"I kind of feel like it's an attack sort of on Arkansas directly. There's so many of us that our way of life is directly tied to Walmart. When you pick on Walmart that way, it's sort of like you pick directly on Arkansas."
--State Sen. Bob Ballinger of Berryville, on Capitol View on KARK-TV, Channel 4, on Sunday.
State Sen. Bob Ballinger is an extreme-right Republican and the kind of source seasoned reporters know to call when they need a quote and conflict.
You'll remember that Ballinger wanted to repeal part of the voters' passage of a higher minimum wage. Now he is disapproving that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders plans to appear Wednesday in Rogers to challenge Walmart.
Sanders, the quasi-socialist, is intending to present an employee's proposal at the Walmart shareholders gathering. The proposal, which is said to be doomed to perfunctory and expeditious rejection, is that hourly employees get a seat on the board.
Sanders is planning to come at the invitation of hourly Walmart employee Carolyn "Cat" Davis, a pharmacy technician in New Bern, N.C. A political activist, she asked Bernie to be her proxy--"crash" the meeting, as some have termed the matter.
What Ballinger says above--that picking on Walmart is picking on Arkansas--would be true only if Arkansans embraced approvingly the boss making $23.6 million last year and thus more than a thousand times more than the average hourly waged employee making around $19,000.
Walmart is a company of which Arkansas is justifiably proud, and from which the state has reaped great benefit, and which has understood and acted on the economic need to be more culturally progressive, a good thing.
But Walmart is not, by any reckoning, the state. No company is.
If we're genuinely the populist state we're said to be, thus supportive of the working man against the consolidation of money and power in a few, then we're not at all averse to Bernie gracing our thriving northwest corner for a few hours to stand up for the working folks who want higher pay, better benefits and more consistent schedules.
Only a man like Ballinger who wanted to defy the will of voters on workers' wages could think otherwise.
Sanders has a bill mostly for show called the "Stop WALMART Act," though Walmart is hardly the lone offender. It would provide that a corporation could not buy back its own stock, enriching its shareholders and executives, unless it paid a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
The bill also would provide that no corporation executive could make more than 150 times the average worker wage.
Last year, Walmart president Doug McMillon raked in that $23.6 million, which was 1,076 times higher than worker compensation.
Bernie would put McMillon down around $3 million a year, barely enough to get by on.
It is a decidedly populist notion that the working man should not be so lowly valued in comparison to the big shots in the suits. Prevailing Arkansas values would seem to mesh easily in limited respects with Sanders' rhetoric--except that everything gets lost these days in oversimplified politicized labels and polarizing phrases such as "socialism" and "Venezuelan collapse."
Yes, on cue, Ballinger told Capitol View that what Bernie advocates is socialism, which, he said, will always collapse as it has collapsed in Venezuela.
I don't want to argue socialism with Ballinger, or anyone, but I do seek accuracy. What collapsed in Venezuela was socialism as wrapped in authoritarianism and criminality.
We have the example of much happier and richer democratic socialism in Scandinavian countries. For that matter, there are elected leftist rulers elsewhere in South America who are essentially socialist, and not collapsing.
It's important to hammer the point that Ballinger is not being factual, just as it's important to make the point that he was wrong to propose defying the will of the voters on the minimum wage, and just as it's important to say he was wrong on Capitol View on Sunday to suggest Walmart and the state are in any way synonymous.
Walmart advocates nondiscrimination against gays and transgender persons. Does that mean it's anti-Arkansan for religious fundamentalists to disagree?
Surely not.
We can accept Southern Baptist opinion in Arkansas. Can't we? And we can accept a few minutes of worker advocacy from a fiery guy from Vermont. Can't we?
It is, in fact, a tribute to Arkansas that a home-grown company could emerge as so dominant in the world that it makes Arkansas something of a destination for the major economic and cultural debates of our time.
We should welcome Bernie. Gov. Asa Hutchinson ought to meet him in Rogers with an Arkansas Traveler certificate.
But I suspect he won't.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/04/2019