The principal new owners are Walmart heir Rob Walton and his daughter and her husband. Their ownership group also includes Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and now a board member of the hedge fund Makena Capital Management; Mellody Hobson, chair of the board of Starbucks and a director at JPMorgan Chase; and Lewis Hamilton, a race car driver worth an estimated $285 million. The Walton heirs are the world’s richest family, with a net worth of more than $200 billion.

When Walmart opened a store in our little town of Talent, Oregon, in 1988, it promised new and needed jobs. But some residents were concerned that local stores would close and wages for the new jobs would be low. Even today, Walmart’s minimum wage, including an increase announced last September, is only $12 per hour.

A congressional report based on data from the month before the Covid pandemic started found that Walmart’s pay and benefits were so low that it was the top employer of food stamp and Medicaid recipients in about half the states studied.

What does this mean in human terms? Near where I live, a young boy for years has woken up to an empty house, fed himself breakfast in front of the TV, and gotten himself to elementary school, and when he comes back there is still no one at home. He lives with his grandfather who leaves before dawn for his job at Walmart and then has to work a second job before he finally comes home in the evening.

I also know a neighboring family that operated the local hardware store. They had to close that business after Walmart came to town.

Then in 2012, Walmart left our town to establish a supercenter nearby, with a giant supermarket that competes with local food stores.

In 2019, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance released a study showing that Walmart’s supercenters reduce farmers’ share of income from food sales and drive down wages for people who harvest and process food.

As new owners of the Broncos, the Walton heirs can take advantage of a special tax loophole to deduct nearly the entire sale price against their income over a period of years. A 2021 study by the nonprofit news service ProPublica found that the billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Clippers uses loopholes like this to pay taxes at a lower rate than the workers who sell beer at the stadium concession stand.

So what can be done about the fact that communities, families, and farmers create so much wealth for billionaires that they’re able to spend billions on sports franchises?

Consumers could make it a point to patronize local stores and food producers, and also ask why a company like Costco can afford to set its minimum wage at $17 an hour when Walmart says it can’t.

Workers do have some bargaining power, and they could organize unions, as they are doing at more than 300 Starbucks locations so far in 36 states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington. Because of that pressure, Starbucks has felt it necessary to improve pay and sick leave even before union contracts are negotiated.

Cities, counties, and states could also choose to support development by local small businesses that pay living wages instead of offering incentives to low-wage chains.

All these steps require no longer accepting that a few people should have far more wealth than they could ever possibly need at the expense of many others who are struggling without affordable housing, health care, education, child care or other basics.

Building strong communities and families is a team sport, but billionaires and some giant corporations seem to be playing a different game. Isn’t it time we changed the rules so everyone can win?

Matt Witt is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation in the West. He is a writer and photographer in rural Oregon.

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In the indigo hour when night becomes morning, dozens of people — most from Mexico — queue for the van that will shuttle them to the picking fields. For the next 15 hours, they harvest. Ladders teeter on the uneven, parched earth. Cherries are quickly pulled from high branches by the handful. 

The fruit isn’t for them. Like most regions in the country whose economies rely on exporting food, little of what’s picked here makes it onto the plates of the people who harvested it.  

At the end of the daylight hours, a company bus returns and drives the farmworkers to the Walmart, on the far side of town, where they can shop for groceries and gloves. Farmworkers forced to shop late at night have frequently been met with depleted shelves ever since the early days of the pandemic. They buy what little they can, then re-board the van that brings them home. Many fall asleep hungry.  

In 2020, when the pandemic began, organizer Samantha Guerrero drove across the low, parched hills of Idaho’s Canyon County to a neighborhood she calls Farmway Village. First built as a labor camp, the low-income housing complex has become home to many of the county’s agricultural employees. Guerrero had planned to distribute information about the new virus. But what she found wasn’t a lack of information; it was a lack of good groceries. She’s been working to change that ever since. 

For immigrant farmworkers, food is in short supply: “The only thing close to that place is a gas station,” Guerrero told me. “That means they only have access to the processed foods sold there.” 

Guerrero works for the nonprofit Idaho Organization of Resource Councils, which is trying to change things. Recently, it started distributing culturally relevant foods, like masa for corn tortillas, and some local, organic farmers let volunteers glean produce like tomatoes and pumpkins to redistribute.  

Yet the need is widespread — in Idaho and elsewhere where farmworkers are needed — and even the best-organized mutual aid projects can’t meet the demand. Nonprofits try to help, but they aren’t equipped to make the systems-level changes needed to end the lack of nutritious food and the hunger suffered by farmworkers and other immigrants. 

Local food pantries try, but they’re not always an answer. Many farmworkers come from agricultural communities south of our border with Mexico, Guerrero says. They’re used to fresh fruits, home-raised meats, or hand-pressed tortillas. Even though these immigrant communities are the primary audience for many food pantries, the canned and boxed food they provide can be unrecognizable to the people they serve.  

This holds true across the West. I’ve spoken to other farmworkers and organizers in Montana, Oregon, and the Dakotas, and all echo those sentiments. We haven’t diminished the hunger of the workers who feed us. 

There are 3 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the United States. For more than 20 years, migration from Mexico has been largely driven by economic hardship that began in 1994, when the NAFTA treaty crashed the value of the peso. Now, migrants from that country and Central America are increasingly coming north to escape drug violence, or when landslides, hurricanes, and other disasters hastened by the changing climate force them to flee.  

When many workers land at large, corporate-owned farms, they sometimes find harsh conditions; this February, for example, the U.S. Department of Labor found that one large Idaho farm had shortchanged its 69 workers by $159,000. 

Ninety-one percent of counties with the highest rates of overall food insecurity are rural, and workers there face soaring costs of food and a declining number of grocery stores, as consolidation and rising real estate values close outlets. Although farmworkers harvest fruit and vegetables all day, it is odd, but true, that they are living in “food deserts.” 

“I have to say,” Guerrero says, sighing, “that there is a lot of abundance (in Idaho). There is enough to go around. It’s just all going elsewhere.” 

Astra Lincoln is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to lively debate about Western issues. She writes in Oregon.

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Run by the heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton, the foundation donates $25 million a year to nonprofits concerned about the Colorado River. It’s clear the foundation cares deeply about the River in this time of excruciating drought, and some of its money goes to river restoration or more efficient irrigation. 

Yet its main interest is promoting “demand management,” the water marketing scheme that seeks to add 500,000 acre-feet of water to declining Lake Powell by paying rural farmers to temporarily stop irrigating. 

In November 2020, that focused involvement paid off. The Colorado Water Conservation Board boosted demand management into a “step two work plan,” moving the concept closer toward policy in the state, which leads the Upper Basin states of New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah in drought-management planning.  

But is this approach, which verges on turning water into a commodity, good for the Colorado River? And was the public debate sufficient for policy about a water source that’s vital to 40 million people?

Without doubt, the foundation has supported the region’s nonprofits. During the last four years, over 60 Colorado River philanthropic organizations received between $5,000 and $2.9 million each, with seven organizations including the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy, and Western Resource Advocates each receiving $1 million or more in 2019 alone.  A good share of the Walton Foundation’s $25 million in annual donations also went toward testing demand management on numerous creeks and tributaries in the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.

The Walton Foundation also paid EDF millions to carry out crucial aspects of a $29 million pilot program for demand management in the Lower Basin states of Nevada, California and Arizona.

Then, there’s the Walton Foundation funding media to do stories about the Colorado River. What’s troubling is that some of the stories produced omit the Walton Foundation’s role in advocating for demand management. 

Because the foundation’s reach is so extensive, few of its critics are willing to speak publicly. They charge that the Walton Family Foundation doesn’t just have a seat at the table, it sets the table’s agenda. Lately, though, some “water buffaloes” seem skittish about a policy that leads to water speculation, which raises the question: Are the critics of demand management gaining traction?

Dan Beard, former chief of the Bureau of Reclamation under President Clinton, hopes so. 

“They (Walton Family Foundation) think they’ve found the solution,” he said “The way they’ve done that is to get all the nonprofits on their side. I think that’s a horrible result, especially for the environmental community. We need to sow the seeds of intellectual curiosity. If you’ve come to a conclusion and you don’t deviate from that, you’re nothing more than an intellectual dictator.” 

Then, there’s the impact of Walton Foundation money on media nonprofits. 

Brent Gardner-Smith runs Aspen Journalism, a nonprofit news organization that has received $100,000 annually for three years from the Walton Family Foundation and three years from the Catena Foundation, a foundation run by Sam Walton 3rd. Public radio station KUNC has received three years of similar funding from the Walton Family Foundation for its “water desk.” 

In May 2020, the two nonprofits collaborated in a story exploring the investment group Water Asset Management (WAM), speculating that it sought to “buy and dry” agricultural water, leaving behind barren dust bowls.  What was not reported, that only municipalities can “buy and dry” under Colorado’s already tough water anti-speculation laws.  The big omission was that a Walton-funded nonprofit, the Nature Conservancy – had an ongoing demand management study – exactly where and when WAM was buying land. 

Colorado College journalism instructor Corey Hutchins said he was surprised to hear the size of some of the funding KUNC and Aspen Journalism each receiving $100,000 apiece for several years: “That sounds like a big Colorado water story in itself,” he said. “You might also worry about self-censorship.”

A story by Politico, a for-profit news conglomerate, is illustrative. In 2018, Politico received a $200,000 grant from the Walton Foundation for special projects. In December, Politico ran a feature on the drought-stricken Colorado River that quoted the Walton foundation’s head of Colorado River philanthropy, Ted Kowalski. Yet the foundation’s involvement in river policy wasn’t mentioned; nor was Politico’s previous funding from the Walton foundation noted.

Even odder, the recent New York Times article on water speculation in the Colorado River Basin omitted the Walton influence.

Joel Dyer, former editor for Boulder Weekly, who wrote a critical Walton piece, sees the issue of transparency this way: “They’ve (the Walton Family Foundation) spread their money so much they’ve diluted anyone who could push back. The big stories, the big ideas, who’s going to look into that?”

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