… You’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dyin’ day…

Womb to tomb.

Cradle to grave.

Welcome to the United States of Corporate America.

There are whole chunks of a day that go by when I can forget that. Unless I get on the Internet, turn on the tube, pick up a magazine, or, you know, step outside.

Corporations don’t just want you to buy their products. They are after something far bigger: Consumers who are loyal for life. There are actually marketing firms working on creating brand loyalty in toddlers. That all-important 0-4 years consumer segment. As the late, great, Bill Hicks used to say, “If you’re in marketing, kill yourself.” He was on to something.

I bring this up as part of my occasional postings about the incipient Wal-Mart invasion of our neighborhood.

A New Wal-Mart at Northcross: A unique store for a unique community. At Wal-Mart, we work to provide convenience for your everyday needs and integrate into the communities in which we locate. We look forward to getting to know you and becoming part of North Central Austin.

I say “our neighborhood” because where they want to put this monstrosity is smack dab in the middle of town. Not on the feeder to the highway, not at the edge of town – nope, right in the middle of seven neighborhoods that will be directly impacted by said behemoth.

This is not your grandpop’s Wal-Mart. It’s 225,000 square feet of pure unadulterated cheap-ass stuff sold at cheap-ass prices. (Though not actually as cheap as their loss leaders would have you believe. Wal-Mart’s overall prices are less than 2% below Target’s prices.) And these goods are also made cheaply for slave wages in such lovely democratic societies as China and Singapore.

A new Wal-Mart at Northcross. Making your life easier.
As neighborhoods grow, so do the needs of their residents. That means updating the Northcross area to reflect the needs of a growing community.

Since we’re a bunch of hippie-pinko-commie-bastards here, we’re not entirely thrilled at the prospect of a 24-hour, mega-corp, mega-box, and we’ve been rattling some cages. And because Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in THE WORLD, they are, of course, shitting bricks about this.

How do I know this? They actually sent out pretty three-sided, fold-over slicks to all the surrounding neighborhoods. The italicized bits in this post are from that lovely missive.

Attached to this gorgeous piece of 4-color propagan . . . er, PR, was a detachable card to send back to Wal-Mart. Your options for expressing your opinion:

Yes, I agree. The new urban Wal-Mart Supercenter belongs in my community.

I would like the City of Austin to know that I support the new Wal-Mart Supercenter.

There were little check boxes next to the bottom two lines.

Given the dead-of-night deal that was crafted to allow this behemoth to fly under the radar of the City Council and the neighborhood associations, I can only imagine that all parties are sweating bullets. And, given some of the revelations in The Austin Chronicle’s latest edition, the plot thickens — with Wal-Mart threatening to sue individual council members if they don’t get their way.

I particularly love the bit about how our neighborhood is “growing.” This is a centrally-located collection of neighborhoods that were built from 1958-1980. The only way we’re “growing” is if they tear down all our single-family homes and replace them with high-rise apartments.

Wal-Mart has a stated plan of rolling out nine of these “urban” Wal-Marts over the next year. This was announced in a USA Today story a couple of months ago. Wal-Mart already has an “upscale” store in Plano. (Or, as we like to think of it, Dallas with a drug habit. Plano, not Wal-Mart.) Wal-Mart needs to expand in urban areas because there are no other places for them to open new Wal-Marts. Rural, small-town, and suburban America is blanketed in Wal-Marts. They’ve got nowhere to go but into the city.

If Wal-Mart meets a lot of opposition here, then they’re going to see more opposition in other “upscale urban” locations. They need some stores slapped up quick before anyone gets the wiser. That way they’ll have “success” stories to point to when they begin the next part of this plan – total global domination. (Okay, they already have that whole global domination thing pretty well in hand. But they don’t have a death ray – yet.)

And speaking of corporate charm, The Dude and I watched the documentary film THE CORPORATION this evening. This film traces the roots of corporations and how they grew from small collections of investors to being the dominant force in our culture.

The film affected me the same way televised appearances of The Chimp do. I found myself yelling things at the TV. Things like, “Fuck” And, “No shit.” And, “Oh my God, tell me when the bad stuff with dead animals is off.”

Though the film came out in 2003, I would say THE CORPORATION’s message is even more pertinent now. And more harrowing. There have been four more years of utter domination of this government by their corporate masters. If you didn’t get a chance to see it back when it was released, please make an effort to check out thecorporation.com.

And for my final fun fact of this post from the aforementioned film: In 1933, after Roosevelt’s first 100 days in office, business leaders in this country were frantic. The president was actually trying to help the poor by making the wealthy bear some of the burden that had been shifted off them during the previous decades.

Business leaders Irenee Du Pont, Grayson Murphy (Bethlehem Steel, Goodyear, JP Morgan Banks), Robert Clark (one of the top stockbrokers on Wall Street), and others contacted General Smedley Butler with a plot to force Roosevelt from office and replace him with an official in the pay of big business. They believed that Butler’s popularity with the troops would allow him to manipulate them into believing that they would be doing the right thing by driving a democratically elected president from office should Roosevelt prove to be difficult.

Butler was appalled by this plan and played along until he felt the time was right to go public. The coup collapsed, but with a Congressional whitewash, the perpetrators were never brought to justice.

The more things change . . .

Ahem.