Do you remember that scene from Schindler’s List when Ralph Fiennes’ character, Amon Goeth, pardons the boy who dropped his saddle (instead of killing him on the spot)? I kind of think that’s what this Wal-mart fair trade thing is like. The bull-shit-o-meter should probably be jumping into the yellow at least. The key here is in the first sentence you quoted: that Walmart is overhauling its IMAGE. It’s the same basic thing as when they donate some money to charity, then spend millions advertising that they did it. I think their business model itself is inherently dispassionate, and putting fair-trade coffee in their stores isn’t changing the core of what the company tries to do. They’re trying to adapt a socially responsible, “the-bottom-line-isn’t-the-bottom-line” movement into a “low-cost-at-any-cost” corporate structure. It’s like what Tony Campolo said about religion and politics on “The Colbert Report”: it’s like mixing ice cream and horse manure. It doesn’t hurt the manure, but the ice cream is ruined.Four minutes after the saddle scene, Goeth goes back to indiscriminately shooting Jews. Mercy couldn’t fit into his hateful worldview. But on the plus side, he got hung at the end of the movie.