The Perfect Crime

You may have seen this meme floating

around lately. The story behind it made the rounds on ThinkProgress, The Daily Banter, Salon.com, among other places. And that story is well, pretty much explained by the meme. Deep down, we all understand that there is nothing we can do to walmart. This is a symptom of the perfect crime perpetrated on Americans by some of the most sophisticated criminals in history.

Recently, the "left" gave it their best shot. With boycotts, protests, strikes, legal actions, and more we dug deep to try and do something to this giant criminal enterprise. And all for nothing. It is hard to say how this idea, the food drive for slave laborers, originated. I can only imagine some combination of management types at this one store had a pang of conscience and this show of compassion was the result. Maybe they really meant well, who knows for sure.

The American business corporation, our singular gift to the extinction of all life on Earth, is a completely closed system. The outside world has almost no real influence on it. A corporation is entirely hierarchical, intensely bureaucratic, and legally mandated to make as much money as possible. It is one of many ways of organizing economic activity, there is nothing written in stone about a corporation in this conception. Every time a story like this comes up to give evidence of how a corporate giant like walmart is simply sucking the very life out of so many lives, I am reminded of a quotation I came across in Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center. It was from a 17th Century theologian, roughly that "an evil which would weigh heavily on a single conscience is quite bearable when pressed lightly upon many souls." Theoretically, all the evil and harm walmart as a legal entity does to the communities where it operates rests upon the conscience of one individual, the CEO, but he is so heavily insulated from the mortal world as all members of the golden elite are that what would probably kill us from guilt rests softly if at all here.

 

The food drive for its associates is part of the one two punch in this most perfect of perfect crimes. Do something utterly evil, paying poverty wages, then with the most sincere doublethinky smile, offer a helping hand and congratulate yourself to the world for your benevolence. Walmart began it's meteoric rise in the 1970s and 1980s when the provincial hinterland of America was being devastated by deindustrialization, deregulation, and deunionization which led to social disintegration and atomization of the communities. Like an opportunistic disease, walmart swept in with promises of jobs and low-priced goods all wrapped up in a safe, white, sterile one-stop shopping experience. People abandoned the outlets they formerly patronized because, let's face it, the mom and pop stores that inspire so much weepy-woo on the part of liberals today were often seedy or at least unpleasant to shop in. So factories closed, throwing many out of work and forcing most to seek bargains, which dried up downtowns all over rural America to the benefit of walmart.

 

What walmart really represents is the triumph of retail in America, the transition from an economy that produces things to one that sells things. The "service" economy existing alongside the high tech economy, bringing segregation and a wall between city and country. Putting the retail store in the driver's seat was a tipping point in American economic relations. Walmart gets to dictate, because of its size, what is produced and for how much to the outside, and what is done and how much they pay on the inside. This reordering of power is the culmination of that perfect crime. And why all the finger-wagging, pouting, and direct action is meaningless. Walmart won the war before America even knew what hit it, and the rest of our diminished lives will reflect that victory. There is no choice for a great deal of infected areas, work for them, shop there, or die of starvation. There is no chance of meaningful change within the company, and no chance of really influencing walmart from the outside. So this is what we get for not recognizing the cancer, food drives, government assistance to keep the slave laborers alive, no hope.