If Walmart is a green company then John McCain is a candidate of change. Both are ridiculous suggestions, and both are being propagated by these two antiquated refuges of Republican America.

McCain, for his part, is suddenly casting himself as an agent of change after spending the last two years cozying up and currying favors from the Bush-Rove-Falwell axis.

And Walmart?  Well, the world’s largest retailer has launched a much-ballyhooed greening initiative that has won acclaim from everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Bill Clinton.

Just to be fair, let’s take them at their word for second – Maybe McCain and Walmart read some polls and learned that, wow, people want change and want to go green.  

But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t make them the gold standard.  They’ve still got a lot of atoning to do.

Walmart is the poster-child for suburban sprawl in America and their stores take up more square mileage than the entire island of Manhattan!  When they move out of those stores to pursue greener pastures (leaving the local economy conquered and depleted), the stores sit empty and the parking lot crumbles.

When Walmart builds new Supercenters, they don’t hesitate to pave over wetlands or suffocate corn fields with asphalt.  And their green plan for these new stores seems to overlook that rainwater flushes garbage form their Supercenters’ Mega-Parking Lots into the local waterways.

And then there’s China – they place that produces 70% of Walmart products.  Don’t even get me started about China.  The stories about mercury spills and raw chemical discharges would disgust you.

I hope Walmart can reform some of these practices.  I hope that they’re serious about being greener.  But I’m not going to hold my breath – It’d be like taking McCain’s word that he’s going to bring change to the White House.

Question: What do Walmart and Wall Street have in common?

Answer: The execs get fat contracts while the workers get shafted.

A week after Wall Street bankers collected taxpayer-funded golden parachutes, Walmart announced that it was shutting down its first shop in North America that had successfully unionized.

Brian White at Blogging Stocks reports on the shuttered store in Gatineau, Quebec:

“The retailer would rather see the operation shut down entirely instead of having employees with any kind of power. … Was the global retailer trying to get a message out to any other Wal-Mart location in North America — “unionize and we will shut your doors?” If so, that’s no way to run a business, right? Is Wal-Mart so afraid of unions in its stores that it would rather shut them down (or pieces of them) instead of continuing to operate?”

Walmart would rather see the operation shut down “entirely instead of having employees with any kind of power.”  

That kind of power?

As White notes:

“Many Wal-Mart employees are apparently so underpaid that their only recourse is to try and unionize their stores in order to negotiate a better wage.”

Meanwhile, four of the Waltons, who control Walmart, were named to the Forbes’ top 10 richest Americans list.  Jim Walton ranked No. 6 at a net worth of $15.7 billion, right behind Warren Buffett and Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

Do the Waltons really feel threatened?  Are they really worried about some workers organizing to make an honest buck to take care of their families?

This is disgraceful.  Boycott Walmart.  

McCain probably thought that by choosing Sarah Palin as a running mate he could mask his record on women’s issues – or to borrow a timely phrase, put lipstick on the pig that is his platform.

But WakeUpWalmart.com is going to make sure he doesn’t get away with it.

In a new ad, WakeUpWalmart.com highlights what is one of the most egregious examples of his standing in the way of progressive reforms like fair pay for women.  

Women working at Walmart make notoriously less than their male counterparts (it’s the Walmart way).  That’s why WakeUp Walmart joined together with other groups to form the largest discrimination class action in history.  

This was a chance for Big Mac to prove those reform credentials he likes to talk about, but instead he case a big, fat, regressive “NO” to fair pay.

You call that “reform”?  

McCain talks a big game about “change” all of a sudden, but he’s saddled with an ugly record of reinforcing Walmart’s Republican policies.

As economic anxiety continues, we need a president who will fight for the rights of workers, not Walmart.

WakeUpWalmart.com will hold McCain accountable for his votes and is running this ad in battleground states beginning with the McCain’s parading of Palin at the debate tonight.

I encourage everyone to send it to any of the women in your life and to post it yourself.