Organizing At Home And In The Wal-Mart

An editorial in today's WSJ (subscription required you cheapskate) lays bare the cozy relationship between activist groups, leftist think tanks and their controlling overlords the unions.

Bottom line: the unions call the tunes (while stuffing the tip jar with cash) and the activist groups and the think tanks play them note-for-note in the steppin'est fetchin'est manner possible.

The media like to portray this as a populist uprising against heartless big business. But what they don't bother to disclose is that this entire get-Wal-Mart campaign is a political operation led and funded by organized labor.

So that makes the activist groups nothing more than political hacks funded by a self-interested cabal? Shocking.

We've done a little digging into the two most prominent anti-Wal-Mart groups, and they might as well operate out of AFL-CIO headquarters. An outfit called Wal-Mart Watch was created by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), probably the most powerful union in America after the National Education Association. Wal-Mart Watch is backed by Five Stones, a 501(c)3 organization that received $2,775,000 in 2005 from the SEIU, or 56% of its $5 million budget. According to financial records, SEIU also gave Five Stones $1 million in 2004 to launch the anti-Wal-Mart group, and SEIU president Andy Stern is the Wal-Mart Watch chairman.

You mean the groups aren't grass-roots organizations that rose up (Being The Change they believed in) in righteous indignation of Wal-Mart's business practices?

Most of the local protests against Wal-Mart are organized through the left-wing activist group ACORN, an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN is the group that put the squeeze on the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance this summer to require Wal-Mart, Target and other big-box stores to pay a minimum $10 an hour wage and $3 an hour in benefits by 2010. (Democratic Mayor Richard Daley vetoed the bill.) ACORN also pretends it is a locally organized and funded voice of the downtrodden masses. But guess where ACORN gets much of its money? Last year the SEIU chipped in $2,125,229 and the UFCW $165,692.

Then there are the anti-Wal-Mart "think tanks," if that's the right word for these political shops -- notably, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center. The job of these two outfits is to publish papers backing the economic claims of Wal-Mart critics. The UC Berkeley group recently asserted that Wal-Mart "reduces total take-home pay for retail workers."

The UC Berkeley Labor Center has received at least $43,550 from SEIU. The Economic Policy Institute received $100,000 from the SEIU and $40,000 from the UFCW in 2005 and has published several anti-Wal-Mart studies, particularly on the benefits of the Chicago ordinance. By the way, Andy Stern also sits on the EPI board. He's a busy guy.

Bought and paid for activists. Ironically the very thing lefties continually accuse conservatives of being, albeit without a hint of evidence.

So next time you hear the anti-WM talking points of the activist groups or supposedly independent think tanks, remember that they come directly from the hacks that hate the fact that WM is non-union and are scared they will lose their control of yet another labor racket in the supermarkets.

SP ADDS: When they're not covertly undermining American business, they're dabbling in election maninpulation. More blessings from the fine foks at SEIU:

The FEC website says the Service Employees International Union has started running $93,234 of radio ads on behalf of DFLer Patty Wetterling. The union is also doing robo calls on behalf of Wetterling.