The Clergy Campaign for Social and Economic Justice Supports the ‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ Movement

These are the first principles of The Clergy Campaign for Social and Economic Justice’s support of the ‘OCCUPY WALL STREET’ Movement and the basis of our progressive action campaign against the Wal-Mart Corporation as a matter of social and economic justice.

1. Politicians and governments rule by consent of the governed.
2. Corporations are not people. We are the people. A person is a spirit (with a personality and character, feelings, hopes, dreams, desires and aspirations for the best possible life for him or herself, family and community), possessing a living soul (conscious, cognitively intelligent, and alive), occupying a mortal body. Corporations are creations of people. Corporations exist to engage business interests and activities that serve the needs of people, profitably. The needs and the civil and human rights of the people supersede the interests of corporations and business morally, socio-politically, socio-economically, and as a fundamental construct of civil society. This is the social contract between business and civil society.
3. ‘Corporate Social Policy’ should at all times reflect this fundamental tenant of civil society, and corporations must not and may not violate this social contract on pain of action against it by the people and dissolution.
4. Politicians and Government (local, state and federal) should and must at all times serve the interests of the people that they were elected to represent, as a matter of socio-political obligation by advocating for and defending this social contract, recognizing fundamentally the needs of the people as superior to and having priority over the needs of corporations and business. The people have a voice independently and collectively, and they alone determine what their needs are. Politicians and Government are agents of the people and serve at the pleasure of the people on pain of disenfranchisement.
5. The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Movement (OWS) is a movement of the people to redress our system of capitalism which places the self-interests of corporations and business over the needs and the civil and human rights of the people, and Politicians and Government held captive by corrupt financial influence against the best interest of the people that they represent. We endorse and support the OWS Movement and the rights of the people to seek public redress through the creation of this public square (Zuccotti Park) re-named LIBERTY PLAZA. We recognize and respect their peaceful protest and their sacrifice on behalf of all of civil society and our country.
6. Wal-Mart among the world’s largest and most profitable corporations, and the largest retailer in the world, is among the most egregious offenders of this social contract with the people, duping the public with its low price business model and corporate marketing, but the profits obtained from this virulent business model accrue against the interest of the very consumers who flock to Wal-Mart retail stores because they desperately desire to make ends meet in these harsh economic hard times.
7. Wal-Mart employs a vast number of the working poor in its retail empire, paying poverty wages that keep their employees below, at, or barely above the 2011 HHS Poverty Guidelines. A jaw dropping number of Wal-Mart employees receive public assistance to supplement their meager paychecks. Wal-Mart fights unionization, as well as their own employees who join together in solidarity to improve wages and work conditions for themselves and their colleagues. Wal-Mart regularly engages in tactics that serve to break efforts to unionize and provide benefits for their ‘associates’ including limiting weekly work hours to under 24 hours keeping their ‘associates’ on a tight leash and literally hungry to work.
8. Instead of hiring a solid core skilled workforce, Wal-Mart employs huge numbers of people from the communities where they establish Wal-Mart retail stores, paying these individuals, they call ‘associates’ poverty wages, giving them low hours so they do not qualify for benefits, and when they do qualify for benefits the ‘associates’ pay a significant portion of their poverty wages to maintain health insurance. New York Times, October 21, 2011, ‘Wal-Mart Cuts Some Health Care Benefits’. Wal-Mart employs over 2.1 million people in the United States.
9. There are those that will advocate for Wal-Mart’s entry into the NYC market (Mayor Michael Bloomberg) citing the need to create jobs in a climate of high unemployment in the country generally and in New York city in particular, but the question remains ‘Wal-Mart Jobs at What Cost to New York City?’

1. Wal-Mart will not pay its employees a ‘living wage’ that keeps them squarely in the middle class and out of poverty, perpetuating a permanent underclass that not only cannot make ends meet, but who then simultaneously while drawing a Wal-Mart poverty wage paycheck require public assistance to remain a healthy component of our social fabric.
2. In spite of earning well over $1 Trillion over the last three (3) years Wal-Mart is still crying poverty, not only refusing to pay their employees a ‘living wage’, but simultaneously refusing to give their associates benefits, making them pay a significant portion of their meager poverty wages to purchase health insurance coverage. They have now increased the amount that an ‘associate’ must pay to maintain health insurance coverage which will force vast numbers to drop their employer provided health insurance ending up at the door steps of our public health system costing the city, the State of New York, and the middle class billions of dollars. New York Times, October 21, 2011, ‘Wal-Mart Cuts Some Health Care Benefits’.
3. Wal-Mart will say that to raise wages for its employees would mean higher prices for its customers. But Wal-Mart’s customers already pay an astronomically high social and economic price in the communities where Wal-Mart maintains its over 5,000 U.S. retail locations. Wal-Mart with its brute buying power, purchasing goods from low wage sweat shops in China and other developing countries around the world, under cuts healthy local business establishment driving many of these local businesses out of business, forcing Mom & Pop entrepreneurs, which are the backbone of our nations local economies, into economic chaos and distress because they simply cannot compete. Wal-Mart is anti-competitive in the local economy and neither do they re-invest revenue harvested from local economies back into the local economies from whence it gleaned its wealth.
4. Think about it. Goods that were once made in America by American workers earning good and fair wages, are now being manufactured in low-wage, high output, China sweat shops, at the expense of China’s human capital, costing Americans millions of good jobs. Wal-Mart buys these goods and sells them back to those same, now desperate Americans, at dramatically low prices, under cutting local businesses in local economies destroying more American jobs and local American homes and communities in the process. Wal-Mart’s business model is anti-American and a cancer on civil society.
5. Wal-Mart does not invest in small businesses serving the local economies in which they have their retail stores. They do not extend major contracts to provide goods and services to its retail establishments to local businesses that exist in and serve the local communities where they have Wal-Mart retail stores.
6. Consequently, Wal-Mart is a corporate parasite and pariah on the backs of the middle class and working class America, providing a short-term fix in the form of low prices, and at the same time sucking the blood out of the socio-economic life of America in general and the local community in particular.
7. Does the city of New York need to subsidize Wal-Mart, a Trillion dollar mega-corporation?
8. Wal-Mart has never kept its promises to the communities in the large urban cities where they have fought the community to establish new Wal-Mart retail locations. NEVER. Why? Because it violates Wal-Mart’s virulent business model.

1. Wal-Mart has spent over $12.3 Million nationally since 2002, and $1.8 Million in New York State in lobbying and political advertising in 2011 alone (the Center for Political Accountability), increasing its spending of corporate profits derived from the backs of regular hardworking Americans, the 99 percent, to influence Politicians and Government, placing more Wal-Mart retail establishments in local communities continuing the nefarious cycle of destroying American jobs, decimating local economies, and replacing good jobs with poverty wage employment as ‘associates’ in Wal-Mart stores, increasing the burden on entitlement programs.
2. New York and America, has to make the decision today to eradicate the cancer that is the Wal-Mart business model, and others like it, if we are to recover from America’s current economic crisis.
3. Business does not exist for the sole purpose of making profits. Business exists to provide goods and services that serve the best interest of the people of civil society who comprise the marketplace, and to do so profitably and morally. Businesses that exist for the sole purpose of making money at the expense of civil society, and not to offer the best products and services to the people in fair competition with other businesses in the marketplace are socio-economic pariahs that must be rooted out of civil society because they violate the vital social contract that fundamentally recognizes the interests and needs of the people over the greed that corrupts men’s souls and destroys the very fabric of civil society. For this reason Wal-Mart is corporate public enemy number one.