Wal Mart FASCISM

Today I went shopping at Wal Mart.

As my father pointed out, the building is unsafe. There's no rear exit, and it's a huge building. What would happen in a fire?

I believe that my father also remarked that this was probably illegal....

(Perhaps, might it be that someone was paid a bribe to ignore it? Maybe, I do not know.....)

I don't like Wal Mart. The air is bad. The lighting is bad. And we know that Wal Mart is ruthless in the way it treats people (no unions) and ruthless in the way business partners are treated.

In some cases Wal Mart does not even pay taxes. I have read that in some places in the USA, the taxes that customers pay (the local sales tax) when they make a purchase at Wal Mart does not even go to the local government...

And I don't like buying clothes made in El Salvador or Nicaragua ... I am sure that the people who grew the cotton and made the shirts were not well treated.

But, in the place where I currently live, there are not many places to go shopping. -Unless you are willing to drive 20 or 25 miles... which, again, is ecological madness....

As the fotos on this blog show, greedy companies deserted this neighborhood because higher profits were to be made elsewhere. That's the way American capitalism works. It's not enough to make a profit--you must make more and more profit...

Plainly, this gives the lie to the commonsense idea that businesses have a kind of social function--supplying people what they need. Businesses in America are part of a system designed to support a wealth gap, to increase the gap between rich and poor, and they, in effect, are a means of sending more and more tribute to a ruling class...very feudal that....

Actually, in Wal Mart, I needed to buy contacts (contacct lenses), and that's when the FASCISM I refer to above occurred. As a captive audience, I was compelled to endure pointless questions before I could purchase what I really wanted.

And since the questions were set up on a computer----well that's sort of totalitarian, isn't it?
--dictated from on high...

I mean, I had to endure five or six computer screens asking me stupid questions like,

would you like twenty boxes of contacts
or five boxes
or a hundred boxes

Shit if I buy a thousand boxes, I'd get a good discount! And I would probably be dead
before I could use them all....

No, I don't like Wal Mart. I don't like El Paso. and I don't think the USA is especially a good place to live.... and every sign is that it's getting worse... \

PS
Then there's the fascism/totalitarianism/greedy attempt to control at Walgreens: as the nice sales lady said, "Our computer is telling us you filled this prescription at another pharmacy...."
What the fuck? When did I sign a contract with Walgreen's promising to give all my money to them? What are we? Slaves to Walgreens. You have to have a life time promise to always buy only from them?????? How disgusting, offensive...****!!!!==censored....none of your f...ing business. How dare they?

---another case where computers and technology make us all (me, when I shop, and the person helping me) less free....

service with a smile? ha ha ha "service' is another word whereby we are enslaved.....

I want equal relationships of solidarity with other citizens, not with some bowing and scraping person behind a counter who smiles falsely.....A culture of service? Make me puke. I really prefer the surly Slovak attitude towards customers---at least that's honest!

Recommended Reading

Erik Olin Wright and Joel Rogers, American Society: How It Really Works, WW Norton, New York and London, 2011; Part 1: Capitalism.

Recommended Viewing

http://www.democracynow.org
Special Program: The 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire,
Friday, 25 March, 2011