Wal-Mart the (Corporate) Welfare Queen
Shopping for Subsidies: How Wal-Mart Uses Taxpayer Money to Finance Its Never-Ending Growth
by Philip Mattera and Anna Purinton
“The $1 billion figure we cite for total public assistance to Wal-Mart may very well be the tip of the iceberg.”
Link above is to the full study. Handy summary available here.
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[...] As much as I have always hated their cluttered, trashy stores and the ultranationalist overtones of their overall, err, gestalt, I used to be a defender of the Wal-Mart business model. Thanks to Kevin Carson and others, I’ve seen the terrors of the Walton way. Now Spangler links to an extensive study on what a shameless corporate welfare queen the Wal-Mart leviathan really is. The high cost of low price indeed. So, is the alternative any less repugnant? Likely not much. But I shop there anyway, if only because my rabidly patriofascist cousin still thinks they are veteran-hating, dildo-pushing Frenchies. It’s pronounced “Tar-jay” in my house. [...]
your email is down, and bounced back my reply
my thoughts on the Joint Terminology declaration:
This is fucking Beautiful. If you can somehow get Chuck to support this I
will sign the crap out of it and promote it all over the fucking world.
I’ll sign it anyway, but without such a major inroad I’m not sure it’ll
have much of an effect.
Notes: I think the title should use “Anarchist/Libertarian” rather than
just Libertarian and I’d tone down the formality just a wee bit. I know
that such formality will play well with the ancap side of the spectrum,
but it’ll be instinctively offputting to the social movement, who are very
sensitive to even the slightest element of such.
For what it’s worth, I rather strenously feel that you should reference a
“Rulership-less” society and not “State-less.” Those further down the
ancap spectrum would probably recoil at the presence of terms like
“anti-hierarchical” or “anti-power” (which, by the way, ARE crucial to
anarchism) but without at least something more than the rejection of the
boring ol’ Westphalian Nation State, anarchists within the social movement
will think it preposterously disconnected. I would also throw in the term
“anti-authoritarian” at least once.
Lastly, if you’re speaking to the social movement, I think maybe a
reminder is in order that at least half of it doesn’t really associate
with the “socialism” term. Primitivists, Relationalists,
Insurrectionaries and the huge number of Post-Leftists will pretty much
ignore this as it is.
…Maybe a bulletin point more explicitly on the inherent stupidity and
misdirection built into the political spectrum and the need to shed off
old baggage and find new directions beyond such narrow confines?
Oh, and it’d go a long way if there was something regarding racism, sexism, ageism, and gendernormativity… (accepting that Libertarian culture has a long
way to go on these fonts and also rejecting the anarchist social
movement’s historical outright rejection and hostility to the value or
perspective of anyone not caught up in these fronts… ie the american
white working class).
Good work.
-William Gillis
[...] By way of Brad Spangler Shopping for Subsidies: How Wal-Mart Uses Taxpayer Money to Finance Its Never-Ending Growth [...]