My old HR professor once told me "Companies get the Union they deserve". There is a kernal of truth to that statement. Wal-Mart, while phenomenally profitable for some, is not exactly the place I'd go drop my resume. For a lot of reasons, but this is one of them:

With most of Wal-Mart's workers earning less than $19,000 a year, a number of community groups and lawmakers have recently teamed up with labor unions in mounting an intensive campaign aimed at prodding Wal-Mart into paying its 1.3 million employees higher wages.

H. Lee Scott Jr., Wal-Mart's chief executive, vigorously defends his company, arguing that wages are primarily determined by market forces and that Wal-Mart pays more than most retailers and provides better opportunities for advancement.

"If people tell you that Wal-Mart is leading the so-called 'race to the bottom' in terms of job quality or pay, they're not only wrong, they're dead wrong," he said to journalists at a company-sponsored conference here in April, the first time Wal-Mart has gone out of its way to invite a number of reporters to its headquarters to hear its views. "We are instead creating a better workplace with more opportunity and more benefits than have been available in retail."

Mr. Scott contends that the critics, including competitors, are defenders of an outdated status quo, intent on upholding a retailing system full of inefficiency and inflated prices.

He said that if Wal-Mart were as greedy as its detractors say, it would never have attracted 8,000 job applicants for 525 places at a new store in Glendale, Ariz., or 3,000 applicants for 300 jobs in outlying Los Angeles.

Mr. Scott argues that retailers, with narrow profit margins, face a different competitive situation and cannot afford to be as generous to their workers as automakers and other capital-intensive companies.

"Some well-meaning critics," he said, "believe that Wal-Mart, because of our size, should play the role that General Motors played after World War II, and that is to establish the post-world-war middle class that the country is so proud of. The facts are that retailing doesn't perform that role in the economy as G.M. does or did. Retailing doesn't perform that role in any country in the world."

Seems to me that the Wal-Mart execs want it both ways, they want the love of the stock analysts and Wall Street for being "efficient", and they want taxpayers to help them maintain those "efficiencies" by providing Medicaid and Food Stamps to help the company keep expenses down. How utterly republican. Greed, is after all, good. Right/Correct?

Here's the riddle inside the enigma question: what happens as republicans gut programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps? How does that play out in the Wal-Mart corporate strategery book, given that they are big contributors to/supporters of [gasp] the 1600 Crew and their help-the-rich agenda?