Great googly moogly. I'm not a fan or supporter of Wal Mart. I just hate this sort of article. While Wal Mart may be guilty of all things evil, the kind of comparisons going on in the article are just insane. It's made me so insane that I now feel I have to actually take the time to fisk an article instead making a snide comment or three along with a link.
They get going in paragraph two of the article with this little bit of "information"
The largest and most profitable retailer in the world -- and in the United States, with 1.3 million workers, the largest private employer -- is becoming nearly as infamous as Enron or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
Remember, Wal Mart is the largest and most profitable retailer in the world and the largest employer in the US. This will be worth remembering later. As to the comparison to Enron, maybe so, I'm no judge. Enron was guilty of horrifyingly bad business processes and Wal Mart may be as well. As to the Triangle Factory... Cornell University has a nice site on this
event. So, Salon has evidence that Wal Mart is chaining exit doors shut and preventing its workers from evacuating facilities during a fire? No? Oh, and by the way, it's the "Triangle Waist Company" that makes shirts, not "Triangle Shirtwaist Factory." If you're going to make a comparison Ms. Featherstone, at least get the names right.
The article continues:
Years of citizen outrage...
Have resulted in the largest and most profitable retailer in the world and the largest employer in the US... Oh, that wasn't your point.
What Wal-Mart's abuses have in common, they say, is a disregard for the public interest in a single-minded pursuit of the bottom line.
Yeah, how dare they try to make a profit. How dare they actually try to pay their unskilled workers a legal, yet not exorbitant, wage, plus health insurance for the full time workers, etc.. You know, they're actually acting like they operate in a capitalist society. How dare they.
This Wal-Mart moment has been decades in the making. In the retailer's early years, beginning with its 1961 founding in Arkansas, unions mostly ignored its expansion. After all, many of the stores were in the South, where restrictive laws -- and a tradition of labor exploitation as extreme sport, dating back, of course, to slavery -- have historically kept unions weak. (Sam Walton's original five-and-dime store, in Bentonville, Ark., sits on a town square overlooking a monument to fallen Confederates.)
Oh boy. First, they're locking the doors on their sweatshop workers. Now, they're almost the same as slave owners since they run a non-union business. Yep, if you're not in a union, you must be a slave because, really, there's no such thing as middle ground there. And, Sam Walton had the effrontery to open a store in a town in Arkansas and in front of a Confederate monument. Now doubt, by design. See that slavery thing if you're confused.
Recognizing that so many low-income Americans desperately need Wal-Mart's low prices, Wake Up Wal-Mart's message is not strident or purist: The group is simply urging people to reduce their Wal-Mart shopping as much as they can.
Here we have the first words of sense in the entire article. Wal Mart lives and dies by margins. They keep all their costs as low as possible, in turn keeping the prices as low as possible thereby deriving a profit while providing a service. I thought this was what capitalism was all about. I mean seriously, if Wal Mart is violating laws, let's punish them, but let's not beat them up for being really good at operating within the free market system.
Blank, along with two other Wake Up Wal-Mart activists, emerged from the youthful enthusiasm of the Howard Dean presidential campaign, which used the Internet creatively and made activists of people who'd never before believed in the political process. (Another member of the Wake Up Wal-Mart team comes from the Draft Wesley Clark campaign, the Internet-based group that raised large sums of money for Clark before he'd even agreed to run in the 2004 presidential campaign.)
Aaaahhemm! Excuse me, little cough there. Enough said.
Like Wake Up Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart Watch's staff has its share of Democratic political pros.
So, in short, the Democratic party is against successful companies that provide goods & services that poorer people can afford. They want to increase the overall operating expenses of Wal Mart, thereby raising the prices, thereby taking good and services away from poorer people. They're doing this because they're on the side of the poorer people. OK.
research showing that a new Wal-Mart actually increases countywide poverty rates.
What research? That's a pretty huge statement to make with nothing to back it up. You want to stop Wal Mart because you're anti-sprawl? Cool. I think, to a certain degree you're trying to fight the tide, but hey, more power to you. You want to stop Wal Mart because it closes down Mom & Pop stores. There is evidence that it does. Of course, there are also the Mom & Pop specialty shops that open up next to Wal Marts that seem to do very well indeed. Still. There's plenty of evidence for those arguments. Wal Mart CAUSES poverty. I need really solid facts from a source that's not union funded, but I'll take that much now.
City dwellers are also more likely to be offended by Wal-Mart, sometimes for social justice reasons, as in the massive sex discrimination lawsuit, Dukes vs. Wal-Mart, the largest civil rights class action in history, which charged the retailer with discrimination in pay, promotions and training. Urban residents also often oppose Wal-Mart out of concern over low wages, or for snobbish reasons: Wal-Mart sells ugly, cheap stuff, brings more poor folks to the neighborhood to shop and doesn't belong in a cosmopolitan environment. It's also, compared with the lonely exurbs, or rural America, relatively easy to organize and inform people who live in cities: They have plenty of civic institutions and consume media avidly. To win them over, Wal-Mart may have to make changes.
Now we finally get to the real deal. Open 15 more Wal Marts in Joplin and most of the people protesting aren't going to make a sound. Try to open one up near Tribeca and watch the "oh so concerned with the little man" liberals come crawling out of the wood work to protest. "What?" they'll say, "cheap goods that poor people will buy are being disseminated down the block? This shall not stand."
It is no accident that the anti-corporate campaign emerged in the anti-government Reagan era. Perceiving the major political parties as thoroughly bought off by corporate interests, activists saw their only recourse as appealing directly to the corporations and to their consumers. In President Reagan himself, corporate interests found a true friend, but even more important, for the first time, business was successfully organized as a political force, one that could lobby more forcefully than ever for its own interests.
And why, you may ask, did people feel this way? Because, instead of pursuing the socialist utopian plan, Reagan (and Thatcher) pursued the market. Lo and behold, our economy, which under Dem & Rep alike, has followed the market approach, is booming, making everyone more money. See
Commanding Heights the documentary or book.
Indeed, we live in an era of painfully small-scale do-good impulses, best characterized by Julie Delpy's winsome character in last year's Richard Linklater movie "Before Sunset." Sitting in a cafe with her long-lost lover (played by Ethan Hawke), she explains that she used to believe in changing the world through revolutions, politics and big ideas, but now she doesn't think any of those can work, so she works for a nongovernmental organization that distributes pencils to impoverished third-world schoolchildren (just pencils). I'd guess that every moviegoer familiar with the fragmented, microspecific world of nonprofit organizations cringed and nodded with recognition at this scene, but it was also a funny -- and sad -- reminder of a generation's dearth of politics.
Ah crap. You want a revolution? Read some damned history! Even the American Revolution, although extremely sedate and kind as revolutions go, was something of a blood bath. From there you get into the extremes like the French Revolution(s) and all the miriad communist revolutions which left, literally, trails of bodies in their wakes. Yeah, last thing we need are people working to make a difference one pencil at a time. We need a revolution! Idiot!
It is precisely the willingness of the anti-Wal-Mart activists to rise above this nobly ineffective, pencil-sized universe and engage with a bigger picture, and with politics, that makes their campaign so promising. It is a campaign against greed itself, and the current direction of our economy, in which corporations can do as they please regardless of the human cost.
I say again, if they're breaking the law, let's prosecute. If they're just doing a good job at being capitalists, shut the 'f' up and sit the 'f' down.
What's more, Americans are desperate to catch a financial break somewhere. Since breaks are not forthcoming on the job, or from the government -- through, say, universal healthcare or free college tuition -- many will continue to look for relief in the aisles of Wal-Mart. When you're struggling to make ends meet, a $2.50 bra and a $30 microwave look pretty good. It may be that without more progressive people in government, and a more collective ethos in our society as a whole, activists may not be able to force Wal-Mart into fundamental changes.
And here is the word that I've learned to loath. Collective. Yes. Collective. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. It's been tried. It doesn't work. It failed. Badly. Go to Russia. See the devastation wrought by the Soviet Union on the people and the environment. Read the histories of what collectivism does to human rights.
