The bad idea that won't die

While a noble band of local folks have been waging a grass-roots campaign to try to stop a Super Wal-Mart from being constructed just outside the Hastings city limits, Hastings City and Rutland Township officials have been quietly negotiating a deal with the giant retailer. Citizens: Prepare thyselves for Wal-Mart’s presence near the corner of Green Street and Cook Road in Rutland Township. Back-room politics appear to be winning yet another battle in hyper capitalism’s war on the unwary working middle class.

Forget the fact that a horde of local citizens cheered when the Rutland Township Planning Commission voted unanimously in March against recommending Wal-Mart’s request for mixed use zoning to accommodate the project. Forget the fact the Rutland Township Board last month voted 4-3 in the face of public opposition to have another traffic study done, effectively delaying Wal-Mart’s request to get started on a "super" shopping center. Forget what you heard about the Super Wal-Mart plan being dead. Like a movie monster, this bad idea just keeps getting up again in order to continue scaring the villagers...

The crucial argument against Super Wal-Mart’s location selection has been the nature of Green Street, residential, too narrow and too close to a hospital that needs quick ingress and egress for emergency vehicles. The secondary argument against the world’s largest retailer is its awful habit of ruining small communities by sucking the life out of downtowns, forcing taxpayers to widen roads and provide infrastructure as a result of Wal-Mart’s mere presence and the retail giant’s penchant for locating just outside the city limits and in the adjacent township to avoid paying higher city taxes (in Hastings the levy is 16.2 mills, in Rutland, it’s one measly mill).

Several city and township officials, through private negotiations, apparently have cut off the traffic argument at the pass with a novel idea: Closing Green Street just to the west of Pennock Hospital and Fish Hatchery Park, thereby countering claims Green is too narrow and the hospital can’t absorb increase in traffic. Meanwhile, it seems people then could get to Wal-Mart from Cook Road and the portion of Green that runs from Cook east from the M-37/M-43 traffic light that was necessitated by the current existing Wal-Mart and paid for by taxpayer dollars.

I’ve always said one of the most important functions of government is to solve problems, and a few city and township officials seem to feel they’ve done just that. They’ve found a way to avoid potential costly litigation at the hands of the second richest company in the world, second only to Exxon/Mobil. And they didn’t get that way by just being the benevolent smily-face falling prices public relations fantasy baloney they’ve fed us for so long. They’ve gotten where they are by bullying backwoods rube governments with little courage and not enough knowledge or money to stand up to them. They’ve climbed to the top on the backs of poor Third World workers who ultimately are doing what many Americans used to do, only much cheaper and under conditions more foul than the sweatshops of late 19th Century America in the era of robber barons. They’ve used cut-throat tactics to sell their products for less and eliminate competition, which is supposed to be the cornerstone of the free market enterprise system.

But it seems too many consumers examine only what’s right in front of them, the low price, while ignoring the man behind the curtain who hopes someday to be the only seller left standing so he can name whatever price he wishes. Some letter writers to the local newspaper call this process “progress” for Hastings and Barry County. I call it a giant step back into the early 20th century before Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era put a stop to it.

So city and township officials seem to have found a way to let Wal-Mart in the back door. And they’ll probably tell us they were forced to, they couldn’t legally stop the world’s largest retailer. At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I sentence Jim Carr, Jeff Mansfield and a few other sellouts to study the story of the Munich Conference in 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave away the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler, declaring “Peace in Our Time.”

And I challenge the many people who live here to engage in a serious boycott of ever buying anything at Wal-Mart. If your local elected officials won’t stand up for you, you’re going to have to resort to the only weapon you have left: “Vote with your pocketbook.”

And I challenge the readers of this blog to call up their local representatives and let them know that if they don't support local businesses and citizens, maybe those businesses and citizens won't support them when they run for re-election. Don't let Barry County join the race to the bottom we like to call "globalization." Don't let back door deals override the will of the people. And don't let the politicians forget that they can get "downsized" when they don't defend the working class that pays their salaries and votes them in or out of office.

And for any politician or citizen who wants to do the right thing and fight Wal-Mart, please click go to Wal-Mart Watch's BattleMart page.