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December 02, 2003

Hope in the heartland? (Another Wal-Mart tale)

The Village Voice has news on possible rifts in the heart of Dubya country:

Don offers an example: "What happened to the tax rebates? Everyone went to Wal-Mart and got a DVD that was made in China, which created no jobs. Thus: a jobless recovery."

He has mentioned a bogeyman. And now the conversation turns headlong.

Eric: "Wal-Mart and the rest, they love the way the trade situation is right now. They're forcing their suppliers to basically shut down and move overseas to produce."

Judy—whose company will probably have to shut down next year—moves the critique to the terrain of family values: "The moms that used to have a factory job with me and who go home at the end of eight hours and 10 hours and take care of their children and have decent day care, now they're working two jobs at Wal-Mart with no health benefits."

Eric takes this all home to politics: "At some point the Republican Party has to realize that, yeah, they need the money today to get elected"—the big, multinational, corporate money—"but it's not the General Electrics or all these large corporations that are putting them in office. It's the people who work for these corporations."

Perhaps one of the reasons these successful people are entertaining the thought of supporting Democrats is that they feel like they're abandoning a sinking ship—a party that stakes its future on unsustainability, on the "efficiency" of shutting down every factory in sight because it makes for a better-looking quarterly balance sheet.

Don notes that an employee at his plant, non-union, starts at $16 an hour and makes as much as $100,000 a year: "sends his kids to private school, he drives a nice car—does that sound like a Democrat to you? . . . Our people, in the past, didn't want government interfering with their life. . . . What happens to these people is that they find out they can't become a Wal-Mart associate . . . at $7.50 an hour without completely undermining their lives."

Here's a riddle: What do shuttered factories manufacture? Democrats. Or at least they might, if the national Democratic Party had the balls to do what needs to be done.


Follow the link and read the whole article. It's very illuminating.

Posted by Norwood at December 2, 2003 04:18 PM
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