Thinking Too Small?
This post is kind of a twofer. Shortly we’ll get to some reflections on my Thanksgiving weekend that I had decided not to post. The raging Wal Mart conversation has changed my mind.
I agree with Nathan and others—Wal Mart presents BIG questions. It is a “poster child” test of our ability to find our way in the not-so brave but very new world in which we find ourselves. Part of passing the test is being patient with ourselves as we sort our how to move forward. I am in a camp that thinks the old order is more gone than is generally realized. For that very reason, I appreciate difficulty of figuring out a new and better order—not to mention how to achieve it. It takes time. It also takes respectful struggle and dialogue.
Just speaking for myself, I worry a lot about not thinking big enough, bold enough and new enough. The pull of the old is powerful indeed. Wal Mart itself has us in a kind of “Stockholm syndrome.” Some “liberals” apparently buy into the notion that about all we can do for poor people is celebrate the fact that there’s a department of the Matrix that’s devoted to enriching the Walton family by providing poor people with low prices—obtained in no small part by exploiting even poorer people in China and elsewhere.
What’s most disturbing about this to me is the implied defeatism: since we can’t really do anything about poverty and we can’t really do anything to make Wal Mart follow a better business model, let’s just declare them a “Good Goliath.” Apparently there is an intelligent designer. According to His disciples, including that well known advocate for the poor, John Tierney, proof that the ID loves poor people is that He created Wal Mart. Yikes.
I don’t buy it. Borrowing the title from a recent piece by Grace Boggs (more on that in another post.): Another World Is Necessary/Another World Is Possible/Another World Has Already Started.
And now on to: Thanksgiving Weekend in the Year of Katrina
We share our Thanksgivings with the family of one of my oldest friends. It’s a big deal for us, bigger than Christmas. We work hard to get ourselves and our kids there. We always have a hell of a good time.
We alternate the site, so this year I drove seven hours from Paso Robles, CA to Las Vegas and back. I like to drive—always have--motor oil in my veins and all that. (Let’s not even discuss the monster speeding ticket I got on the return trip.) I especially like long drives with my wife. It’s always good talking time.
I like the chance to look at things too. Parts of this drive are scenic. Parts are pretty boring.
For me though, a long drive reveals some of the muscle and sinew of the American economy. There are the roads and the bazillions of cars. Traffic was heavy going and coming. The lines for the women’s bathrooms were invariably longer than any lines at the gas pumps. (For better and worse, for the time being anyway, gasoline is cheap and plentiful in this country. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.) And then there are the trucks. Am I hyper-attentive, or is every tenth one a Wal Mart truck? How many damn trucks do they have anyway?
Rail tracks parallel both sides of the road. Two, three and four locomotive trains pulling mile long loads are common. Mostly they are hauling containers. Some are non-descript. Many were badged with the UPS logo. There’s a lot of stuff inside those containers.
Outside Mojave, CA there is a miles square “parking lot” full of scores of mothballed commercial aircraft, up to and including 747’s. You may have seen the pictures, but it’s still striking to see in “real-life.”
Another dazzling sight is the thousands of wind turbines on the hills and mountain sides between Bakersfield and the high desert.
And then there’s Las Vegas. Jeez-o-Pete. Can it get any wilder? It’s mind boggling to think about how much water, electrical power, air conditioning, construction equipment and construction labor is involved. Likewise the number of people with the leisure time, the income and the transportation required to move the tourists in and out.
Consider the amount of capital it takes to make Las Vegas happen. The new Wynn casino is stunning. For two billion bucks, it ought to be. (Let’s not discuss how I did in Mr. Wynn’s casino either.) The pace of residential construction is phenomenal. It’s getting closer and closer to Red Rock Canyon by the minute. Someone told us that 5,000 people a week are moving to Vegas.
Consider the amount of capital it takes to make Las Vegas happen. The new Wynn casino is stunning. For two billion bucks, it ought to be. (Let’s not discuss how I did in Mr. Wynn’s casino either.) The pace of residential construction is phenomenal. It’s getting closer and closer to Red Rock Canyon by the minute. Someone told us that 5,000 people a week are moving to Vegas.
Las Vegas is the most unionized city in the country. Maybe unions aren’t exactly the impediment to growth that some people want us to think they are.
The Thanksgiving meal itself? No surprises there. Delicious food (most of the ingredients purchased by our hostess at Wal Mart, by the way) and good wine. Much left over—well not the wine.
After Thanksgiving comes...BLACK FRIDAY. Now there’s a day worth thinking about. OK, so we’re not a manufacturing economy any more. (Actually we are but that’s a different conversation.) They say we’re a service economy now. Or a knowledge economy. Seems to me we’re a retail economy. Imagine, a thousand people waiting in line for the Best Buy to open at 5:00 AM. Needing the police to quell “rioting” shoppers at a Wal Mart in Washington State. A single day of shopping that exceeds the gross national product of many nations.
So, you may be wondering, what’s that all got to do with Katrina?
We’ve got a lot of economic power. There’s plenty of food and consumer goods to go around. Tens of millions are able to get their material needs met on a scale never seen before.
But many are not. All the Wal Marts in Louisiana didn’t save those people from the hell at the Convention Center or the hell most are still enduring--Lady Barbara Bush, notwithstanding.
Obviously it’s not resources we lack. Surely in the twenty-first century, we can devise a better and more just way to get services, knowledge and stuff distributed.
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Regarding your great narrative about your cross-state drive, I immediately think of something that many might call off-topic, but I would not.
I used to travel around the country a great deal to small cities and towns, including a lot of driving and finding my way around and getting lost.
The picture of the United States that I have seen being painted on blogs left and right over the last couple years by people staying home in their jammies (including me too often over the last couple of years)
rarely seems to jive with what I saw on my travels. Here on the net I often see ideologically-formed pictures; artful at times, but not in realist style. That's because the people that are blogging are not "the people." They are people that have an agenda.
December 2, 2005 7:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that it’s obvious that the U.S. we consume lots of stuff even if it puts us deeper in debt. I also believe you hit the nail on the head when you imply that the issue to be addressed is how in this land based on the ideals that, in theory, all citizens have “inalienable rights,” where there is “liberty and justice for all,” and where an consumerist, greed-driven, unregulated free-market economy makes a mockery of both those ideals.
New thinking is indeed needed because agitators for social and economic justice like yourself haven’t been as successful in promoting as much needed change as you’d like.
But please indulge me, what specifically do you have in mind when you refer to “the old order” that is more gone than most of us realize?
December 2, 2005 9:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
The flip side of thinking too small about our resources to respond to WalMart is underestimating the nature of the problem posed by the retail giant.
WalMart is not just another company. It is the largest company, and it is an opportunistic one. WalMart seeks to destroy all its competetitors, and even if it falls short of doing so it's going to radically change the way those companies do business. So when we ask whether we can live with WalMart, we've really got to consider whether we want WalMart to define the sum of retail experience in this country. In a lot of places, like the small town where I live, that's what it comes down to.
Another thing to consider is that WalMart's cruel ways don't simply affect some static group of low income workers. The WalMart model is dramatically swelling the ranks of the marginal workers, because the company does everything it can to destroy the institutions which took the less qualified out of the ranks of the lower class. WalMart destroys small business, both of the retail and manufacturing variety. And it destroys union employment, both retail and manufacturing.
Would working class Americans trade the ability to earn a decent wage to care for their families for the ability to buy cheap shampoo and lap tops? I don't think they would if they understood the stakes.
December 2, 2005 9:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
To come at it another way, the twentieth century social contract was a function of a quite different set of conditions than those that now obtain. For one thing, the dominant capitalists of the twentieth century (that includes those who won WWII) believed that the potential popular appeal of “socialism” could be mitigated by “carrots,” e.g. the growth of trade unions, and/or social welfare programs, not just the “sticks” of political and economic repression. For various reasons the roots of those “carrots” went far deeper in Western Europe than they did here and those social contracts, while under attack, remain stronger there than here. The US never had national health care for example. The Taft-Hartley Law and other factors kept significant areas of the US—the South in particular—exempt from unionization. So, when the civil rights movement helped to “unite” the national economy for the first time, Wal Mart was poised to replace GM as the corporate “model.” Another “new” factor, as you imply, massive personal debt is a tool of bondage deployed on a scale never seen before.
The collapse of the Soviet Union took down with it all but the faint fumes of a coherent alternative to capitalism. So now, among other things, we are essentially searching for a way to “tame” capitalism-gone-wild. It’s entirely possible that the answer will mostly come from outside the US, not inside. It’s also entirely possible that the old left-right political spectrum is obsolete. How can you have a continuum that has only one pole? (Is that the applause of one hand clapping I hear in the background?)
It’s not that I think that history has “ended,” or that there is no hope, or even that global capitalist hegemony doesn’t have its up sides—it surely does. Rather we have a new problem that requires new solutions, as distinct from the futile effort to win back the new deal or some such. In that sense, the American Revolution was a response to a new order. As we know, that revolution didn’t fall from the sky. It took lots of thinking, debating and action. (Who knows—if they had blogs, it might have happened quicker—or not.) Another analogy—the industrial unions of the mid-twentieth century obviously couldn’t have come about prior to the mass production itself.
You are entirely right, by the way, that “agitators for social and economic justice like yourself haven’t been as successful in promoting as much needed change as you’d like.” That too is another good reason think to think different.
I realize this answer is vulnerable to many varieties of: wait, it’s more complicated than that. Well, it is complicated, but to state the obvious, I think the guts of it are true.
December 2, 2005 12:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Walmart pays lousy wages. Walmart does not provide decent health care insurance. Tell us how that is good for any worker?
Wages are like water, they seek the lowest level. When an outfit like Walmart is allowed to get away with paying low wages and crummy benefits other companies that do provide family sustainable employment are thus disadvantaged. They often claim that in order to compete with Walmart they will have to reduce pay and benefits too. Studies show that many of those claims are real. Nationwide, an average of two markets close down in communities where Walmart Super Centers are built. Does it make sense to trade good paying jobs for poor paying ones?
If you believe the Walmart way is ok, let us take a few minutes to decide how you would feel if your job was on the line.
Suppose one bright day Wal-to-Wal Labor Mart arrived in town Further suppose that Wal-toWal had a wide variety of "services" it offered, all at reduced prices. Teachers could be furnished. So could truck drivers, city workers, firemen, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, masons, roofers, restaurant workers, farm workers, etc., etc. Want a cut-rate teacher? On the lookout for a cheap carpenter? How about someone who will work dirt cheap to dig a hole? Call Wal-to-Wal! Sound good?
Huh? What is that you are saying? You are a teacher and your job should never be subject to under-pricing? Would it surprise you if truckers, city workers, firemen, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, masons, roofers, restaurant workers, farm workers, etc., etc., felt the same way? Would it astonish you to learn that each worker in each of those job descriptions can justify his/her wages and benefits?
Naturally, if a Wal-to-Wal arrived, wages would plummet Disposable income would dive. A ripple effect would occur. If you have not got money to spend you won't. Others would be in the same boat. You would not be hired because there would not be anyone with enough money to pay you. You would have to go on public assistance.
Would Wal-toWal care? Heck no! The company would be raking in huge profits. Their low cost workers would be doing the work you used to do!
Have you changed your tune? Now do you see why it hurts everyone when giant corporations are allowed to pay miserly wages and offer miserable benefits?
Walmart workers are no better or worse than you. They want what you want. They want good pay and adequate benefits just like you do.
Does it make sense to allow companies to move into your community and undermine the living standards of long time dwellers such as yourself?
When we personalize the issue we often get a new and fresh perspective.
That is why it puzzles me whenever working class people support big-business schemes that are detrimental to fellow workers and therefore to themselves.December 2, 2005 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wal-Mart is part of a system across the whole economy.
Corporate America, the mega corporations, looking for its own interest, aimed at getting oil, has used the income of the middle class to pay for a military based approach , while pressing downward the wages of the most poor workers so that the middle class, buying at walmart doesn't notice how far its real income has shrunk. The poor are equally confused as they are forced out of jobs but can purchase cheaply the goods they used to make.
December 2, 2005 8:37 PM | Reply | Permalink