The Times noted that EDF “does not accept contributions from Walmart or other corporations it works with.” EDF itself often mentions this when the subject of Walmart comes up, making note of it on its website, as well as in blog posts and other communications about its work with the company.

But, while it’s true that Walmart does not fund EDF (either directly or through its internal, company-run foundation), the environmental group does receive an awful lot of money from the Walton Family Foundation. Since 2004, the foundation has given EDF more than $53 million. Last year, the foundation’s $13.7 million grant to the group amounted to about 15 percent of EDF’s budget. After readers brought this to the attention of The Times, the newspaper amended its story and ran a correction noting the Walton foundation’s grants to EDF.

Established by Walmart founder Sam Walton in 1987 and run today by his children and grandchildren, the Walton Family Foundation has quietly grown into one of the largest foundations in the country. Last year, it ranked second in the nation based on total giving, behind only the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

It’s impossible to untangle all the connections between the Walton Family Foundation and the Walmart corporation. They are separate entities, but the Waltons pull the strings within both — the family has complete control over the foundation and significant control over the corporation.

The foundation’s board is made up entirely of Waltons. Walmart’s board includes three family members: Rob Walton, who’s been a director since 1978 and chair since his father Sam died 20 years ago; Jim, another of Sam’s sons; and Greg Penner, who is married to Rob Walton’s daughter, Carrie, one of the more visible and active directors of the foundation.

More important than board seats is stock: The Waltons own about 50 percent of Walmart’s stock. Yes, it’s mind-boggling, but a single family owns half of the second-largest company on the planet, a corporation whose revenues last year exceeded the GDP of all but 23 countries.

This year alone, the Waltons will pocket more than $2.7 billion in dividends from their Walmart stock. That’s more than the combined income of 53,000 American households earning the median income. The Waltons’ wealth and their capacity to fund their foundation rests not on a residual fortune amassed generations ago, but rather on a fat pipeline of profits flowing directly from Walmart’s current success.

The overlapping interests of the Walton foundation and the Walmart corporation are particularly evident in the realm of the environment. Walmart launched its sustainability campaign in 2005. About the same time, the Walton Family Foundation began ramping up its giving to environmental causes. The environment is now one of three major funding areas for the foundation.

Last year, the foundation made $71 million in grants to environmental organizations — with the largest grants going to groups that have collaborated with Walmart. In addition to EDF, top recipients included Conservation International, which has a corporate partnership with Walmart, and the Marine Stewardship Council, which began receiving foundation support the same year it agreed to certify and provide an eco-label for some of the seafood Walmart sells. These three organizations accounted for 46 percent of the foundation’s environmental funding last year.

Jon Coifman, spokesperson for EDF’s Corporate Partnerships Program, says that, while the organization has an ironclad policy of not accepting donations from the corporations it works with, EDF has always been less restrictive with respect to individual donors and family foundations because “it would simply be prohibitive to attempt to vet every stock portfolio or source of income.” Coifman also says that EDF “holds Walmart to the same standards we would any other company.”

What does it mean for the environmental movement that the Walton Family Foundation is now one of the largest environmental grantmakers in the nation? For one thing, it means that Walmart’s money is exerting significant influence in setting the agenda, defining the problems, and elevating certain kinds of approaches — notably those that reinforce, rather than challenge, the power of large corporations in our economy and society. That’s a worrisome trend given how far this company’s tentacles already reach into our economy and government.

This article originally appeared on Grist.

A new ranking of states based on “small business friendliness” was released this week by Thumbtack, in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Thumbtack, an online directory that helps people find local service providers, surveyed over 6,000 small business owners who list their services on its site and, based on their responses, assigned letter grades to each state.

The survey-takers were asked to rate their state across several measures of small business friendliness. Many of the questions dealt with regulations. Business owners were asked how friendly or unfriendly their state is with regard to environmental, labor, health & safety, licensing, and land use regulations.

In the final results, which you can see in this interactive map, states that have more regulations tend to rank low, while those with fewer and looser rules top the list. The five states deemed least friendly to small businesses are Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii, California, and New York. The five most friendly are Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, and Louisiana.

In a press release, Thumbtack put a point on the findings by quoting the owner of a roofing business in Texas:  “With comparatively few regulations or government oversight on small businesses, Texas is truly a small-business-friendly state.”

The trouble with this analysis, though, is that many of the “unfriendly” states are actually home to much larger numbers of small businesses than the “friendly” states.

Vermont, for example, which earned an “F” in the ranking, in part because of its cumbersome environmental and zoning regulations, has nearly twice as many small businesses per capita as laissez-faire Texas, which scored an “A+.” Low-ranking New York and Rhode Island likewise have more small businesses than most states.

Of the five most “friendly” states, only one, Idaho, outperforms the national average on numbers of small businesses. The other four lag behind, with Louisiana ranking 36th and Texas 47th in the nation.

The regional results also don’t line up. “The South was the most small business-friendly region of the country, while New England was rated the least small business-friendly,” the Thumbtack/Kauffman analysis finds. But, looking at the actual distribution of small businesses, one would conclude that the South is the least hospitable region for small businesses, while New England is one of the most favorable areas.  (Keep reading after the next map…)

Another way one can evaluate the Thumbtack ranking is to look at which states had stronger small business growth (or slower decline) over the last decade. Here again the “unfriendly” states outperformed the “friendly” ones. Nationally, the number of small firms has fallen 6.5 percent since 1999 (relative to population). Rhode Island, Vermont, Hawaii, California, and New York all beat the national average. In fact, these five states together lost half as many small businesses per capita as the U.S. as a whole.

Meanwhile, Texas saw its small business numbers drop by almost 12%. Idaho and Louisiana likewise lost more small firms than the national average.

Thumbtack also graded 40 metro areas. Again, their results differ from other measures of the robustness of local businesses, notably the Indie City Index published last year by Civic Economics, which rated metro regions based on the share of spending captured by independent retailers.

What does all of this tell us? It’s impossible to draw conclusions without an in-depth study that analyzes causality. It may be that regulations have little impact either way on small business vitality and that other factors are much more crucial in fostering entrepreneurship. (Remote, rural states, like Montana and Maine, for example, seem to have a more robust small business sector.)

But it’s also possible that some of the regulations small business owners find burdensome are ultimately beneficial. It may be that strong environmental and labor policies can help to create the kinds of healthy, vibrant places that enable local businesses to thrive. It may also be that these rules have a more limiting effect on their big competitors. Vermont’s land use policies, for example, have done much to preserve the vitality of the state’s downtowns and protect its farmland from sprawl, which has been a boon to local businesses and food producers, while also inhibiting the spread of Walmart and other big-box retailers.

That some regulations might be good for small business is an idea rarely entertained in the public debate over how best to nurture the economy. It runs so counter to the dominant, overriding assumption that public policies that set limits and standards are bad for all businesses, perhaps most especially small ones.

But the evidence to support this conventional wisdom is surprisingly sparse. That one of its main proponents is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce should also give us pause. As I’ve written elsewhere, the Chamber has a long track record of pushing its big business agenda under the guise of protecting small businesses.

What we may well find over the long-run is that, in an anti-regulatory, race-to-the-bottom environment, big corporations thrive, while small businesses, much like labor unions and endangered species, continue to see their numbers dwindle.

Walmart spent much of last week burnishing its green image and touting its progress “toward becoming a more sustainable, responsible company.” All the while, those at the very top of the company, including CEO Mike Duke, knew that The New York Times was about to publish an explosive story that would lay to waste the notion that Walmart cares about anything other than its own growth.

The Times story presents credible evidence that Walmart’s Mexican subsidiary spent millions of dollars bribing local officials in order to speed up permits for new stores, get “zoning maps changed,” and make “environmental objections vanish.” When top executives, including Duke, learned of the bribes in 2005, they declined to notify U.S. and Mexican law enforcement, shut down Walmart’s own internal investigation, and continued to lavish promotions on the alleged ringleader, Eduardo Castro-Wright, who currently serves as Walmart’s vice chair.

In the days since the Times story broke, attention has turned to the potential punishment Walmart might face. A criminal investigation is underway at the U.S. Department of Justice, which, under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, could pursue prosecutions that might lead to substantial fines and even jail time for Duke and others implicated. The Mexican government, meanwhile, has initiated its own inquiry.

If justice is to be served in this case, though, Walmart must not only face fines and prison terms, but also be forced to sell off a sizeable number of its ill-gotten Mexican stores. By bribing officials, Walmart was able to crush its competitors, opening new stores so fast they had no time to react. In just a few years, Walmart came out of nowhere to dominate the Mexican economy.

But, as any athlete or other competitor knows, if you’re caught cheating your way to a win, then you most certainly do not get to keep the prize.

Walmart’s expansion into Mexico began in earnest in 1997 when it bought a controlling stake in one of the country’s largest retail chains. Walmart then began to build new stores with stunning speed. By the time the bribery allegations reached executives at the company’s Arkansas headquarters in the fall of 2005, Walmart had more than 750 stores in Mexico and was opening new ones at the rate of almost two per week.

As Walmart grew, Mexico’s traditional vendors, open-air markets, and independent businesses declined. Competing supermarket chains were left in the dust too, unable to match Walmart’s speed and financial muscle.

Although Walmart’s expansion plans often encountered strong grassroots opposition, as its stores frequently do in the U.S., the company consistently outmaneuvered local residents, in part, we now know, by using bribes to skirt land-use rules and quickly win approvals.

Even the massive public outcry that arose in 2004, when Walmart unveiled plans to build a store near the base of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, failed to stop the giant. The store is now visible from the top of the pyramid.

In its no-holds-barred quest to dominate the Mexican landscape and economy, Walmart may have also violated Mexico’s antitrust laws. In 2002, the Federal Competition Commission opened an investigation into Walmart for using its market power to threaten farmers and other suppliers and pressure them into providing deep discounts that were not available to competing retailers, even at the same volume.

A year later, government officials said they found evidence that Walmart was violating competition laws, but not enough to pursue legal action. They closed the investigation on the condition that Walmart abide by a “code of conduct” in its dealings with suppliers.

Throughout all of this, Walmart portrayed its Mexican operations to both stockholders and employees as the crowning jewel of its international division. In its 2006 Annual Report, released shortly after top executives decided to look the other way on the bribery charges, according to the timeline in the Times story, Walmart crowed about its success south of the border: “Wal-Mart de Mexico had a great year as operating income grew faster than its sales increase of 13.7% (inflation adjusted).”

For employees in foreign subsidiaries that were struggling to meet their expansion targets, the message was clear: Be more like Walmart de Mexico.

As all of this was occurring, Walmart was also launching its sustainability campaign, a broad effort to remake the company’s image in order to keep its growth machine going, both here and abroad.

And grow it has. By 2009, Walmart was opening stores at the rate of more than three per week in Mexico. The pace accelerated to more than five stores per week in 2010. Last year, Walmart opened a staggering 358 stores in Mexico — compared to only 59 stores opened by the next five largest retail chains in the country.

Walmart now has more than 2,000 stores in Mexico, a country with one-third the population and less than one-tenth the retail sales of the United States. Walmart is Mexico’s largest private employer and largest retailer by a wide margin, capturing an estimated 62 percent of sales made at publicly traded supermarket chains, according to HSBC.

The only just resolution to all of this — the only punishment that would actually sting Walmart and provide real benefit to the public whose laws were broken — would be to force Walmart to divest a sizable share of its Mexican stores. These outlets could be sold, under supervision by competition authorities, to a range of competitors, including independent entrepreneurs as well as other chains. This would begin to restore a more competitive retail economy, one not dominated by a single cheating giant.

It’s a super long shot, I know, especially given the tepid response from the Mexican government so far. But citizens and activists groups on both sides of the border should be calling for something more than Mike Duke’s resignation. Walmart’s penalty should fit the scale of its crime and offer a measure of restitution for the communities and local economies harmed.

Walmart works hard to show off its green side, but environmental activists have been slamming the corporation for a litany of sins against Mother Nature—emitting millions of tons of CO2, encouraging waste by selling low-quality goods, and building warehouse-sized stores…. This week, the largest corporation in America itemized its environmental successes in its Global Responsibility Report.

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Walmart recognizes that it is under the microscope. “We’ve set bold goals for ourselves, and government leaders, NGOs, and our customers are watching our progress,” company chairman Rob Walton said at the company’s Sustainability Milestone Meeting this week.

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There are other green issues that environmental groups raise. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), one such group, has blasted the placement of stores on the outskirts of cities, requiring consumers to drive further to reach them. The retailer’s massive grocery operation also promotes industrialized farming, they allege, and the Sierra Club has pointed out that stores’ 24-hour operations make for more energy consumption.

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“The argument that academics make, and that I’d make too, is Walmart is many times the size of Target or Costco. [Those stores are] big, but they’re not of such a size that they’re so incredibly influential,” says Stacy Mitchell, senior researcher with ILSR.

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Similarly, many consumers are more likely to go green when it’s cost-effective. The need for cheap groceries can be more pressing than any environmental repercussions. But low prices can create a vicious cycle. Walmart, the employer of 2.1 million workers, has borne heavy criticism for its compensation policies, particularly its recent cuts to health coverage for some workers.

That kind of cut perpetuates consumption and waste, says Mitchell: “Many people feel so strapped that they feel they have to buy the six-dollar toaster, but part of the reason that so many people are in that situation has to do with the Walmart economy.”

Read the fully story here.

For Immediate Release — April 17, 2012

Washington, D.C. – In response to Walmart’s release of its Global Responsibility Report, Food & Water Watch and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) have published the Top 10 Ways Walmart Fails on Sustainability. Since 2005, the country’s largest retailer has been making splashy announcements and issuing slick reports to highlight its environmental and social responsibility efforts. Food & Water Watch and ILSR contend that Walmart fails to live up to its promises and continues to ignore the fundamental problems with its business model that harm the environment, undermine healthy food choices, and exacerbate poverty.

“No amount of greenwash can conceal the fact that Walmart perpetuates an industrialized food system that diminishes our natural resources, causes excessive pollution, and forces smaller farmers and companies to get big or get out of business,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.

“Once again, Walmart is using sustainability as a marketing tool to improve its public image and propel its growth —  even as it continues to pave over critical habitat, increase its greenhouse gas emissions, and flood the market with shoddy products that go from factory to landfill in record time,” said Stacy Mitchell, senior researcher at ILSR.

Top 10 Ways Walmart Fails on Sustainability is based on ILSR’s report Walmart’s Greenwash: How the company’s much-publicized sustainability campaign falls short, while its relentless growth devastates the environment and Food & Water Watch’s report Why Walmart Can’t Fix the Food System.

Download Top 10 Ways Walmart Fails on Sustainability.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance is a 38-year-old national nonprofit research and educational organization that works to support strong, community rooted, environmentally sound and equitable local economies. www.ilsr.org.

Food & Water Watch works to ensure the food, water and fish we consume is safe, accessible and sustainable. So we can all enjoy and trust in what we eat and drink, we help people take charge of where their food comes from, keep clean, affordable, public tap water flowing freely to our homes, protect the environmental quality of oceans, force government to do its job protecting citizens, and educate about the importance of keeping shared resources under public control. www.foodandwaterwatch.org

Contact: Food & Water Watch, Anna Ghosh: 415-293-9905, aghosh(at)fwwatch(dot)org
Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Stacy Mitchell: 207-774-6792 , smitchell@ilsr.org

Bringing together strangers, often through social media, the events aim to support locally owned merchants. The upshot: stores get a windfall, and ‘mobsters’ learn more about their city and meet new friends.

The crowd stood at the corner of San Pedro and Boyd streets, a bustling shopping area near L.A.’s Skid Row, waiting for stragglers to arrive before descending on the store.  But this mob wasn’t an angry one. It had gathered on a recent Saturday afternoon to spend money at a small cafe and boutique.

Dubbed a “cash mob,” members of the group, many of them young professionals, had arranged the event through social media. Over the course of an hour, the shoppers plucked soy candles, pillows, purses and ornate jewelry from the shelves. By the time they were through, they had dropped $1,200 — nearly double what Made by DWC brings in on a typical day.

“We sold out of a lot of products,” said Patrick Shandrick, spokesman for the nonprofit Downtown Women’s Center, which operates the shop. This event was “more of what the holidays are like.”

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Cash mobs have cleverly harnessed social media to make small businesses the meme of the moment. Tough economic times have raised awareness about the plight of Main Street merchants, said Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance who has written extensively on small businesses.

“Whether people will continue to organize these [cash mobs], it’ll be interesting to see,” Mitchell said. “The larger point is that this is part of a much larger trend in terms of support for the independent business movement.”

About 200 cash mobs have sprung up across the U.S. since last summer, including nearly two dozen in California, according to Andrew Samtoy, a Cleveland attorney who has become something of a Pied Piper for the movement. He organized his own cash mob in November as a way to get strangers to meet for a fun outing that would also help boost the local economy. Samtoy garnered media attention for his efforts, and he enlisted friends in other U.S. cities to organize their own events.

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Read the full story here.

An environmentalist in Bentonville sounds like the premise for a low-budget reality show, but Wal-Mart has been courting environmental groups and seeking their input on its policies in the seven years since it first announced a sustainability program.

The company, the nation’s biggest retailer, has met some environmental goals and missed others. On Monday, it plans to announce that it now reuses or recycles more than 80 percent of the waste produced in its domestic stores and in its other United States operations. That is up from 64 percent as of 2009, but it is short of the zero-waste goal the company hopes to get to.

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Before Wal-Mart announced the environmental initiative in 2005, H. Lee Scott, the chief executive, reviewed the legal and public relations problems the company was having. It had paid millions of dollars in fines for violating local pollution laws, and was facing a lawsuit claiming that Wal-Mart discriminated against women. Mr. Scott wondered if behaving differently could enhance the company’s reputation, he told Fortune. That year, Mr. Scott announced a wide-ranging plan to lessen the retailer’s environmental impact. Wal-Mart has issued regular updates on its progress since then.

But some environmental and shop-local groups contend that the company’s business model remains inherently anti-environment.

“Wal-Mart’s price pressure on manufacturers is undermining the durability and quality of products, which has contributed to a sharp increase in how much Americans buy and how much we discard,” said Stacy Mitchell, senior researcher for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “The majority of what the company does is designed to accelerate consumption.”

Vonda Lockwood, senior director of operations who handles the waste program at Wal-Mart, said she had heard the objections.  “My question is, ‘So do we do nothing then?’ I feel like we are a retailer, we’re here to be a retailer, and in doing that we’re trying to be good partners as a retailer,” she said. In the report to be released next week, Wal-Mart will describe a mixed degree of progress on the goals Mr. Scott outlined seven years ago. Mr. Scott, who retired in 2009 as chief executive, serves on Wal-Mart’s board of directors.
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Read the full story here.

Chris Dilla figures somebody must like the posters she puts up in the bathrooms of her Bocktown Beer and Grill restaurant in Robinson, because a few have disappeared.

Rock star images? Andy Warhol prints? No. Just marketing materials from The 3/50 Project, a low-key effort to get consumers to think about where they’re spending their money. The basic message: Spending $50 at three independently owned businesses each month could help save the local economy.

The “buy local” buzz has been getting louder in recent years and the economic downturn may have helped the cause. Independent businesses are reaching out for low-cost ways to boost their chances for survival, and they’re being heard by consumers starting to believe their spending choices could help themselves, too.

“Put your money where your house is,” urges one new Western Pennsylvania program to help promote various business districts. A casual decision on where to buy dinner can be important, said Amanda Parks, co-owner of Equita, a fair-trade and green lifestyle store in Lawrenceville. “You’re voting what your neighborhood is going to look like.”

Armed with data and advice to back up the argument that a higher percent of money spent with independent businesses stays in the local community, programs to market “buy local” have multiplied. There are now about 130 local advocacy groups around the country, touching 30,000 independent businesses, according to Stacy Mitchell, senior researcher for the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which promotes sustainability issues.

But all is not blue skies and uncomplicated choices. In applying the concept to hundreds of different communities, different definitions develop for what’s local or independent. Some groups focus on supporting independent businesses, others are food-based — trying to connect farmers with restaurants or residents. Some put geographic limitations on “local,” others debate the definition of a franchise.

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Read the full story here.

Supercenters, which average more than four times the size of a typical grocery store, sell everything a regular Walmart store does, plus baked goods, deli items, frozen foods, meat, dairy, snacks and produce.  In many communities it’s a problem when the big box retailer moves their operation somewhere else.  “We’re seeing this all over the country, where Walmart is abandoning stores that in many cases are not that old and moving down the street or a mile down the road to build a new Supercenter” on vacant land, said Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis and author of “Big Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses.”   Unlike older buildings in most business districts that can accommodate different uses over the years, Walmart’s cavernous, windowless buildings “are built to spec for a specific use” that make them hard to adapt to other tenants, she said. “There just aren’t many retailers who need more than 100,000 square feet.”

Read the full story here.

Like the Austin Independent Business Alliance, begun by Steve Bercu, co-owner of BookPeople, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, many early shop-local initiatives were started to keep Borders out. In Austin, Borders attempt to move across the street from Bercu’s store also led him to enlist Dan Houston and his strategic planning consultancy Civic Economics for their now classic study, in 2002, which showed for the first time the economic impact of the chains: for every $100 a customer spends, the local economy gets $13 back from a chain store, compared to $45, from a local merchant.  With Amazon poised to reach Wal-Mart proportions by the end of this decade, according to Stacy Mitchell, senior researcher with the New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and the e-book onslaught, can shopping local turn the tide?

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