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.

Breaking: Falling prices land on house, kill 5

“Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.”
— Georges Santayana

The news broke last month that Wal-Mart plans to build a supercenter near the corner of Green Street and Cook Road, just outside the City of Hastings. Never mind that Wal-Mart already has a huge store in Rutland Township that hasn't been around very long, but I guess it’s not enough for the board of directors at Wal-Mart, they’ve got to have a store that will offer people everything in the world of goods and services, from groceries to haircuts, to lawn implements to lamp shades and all or most of it made in China. It feels like nothing is ever enough for these guys, they want to rule the world. And I hope we’re not dumb enough to do our part to let ’em do it. Wal-Mart made a pitch last month for rezoning to the Rutland Township Planning Commission and was rebuffed by a unanimous vote in a packed house full of people mostly opposed to the project. But those who opposed the project only won Round One, and this 800-pound gorilla will be back with a bigger team of lawyers and more threats Wednesday night when the Rutland Township Board will take up the issue in the spacious digs at The Barry Expo Center.

Meanwhile, the debate is raging, with most people opposed explaining that Green Street is mostly residential and too narrow to handle the traffic especially considering it's already a congested road at peak times of day and is the only route for ambulances to take to Pennock Hospital where any delay because of traffic can lead to death. Some people are arguing a bigger Wal-Mart would be bad for local business but that doesn't sway the ones who would rather pay a little less for a product without regard to the steeper social and economic costs to society which we have seen before in periods of American history where corporations began taking too much power and squashing their competition. Some of us are arguing that we need to remind ourselves of the lessons from those mistakes in history and see that unabated corporate greed has a way of coming back to hurt the people who never profited from its success in the first place.

For those who have forgotten about what happened in the United States 100 years ago, the Progressive Era was born at the beginning of the 20th century in response to the excesses of the Gilded Age, the Industrial Revolution, laden with “robber barons” such as J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, who made millions of dollars by screwing the poor masses glad to have jobs with meager pay and lousy hours.

The progressives included “muckrakers” like Upton Sinclair, whose book “The Jungle” exposed the awful things that were allowed to go into our food; Ida Tarbell, who a critical history of Standard Oil, and even politicians such as Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, who came up with a lot of the political reform ideas later captured by Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the New Deal which helped fuel the period in history that made America the champion of liberty, prosperity and generosity around the world.

These reformers had their greatest champion in arguably one of our greatest presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, who did a lot more than just talk about doing something to stop the abuses of the super wealthy and hyper capitalism. It was T.R. who stopped the merger mania that had been occurring so frequently in early 1900s with his trust-busting activity and
he halted Big Oil’s march toward monopoly. The most important thing Teddy did was call out and defeat the likes of Standard Oil, which had designs on monopoly and status more powerful than the federal government through cut-throat tactics, simply because they could.

Under the still highly touted principles of an unregulated free market system, Standard Oil, because it had become so rich and powerful, could afford to sell petroleum products at ridiculously low prices that eventually could eliminate all competition. When the mission had been accomplished, Standard would be the only company left standing and it could set prices for as much as it pleased.

When you use cut-throat tactics to sell your goods and services for less, when you treat your employees like indentured servants, when you collect all the goods you sell from foreign countries that exploit their workers and pay them a fraction of what the U.S. used to pay ours, when you put a tremendous tax burden on the citizens where you locate because they must pick up the tab for roads, sewer, water and traffic lights that your presence requires, when you deliberately locate just outside city limits to avoid paying higher tax rates than neighboring citizens must pay, when you create schemes in which your employees must seek health care paid for by the public in order to shirk the cost of doing business in a fair society, you are just like the robber barons Theodore Roosevelt fought against so long ago. Citizens have a right to stand up and ask their government to be a fair referee. It's long past time we reminded government of it's duty and it's purpose.

There are plenty of shallow and uncomplicated people, too many of them, who only look closely at the low prices offered at Wal-Mart. They don’t understand they’re selling their souls to the devil, and they don’t want to be told about it. They’ll tell you they shop at Wal-Mart simply because the prices are cheaper and in these hard times, you’ve got to save money. But they don’t want to be presented with the big picture, the inconvenient truth such as I have only scratched the surface of here. I only wish these people, too many of them, would revisit history from 100 years ago and then look long and hard at the real price they pay for lower prices at Wal-Mart. There's a price to be paid for ignoring history and it's one that our children and grandchildren will likely pay. But that's just my 2¢...