|  |
 |
|
OPINION: Walmart... the Cheapest Kind, Part Two |
Barr Bentley | 1/27/12
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Read Part One
Perusing the upchucking chaos of industrial affluence stacked under garish lights inside a sterile ugly corporate cornucopia while sucking in the slow-death carcinogenic out-gassing fumes from a plethora of plastic packaged products spawned from chemical concoctions that never existed in our world 50 years ago... it eventually occurs to us that we don’t want to be there, shop there or work in there, trying to tolerate all that toxicity while pretending we are increasing our quality of life.
And Walmart is not simply a “local” issue. The ships that bring Walmart goods from China into LA harbor are almost a mile long. They come in loaded. They return to China empty. In a vicious cycle, U.S. dollars continue losing global value because we keep sending more abroad and then borrowing them back from China and Japan to finance a war machine to control global flows of energy to sustain lifestyles based upon consumption of cheap goods sold at Walmart.
An example of a deadly life-support system.
 The way we rationalize this kind of self-destruction is through complacency and self-deception. We pretend that it’s somehow good, fair and just for a corporation to amass absurd wealth and global manipulative influence as long as the peasantry can still imagine some possibility of upward mobility. Jefferson was aware of this aspect of human nature when he added these lines to The Declaration of Independence:
Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Walmart’s mega-corporate mandate is to effectively extract overall wealth from a target area and concentrate that wealth in other hands. Enormous global corporations like Walmart tend to become tyrannical and exert unrighteous political influence akin to the monarchs of Europe we declared independence from 250 years ago. An example of local political tyranny is Mayor Aragon’s despotic denial of a forum for public comment upon Walmart’s announced arrival.
The few jobs a Walmart might create cannot in anyway offset the deadly social illusions it fosters and represents. Imagining that our community will endure and be happy if only surrounded with more convenient mediocre consumer goods is a tempting fantasy. But is "more stuff" truly what people need? Eventually we learn that consumption cannot fill our personal or community void. What consumption can fill up fast is our landfill — because big consumption means big waste. So a new Walmart would mean landfill abatement fees would have to be charged to develop and site a new landfill which must meet stringent EPA standards... NOT of the cheapest kind.
Today money freely and quickly moves around the globe, as institutions and corporations extract and concentrate wealth with dramatic speed, automatically wiping out a middle class. As a thoughtful citizenry, we can coordinate, cooperate, and commit to keeping each other thriving at the community level.
If that is truly what we want.
We do not have to accept or support exploitative, extractive empire-mind systems sick with illusions of wealth, grandeur and self-righteousness. We don’t have to define ourselves by the cheapest kind.
As a society we are the undisputed globally dominant digesters of disposable debauchery. We don’t need more cheap kinds. We need to hold our children’s hand, take them for a walk, teach them the plants, how to share and how to care for each other. Most of us are happy to be warm, dry, fed, and loved, for heaven’s sake. What we have a real shortage of is not cheap jobs and cheaper stuff, but priceless love and care for each other and for all people. |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|