A twofer! The first part of this meme is false, he didn’t say Walmart would close stores. The 2nd part is misleading & brings up a red herring about wage theft. Nearly all of the wage theft lawsuits are decades old and have little bearing on Walmart’s current balance sheet.
▪️The first part of the meme’s claim comes from a Dec 6 interview with CNBC. McMIllion said retail theft was ‘higher than what it has historically been” and “If that’s not corrected over time, prices will be higher, and/or stores will close.”
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/12/06/walmart-ceo-on-rise-in-retail-theft-prices-could-go-higher-and-stores-will-close.html
▪️This spawned headlines and memes that Walmart was considering closing stores, but in context McMillon was clearly speaking generally. Walmart’s spokesman later confirmed this & said McMillion “was speaking about retail in general and not specifically about Walmart.”
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.33399EU
▪️The $1.5B in wage theft claim comes from the Violation Tracker from Good Jobs First, a left wing advocacy group. It compiles lawsuits against companies. There are 44 lawsuits for Walmart listed under “wage and hour violations,” you can check it out here:
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=walmart&order=primary_offense&sort=desc&page=3
▪️The vast majority of the $1.5B comes from 3 lawsuits:
🔹$640M from 2008, settling 63 lawsuits over wage-and-hour violations, most of which happened years prior.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28372433
🔹$242M from a 2016 settlement over meal and rest break violations. However, this claim dated back to a 2006 judgment of $78M, which was appealed over a decade and included post-judgement interest.
https://wjactv.com/news/local/thousands-get-early-christmas-present-from-walmart-class-action-lawsuit
🔹$152M in a 2009 class action lawsuit over violating California’s meal and rest break laws. These violations dated back to a 2001 lawsuit.
https://legalpad.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/09/in-walmart-class-action-huge-judgment-followed-by-stillquitebig-settlement.html
🔹The two other largest settlements, violating California and Nevada labor laws, totaled $86M and $85M. They were from 2009 and 2010, and also dated back to years prior. The vast majority of the smaller settlements were also before 2010.
▪️Clearly, Walmart had problems running afoul of labor laws in the early to mid 2000s. But in recent years, there’s been very few big lawsuits, and settlements aren’t even a rounding error in comparison to their $572B in revenue.
▪️But retail theft is a significant current problem, affecting not just Walmart. Retailers lost nearly $100B to organized crime in 2021. Dismissing this by pointing to an irrelevant stat on wage theft is dishonest. (Ironically this source repeats the false claim about Walmart closing stores)
https://thehill.com/homenews/3767004-walmart-ceo-stores-could-close-with-uptick-in-shoplifting/
As with the leftist freak out over “banned books” this is not banning books, it’s still easy to get Harry Potter and bookstores should be able to limit whatever books they want for whatever reason. But not only does it show a double standard, the rationale is far less justifiable than removing certain content from school libraries. At least there the justification was the content of certain books are inappropriate for children, clearly not every book should be available in a school library. Here, there’s no argument about the content they just don’t like the author’s politics!
Because news came out about his letter to the FBI, revealing he was a nutcase. The letter was rambling and incoherent, claiming he was trained by the US military off the books, and that Walz had instructed him to kill Amy Klobuchar so he could run for Senate. None of it made any sense (Walz is not running for Senate) and none of the assassinations made any sense, even in a diabolical way.
Nearly all of his hit list was Democrats (including Walz) and abortion clinics, but he was supposedly working for Walz?! Plus, one of the guys he killed wasn’t even on his list, and others were no longer in office or deceased. None of it makes sense from any coherent angle.
Basically, it appears the guy was mentally ill and neither the left or right can use the incident to push their agendas anymore, so the story was dropped.
This is so dumb. First, this means LA began as Spanish land founded to support Spanish missions (i.e. colonialism). Which contradicts their entire premise. But the reality is that Los Angeles is a quintessential American city.
▪️When the US acquired California in the 1840s, LA was a small town of less than 2,000 people. It was basically nothing. It became large only after the gold rush and the railroads completed in the 1870-80s, which brought thousands of new settlers and a booming commercial center.
▪️But LA had a major issue limiting its growth, no water. It wasn’t until Mulholland found a water source and built an aqueduct down from Northern California that LA had the infrastructure to grow into a major city.
▪️Then, a combination of oil, real estate and the film industry caused it to boom in the early 1900s. Post WWII, industries like aerospace continued its spectacular growth. Calling this “Mexican land” is a brain dead take. Neither the Mexicans, Spanish nor ...
