Breaking Fake News

Wal-Mart offers to buy island of Taiwan
by
Nate Mecredi
The Bubble News Service


The Wal-Mart corporation is set to announce plans to purchase the island of Taiwan, “from whoever can produce a legal deed first,” according to an internal memo. A copy of the memo was given confidentially to the Bubble News Service by a Wal-Mart employee, and only on condition of receiving help with his food stamp application.
According to the memo, Wal-Mart officials are well aware of the disputed ownership of the island, recognizing that both China and the United States claim the deed. But these officials believe a continuing and even escalating dispute will just be bad for business. (Suggestions that Taiwan itself claims independent ownership of its own island and affairs was dismissed in the memo as “piffle.”)
The memo, signed by Wal-Mart World Acquisition Vice-President Milo Minderbinder III, will offer a combination of cash and “all the batteries their little hands can carry,” in return for the island.
“This is not about politics or culture or even what’s right and wrong; it’s about business,” according to Minderbinder’s memo, whose grandfather once lost a fortune selling chocolate-covered Egyptian cotton during World War II. (The elder Minderbinder had originally made that fortune by buying eggs for three cents and selling them for two cents to United Sates forces stationed in Italy, claiming to make a profit on volume.)
In the memo Minderbinder claims that any conflict involving the possibility of military action between the two nations could lead to a vast call-up by the Chinese, resulting in less workers available to produce cheap foreign goods for its stores and supercenters.
“Can you imagine the effect on profits if we have to start buying from America again, because the Chinese suddenly have a billion people in uniform and armed to the teeth?” Minderbinder asked in the memo. “We just can’t afford the prospect of paying fair wages, and restoring a middle class that would prefer to shop at Macy’s or even a Target.”
Officially, the Bush administration had no comment when presented with a copy of the Wal-Mart memo, but privately one official who spoke only on condition of receiving a free Sam’s Club membership, said the administration sees the wisdom of Wal-Mart’s move.
“It’s a heckuva lot cheaper than trying to impose stability and democracy at the point of a gun,” said the official, casting his eyes toward a nearby map of Iraq. The official said a secret task force headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney was already at work looking into tax cuts and subsidies for companies buying problem countries and rogue nations.
“There would, of course, be a premium paid on a purchase of any of “axis of evil” nations,” admitted the official quoting task force minutes, and only after a case of 64 oz cans of Starkist tuna was placed in front of him.
This is not the first time an American company has been implicated in an effort to buy and own an entire country. According to a diary kept by a member of the Medellin drug cartel, Pablo Escobar had tried to offer the country of Columbia to Halliburton Inc. in exchange for a “good deal” on some processing and refining equipment.” According to one diary entry, Escobar pulled the offer off the table, after receiving his first invoice from Halliburton and realized he was being gouged.
It remains uncertain at this point just what Wal-Mart’s next move can be. “There’s really no international law dealing with the subject of nations being purchased by multinational corporations,” says Robert Saccamano of the American Enterprise Institute. “Not that international law or any international organization has ever stood in the way of what a multinational decides to do, mind you.”
In fact, Saccamano’s book, Why We’re Better Than Everyone Else: America and the Nuke Card, Saccamano writes precisely about providing tax breaks and other incentives for multinationals purchasing problem countries. In charts and graphs, Saccamano shows how the cost of the outright purchase of any country that “does not agree with us,” would be less than what the current prescription drug benefit will eventually cost taxpayers.