The e-mail that I am reproducing below has just been disseminated by “Making Change at Walmart,” the employee organization that is trying to pressure Walmart into providing more of its employees with living wages and decent benefits.

It serves to reinforce my ongoing complaints about the Obama administration’s seeming obliviousness to the messages that it communicates with its choice of photo-ops.

President Obama has passionately declared that income inequality and climate change are two of the defining and most urgent issues of our time. And yet tomorrow, he’ll be holding a photo op at Walmart to commend the company on sustainability.

You read that right. The president is going to Walmart, America’s largest low-wage employer that just won “greenwasher of the year,*” to commend the company.

Don’t let this publicity stunt cover up Walmart’s unsustainable environmental and employment practices. Tweet at President Obama now to let Walmart know we’re not falling for its lies.

Not on Twitter? Send the president a message by adding your name to this petition.

We need to let President Obama know that while he’s inside with Walmart’s bigwigs, workers like Pamela Ramos (who works in the very store he plans to visit) are struggling every day to make ends meet. Thanks to Walmart’s poverty wages and medical bills that Pamela couldn’t cover, she’s currently living out of her car.

Tell President Obama that if he wants to take on inequality, he needs to speak with Walmart workers–-many of whom are hardly scraping by even though they’re working at a company owned by the richest family in America.

Walmart and the Waltons can afford to pay Pamela and hundreds of thousands of Walmart workers more. President Obama should challenge them to do so.

In Solidarity,

Making Change at Walmart

* Greenwasher of the Year 2014: Walmart http://50.87.144.187/~grnlife/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/report-2.pdf

The report available in pdf through the above link highlights how companies selectively go to great lengths to appear to be environmentally friendly but actually pursue many other policies that are anything but environmentally friendly.

So it turns out that even the ostensible purpose of President Obama’s visit to the company has a very dubious rationale.