INTERVIEW

‘It’s All About Keeping Wages at Poverty Levels to Overpay Their CEOs’

By Sarah Anderson, Janine Jackson 

April 21, 2026

Source: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

Image by Wikideas1/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

Janine Jackson interviewed Institute for Policy Studies’ Sarah Anderson about “successful” corporations paying poverty wages for the April 17, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: In 2024, Forbes asked, “What Is the Secret to Walmart’s Success?” The answer:

Walmart’s strategy is boring but reliable. The foundation is provided by the scale of the business, creating the fuel necessary to maintain cost leadership.

In 2025, the Economist explained to readers “How Walmart Became a Tech Giant—and Took Over the World.” The answer, well, founder Sam Walton, a “trucker-capped, pickup-driving penny-pincher,” had a simple idea: “Keep costs low, pass savings on to customers, win market share, harness scale to further lower costs, and listen as the cash registers sing.”

Early this year, Inc. Magazine gave us “One Bold Decision Helped Make Walmart a Trillion-Dollar Company.” That story says:

Most experts see the company’s tremendous growth as a triumph of technology, including AI, and that’s certainly true. Walmart has used its heft, highly efficient warehouse network and the ubiquity of its stores as a competitive advantage.

But oho, the shocker, the big reveal, is that former CEO, Doug McMillon, “visited Walmart stores and asked the people working there what they needed. He listened to their answers and he started paying them more.”

Well, I hope you’re sitting down for this: “To begin with, every associate, as Walmart calls employees, would earn at least $9 an hour and soon move up to $10 an hour.” McMillon took home $27.4 million in 2024.

That the same media that herald companies like Walmart for supposedly building a better mousetrap, and getting their rightful riches, also complain about government spending on public assistance programs like SNAP encapsulates a certain media mythology that needs puncturing.

And that’s just what a new report does. “America’s 20 Largest Low-Wage Employers and the Affordability Crisis” is out from the Institute for Policy Studies, and we’re joined now by its author.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-edits the IPS website Inequality.org. She joins us now by phone; welcome back to  CounterSpin, Sarah Anderson.

Sarah Anderson: Really great to be here. Thank you.

JJ: Media talk about companies as not just successful, but as evidence that profit-driven capitalism—and the deregulation that enables it—really is the best thing for everyone, because, look, they’re providing a product or a service; they’re creating jobs. So, really, any criticism is wrong, and maybe just jealousy.

Your new report is not about a small, ancillary thing that companies could improve on. It really drives a stake through the heart of this mythology. So tell us, what did you look at, and what did you find?

SA: Yeah, well, just continuing with the Walmart example, you mentioned that the CEO made $27.4 million in 2024. So, yeah, if we criticize that, then sometimes people will say, “Oh, you’re just envious. You want to make that amount of money, and it doesn’t have anything to do with you, so why should you complain?”

Well, it does have to do with all of the rest of us, because, for one thing, Walmart and many other large US corporations are really based on a business model that extracts wealth from low-wage workers and funnels it up to guys like Doug McMillon. And they are paying their low-level workers so little that many of them have no choice but to rely on public assistance.

And so that’s what our report looks at, is the 20 largest US corporations with the lowest median worker pay, and we found that the vast majority of them have median pay that’s so low that a worker at that level would qualify for Medicaid for a family of three. Most of them would qualify for SNAP food aid benefits.

And what that means is that not only are workers getting the shaft from this business model, that it’s all about keeping wages at poverty levels at the base to overpay their CEOs, but the rest of us are affected, because it’s our taxpayer money that is going into those public assistance programs that these companies are using to make this model workable.

And I think that this is a big part of the current affordability crisis that so many people are talking about, as they struggle with the rising costs for things like housing and groceries. And there’s a lot of focus on how can we bring these costs down, but we’ve also got to look at why do people have so little money in their pockets in the first place, and that’s because of wage suppression by companies like Walmart.

JJ: I just want to say, if we can say “poverty-wage business model,” like 10 times; I want that to enter the lexicon.

But I feel like some media feel like they found a hack. The Washington Post had a thing a few months back, “Why You May Not Want Lower Prices as Much as You Think You Do.”

And I get it. They’re saying prices are one factor, and we have to look at other factors. But if you just report it that way, “Oh, you’re so dim, you want prices to go down. You don’t understand how the economy works.” It’s like giving the ball score, “Yankees four.”

There are other elements of course at work here, and this is in a context, as the report lays out. It’s in a context of cuts to benefits, union participation, stock buybacks. There’s a lot going on here that is part of the affordability crisis, yeah?

SA: Absolutely. And the companies are saying, “Oh, with rising costs for so many things, we have to pass those costs on to customers, or we have to cut jobs. There’s no other way to find money to cover these things”—when, if you look at what they really are spending money on, these 20 companies altogether have been on a massive stock buyback spending spree. Altogether, let’s see, I think it was over $200 billion over the past 20 years.

Some companies are just completely outrageous examples, like Home Depot spent $38 billion on stock buybacks over the past six years, and every dollar that’s spent on stock buybacks—first of all, I should explain what they are. This is when companies go out and repurchase their own stock on the open market, and when they do that, it artificially inflates the value of their shares, because they’re reducing the available supply.

And what that also does is it inflates the value of their CEO paychecks, because CEOs get most of their compensation in some form of stock-based pay. And every dollar that’s spent on those buybacks is a dollar that’s not spent on worker wages.

And so at Home Depot, if they’d taken all the money that they spent on buybacks over the past six years, and instead gave it to their workers, they could have given every one of their 419,000 US employees a $15,000 bonus every year for those six years.

At Lowe’s, Home Depot’s competitor in the home improvement field, the figures are even more insane. I think that they could have doubled the level of median pay at that company if they had spent money on worker wages instead of stock buybacks.

So it’s not that these companies don’t have the resources to be paying something other than poverty wages; it’s that they’re choosing to use their resources to enrich those at the top.

JJ: It’s so important to indicate that these are choices. When you read economic reporting, it’s often like, “They had to pass the cost on to customers.” Like they had to. No, these are choices. These are priorities that are being made. We could talk about them that way.

SA: Absolutely. They also say, “Well, of course pay is low at these companies, because the workers are mostly part-time.” Again, that is a choice, to have a business model that’s based on an overwhelmingly part-time workforce, which comes with all kinds of costs. It tends to contribute to higher levels of turnover, and people not feeling as invested in their workplace.

And so there’s all kinds of business arguments as to why it might make more sense for them to have more full-time employees with benefits, but it’s a choice. They want more part-time workers so they don’t have to pay benefits, so they can keep their labor costs down. So it is a choice. It’s not just something like the weather, that just happens out of their control.

JJ: Right. And it’s a storyline. It’s such an old storyline: “We don’t need to pay fast food workers a livable wage because they’re teenagers, and they’re just getting pick-up money to go to the movies.” And it’s so outdated and unrealistic. And I have such frustration with the unending power of these narratives.

SA: Exactly. There’s such a large share of these low-wage workers are parents, many of them single parents, who are really struggling to make ends meet. We’ve talked about our country’s largest private-sector employer, Walmart, but if you look at Amazon, too—we were able to get data from a handful of state governments that report how many employees big companies have on public-assistance programs.

The state of Nevada actually is the only one that reveals this information for Medicaid, and Amazon  had 8,900 employees in Nevada on Medicaid, and that was 48% of their whole workforce. So imagine that, they’re the second-largest private-sector employer, with a gazillionaire founder in Jeff Bezos. They’re generating enormous wealth for people at the top, and yet 48% of their employees in this one state are on Medicaid.

JJ: OK. I’m going to need to talk to you more about this, I suspect, but for now, I just would ask you, what could happen today, tomorrow, policy-wise, legislatively? What could happen that could start to address this situation?

SA: Yeah, there’s a lot that could be done. First of all, raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for 16 years now. We could strengthen our labor laws, so that workers like the ones at Amazon and Starbucks that have voted to unionize about four years ago now, but still don’t have a first contract because our protections for union rights are so weak, and these companies have just used every trick in the book to undermine the desires of their employees to be members of unions to bargain collectively for better pay.

And then I’m very excited about efforts to also use the tax code to address this issue of overpaying CEOs and underpaying workers. And this year, there are ballot initiatives moving ahead in both Los Angeles and San Francisco that would raise local taxes on businesses based on the size of the gap between their CEO and their worker pay, as an incentive for them to either narrow those gaps by lifting up worker pay or bringing down CEO pay, or, if companies refuse to do that, and want to stick with the status quo of having really large pay gaps, then they would pay more taxes into public services and infrastructure that is so needed by so many states and cities because of the federal cutbacks in funding.

JJ: All right, then. OK. We’ll end there for now, but I suspect I’ll be talking with you again soon.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-edits the IPS website Inequality.org. The report we’re talking about is “America’s 20 Largest Low-Wage Employers and the Affordability Crisis,” and I encourage you to check it out.

Sarah Anderson, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SA: My pleasure. Thank you.Email

Sarah Anderson

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies.

 

As Fuel Protests Sweep Ireland, the Left Points to Imperialism as the Culprit

By Samantha Borek

April 21, 2026

Source: Truthout

Image by infomatique/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0

As of April 16, the International Energy Agency reported that Europe has around six weeks left of jet fuel amid the ongoing war on Iran. This comes on the heels of a seven-day long blockade of major roadways by a decentralized coalition of farmers, truckers, agricultural contractors, and others in protest of skyrocketing fuel prices in Ireland. The country grinded to a halt as protesters also blockaded major fuel depots such as those in Galway and County Limerick, with RTÉ reporting that 600 fueling stations ran out of diesel and gas as of April 11. Protesters’ demands were for immediate relief: a cap on fuel prices or cuts to excise duties, VAT, or carbon taxes. Effects of rising fuel prices are rippling across the globe as the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran continues unabated, but just as in the U.S., rising fuel prices in Ireland are only a symptom of greater converging crises.

Soaring cost of living, lack of health care access, and a fragile food system within Ireland have contributed to a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric and other far right ideologies, culminating in  multiple eruptions of violence across the island. These eruptions, from 2023 to 2025, were met with little intervention from the state, unlike the current fuel protests — a sign that just like in the U.S., state repression will always disproportionately come for those in direct opposition to power.

Standoffs between the Irish police (Garda Síochána) and protesters occurred at the Whitegate refinery, Ireland’s only oil refinery, culminating in several arrests and scuffles. Irish Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan called the protests the result of “outside actors” of the far right using the people for their own agenda, stating that figures like prominent U.K. far right activist Tommy Robinson (also known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) are taking advantage of the Irish people’s dissatisfaction: “I know the overwhelming majority of people protesting do not want to see themselves manipulated by people like Tommy Robinson.” However, O’Callaghan also threatened the use of the Irish Defence Forces to quell the protests. Meanwhile, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Ireland’s equivalent of a prime minister, called the blockades an unacceptable form of protest on RTÉ Radio 1. He said that protesters should “channel” their issues through various organizations. Such responses only solidified Irish support for the protests across social media.

“The level of disruption achieved by the fuel protests is precisely what we need for the Palestine solidarity movement,” Laura Fitzgerald of the Ireland-based ROSA Socialist Feminist Movement told Truthout in an interview, “and from a working-class-led movement from below on the cost of living crisis.”

The fuel protests emerged from social media and WhatsApp groups, but Fitzgerald says those involved were not exactly a diverse cross-section of the Irish working-class. Still, 56 percent of the population supported the efforts. “Those involved in the protests were mainly medium business people … Despite all of this, the fact that the support they received was so broad is indicative of the generalized cost-of-living crisis and how it’s affecting almost everyone, bar the very elite in society.”

Fitzgerald also said two of the so-called spokespeople that have emerged in the media “are the last people who should be given a platform.” According to multiple outlets, farmers Christopher Duffy and James Geoghegan have both espoused right-wing rhetoric on many issues online. Duffy has spouted anti-immigrant rhetoric and also made comments regarding sexual assault toward environmental activist Greta Thunberg. Geoghegan, while also posting misinformation about green policies online,  has been convicted of animal cruelty.

While some are trying to take advantage of such political momentum to push forward their far right agendas, other organizations and leftists in Ireland are refusing to allow working-class unity to be co-opted. Common themes include pointing out that many of these issues are the result of U.S. greed and empire, and the Irish government’s complicity in it. Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) Ireland said in a statement: “CATU believes we need to unite in support of demands that remove the power that the private market has over our lives and services … The real root of the current crisis is Government greed and neglect, not in our neighbors and fellow workers.” Irish comedian and poet Aoife Dunne, who has experienced years of targeted online harassment from the right, wrote on Instagram: “You cannot support the US and then complain about oil prices. You cannot complain about migration and fuel etc and not denounce what the US and Russia and Isra[e]l and beyond are doing.”

Even as a “neutral” country, Ireland does have financial and military ties to the U.S. Many protests  have erupted at Shannon Airport in response to the war on Gaza, as U.S. military planes continued making stops in the country on the way to Israel. Even during the fuel protests, there were two major actions at the airport: One in which a man climbed on top of a U.S. military aircraft and took a hatchet to the exterior, and 91-year-old Lelia Doolan’s 220-kilometer walk from Clare to the Dáil (the lower house of the Oireachtas, or parliament) in Dublin in protest of U.S. military usage of the airport. This unfettered access continues despite other U.S. allies like Spain and Poland refusing some U.S. demands for military assistance in Iran.

These protests came as recent political efforts from the government have attempted to dissolve the Irish “triple lock,” which dictates that Ireland must have UN approval, a decision by the government, and a vote in the Dáil to send Irish troops abroad on “peacekeeping missions.” Championed by Tánaiste Simon Harris and others in the cabinet, the changes would rescind the necessity of UN approval as well as eliminate the requirement for Dáil resolutions in certain cases. Per a report by The Journal, “The Government argues that this removes the power of UN Security Council permanent members, such as Russia, to veto Ireland’s national sovereign decisions, while also ‘ensuring our continued compliance with the highest standards of international law.’” Antiwar protesters gathered in Dublin on April 18 to highlight the importance of the triple lock to Irish neutrality on the world stage.

Also notable is that the Irish government is currently in a deal to purchase €600 million worth of armored vehicles from France — an effort that would “transform the Irish Army from a light infantry force, with limited armoured elements, to a largely mechanised force equipped with modern armour and heavier weaponry,” according to The Irish Times. Coupled with the Irish government’s responses to the current protests, this is cause for concern, and it comes straight out of an American-style playbook for suppressing political dissent.

On March 26, the Irish Network of Legal Observers, established by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), released a report documenting the policing of protests in 2025. While it found that most protests were policed in a “human rights compliant” manner, it also showed some escalating trends, such as Gardaí removing their own identification and increased response “near sites of infrastructural significance.” It is important to note that the Gardaí are not as heavily militarized as police in the U.S., and they have powers to disperse protesters and traffic obstructions, according to ICCL in a statement about the fuel protests on April 9. However, the ICCL also noted that the threats to deploy the Defence Forces are “a significant step and does raise serious concerns for the protection of peaceful protest in Ireland, and the relationship between the public and the State.”

But while Ireland does seem to be teetering further toward U.S.-style militarization of the state, the groundswell of solidarity and the people’s staunch refusal to be divided by those in power is clear. Amid the fuel protests, charity organization Muslim Sisters of Éire experienced hostilities from individuals carrying the Irish tri-color flag after distributing food at the Dublin General Post Office (which headquartered the Easter Rising of 1916). In a post on Instagram, the organization wrote: “Providing 300 meals to those in need only to be met with hate is sickening. But let it be known: we remain undeterred.”

People Before Profit, an eco-socialist political party within Ireland, called on the Irish people to reject far right ideologues being spotlighted by the protests and to build a bigger movement. “The anger on the streets is real and justified,” it said in a statement on April 12. “But a movement … with far-right figures hovering at its edges, cannot win the demands that working people actually need. We must demand that our unions enter the fight. Workers did not cause this crisis. Energy companies, war-makers and a government that serves corporate interests did.”

As the protests and blockades have been dispersed, and the government has announced €505 million in support for farmers and the transport and fisheries sectors, the fight continues. Fitzgerald says that the package is unlikely to make it to the relief of actual working people and echoes calls for a united working-class movement: “Any movement on fuel prices and cost of living will fall at the first hurdle if it doesn’t recognize the need to unite against both the government and political establishment in Ireland, and against U.S. imperialism.”

Meanwhile, Sinn Féin, an Irish republican and democratic socialist party, put forth a vote of no-confidence in the current government on April 14. The vote went in favor of the government.

The current political climate in Ireland represents a precipice — one in which too much air is given to the ideas that let a state complicit in violence off the hook for the converging crises that come through warmongering. The Irish government, like the U.S. government, wants people to return to “business as usual” while Donald Trump holds the world hostage to mass destruction and death. “Never before have the pitfalls of the Irish state’s alliance with Western imperialism, its complicity with genocide, its protection of the interests of fossil capital been laid so bare for the world to see,”  wrote Clara McCormack in an analysis for Rebel News.

Fitzgerald wants the left to harness the momentum of this moment to address cost of living as well as public housing and shifting from fossil fuels: “We need a national strike action that mobilizes the power of workers withdrawing their labor to force government action … such a movement will need feminism and anti-racism threaded through it — and could provide real leadership and hope that’s so desperately needed.”

 

How the International Community Obtained a Nuclear Weapons-free Agreement with Iran―And Lost it Thanks to Donald Trump

By Lawrence S. Wittner

April 21, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Mehr News Agency/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

If the objective of the U.S. war upon Iran is to ensure that that country does not develop nuclear weapons, that goal was attained more than a decade ago through a far different approach than the one now being followed by the Trump administration.

Iran, as a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970, had agreed to forgo the development of nuclear weapons. Even so, fears grew during the early 21^st century that Iran’s uranium enrichment program, used for peaceful purposes, might be diverted to the development of the Bomb, thereby throwing the volatile Middle East into yet another crisis, including a frenzied nuclear arms race.

As a result, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) and Germany began lengthy negotiations with Iran, offering it various incentives to halt uranium enrichment. A key incentive was the lifting of international sanctions, which were having a severe impact on sales of Iran’s oil and, thus, its economy. After the election in 2013 of an Iranian reformer, Hassan Rouhani, as president, the negotiators came to a preliminary accord to guide their talks toward a comprehensive nuclear agreement.

The final agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was negotiated by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, and the European Union. Signed in July 2015, it granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for significant restrictions on its nuclear program. These included Iran’s agreement to ban production of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, ensure that its key nuclear facilities pursued only civilian work, and limit the numbers and types of centrifuges that it could operate. In addition, Iran agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, unfettered access to its nuclear facilities and undeclared sites.

In the United States, the Iran nuclear agreement was strongly supported by the Obama administration, which played a key role in securing it, and by Democrats, but denounced by Republicans. Jeb Bush, then a leading presidential contender, called it “dangerous, deeply flawed, and short-sighted,” while U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that it was a “death sentence for the state of Israel.” Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, lobbied ferociously against U.S. acceptance of the Iran agreement, furiously attacking it as a “historic mistake.”

Despite the opposition, the agreement went into effect in January 2016 and, initially, had smooth sailing. The IAEA certified that Iran was keeping its commitments, nations repealed or suspended their sanctions, Iran’s oil exports surged, and the United States and European nations unfroze about $100 billion of Iran’s frozen assets.

In May 2018, however, Donald Trump, Obama’s successor as President, breaking with America’s European allies, unilaterally withdrew the U.S. government from the Iran agreement and announced the reimposition of oil and banking sanctions. “It is clear to me that we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of this deal,” Trump announced. Assailing the Iran agreement as “defective to its core,” Trump condemned it for failing to deal with Iran’s ballistic missile program and its proxy warfare in the Middle East, as well as for the agreement’s 10-year sunset provision.

In response, Iranian President Rouhani, stating that the U.S. government had failed to “respect its commitment,” declared that he had “ordered the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to be ready for action if needed, so that if necessary we can resume our enrichment on an industrial level without any limitations.” Even so, he promised, he would wait to speak about this with allies and the other signatories to the agreement.

Thereafter, things went downhill. Although France, Germany, and Britain sought to keep the agreement alive by evading the U.S. banking sanctions through a barter system, this effort eventually collapsed. Meanwhile, Trump got into a verbal brawl with Rouhani, threatening Iran with what he called “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.” Ultimately, Iran began exceeding the agreed-upon limits to its stockpile, enriching uranium to higher concentrations, and developing new centrifuges.

Although Joe Biden, as a 2020 presidential candidate, promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement and “to work with our allies to strengthen and extend it,” by the time he was in office the relationship with Iran had deteriorated too far to make this feasible. Coming under a new, more reactionary leadership, the Iranian regime grew more repressive, as well as more distant from the United States and more politically toxic. As a result, a new agreement was increasingly out of reach.

In retrospect, are there any lessons that can be learned from these events?

One is that, to the degree that the development of nuclear weapons by Iran is a currently a problem, it is a problem of Trump’s making. Or as Biden put it years ago, Trump’s pullout from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement was “a self-inflicted disaster.”

Another is that getting a country to forgo nuclear weapons development is easier to accomplish through international―and especially UN Security Council―action than through unilateral action. A threat from one nation to another can easily be viewed and dismissed as bullying. But pressure from a worldwide organization representing the community of nations has greater impact.

More generally, if nations are going to be asked (or pressured) to forgo development of nuclear weapons, it is useful to have a framework that treats nations equally. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty fosters this equality through a bargain, in which the non-nuclear nations forgo building nuclear weapons in exchange for the nuclear nations eliminating their own nuclear arsenals. The next time Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu threaten to annihilate Iranian civilization, someone might remind them of that.

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Dr. Lawrence Wittner, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).