Bloomberg BusinessWeek posts this story about the rapidly escalating wealth divide: The Walton Family is the richest in the world. Its wealth grows by $4 million every hour of every day.
Twenty-five families in the world control $1.4 trillion.
In the magazine’s annual ranking of the world’s richest families, the Waltons are #1.
The numbers are mind-boggling: $70,000 per minute, $4 million per hour, $100 million per day.
That’s how quickly the fortune of the Waltons, the clan behind Walmart Inc., has been growing since last year’s Bloomberg ranking of the world’s richest families.
At that rate, their wealth would’ve expanded about $23,000 since you began reading this. A new Walmart associate in the U.S. would’ve made about 6 cents in that time, on the way to an $11 hourly minimum.
Even in this era of extreme wealth and brutal inequality, the contrast is jarring. The heirs of Sam Walton, Walmart’s notoriously frugal founder, are amassing wealth on a near-unprecedented scale — and they’re hardly alone.
The Walton fortune has swelled by $39 billion, to $191 billion, since topping the June 2018 ranking of the world’s richest families.
As educators know, the Waltons use a small part of their vast fortune to undermine public education and replace public schools with privately managed charter schools.
The least you can do is to avoid Walmart. Boycott Walmart. It may only cost them a few pennies, but do it.
In addition to their nefarious role as the single biggest founder of charters in the U.S., they are the biggest retailer of guns. Just another reason to boycott Walmart.
FYI, the founder of Walmart—Sam Walton—was a graduate of public schools. He graduated from David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tumbrels.
The Walton family supports many great causes. I suggest you review the list and I suspect you will agree with about 95% of what they do with their
money.https://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/grants-database?p=2
I have read the list of Walton “causes.” Almost all education funding goes to charters and TFA. When they give to NPR, it is to buy influence or sympathetic coverage of charters, TFA, and vouchers.
The family is lobbying right now to lower their property taxes in Arkansas.
They are truly disgusting.
Alice bids up the price of artwork which contributes nothing to GDP.
You know what would be a better way to support causes that benefit Americans?
Pay their @#$%&!!!ing taxes!!!
“Great causes” ? Is Arkansa still languishing as the nation’s 2nd poorest state?
Philanthropy is the problem. Instead of being compelled to support the public good by paying taxes, billionaires like the rightwing Waltons choose whether and how to give. They often choose to help others only when they’re also helping themselves. And they get a tax break for helping themselves. The Waltons are destroying public education. Read Winners Take All: The Elite Charade if Changing the World by Giridharadas.
Is there a rationale for community resources used to protect Walmart property?
The Waltons are destroying the public schools where police send their kids. The ruling class decided to erode police pensions. When called for shoplifting, why do police show up at Walmart?
As a community member, a shoplifter at Walmart doesn’t harm me but, Walton heirs do. Prosecutors’ time is better spent elsewhere than on shoplifters at discount retailers primarily owned by the richest 0.1%. Victimless crime.
Taxes support much better causes.
I have long since refused to buy anything at Walmart.
My opinion- a visit to Walmart puts both our lives and souls at risk.
“The least you can do is to avoid Walmart.”
I avoid Walmart like a plague. I detest that store. I can’t tolerate giving money to such a worthless, greedy, selfish family.
I also will never go to Trump Tower in downtown Chicago. I flip it the finger whenever I see it.
The richest family in the world – anti-union, pro school privatization, pro gun. This is why we need to restore the 70% top marginal tax rate, as proposed by AOC, Bernie and other progressives and promote unionization.
The Waltons and other billionaires have an obscene amount of money. They should pay more taxes and contribute more to the common good.
Right now, the Waltons are leading an effort to lower property taxes in Arkansas.
Obscene.
retired teacher The Waltons, etc., could begin with paying their employees more, so they don’t have to depend on government programs to support their basic needs. CBK
Under Ike, the top marginal tax rate was 90%
Diane Speaking of the wealthy, below is a video where Ali Velshi interviews the author of a new book about the Koch brothers:
https://www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/watch/inside-the-koch-brothers-business-and-political-operations-66100293575
“Ali Velshi talks with ‘Kochland’ author Christopher Leonard about how Charles and David Koch built a business empire that touches our lives in so many ways, and a massive lobbying operation that has helped change the political landscape.” August. 14, 2019
Thanks, Catherine!
Oh, but they donate some tiny portion of that to charter and private schools!
So it doesn’t matter that they don’t pay property taxes. Those go to public school students, and public school students are deliberately and consistently ignored in ed reform, including among the thousands of ed reformers who are in government and on public payrolls.
Public school students are always, always the dead-last priority in this “movement”. They simply are not considered. They are the collateral damage that must be sacrificed to reach the ideological promise land of privatization. Don’t worry though! These folks are so much smarter than you are that the privatized systems they create will be vast improvements over the public systems they seek to eradicate. This is guaranteed. No money down and no risk. Plus/and. Win/win.
A Senior Advisor to the Walton Family Foundation is a Pahara Institute (Gates funded) Fellow.
Other Fellow cronies- reps from 50Can, Stanford’s CREDO where Hanushek’s wife is Director, and the Charles Koch Institute.
It is hard to totally boycott Walmart. In some areas, the only thing that is around is a Walmart. Walmart came in and demolished “main street” USA with their cheap plastic goods and lower prices on junk food and processed grocery supplies. In these areas, they are beholden to Walmart to sustain life. It’s how the Walton family likes it.
Walmart’s competition is the “Dollar” franchises- how humiliating for Sam.
@LisaM: Your claims are true. Walmart ( and other mega-stores like Target) destroyed the downtown merchants. In many communities mega-stores and membership stores (like Sam’s club, Costco,etc), are the only game in town.
WalMart does not make the items they sell in their stores. They sell the same Chinese-made crap that other such stores sell.
William Also, the closer we get to making circa-minimum wage, the closer our shopping choices come down to our own monthly financial security–where the cheaper prices are directly related to the concrete quality of our (and our family’s) daily living. CBK
A bicycling manufacturer in Ohio unfortunately signed a contract with the devil. To meet the prices demanded by buyers for the Walmart Corp., the manufacturing operations moved to Asia which is where the Walton heirs should move…wait… I have nothing against the people of Asia.
Sam’s Club IS a Walton-owned company, as is the online retailer Jet.com.
Lisa M Also, that Ali Velshi video (I posted earlier here) shows how impossible it is to boycott Koch products–they are in pretty much everything we use, from your carpet to your kids’ backpacks. CBK
We can avoid buying Theranos’ product. The Waltons invested $100,000,000 in that promising firm…oh, wait…
You are correct. If we boycott everything, we’d be walking around naked, eating berries from a bush and living in a cave. I do the best that I can. I don’t purchase a lot of processed foods anyway, I shop my local Mom & Pop type grocery store, I purchase at the farm stand and I even grow some of my own food. My teenage daughter likes to thrift shop and I make some of my clothes (although all fabric now comes from Asia!!). I even make my own cleaning supplies and laundry detergent. I try to live very simple. By going back to basics, it has allowed me to be a stay at home mom in the very expensive area where we live. I still use Walmart for some of the things that my local store doesn’t provide, but it I have cut those shopping trips way back.
If one uses only 8-hour work days and allowing for two weeks of vacation and the normal federal holidays, to spend or “earn” a billion dollars requires $532,000 per hour to be earned or spent.
I made about $2,000,000 (uncorrected for inflation) in my just under 40 years as a college professor. These asshats are “making” more money (as unearned income!) in one afternoon than I made in my career.
Our values are sadly distorted.
Six heirs to the Walton fortune have wealth equivalent to 40% of Americans combined.
Wealth concentration is currently a the level where historically, the ruling class is deposed.
Take note Bill and Melinda Gates family.
Giving credit where credit is due. It’s Bill Gates who lives in the state with the most regressive tax policy in the U.S. The poor pay a rate up to 7 times that paid by the Gates family in the state of Washington. Bill prefers consumption taxes to income taxes. (He’s spoken out against raising the minimum wage and public pensions. Paint me surprised.) Since most Americans unlike Bill, have been robbed of the gains for their productivity, they spend a large portion of their salaries on taxable items.
I’ve never had a problem with people who make a lot of money.
I have a problem with people who use their money to buy political power and their political power to deprive other people of what little they have.
Jon Awbrey I second that emotion. The pathway for the rich becomes one of legalized corruption. CBK
Addendum To paraphrase and analogize from “The King’s Speech” given as England entered the World War II, the “rich-take-all” movement we are in, stripped of all diversions and sheep’s clothing, is nothing less than might makes right.
That they use their wealth to buy-off politicians, and use good causes to feed their own insatiable selves, instead of dropping bombs, makes no difference to what “might makes right” means. CBK
I have a problem when the rewards for productivity gains go exclusively to the those who eat the bread for which others toil, a warning from Lincoln.
Wealth concentration is at the level that it threatens societal stability.
I do not hear anyone talk of trust busting like TR did during the progressive era. Are there no anti-trust laws that protect us from the dominance of concentrated wealth and power? Perhaps we do not have the political will to enforce them? Maybe they need revision for a new set of economic conditions?
*Roy Turrentine** When everyone is finally bought and paid for, then we can through out the Constitution and all of the laws–because no one will pay attention to them anyway. CBK
Boycotting Walmart (for those who can) is great, but if you’re replacing Walmart with Amazon, that’s no better. Maybe worse. At least Walmart employs people in their brick and mortar stores (even if they treat them like crap for dirt wages). Amazon is doing its level best to eliminate people altogether.
We have a copy-cat hater at Walmart store in NW Indiana. How many others are going to follow this “latest trend”?
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Hammond [Indiana] man charged after threatening to shoot up Walmart
…The Lake County prosecutor’s office and Hammond police allege Washington posted threats on social media the evening of August. 6. “Murder suicide tomorrow at Wal-Mart” and “Yes bro I’m shooting the store up too and the cops is gone (shoot) my a— down.”
Washington’s alleged threat occurred only days after a mass shooting Aug. 3 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where a lone gunman killed 22 people and injured 24 others…
https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/lake/important-stories-you-need-to-know-from-yesterday-hammond-man/collection_a558e089-079c-5903-b1cb-0a5837c1360c.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share#utm_source=nwitimes.com
The Waltons strike me as a ruthless gang. Guns and their places of business- not a stretch.
“The Waltons’ make $4 million an hour”
Since the era of kings, the technology of increasing wealth has improved more than anything else. Kings had to conduct cumbersome wars on faraway lands, build empires for decades to increase their wealth and power. The Waltons use all the advances of the natural sciences, politics, sociology, bribery, blackmail, digital technology to increase their wealth and power at a much faster and efficient way.
The times of Kingdoms passed and so will soon the billionaires’.
Trump on Thursday suggested that good earnings from retail giant Walmart were an indicator of broader health in the economy.
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How wonderful.
Trump said in a rally yesterday that “if you don’t vote for me, you will lose your 401K.” He insisted that he alone was all that stood between current prosperity and massive economic collapse.
He doesn’t know or will not acknowledge that he inherited a good economy, which began after the collapse of 2008.