the daily snivel

  I Will Never Spend a Penny at Wal-Mart

As much as any person can be, I try to be an "ethical shopper." My coffee is fair trade, whether I'm brewing it at home or when I'm out and about, say at the school coffee shop. I go to the local/independent book and music stores. I try to support as few oppressive regimes as possible when buying sneakers. Heck, If I'm ever in the financial and romantic position to buy someone a diamond, I'll make sure it's not the bloody kind. Now, nobody is perfect, and you can't expect that at all times your buying decisions will make the world a happy fun super swell place to live, but there's a lot to be said for spending your dollars judiciously enough that retailers who stock sensible products get the hint that there's actually profit to be had in taking the high road. In the end, however, I also try not to come off as sanctimonious or morally superior. I'd rather just enjoy my extremely high quality, supremely tasty coffee and not attempt to convert or lecture to people who aren't going to be swayed by any amount of rhetoric, dimples, or beatings. Lead by example, I always say.

Discussing politics at the office one afternoon in that luke-warm, non-inflammatory way that co-workers do, I was at least able to express the opinion that Wal-Mart just isn't for me, even if I can't expect everyone else in North America to stop shopping there, or hold people to my personal standards. After all, I have the privilege of being able to choose to shop elsewhere. I live downtown in a large city with lots of easy access to transportation, I have a reasonable amount of disposable income and I don't have any dependents. I'm not forced to shop at one store as many people are, either because their small town only has the Wal-Mart now, or because they don't have access to good transportation, or are simply shopping on a meagre, downsized budget (or some combination of all of those things).

But it remains that I refuse to shop there, and I think a lot of us could easily manage to buy our crap somewhere else given just a little pause for thought. There's a Wal-Mart moving into my hometown of Smiths Falls, now, and they've already received 3,000 job applications (in a city of 9,000). Times are tough for the place I grew up. Jobs are disappearing. So some might see the store's arrival as something of a blessing, as not only will Wal-Mart provide a lot of jobs, but it will provide cheap goods in vast quantities. Yet I'm not happy about this. Because Wal-Mart cuts corners so expertly, they can undercut almost any competitor in prices and selection. This eventually drives other, locally owned shops, right out of business. Wal-Mart also manages to save a great deal of money by offering employees poor wages and benefits. The management is vehemently anti-union.

Indeed, because Wal-Mart imports goods so extensively from countries like China, where goods are mass-produced for a fraction of the cost demanded by North American workers, we are sending our own jobs overseas by buying there. Domestic companies can no longer compete. Wal-Mart imported 12 billion dollars worth of goods from China alone last year.

I came across a great article detailing the economics of the Wal-Mart empire, and how this affects both its suppliers and the working joe. You can read it here, and I highly recommend doing so:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

I also have the article saved on this website as a PDF file in case it ever goes offline.  

  Well, that's it for 2003.

It's been a fairly swell year for me, as these things are reckoned. With the completion of my courses in tax law, evidence law, and feminist law (agonizingly, however, my grades for all three are still pending), I'm now officially halfway finished my law degree (three terms down, and just three to go). I'm extremely well-rested after the holiday break, and warm in my happy, cluttered, candle-lit room. In terms of lifestyle, I am reasonably well off between my job, student loans, and receiving a modest student line of credit from the bank, so I can afford to eat and buy textbooks, as well as having paid back some of the money I owe my friends and buy my family some swell Christmas presents. Throughout 2003, I was surrounded by wonderful friends and a loving family, and I've also matured and grown as a person. I've learned to put the happiness of friends ahead of my own insecurities, crushes, desires, and baggage. I can leave heartache in the past and live more fully in the present. I was also privileged to read excellent books like Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? and treated to the cinematic goodness of The Return of the King.

But 2003 is memorable for reasons that have nothing to do with my new cat or
that wonderful, funny, dancing-filled and ultimately ill-fated first date that culminated in the girl of my dreams leaning back, limbo style, to avoid my lips as I leaned forward to kiss her. Instead, the world (or, rather, a very small and unilateral part of it) went to war against terror by invading one of the countries least connected to it. I was never in favour of the unilateral invasion of Iraq. I don't think world stability can be achieved when one nation, acting without justification and against the counsel of a largely outraged coalition of unwilling nations, can declare war on another country for political ends. Worse, what justification the United States was willing to offer the public and the United Nations Security Council have not been validated by any measure. Most reasonable people agreed the evidence supporting the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was dodgy even before the invasion. Now, no one refers to Iraq's WMDs except in derision.

The tunnel vision of the political machine in the US is highlighted by the fact that you probably never heard about the fact that honest-to-goodness weapons of mass destruction were found in 2003.

You heard me right. A terrorist plot involving the use of weapons of mass destruction against the US was foiled in 2003. Terrorists had assembled and stored a sodium-cyanide explosive capable of killing thousands of people, along with half a million rounds of amunition and more than a hundred other conventional explosives. Thanks to the redoubled efforts of the formerly humbled FBI, a deadly terrorist attack on US soil with real WMDs never came to be. But stop for a minute to ask yourself who could have been behind this evil terrorist plot -- Al-Qaida? Saddam Hussein? North Korea? In fact, it was the work of home-grown, white supremacist Americans working out of Texas.

I wonder: Did you read this news story on the front page of USA Today or see it on CNN? Did you hear about it at all? After months of colour-coded terror alerts, and commentators such as Ann Coulter pronouncing that the liberal left were one of the single greatest threats to American security (in fact, she dedicated an entire book to calling liberals "treasonous"), and fictitiously tenuous insinuations that Iraq had something, anything, to do with the attacks on September 11, 2001, you would think that the repercussions of a real live terrorist plot on US soil would fuel a media wildfire.
I believe the Daily Show actually covered this story, but as glad as I was to have seen it reported by someone at the time, isn't it sad that the only major media reporting came from a fake news show that airs in the US on Comedy Central?

The sordid details can be read about here:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1229/p02s01-usju.html

Here is an excerpt:

Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.

"Without question, it ranks at the very top of all domestic terrorist arrests in the past 20 years in terms of the lethality of the arsenal," says Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right."

....

Experts say the case highlights the increased cooperation and quicker response by US agencies since Sept. 11. But others say it points up just how political the terror war is. "There is no value for the Bush administration to highlighting domestic terrorism right now," says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "But there are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists, especially when trying to whip up support for war."

Mr. Levitas goes even further: "The government has a severe case of tunnel vision when it comes to domestic terrorism. I have no doubt whatsoever that had Krar and his compatriots been Arab-Americans or linked to some violent Islamic fundamentalist group, we would have heard from John Ashcroft himself."

....

Experts say the case is important not only because of what it says about increased government cooperation, but also because it shows how serious a threat the country faces from within. "The lesson in the Krar case is that we have to always be concerned about domestic terrorism. It would be a terrible mistake to believe that terrorism always comes from outside," says Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

The fact is, the number of domestic terrorist acts in the past five years far outweighs the number of international acts, says Mark Pitcavage of the fact-finding department at the Anti-Defamation League. "We do have home-grown hate in the United States, people who are just as ill-disposed to the American government as any international terrorist group," he says.

....

Because I'm not a skilled, dedicated, and s-m-r-t political weblogger like the devastatingly astute Atrios or the sexily brilliant Cruinne, I'm also including a link to a critical examination of the matter by Orcinus:

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003_12_28_dneiwert_archive.html#107257032555368697

So, happy 2004. May it be filled with far more peace and prosperity around the world than 2003 saw. In particular, may the citizens of the United States of the America, a good and well-meaninging people all in all, boot that no-account George W. Bush out of office and restore some sanity, integrity, compassion, honesty, and rational thought to the White House.

On a personal note, I hope that everyone reading this is happy, warm, well-fed and safe, and may your 2004 be filled with smooches, cake, great books, good beer, and sexy thoughts of me.