(Astrology Explored) Stamping its feet and ironically crying discrimination multi-billion dollar retailer Walmart threatened put the stops on opening new stores in Washington D. C. if that city’s council insists on passing a law mandating a $12.50 minimum wage for large retailers.
The proposal comes on the heels of a wave of union-backed worker protests against Walmart, demanding better hours and a “living wage,” which some have pinned at $15 an hour, and accusing the country’s largest employer of retaliating against workers who try to organize. . . Last week, two major European pension funds divested from Walmart, citing labor violations.
Walmart, according to Wikipedia:
. . .is the world’s third largest public corporation, according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2012, the biggest private employer in the world with over two million employees, and is the largest retailer in the world.
Walmart reports a net profit of 17 billion dollars on gross revenue of 469 billion dollars.
Despite Walmart’s huge earnings most Walmart employees earn their region’s minimum wage which does not pay for the necessities of life. Calling Walmart the “real welfare queen” the Daily Kos points out ” Walmart has become the number one driver behind the growing use of food stamps in the United States with “as many as 80 percent of workers in Wal-Mart stores using food stamps.” Walmart employees are also the top recipients of medicaid. This amounts to 2.66 billion dollars of indirect federal corporate aid to a company that with profits many times that amount.
Gee, no wonder they can afford greeters at the door that intone “Welcome to Walmart.”
Even sadder, while proponents of the law call $12.50 a “livable wage” in D.C. according an 8 year old report is< one half of a "self-sufficiency" wage for one adult.
But Walmart is no stranger to fighting public opinion while it plies its business. Why are they taking such a strong stand in what would be a lucrative market for them? Why Washington D. C.?
The Astro*Carto*Graphy chart for Walmart yields some interesting clues. Astro*Carto*Graphy is a technique pioneered and developed by the late Jim Lewis . Due to the motion of the earth on its axis the path of planets are trace ascending and descending lines across the planet. The lines of where the planet fall on the ascendant, midheaven, 4th house cusp, and the descendent of the horoscope chart are also marked on the chart.
While a traditional horoscope chart shows us when something with happen, Astro*Carto*Graphy can show us where something happens.
In the case of Walmart, the planet Neptune on the descendent is the closest Astro*Carto*graphy line to Washington D.C. Jim Lewis and his collaborator Kenneth Irving in their book The Psychology of Astro*Carto*Graphy tell us about Neptune:
Marriage or legal concerns are areas in which you may be taken advantage of by others . . .Beneath the problems which are too easy to blame on others, lies a lack of commitment on your part . . In marriage and other partnerships, you resist seeing your partners as they really are, preferring to project your own ideals on them, and you may be drawn to people who fear the truth and prefer to support fallacies. Relocation may be one means of ameliorating such problems.
Whether or not Walmart pulls out of Washington D.C. remains to be seen, but the corporate Plutocrat seems bent on projecting their vision of what constitutes a fair wage on the D. C. City Council. D. C. itself has to answer the question whether the 1800 substandard wage jobs are worth backing off promoting a better wage for these workers. They need to decide if partnering with a corporate entity that does not have the best interests of those workers at heart is the best course of action.
This Neptune line has proved problematic in the past. Sitting on the same line, New York City’s first Walmart project fell through “because of backlash from labor unions, community advocates and politicians who charged the retailer with unfair labor practices.” No doubt it will continue to challenge Walmart’s Plutocratic efforts to pay less than a liveable wage.
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