dropping part-time employees, but added that the company will use a third-party organization to help part-time workers find insurance alternatives: "We are trying to balance the needs of (workers) as well as the costs of (workers) as well as the cost to Wal-Mart."

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China Wal-Mart Surprise: How Did Fox Meat Get Into Donkey Products?

China Wal-Mart surprise: How did fox meat get into donkey products? (via The Christian Science Monitor)

If the discovery of “pink slime” in American hamburgers and horsemeat in European ones made you squeamish, read no further. Wal-Mart has just recalled donkey meat products from some of its stores in China because tests have found them to be contaminated…

The Pitiful, Brainwashed American Consumer: Fighting, Shooting, Stabbing Over The 'Right'... To Buy Things

While many Americans shop for bargains, many retail workers
use the holiday season to remind buyers of low wages and poor
working conditions. (Wal-Mart Strike, Oct 2012: Photo -
Neon Tommy)

A quick scan of newspaper headlines reveals that American shoppers are losing their collective minds over material goods and getting into violent confrontations over their "right to buy stuff."  Most of the violence seems to be taking place at Wal-Mart locations throughout the US.

• In Las Vegas, a shopper is shot in the leg over a television set.
• In Claypool Hill, VA, one man pulls a rifle and gets stabbed over a Wal-Mart parking spot.
• At a Wal-Mart in Clinton, UT a woman was trampled by deal seekers.
• A man was peppered sprayed at a Wal-Mart in Garfield, NJ during an argument with a store a manager.
• In Realto, CA, a police officer was injured and two people arrested after a fight at Wal-Mart.
• A man was stabbed in the stomach at a mall in Carlsbad, CA.

Democrat's Broken Promises on Minimum Wage: Suddenly Making Noises About the Minimum Wage Yet Know Congress Won't Cooperate - Are They Serious Or Just Pulling Our Chain?

If President Obama and his party didn't even try to deliver on their 2008 campaign promise of a minimum wage hike when they had the White House and both houses of Congress on lockdown in 2010 and 2011, what does their sudden rediscovery of the minimum wage mean now, when they know they can move nothing through Congress?  Are they and their sheepdogs, the so-called “progressive Democrats” just yanking our chain again?

NYC Rally To Raise The Minimum Wage, Oct. 2013
(Photo by The All-Nite Images)

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
As a presidential candidate back in 2007 and 2008, Barack Obama promised to ram a hike in the minimum wage through Congress by 2011. Like the president's promises to renegotiate NAFTA and enact labor law reforms to make union organizing possible again, it wasn't one of those high profile pledges he repeated at every opportunity in front of every audience. He didn't have to, that's not the way it works.

If you're a right-leaning Democrat nowadays, here's how it works: you make those kinds of promises before small audiences of labor and poor folks. From that point, it's the job of your sheepdogs, the Democrat “progressives” campaigning for you to keep the herd of your base voters in line by putting those words in your mouth a lot more often, and with a lot more emphasis than you actually place upon them. Promises are promises, after all, and promises made by the wealthy and powerful to the poor and powerless are worth exactly nothing.

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