Its Just Business

Many of you have seen my Wal-Mart blogs. I thought I would say something about how I feel about them. I grew up in Joplin, MO which was one of the first cities that Wal-Mart expanded to. Where I grew up we used to have a store called Missouri Mills that had all the fabric and sewing supplies you could think of. Wal-Mart came in, and it went out of business.

Wal-Mart recently made a decision at the corporate level that it can no longer affored to keep the fabric department in their stores so they are eliminating them. Now they can't make money off of it and so they are letting it go. Its sad and really gives me a poor opinion of the store. Here they are making billions of dollars a day and this is just one thing they could do for their customers. Hopefully the craft stores can step in, if there are any left after Wal-Mart stole their business.

When we were little, Sam Walton would come up in his beat up ol 73 Ford pick-up to inspect the stores on occasion. I think he would be dissapointed in what his empire has become and what it has done to American jobs. Then again, maybe not. It seems there is an attitude in America today. I call it "Its just business." It doesn't matter what happens to the little guy. It doesn't matter what affect the activities of a business do to the rest of the economy. It doesn't matter how many downtown areas have been laid to waste. It doesn't matter how many small busineses have been put out of business. It doesn't matter how many factories go overseas. It doesn't matter how many people are put out of work. "Its just business."

Its-just-business-men have no care for the little people. For them, the little people deserve what they get because they are lazy or unmotivated. They cost too much because the profit motive has been made sacrocanct. Paying decent wages or providing health insurance is not profitable so it has to be eliminated. Everything is motivated to increasing profit margin and if you aren't making money for the company you are not welcome. Your contribution matters little.

Senator Obama has recently stated that there is a group of people who have become frustrated. Here is what he said:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

He is right. This attitude has been prevelant since the 1970's when we began to find out there was an outside world in American and we started giving up ourselves and stopped depending on ourselves. We all decided that number one is what mattered and it didn't matter what happened to anyone else. We all decided that we are going to get our little piece of the pie and it doesn't matter how many people we step on to do it.

It has resulted in our world of today. We have a President that has run roughshod over our rights while he fights a war with our best and brightest, draining our army and making it unable to deal with a real crisis. (This concerns me greately because a weak army makes us more likely to use nuclear weapons because we are unable to deal with another crisis, but that, as they say, is the subject of another blog). We have businessmen that live in obscene luxury with salaries that exceed any just compensation. Even when they run a business into the ground, they seem to get compensated above and beyond what any normal person should. I think if I didn't do a job very well, the CEO in question wouldn't reward me.

Now there are food riots in the smaller countries. In Hati, they are eating a new delcacy called "dirt cookies" made of dirt and lard mixed together with a binder. No one can afford food on two dollars a day. Its starting. The poorest are being hit first. It will be a while before it gets here, but I would start planning. Its comming. I hope I am wrong, but the signs are all there. Ours is the last generation that will enjoy the luxury of having a coice in their lives. Our is the last generation of the private automobile. The powers that be have decided that we are to be drones in their retail stores.