While news such as Walmart doing canned food drives for their own employees and the NLRB deciding to pursue charges against Walmart for violating labor laws are making their way into the headlines this week, what are the talking heads over at Fox doing? You guessed it... damage control.
Fox's Neil Cavuto started off the segment above by trashing the unions and workers making demands for a living wage for Walmart's workers -- followed by a nice softball interview with Walmart CEO Bill Simon, praising the company for their decision to promote 25K of their 2.2 million or so employees by the end of January.
They followed that with a panel segment which included Fox Business Channel regular Charles Payne and union organizer Stewart Acuff, where of course, Cavuto and Payne proceeded to talk over Acuff every time he managed to make a good point about Walmart not paying a living wage, or the fact that they destroy all of the other small businesses when they move into an area.
As really painfully bad as the entire segment was, I have to say that Payne wins the award for the most ridiculous quote of the day though for this nonsense. When Acuff rightfully pointed out the fact that Walmart costs the taxpayers millions of dollars a year while the Walton family continues to enrich themselves and the company participates in an economic race to the bottom, here's how Payne responded:
PAYNE: You know, it's interesting. In the footage that you showed of one of the protests, I saw one sign that said, "I work at Walmart. I make $8.50 an hour." Then I saw another sign that says "I work at Walmart. I make $11.50 an hour."
We already heard the CEO, the president talk about the upward mobility there. The idea that hundreds of thousands of people have chosen to work there for well over a decade, I think speaks for itself.
You know, another way of looking at this is not that somehow the U.S. taxpayer is supplementing Walmart, but that maybe Walmart is supplementing the U.S. taxpayer, because I've got to tell you, there are a lot of times... there's gigantic difference between making $11 an hour than making zero, a huge difference.
