Another Shocking Fact About the Walmart Heirs

The Waltons currently own 49 percent of Walmart stock.

That’s right. The six Waltons, heirs to Walmart founder Sam Walton, not only have a net worth equal to the combined wealth of the bottom 30 percent of Americans, as we learned this week from University of California economist Sylvia Allegretto, but they also own and control nearly half of Walmart, the world’s largest corporation…

The Waltons are a fitting face for the 1% (actually the 0.000006%), because Walmart has arguably done more than any other company to undermine the American middle class and force an ever-growing share of the population into working poverty. As Walmart has grown, it has eviscerated two key pillars of the middle class — small business owners, who have lost their livelihoods by the tens of thousands, and union-wage manufacturing workers, more than 3 million of whom have seen their jobs shipped to low-wage countries, thanks largely to pressure from Walmart and other big-box retailers.