There's no denying Costco gives us a real alternative to Walmart, but it's difficult to compare the two in terms of breadth of product line. Let's not forget that the Costco model uses very few employees in the first place.

Simran, thank you for the abundant information! I had no idea there are all these socially responsible investment funds. I have some savings in mutual funds which I'm not sure if they are socially responsible or even support sustainability. How can one switch safely? I'm not good at these things.

As for Costco and Wal-Mart - I hardly, ever, go to either of these. I don't like going to Wal-Mart - I feel suffocated in there. I'm glad that Costco treats its employees well though, and that they are sustainability conscious.

Thanks, M:)

Excellent focus Simran: There is a saying: A company will, in truth, treat it's clientele exactly like it treats its employees. How many in the corporate world feel safe, happy, and healthy? So much of it is about maintaining the appearances of a great workplace--and woe unto those who expose it as otherwise!

Do you recall the book or movie called "The Horse Whisperer?"--by Nicholas Evans (???)

There is a man named Monty Roberts--he is the true-to-life Horse Whisperer that the book/movie is based on--except he is a very different character than portrayed by Robert Redford's movie--which is outstanding.

The real "Horse Whisperer" is, in my estimation, even more exceptional than the fictional one. It is a moderately short book that Monty Roberts wrote called, "Horse Sense For People"--that has the names of three pages of the world's major corporations at the end of the book.

They are just a few of the companies that have hired this man to come and do "corporate training sessions for key managers" that, in essence, applies his "Horse Whisperer 'Stuff'" to the people who are sent by their respective companies--to attend these "training seminars." The company reports within two years reflect the same astonishing transformations as occur with the characters of the fictional accounting--both horse and human.

Thinking of you guys especially strong today--as I know your thoughts and feelings are strongly directed toward "Ma and the beloved group that are Chopra family and friends." Dave

What great information. I have resisted shoping at Wal-Mart since I became aware of all of the concerns connected to it.

I worked last Christmas at Target and they have an employee program called Fish Philosophy - http://www.charthouse.com/home2.asp?.
It was interesting but the pay and other things are very similar to the box stores.

This information was wonderful - thanks.

Great synchronicity, Simran! I was thinking this past weekend about finding some resources about socially responsible investing and here's my answer!

Thanks, Sheba

"Wal-Mart (the world’s biggest retailer and the 30th largest economy"

..to put Wal-Mart's hugeness another way.

If WalMart was a country, it would currently be Chinas 8th largest trading partner (Canada and Australia would rank lower ..WoW!!)
Unfortunately, even if Wal-Mart (a producer of nothing-other than cash flow!) was outlawed by all G8 and remaining industrialized Nation's worldwide, it would certainly continue to thrive into the foreseeable future, simply through its close business relationship with just one country ....China!

Welcome to the new Economy!
Globalization!

recommended reading on this topic:
The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374292884/ref=lbrc_inter2/104-4716439-3044725

Good morning!

As I type these words, Hewlett Packard is laying off 10% of its US workforce & Wal-mart is opening a store in McKinney, Texas based on environmental design principles and replete with a 120 foot windmill, solar panels, and a rainwater collection system for irrigation. (Filtered water in hand, NPR's Marketplace on the radio. . .)

Change happens everywhere. & to paraphrase Anson & Thomas Freidman, size matters. When a corporation like Wal-mart installs energy-efficient lighting or experiments with alternative energy, the impact is astounding. That's why I am of the belief that we have to work together to encourage all good works -- great and small.

That said, economies of scale mean larger companies lower their production costs (since fixed costs are shared over an increased number of goods) and they have no excuse for not compensating their workers accordingly.

A few more stats from John Cavanaugh and Sarah Anderson at the Global Policy Forum (http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/tncs/top200.htm)

These findings are from 2000 & are currently being updated for the 2005 edition. Please see the link for citations. While there are limitations to formulating statistics based on GDP and sales, I was really surprised to learn the size and impact of multi-national corporations.

Simran

Top 200: The Rise of Global Corporate Power
1. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries. Wal-Mart-the number 12 corporation-is bigger than 161 countries, including Israel, Poland, and Greece. Mitsubishi is larger than the fourth most populous nation on earth: Indonesia. General Motors is bigger than Denmark. Ford is bigger than South Africa. Toyota is bigger than Norway.

2. The combined sales of the world's Top 200 corporations are far greater than a quarter of the world's economic activity. Our calculations indicate that the Top 200's share of global economic activity has been growing rapidly over the past decade. In 1982, the Top 200 firms had sales that were the equivalent of 24.2 percent of the world's GDP. Today, that figure has grown to 28.3 percent of world GDP.

3. The Top 200 corporations' combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest; that is they surpass the combined economies of 182 countries. At latest count, the world has 191 countries. If you subtract the GDP of the big nine economies: the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Canada, and China, the combined GDP's of the other 182 countries is $6.9 trillion. The combined sales of the Top 200 corporations is $7. 1 trillion.

4. The Top 200 have almost twice the economic clout of the poorest four-fifths of humanity. The world's economic income and wealth remain highly concentrated among the rich. Indeed, according to the United Nations, some 85 percent of the world's GDP is controlled by the richest fifth of humanity; only 15 percent is controlled by the poorest four-fifths. Hence, the poorer 4.5 billion people in the world account for only $3.9 trillion dollars of economic activity; this is only a little over half the combined revenues of the Top 200's $7.1 trillion.

5. The Top 200 have been net job destroyers in recent years. Their combined global employment is only 18.8 million, which is less than a third of one percent of the world's people. The world has just over 5.6 billion people. Of these, around 2.6 billion are in the workforce. Hence, the Top 200 employ less than three-fourths of one percent of the world's workers. Of the world's top five employers, four are U.S. (General Motors, Wal-Mart, PepsiCo, and Ford ), and one is German (Siemens). If one also includes the public sector in these calculations, the U.S. Postal Service is the world's biggest employer, at 870,160, roughly 160,000 more workers than GM's 709,000 workers.

6. Not only are the world's largest corporations cutting workers, their CEOs often benefit financially from the job cuts. A total of 59 of the Global Top 200 are U.S. firms. Of these, 9 laid off at least 3,000 workers in 1995: AT&T, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, BellSouth, Kmart, Chase Manhattan, GTE, Mobil, and Texaco. Even worse, the CEOs of these 9 made millions of dollars in the increased value of their stock options after announcing the layoffs. Indeed, on the day that the CEOs of these 9 firms announced the layoffs, the value of the stock options of their 9 CEOs rose $25,218,819.9

7. Japanese corporations have surpassed U.S. corporations in the ranking of the Top 200. Six of the top 10 firms are Japanese; only 3 are from the United States. Of the Top 200, the 58 Japanese firms account for almost 39 percent of total sales, while the U.S.'s 59 firms account for only 28 percent of total sales. The vast majority (186) of the Top 200 are headquartered in just 7 countries: Japan, the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. South Korea and Brazil are the only developing countries to break into the Top 200.

8. Over half of the sales of the Top 200 are in just 5 economic sectors; and corporate concentration in these sectors is high. Half of the total sales of the Top 200 are in trading, automobiles, banking, retailing, and electronics. The concentrated economic power in these and other sectors is enormous. In autos, the top five firms account for almost 60 percent of global sales. In electronics, the top five firms have garnered over half of global sales. And, the top five firms have over 30 percent of global sales in airlines, aerospace, steel, oil, personal computers, chemical, and the media.

9. When General Motors trades with itself, is that free trade?: One-third of world trade is simply transactions among various units of the same corporation. This figure has remained steady for the past few years, and is higher in certain countries. Two-fifths of Japanese exports, for example, are intra-firm. For manufacturing exports from Brazil, the figure is 44 percent.

10. The Top 200 are creating a global economic apartheid, not a global village. The top eight telecommunications firms, for example, have been expanding global sales rapidly, yet over nine-tenths of humanity remains without phones. Television ads for AT&T and GTE give the impression that the telecommunications giants are bringing the world closer together. And yet while the top eight firms in this sector enjoyed sales of $290 million in 1995, 90.1 percent of all people live in a household that is not connected to a telephone line. Likewise in the financial sector, when banks boast of the new ease of global banking, they fail to mention the difficulties most of the world's people face in obtaining even a tiny loan. Close to 4.8 billion of the world's 5.6 billion people still live in countries where the average per capita gross national product is less than $1,000 a year; only a handful of these people have access to credit from transnational banks.17 This is despite the fact that the 31 banks in the Top 200 have combined assets of $10.4 trillion and sales of more than $800 billion.

Simran: I find your post to be full of the kind of "insane" reality that has been something of the journey of my life over the last twelve years.

By the summer of 1993, right at this time, I had to leave my real estate appraisal business, grab my three cats and go with a man I have previously spoke about, a Holocaust survivor, and "go underground" in my lifestyle for sometime--before I could resurface safely again.

As I look back now, I don't really know why I did what I did as it seems to be like pointing a slingshot at an army of oncoming tanks (made by GM!)-but I had to know "why" my refusal to sign some simple legal documents from a bank (Bank One--now JP Morgan Chase) brought this onslaught of lawyers, judges, and eventually thugs, into my life--with such a savage ferocity.

I went through more than 30 lawyers and their respective law firms--most of them directly or indirectly, turned out to have contributed any correspoondence of information between us immediately back to these bankers and their law firms--and even the judges involved in what turned out to be a massive, on-going, and long-term money-laundering machine. In this case it was tracing how assets of substantial values had simply vanished--millions and millions of dollars worth, as well as entire trust accounts--with no accounting given for this.

I was able to obtain original vs. forged documents that span now nearly 40 years of how this was done through just one Arizona probate court, with the appearance of involvment by that states federal court system as well.

What you have put here, I must say, gives me the feeling that I am being set free of any more obligation to try and expose the magnitude of such colossal corruption--that I can now focus on something positive while the inevitability of collapse of these practices bring about their own internal and external demise--as they are not sustainable!

Thank You for your information Simran--somehow it sets me free after all this time. Against the backdrop of the information you've provided--it renders me the feeling of being complete that I had to know that what I was seeing during the thousands of hours and many tens-of-thousands of dollars spent on this endeavor were true.

In other words, the magnitude of the greed and insanity I was trying to account for is not a personal attack on me! It is simply an across-the-board pattern of a runaway feeding frenzy of desperation so extensive that it is vertible incomprehensible.

I am left with a statement from "A Course in Miracles": How do you explain sanity to insane people? You can't! (They don't want to know anyway!)

Clearly you work for some sort of think-tank that is trying to tackle these massive imbalances or it would seem that you would not have compiled and analyzed so diligently such incredible statistics and pulled the screen (what is intended to be veiled by all the PR and marketing) back on what is really going on.

Maybe you will feel comfortable to share more? I thought the world's population was now around 6.5 billion with us breaking 6 billion just shy of the turn of the millenium--vs. 5.6 billion.

The apx. numbers I studied were that we had about 1 billion in 1820, 2 billion by 1930 (took 110 years to double), and then 3 billion about 1962--although I see some stats that show 3 billion around 1970. In 30-35 years we have then doubled again--which of course continues to accelerate at more of geometric progression--rather than an arithmetic linear progression.
Thanks you guys-for your patience with these lenghty inputs. Hopefully we will generate solutions--rather than more problems! Love--Dave

PS Simran and friends: On The Chopra Center's homepage is also the "Daily Inspiration" and "Today's Practice for Spiritual Success."

The focus of those two then leads me easily to the place of knowing the only solution for the problems "we" present in our accountings is: forgive "them" Father for they know not what they do!--as today's message of practice is the tool of invincibility we are all seeking.

Thinking again, to you all, Wayne Dyer's "I send you all green lights," today and everyday.

Dave,

Thank you for your insightful and heartfelt comments. I don't work for a think tank, but I do host/ write for a television program on sustainable business and corporate social responsibility called "Ethical Markets" currently airing in the U.S. on about 40% of PBS affiliates (http://ethicalmarkets.com/). The series was created by the futurist and author Hazel Henderson who is a luminary, mentor, and colleague of Dr. Chopra's.

I care deeply about moving in the world in ways that are aligned with my values--from what I eat. . .to how I love. And I have great hope that change will come about when we start talking to each other, building bridges across cultural divides, acknowledging small victories, and moving towards a collective vision for the future.

An important way to affect change within the global economy is to harness the power of corporations. We sanction their efforts with every investment and every purchase. Through those and other actions, we have the power to hold them to task and encourage good corporate citizenship.

Simran

Exquisite Simran: Your great hope IS felt, and it IS changing things. I love your comment about "how you love."

I would say for those of us who still seem to be starting with love, rather than yet being refined in the reporter's five W's and How--it is important only that "we do love."

I am glad you are not cloistered off somewhere in a think-tank, but rather getting this "stuff" out there in front of people. Good on you! Dave

Thank you Simran, on enlightening us on the power of the economy... and on what each of us can do to help bring more equanimity, peace and sanity to this world...

Re: David's comment above saying
>There is a man named Monty Roberts--he is the true-to-life Horse Whisperer that the book/movie is based on--except he is a very different character than portrayed by Robert Redford's movie--which is outstanding.
>

This is incorrect. Author Nicholas Evans wrote on his webpage at http://nicholasevans.com/faq/faq.asp, "Some of you may have read that someone called Monty Roberts was the model for Tom Booker, The Horse Whisperer in the book, and that he helped me with my research. It's not true. met Mr Roberts once, briefly, in England but have never seen him with a horse or seen him since. He had no involvement whatsoever."

In fact, horse trainer and clinician Buck Brannaman inspired the Tom Booker character and also consulted for the film and doubled for Robert Redford in the film.

For further information see 'Horse Whispers & Lies' which can be read full and complete, free online at http://www.HorseWhispersandLies.com ; the Feb. 1999 issue of Horse & Rider magazine's article, 'Horse Whispers or Horse Feathers?'; San Francisco Examiner Article: 'BIOGRAPHY CALLED UNBRIDLED FICTION' January 11, 1997; "Horse of a Different Color" by John Skow & James Willwerth, Time Magazine Dec. 14, 1998; "Now! Read the True (More or Less) Story!" Tuesday, February 24, 1998 The New York Times; and "A Peddler of Court Gossip May Pay the Piper" by Jonathon Turley.