Book Excerpt, Thieves in High Places, by Jim Hightower.
Stopped by the cops for a traffic violation in the 1940's, New York City mob boss Lucky Luciano was asked to explain why the backseat of his car was filled with guns and ammo:
"We just got back from hunting," said Lucky.
"What were you hunting?"
"Oh, peasants."
"Pheasants?"
"Yeah, that's right. Pheasants."
Apparently, Wal_mart has been taking lessons from Lucky, for it's been a leader among corporations engaging in an elaborate, money-grubbing scheme called Dead Peasants life insurance. Under some state laws, the corporation can take out up to $750,000 worth of life insurance on a single employee- without ever telling the employee.
The macabre aspect of this is that the policy is not for the worker, but for the corporation! When the worker dies, the insurance money goes to the corporation while the family of the deceased doesn't get a dime or even know that such a policy existed.
When Douglas Sims died suddenly of a heart attack in 1998, for example, Wal-Mart quietly pocketed $64,000 from a Dead Peasant policy it had taken out on him. His widow, Jane, got nothing and knew nothing. When she later learned about it, she told a Houston Chronicle reporter: "I never dreamed that they could profit from my husband's death."
(Am I the only one to notice that this scheme could make an employee worth more to the company dead than alive?)
The laws say that the employees are supposed to give thier consent but it turns out that you can consent without knowing it, for it can be buried in the legalese of an employment form you sign- there's no requirement that the company actually tell you what you're signing.
Wal-Mart has taken out some 350,000 of these policies on employees, buying them from Hartford and AIG insurance companies. Its green-eyeshade accounting whizzes even jiggered the deal so Wal-Mart could get a tax deduction on the premiums. The company hires a firm to run sweeps of Social Security numbers- called "death runs"- every quarter to find out who has died, then it submits those names to the insurers... and collects.
A Wal-Mart spokesman told the Chronicle: "The company feels it has acted properly and legally in doing this."
Some of the "peasants" have rebelled, however, filing lawsuits from Texas to Maine. Wal-Mart is fighting them in court**, but because of the worker's suits and bad publicity it says it has now stopped buying Dead Peasant policies.
**Wally World ought to be used to this, as they have the distinction of holding the title of Most Sued Corporation In The Country. They face more than five thousand actions per year, which is almost fourteen per day.
Call this one Reason #369 Not To Shop At Wal-Mart. Aside from that god-awful Mary-Kate and Ashley line of lingerie for little girls (Starting in a size 6! As in, six years old!) and the fact that their products suck arse.




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