Instead of any real problem.
Kevin Drum rationalizes being anti-WalMart
Sebastian Mallaby has a column in the Washington Post today that’s so relentlessly misguided that I just don’t have the energy to take it on. But I do want to say one thing about it, because it fits into the “irate moderate” theme that I was talking about a few days ago.
The column is about Wal-Mart, and Mallaby is complaining that although moderate Dems got out of the corporation-bashing business in the late 80s, they’ve since lost the religion. Every single moderate Dem — even Joe Lieberman! — is now bashing Wal-Mart. “How can supposedly centrist Democrats defend this betrayal of their principles?” he asks sadly.
Well, here’s the thing. When every single moderate Dem starts attacking Wal-Mart, maybe nobody’s betraying any principles at all. Instead, maybe they’ve figured out something that Mallaby hasn’t: it’s not the 80s anymore and things have changed. And one of the things that’s changed is that Wal-Mart has gotten a lot bigger, unions have continued shrinking, working class wages have stagnated, and corporate power has grown tremendously. It’s perfectly rational for even moderate, pro-business Dems to look at the record of the past couple of decades and conclude that things have gotten pretty far out of whack and that Wal-Mart is a good symbol of this imbalance.
Do guys like Drum realize that when everyone gets more money, seeing as how there isn’t a set amount of money in the world, that money slowly becomes worth less. One of the nice things about this surge in the economy, thank you Mr. Greenspan, is that inflation was kept in check and stayed low, with wages keeping pace.
Yes, gas prices have gone up, causing a slight raise in the price of goods because they need to be transported from the factory/field to the market, but the uptick in prices wasn’t caused by a surge in inflation, like in the 70’s.
All the Dems are doing is attacking a successful corporation because, to their socialist constituents, it represents all that is wrong with America: Eevviill Corporations. Never mind that a large number of the Dems, if not a majority, profit from their ownership of WalMart stock.
Drum postscripts to say that he himself doesn’t consider WalMart or the business community as “Evil” per se, but because WalMart only helps the lower and middle classes on the retail end (ie: low cost of goods) and not on the inside (ie: union style wages), they could become “Evil” at any possible moment.
This is the same bullshit argument the left uses against the oil companies when the whine, bitch and moan meme about ‘record profits’ comes out for the umpteenth time.
Never mind that the numbers they are using are profits from worldwide sales (they never, ever mention that part), and never mind that money the oil companies make selling petroleum products to Americans in miniscule to what they make selling them to other nations (another point mysteriously forgotten when the meme goes boom). The left sell the big lie because the two smaller lies are too difficult to get out in one sentence for their minions to continuously regurgitate.
They want to get rid of the tax incentives given to energy companies, never remembering that because all costs are passed onto the consumer, corporations don’t pay a single cent in taxes.
These facts are so simple, yet studies have shown that impact therapy won’t get them through the numb bonestructures surrounding liberals and ‘progressives’ brains.
Fine rant, AK, but it is tangential to the problem: Of course, the anti Wal-Mart crowd is composed almost entirely of Democrats on an anti-corporate bash (which I have to chuckle at because the “new” Democrats are pro-corporation as long as those corps are part of the “global” economy).
The huge danger here is that a valuable American institution is about to be lost because of it. That institution is our LEGALLY politically-neutral municipal corporations. Every city charter, in these parts at least, has a rule excluding party affilliation from all city (or County) business. No party may sponsor regulation with a party label on it.
In city after city, the Wal-Mart bashers have gotten their way on things like permits for siting and remodeling Wal-Mart stores. Of course, these city-planners are liberal, that goes without saying. Never before, though, have they taken a page directly out of the (D)onk playbook and enacted regulation based upon it, and this wrong is damn near universal.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Wal-Mart’s fine legal staff doesn’t due the pants off each and every one of these municipal corporations for violating their charters, or demand recalls of their councillors.