“Roughly half of all Walmart stock is owned by the 3 surviving heirs of founder Sam Walton. The Walton family is the richest family on earth with a net worth of around 224 billion in 2023.
 
In fact, the family dumped about 2.5 million shares in the spring of 2021--worth about $750 million--to get their ownership stake back down below the 50% mark. The largest chunk of the family stock -- about 1.28 billion shares -- are held in a tax-sheltering trust created by dad called Walton Enterprises. Another 245 million shares are held in the Walton family holdings trust.
 
Each of the surviving children hold individual shares as well.  Robson, Walton's oldest living son, holds more than 3.2 million shares. The wealthiest woman on earth, Alice Walton, holds close to 6.7 million shares. Jim Walton has about 10.5 million shares. Sam walton's three kids have a net worth of more than 60 billion each.  In years past, they've been among the top 10 richest people on earth but in 2023 they are merely 11, 12 and 13.
 
Every dollar increase in Walmart’s stock price adds another billion in value to the Walton Enterprises Trust and millions to each of the individual Walton siblings stock portfolios. When Walmart buys stock to boost its own market price, it's largely done to increase the wealth of the richest family on earth.
 
… Therefore, the wages of Walmart workers are suppressed mostly for the Walton families’ benefit. One of every two poorly-paid Walmart workers takes home less pay just so the $224 billion Walton family nest egg grows larger.

This also means that of the $6.2 billion in [taxpayer funded] public benefits spent every year to support Walmart workers [without health insurance or benefits], 3.1 billion is practically a direct subsidy to the richest family on earth.

Should you and I be paying [taxes] to keep Walmart workers afloat or should the Walton family? It certainly seems like they could afford to share a little of that with their workers. After all those 3 Walton heirs sure as hell couldn't run 11,000 Walmart stores all by themselves. Let's make them pay.”

-Scott Bennett
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTREgacJT/

As you read about John Durham's report remember this from The Mueller report: “[T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome and the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts"

(Austin, July 11, 2022) – The United States should immediately end federal funding for the agencies and counties engaged in Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s abusive Operation Lone Star border initiative, even as the Justice Department conducts an inquiry into the operation, Human Rights Watch said today. Operation Lone Star is a discriminatory and abusive operation that targets suspected migrants for arrest, prosecution, and incarceration on state misdemeanor offenses.

“If the federal government ignores escalating extremism while continuing to fund the agencies involved, it could become complicit in ongoing abuses under Operation Lone Star,” said Alison Leal Parker, US managing director for Human Rights Watch. “The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security should investigate abuses and compel Texas to change course, including by ending Operation Lone Star.”

The governor’s office, and many of the agencies and sheriffs involved, regularly receive federal funds through a variety of programs, many of which predate Operation Lonestar.

The Justice Department inquiry, reported by the Texas Tribune on July 6, comes amid a dangerous acceleration of harmful rhetoric and actions by Texas officials. On July 7, 2022, Governor Abbott issued an executive order escalating beyond Lone Star’s arrests and detentions of asylum seekers and migrants on criminal misdemeanor charges to authorize the Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety to unilaterally return them to the US-Mexico border, in apparent disregard for US and international human rights law…