Earlier this month, the world’s largest retailer launched a massive PR campaign meant to save its reputation. On that same day, 10 people mounted a counteroffensive by placing a phone call. In one corner, Wal-Mart called upon its multibillion dollar revenues and high-powered media team, including former Reagan spin-ster Michael K. Deaver and past Clinton employee Leslie Dach, to convince the public that the retail giant offers good jobs, treats its customers like family, and would be a boon to any community which embraced it. In the other corner, a group of civic, religious, academic, labor, and political leaders disagreed.

Turns out that was enough to tip the scales. Wal-Mart hasn’t divulged how much their publicity offensive is costing them, but it’s safe to say they’re out-gunning the two nonprofits – the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and Northern California’s Partnership for Working Families – who organized the teleconference lambasting the retailer precisely for talking about being a responsible corporate citizen rather than being one. Yet from Women’s Wear Daily to La Opinión to the AP, Wal-Mart got more bad press as a slate of stories prominently featured its critics.

Such news hardly represents a mortal blow to globalism’s poster child, but it does signal the opposition has dug in its heels for a long fight and has grown increasingly savvy with its tactics. It also reveals some of Wal-Mart’s inherent vulnerabilities.

One of LAANE’s stated goals has been to partner with a network of like-mindeds to offset the right-leaning confederacy of think tanks, organizers, and policy makers which have helped diminish labor unions and grease the wheels for globalism. To that end, when community advocates got on the phone to vent their frustration with Wal-Mart’s tactics, they were able to substantiate their claims with a 62-page report simultaneously released by LAANE’s researchers. “LAANE has been around for 12 years [fighting these types of battles],” says Tracy Gray-Barkan, who authored the report. “We wanted to show activists on the ground that everyone doesn’t have to start from scratch; there is a model for how to do this.”

For instance, Wal-Mart contends that U.S. households save $2,300 a year by shopping at the discounter. LAANE counters that Wal-Mart employees earn $10,000 less than what’s required for a two-person household to meet its basic needs. Wal-Mart trumpets the fact that their average wage clocks in at $10.11 per hour, and that they offer health benefits for as little as $11 per month. LAANE notes that fewer than half of its employees actually make it onto the rolls of the company’s health insurance plan, while somehow 67 percent of the typical large employer’s workforce do. As a result, Gray-Barkan charges that taxpayers subsidize health care for the company’s workers ?12 through public assistance programs, to the tune of $32 million annually in California alone. Then she made a very timely connection Wal-Mart somehow entirely overlooked: “Martin Luther King Day is a time for all of us to reflect on the issues Dr. King struggled with, including bringing good jobs to the African-American community,” says Gray-Barkan. “The jobs Wal-Mart wants to bring to urban communities now represent the same poverty-wage jobs my parents and grandparents struggled against.”

Conventional wisdom has argued that 800-pound gorillas like Wal-Mart needn’t lose much sleep over the complaints of historically toothless low-income neighborhoods. But community activists got an unexpected shot in the arm recently, as Wall Street took some wind out of the conglomerate’s overblown sails. As the multinational went back and forth with its detractors, investment bank Goldman Sachs demoted the company’s stock from “buy” to “neutral.” While the corporation’s ongoing public relations mess played a part in the analysts’ decision, weak earnings have plagued the giant as of late, prompting a three-year plan to overhaul not just its image but also its inventory. One year into its supposed turnaround, the stock market remains to be impressed, with one salient reason being that Wal-Mart might just be too big in the places it works best. The majority of Wal-Mart stores are located in rural, suburban, or exurban areas. With those markets all but saturated and sales there sluggish, to maintain its position, the company has little choice but to aggressively expand its number of outlets. Hence Wal-Mart is desperately trying to break into an urban center near you.

And it’s no coincidence that that’s where the retailer has met with its stiffest resistance, says David Morris, vice president of the Minnesota-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for regional self-sufficiency and strengthened local decision-making. Shoehorning a 150,000- to 200,000-square-foot big box into a dense urban core more often than not means displacing something that’s already there, Morris says, while at the same time, inside urban areas, consumers can fail to see the convenience inherent in driving past local shops where, despite the hype, prices are often in line with the “discount” retailer. Thus “cities have built-in opposition, and cities have the political authority to stop those kinds of developments and the know-how to exercise it,” he says. And that’s where the relentless march of corporations into our new, service-oriented economy shows some structural weak spots.

“There might not be much a city government can do to influence the business practices of a corporation like General Motors, but retail is a land use issue, and the courts have said that cities control land use issues,” Morris says. “It may be that Wal-Mart has never gone into a community without requiring some sort of rezoning or zoning variance, simply because they’re so large.”

Wal-Mart didn’t return calls for comment. However, the company did e-mail a statement in which it maintained that “the public will see through these attacks, because they know Wal-Mart offers good jobs and opportunities, helps working families save money, and gives back more to our communities than virtually any other company in America.” According to Wal-Mart, the company donated some $245 million to American charities in 2005 alone, and emphasized that last January, 25,000 applicants vied for 325 available jobs at a store opening in the Chicago area. According to the teleconference’s participants, that’s not enough for them to roll out the red carpet – the high unemployment that has hit urban communities shouldn’t translate into a license for exploitation, according to California state Senator Gil Cedillo, who took part in the call.

“These communities lack employment opportunities as well as retail services. But does that mean that anyone can come in under any circumstances? The answer is no,” says Cedillo. “Wal-Mart has the capacity to offer better jobs. Frankly we’d love to have large retailers in the community, but we know other models work.”

As such, activists want to tie Wal-Mart’s advance to living-wage agreements and expanded health care coverage, something city officials have shown themselves increasingly willing to experiment with over the past decade. Thus far, Wal-Mart has rebuffed such suggestions, and reportedly, in addition to its newfound PR presence, the company has also recently significantly upped its political contributions, especially to politicians at the state and local level. But for the moment, it’s still community activists who seem to be holding a handful of cards.

“One of the beneficial aspects of our [struggle against Wal-Mart] has been that it teaches people how much power [the people] have,” Morris says. “Wal-Mart can’t come into an urban community without the community’s permission, and that’s something people didn’t realize. Increasingly, communities are having the confidence to say no.”