Dark money expert Maurice Cunningham has a sudden realization about how SNAP helps fund the conservative reading activists in Massachusetts (and likely in your state, too).
Today I was hoping the Trump regime would comply with court orders to provide SNAP benefits to 42 million low-income Americans when someone called to ask me about Coalition of Billionaires Masquerades as Mass Reads Coalition. Then it hit me: SNAP is helping to fund the Mass Reads Coalition!
That is because the Walton Family Foundation is a major funder of the Mass Reads Coalition. No Waltons, no coalition. The Walton Family owns WalMart. That company underpays its employees, such that a 2020 study by the General Accounting Office at the request of Senator Bernie Sanders found that “Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries in every state.” In nine states that responded to the GAO survey, 14,500 Walmart employees—including workers in Massachusetts—were receiving SNAP. We are subsidizing workers who cannot survive on WalMart’s unlivable low wages.
SNAP also puts billions into directly into WalMart’s coffers. Newsweek says that “According to a June report from the market research data firm Numerator, Walmart accounts for roughly a quarter (24 percent) of SNAP shoppers’ total spending. Given the estimated $100 billion spent by the government on the program annually—roughly $8.3 billion monthly, this would imply a loss of about $2 billion for Walmart if the benefits are withheld for the entire month of November.”
It’s so much money that Walmart is batting down rumors that without SNAP payments it will have to close down.
As I wrote in Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, the late John Walton saw public schools as a $700 billion market and thus a good opportunity to decimate unions (edtech and Democrats for Education Reform investor Rupert Murdoch estimates it at $500 billion). Historian Nelson Lichtenstein found that WalMart keeps wages low and promotes job insecurity, and that Walmart’s cheap wages and meager benefits throw tens of thousands of its workers into government safety net programs. Human Rights Watch found that WalMart exploits weak U.S. labor laws to intimidate employees away from unions and has used illegal means to block organizing efforts.
Keep in mind that for putting its privateering investments through vehicles like the 501(c)(3) Walton Family Foundation, the Waltons and the Billionaire Coalition’s other wealthy benefactors reap substantial tax benefits.