Fortune Magazine reports that Wal-Mart hit the top of the revenue charts again in 2010 beating out the big boys like Exxon Mobil in insatiable profits. Also in the list of top revenue producers are eight bailed out companies: General Electric (3), Bank of America (7), J.P. Morgan Chase (9), Citigroup (12), General Motors (15), AIG (16), Wells Fargo (19), Freddie Mac (54)….

AIG, made the list? Freddie Mac? Citigroup? GM? Aren’t these more like Misfortune 500 companies?

Question: How can you be completely mismanaged, virtually insolvent and held up by taxpayer billions and still make the Fortune 500 list? That is the Trillion Dollar question.

Answer: What constitutes a “great company” for Fortune Magazine is entirely based on numbers, however creative those numbers may be. The 500 List doesn’t consider how many employees lost their jobs, how many worker benefits were cut, how many millions of American families were rendered homeless, and how many of America’s 15 million unemployed and 15 million under-employed lost their medical insurance and ability to feed their families due to the distorted and singular pursuit of revenues by Fortune’s “Best.”

The top dog position this year falls to discount king Wal-Mart. Fortune asks the question:
“Is Wal-Mart Stores a great company, or what?”

How exactly does Fortune Magazine define “great?”

2010 Fortune 500: Wal-Mart back on top
“The mega-retailer knocked Exxon Mobil out of the top slot to rule the Fortune 500 again this year. Wal-Mart managed to lift revenues, on top of a big increase in 2008, by attracting bargain-hungry customers from competitors with remodeled stores and inexpensive private-label goods, offering everything from frozen pizza to patio furniture in one stop. A single trip also meant less spending on gas. Result: Profits surged a whopping 7% to $14.3 billion.”

Wow, that sure is a lot of frozen pizza. So what is the secret to Wal-Mart’s success? Maybe we can learn something about being “great” from Wal-Mart’s example.

In recent years Wal-Mart has gone green, not with envy but with sustainable business practices –at least that is what we are told.

Naturally wherever the retail giant can save money by cutting back on energy usage and recycling goods would make perfect sense for Fortune’s Number One. But making Wal-Mart the poster child for environmentally sustainable practices would be a big pill to swallow for most of us. (Didn’t we already do that with BP?)

As for integrity some of us cannot forget Wal-Mart deliberately mislabeling foods as “organic” only three years ago.  Nor can we forget the internal memo released by top management to encourage high employee turnover and “dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart” to save on healthcare benefits and wages.

But people change and so do companies. Perhaps the “Top Company in America” is a role model for us after all. So just what is the Greenest of Green discount retailers doing today?

Wal-Mart Stores, the $14.3bn revenue producer, is flexing its big legal muscles to fight a $7,000 fine issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for failing to protect the safety of a minimum wage worker who was trampled to death in November 2008.   Wal-Mart, who agreed to a settlement with the Nassau County District Attorney to avoid criminal charges, does not feel the fine is fair. Why is it unfair? Because “crowd trampling” is not an occupational hazard that retailers must actively prevent says the big WM.

Excuse me Wal-Mart…an occupational hazard would be any danger on the job.  Two thousand people queued up in front of a store sign that said, “Blitz Line Starts Here” and a 34-year old temporary worker was stomped to death in the rushing surge for a $300 laptop. It seems safe to conclude from this event that crowd danger is an occupational hazard.

This incident reveals a lot about the 2,000 Wal-Mart customers who were clearly more interested in a bargain than respecting human life. The case also reveals a lot about Wal-Mart’s business practices. Birds of a feather you know…

Wal-Mart believes that paying the small sum of $7000 would set a precedent to make them legally responsible to safeguard workers against errant crowds. And they don’t want to be responsible for that—legally or otherwise.

To make their position clear, Wal-Mart has filed 20 motions, 400 pages of legal briefs, and spent 2 million dollars in legal fees. The case is costing taxpayers millions too by demanding nearly 5,000 hours from OSHA legal eagles. In the NY office, 17% percent of attorney hours are taken up with defending the negligence fine levied against Wal-Mart.

OSHA states that Wal-Mart failed to protect employees from “recognized hazards” and to prevent situations that were “likely to cause death or serious harm” due to “crowd surge or crowd trampling.”

Wal-Mart’s official response: “We are committed to learning from the incident and making our stores even safer for customers and our associates.“

Actions always speak louder than words. Wal-Mart’s fierce battle to avoid the fine says more about company values than any amount of legal briefs or PR. The attorney for an injured shopper states, “They don’t want to take responsibility realistically for what they did.”

So in answer to Fortune’s $14.3bn question:  Is Wal-Mart Stores a great company, or what?
If “great” means only bottom-line profits, maybe so.

But if “great” includes the human-bottom line that requires a company to place the sanctity of life and dignity of human beings ahead of profits?

Or What.

It used to be that indifferent wealth building and outsized risk was sexy. For thirty years, the world of high rolling high finance was the object of admiration and envy. The chants of “Wall Street sucks” some ten thousand strong in front of City Hall last week signify that the days of glamour and greed are over. Inarticulate and ineffectual as that phrase might be, it reveals the increasing rage building against Wall Street titans. In the wake of the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, economic hardship has become too real for too many.

Wall Street’s ”burn baby burn” ethos isn’t looking so hot these days. The thrill is gone baby. The thrill is gone away.

Last week, Wall Street’s ruling class, the risk managers of the mortgage securities division at Goldman Sachs were skewered to a well-done temperature by a suddenly alive and outraged Senate Committee.

Question: Where was this “you done wrong” stance when the Street paid themselves millions on the backs of the downtrodden and newly homeless? Where was the outrage and effective action when the industry cannibalized itself and then walked away with the Golden Goose? The rage of our elected officials on display across TV Land America seems too little too late to help those in foreclosure or destitute from loss of income directly due to the excessive greed of a select few.

So what was this humiliating display of Goldman Sachs princes falling from grace all about?

The current anger at Wall Street seems to be channeled almost exclusively at one firm and that nefarious place called “Wall Street.” Goldman Sachs has come to represent for many critics, the Great Satan in modern America.  Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi called Goldman the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”  His attack of the Big Bank established lines of battle between those who believe the investment banking giant can do no wrong (Warren Buffet  & junk bond king Michael Milken) and those who believe they are modern day Dillingers (Taibbi and most of America.)

In case you missed it, the Securities and Exchange Commission suddenly awakened from its decades long “see-no-evil” stupor and brought civil charges against Goldman Sachs for allegedly deceiving clients by selling bad debt called “synthetic CDOs” and then profiting on their client’s investment faux pas. These “exotic” financial instruments were once ironically termed “weapons of financial mass destruction” by Goldman’s most vocal supporter, Warren Buffet. (Buffet invested 5 billion dollars in GS in the fall of 2008.)

Goldman’s defense: Our investors are big boys capable of making their own decisions. Translation: “We are not responsible for your ignorance…suckers!”

Taibbi points out in a recent UK Guardian article that the philosophy behind their defense is the medieval business model of “caveat emptor.” He writes, “The investment bank’s cult of self-interest is on trial against the whole idea of civilization – the collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even if we can.”

Goldman’s greatest critic is indeed correct that the investment giant’s “cult of self-interest is on trial,” but this is not exclusive to Goldman Sachs. They are simply the most visible and seemingly “best” practitioner of unrestrained profit-seeking at the expense of the greater society. Goldman Sachs is not on trial literally (at least not yet). The entire business model of profit-at-any-cost (Atlas Shrinks) is “on trial” in the eyes of the public.

For years, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. As a culture, we have defended a business model of profits-before-people that has come to bite us in the bloomin’ arse. The model has been reduced to an inane battle of “conservatives versus liberals.” Just curious: Since when is it “conservative” to take the food out of a baby’s mouth and the roof over a hard working family’s heads? Since when is it “liberal” to establish a morally restrained code of behavior that embodies the Golden Rule? All these absurd labels prove is that as a society we force people into tiny boxes for our tiny minds to comprehend and then completely miss the point.

The Point: Are we survival-of-the-fittest capitalists in a deadly game of Darwinian magnitude? Or are we morally responsible and socially conscious capitalists who have personal boundaries in the pursuit of profit which we won’t cross? In other words: In the quest for money, is there anything at all that we won’t or can’t do?

Libertarians or Randian greed-mongers would say no. In the purity of the “free market,” there is nothing we should not be able to do. Theirs is a Wild West philosophy of lawlessness, predatory mortgages, and under-the-radar “derivatives.”

The chances of Goldman Sachs breaking a securities law and being convicted of fraud are pretty slim. They are too “clever” and too connected to behave criminally. Goldman does not have to break laws to profit; they simply change laws to their advantage-circa Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The purity of our democracy is the real issue, not Goldman’s alleged “fraud.”

Law of the Land

While in Wyoming traveling from Yellowstone National Park some years ago, the owner of a lodge asked me if I wanted to go grizzly bear hunting. I replied, “I thought it was illegal to shoot grizzly bears.” The cowboy smiled, “We make our own laws here.” Looking around at the rugged and wild expanse of nature surrounding me, it was easy to understand his conviction. He could have killed me too and no one would have ever known.

What struck me most about his question was that he and I were of such contrasting worlds. I, a city girl, was comfortable with society’s rules. He, a wilderness child, had no respect for anyone else’s law. The fact that he thought I would share his love for the indiscriminate killing of innocent animals astonished me. We held a completely different moral view.

It reminds me of a conversation with a former mortgage trader from one of the big banks just after Lehman’s fall. He had been skiing in Aspen in 2007 and overheard two mortgage brokers ranting about a deal they failed to close. “F***ing Bitch,” they swore of the cautious widow who refused their loan. My friend was weary of the business and said, “I made my money; it’s not fun anymore.” His was a rare conscience in the world of finance-one where he gave up “the fun” to become part of Vermont’s middle class. The price of easy money became too high for his morally conscious mind.

What is really on trial with Goldman on the hot seat is our cultural ambivalence to greed. There is no such thing as easy money or “money for nothing” – that is the great American myth. There is always a price to pay when we throw care and responsibility to the wind.

We live in a shared society, not an island apart from the world. We are part of a complex and extensive global community. Everything we do from polluting the environment to polluting the economic system comes back to haunt us. In our adolescent materialism, we forget there are consequences for our actions.

For the record, “Wall Street” is not the few blocks stretching downtown that last week’s protestors symbolically walked. Wall Street is an amorphous destination that exists as much in our minds as it does behind the gold and glass plated doors of 200 West Street. It stretches from one end of the nation to the other – south, north, west, east and everywhere in between. It reaches every continent on earth and directly affects every nation. It operates through every bank, insurance company, corporation, lender, and financial advisor. It includes the stock exchanges and bond markets in New York, London, Hong Kong, Chicago, and around the world. Wall Street is not a “place” at all, but a global economic system. The question is do we want to support a system that creates value for society or destroys it?

The myth of the “free market” is that we should have no laws. We should be able to shoot grizzlies and each other with impunity in our current economic philosophy. No one will really know if we “screw” each other over. As long as we do not leave a trail of emails behind, it’s your word against mine. Who would ever know?

Our market values do not emulate our societal values. We live in a ”free society” within a complicated system of laws designed to protect us from the tyranny of each other. I can no more “kill” you, than you me, without legal consequences. Yet I can sell you bad debt hidden in between thousands of pages and laugh at your stupidity as you writhe in agony from economic disaster. The double standard of our flawed morality makes little sense.

Greed is looking ugly these days. “The great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” is greed itself. Unbridled greed is primitive, crude, crass, dangerous, socially obsolete and not in the least bit sexy. To paraphrase that great philosopher, B.B. King:

The thrill is gone baby.
The thrill is gone away.
You know you done us wrong baby.
You’ll be sorry someday.

Taibbi writes of the task facing the modern world to make a collective decision once and for all, “not to screw each other over” just because we can.

Goldman Sachs is not the source of the problem. The real source is the primitive and socially unconscious business model they embody and we embrace. The acceptable for-profit survival of the fittest model where we “take the money and run” without responsibility for our actions. The model where it is not only “okay” but “good business” to leave dead bodies in our wake. The model where if I survive and you fail… I win!

After all, they shoot grizzly bears don’t they?

Monika Mitchell - Executive Director    editor@goodb.net

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