Wal-Mart Watch: In These Times explores the Walton family's campaign to destroy public education in America - and how it plays into their campaign to drive down wages and benefits worldwide, and calls for the opposition to mobilize with the same urgency: If evil could be branded, its emblem would be the Wal-Mart logo. The retailer has become so large, and behaves so aggressively, it sometimes appears as a force of nature, like weather. Three huge grocery chains with a 70 percent combined national, big-city market share ambushed the United Food and Commercial Workers union this winter, all the while crying that Wal-Mart’s low-wage, few-benefits “model” made them do it. After more than three months on strike and lockout, UFCW President Doug Dority accepted a two-tier, higher premium health coverage settlement. If the Wal-Mart model is a private-sector inevitability, then larger circles of solidarity are the only defense...Labor can’t beat the Wal-Mart model piecemeal, or even if it were united. A larger mobilization is needed. Wal-Mart shifts the burden of its exploitation to the public, causing federal taxpayers to pay more than $2,000 per employee in social safety net costs to subsidize John, Jim, Sam, Alice and Helen’s profits. In Georgia, Wal-Mart employees’ kids wind up in disproportionate numbers on the state program for uninsured children. Wal-Mart is Georgia’s No. 1 employer, and the state can’t fight that kind of power—not alone.