Immediate Release
Contact: Chris Kofinis (202) 486-6422

“WAKEUPWALMART.COM: PAIDCRITICS.COM, WE HARDLY KNEW YA”
WAL-MART SHUTS DOWN VICIOUS ATTACK SITE (KINDA)

Washington, DC - In a fitting end to a week that can only be described as the “Wal-Mart 2007 Self-Destruction Tour,” Wal-Mart, after having its spin machine exposed by the New Yorker, watching their CEO Lee Scott refuse to answer questions on Fox News, tell New York (through the New York Times) to basically ‘drop dead,’ and then tell Business Week that Wal-Mart is on the side of angels (we would make a joke, but we are feeling gracious), is shutting down its personal attack website, PaidCritics.com.

Paidcritics.com, which was a project of Wal-Mart’s 10 million-dollar-a-year PR firm Edelman, will no longer be posting its “smear and slime” that included such personal favorites as making fun of our communications director’s ethnicity and name (his name is Kristo and Chris, we don’t know why he changed - lol), describing our campaign director as a union boss (he really isn’t, but he may just be hiding it), making fun of our eating habits during the “Change Wal-Mart, Change America” bus tour (okay, this was valid), as well as stating over and over again that employees at WakeUpWalMart.com were paid - yes - paid while they were trying to change Wal-Mart into more responsible employer and company (ok, valid again, but for the record, Leslie Dach just bought a $2.7 million house and the Edelman Communications folks have much nicer clothes and show up at our events wearing pearls).

The following statement is attributable to a snarky Chris Kofinis, communications director for WakeUpWalMart.com

“We are shocked and dismayed that Wal-Mart is shutting down paidcritics.com. We have greatly enjoyed the incredibly hard work of Brian (we don’t know his last name) who worked endless hours for Edelman’s “smear and slime” machine by posting on paidcritics.com. Hopefully Brian won’t lose his ‘huge chunk’ of Edelman’s $10 million PR contract.

Then again, given the amazing collapse of Wal-Mart’s public image, we wonder if it’s really fair to blame Brian, Paidcritics.com, Leslie Dach or Edelman. The truth is that Edelman worked really hard coming up with fake grassroots groups (“astroturfing”, as the Edelman PR folks call it).

I mean, who could forget such Edelman brilliance as a ‘Working Families for Wal-Mart’ group that had no working families or “Walmarting Across America,” a great little fake RV tour bought and paid for by Wal-Mart, and, of course, Paidcritics.com a fake blog whose sole purpose was to hurt the feelings of hard-edged and incredibly handsome/beautiful former campaign workers who now work at WakeUpWalMart.com.

As we move forward, since Wal-Mart is so concerned with ‘doing the right thing,’ maybe Wal-Mart will take some of the $10 million it wastes on Edelman, and maybe some its $11.3 billion in profits, and try to salvage its faltering public image by providing more affordable health care and better wages to its 1.39 million employees.

Unfortunately, as Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott said over and over again this week, Wal-Mart is all but oblivious to its wrongs. Hopefully, Scott and others at Wal-Mart will realize one thing, we are not paid to criticize Wal-Mart, what we are paid to do is to try as hard as we can everyday to make Wal-Mart a better company, and this country a better place for hard-working families.

In that spirit, we can only hope that Wal-Mart realizes only by working together, both Wal-Mart and us, can we move forward and create the kind of better America all hard-working families deserve.”