When we look back on The Steroids Era in baseball, we’re going to see a bunch of players who broke the rules and grew to an unnatural behemoth size, and how the people who were supposed to provide oversight either turned a blind eye or even encouraged it.
Well, if you think about it, wasn’t our economy in sort of a similar Steroids Era? Real estate prices were pushed to unsustainable levels, Wall Street raked in unhealthy and astronomical profits, and our SUV’s looked like they had a case of elephantitis.
The poster child for the Excess Economy was Wal-Mart, the king of suburbia that built Big Box Supercenters anywhere it could find cheap land, introduced oversize shopping carts for its Canyero-driving customers, bought cheap goods in bulk from China, and was the darling of Wall Street.
Like in MLB, the oversight into Wal-Mart’s unprecedented behavior didn’t exist. Bush was Bud Selig. So while Wal-Mart may have broken records, it left an ugly legacy on the American economy by destroying small towns, short-changing workers, and selling out American vendors in favor of China.
I’ve had enough with The Steroids Era, and so that’s why I’m doing some work with Wake Up Wal-Mart this summer. Like in baseball, it’s time to reform the system and restore American tradition in our economy. Join us if you’re sick and tired another so-called “record breaker” juicing the system.
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Was is Stacey Mitchell who wrote that we have gone from being a nation of people who identify with their work to a nation of people who identify with their role as consumers. As such, we have enabled the race to the bottom by voting with our credit cards for more stuff at cheaper prices, rather than less but better stuff at prices that provide a decent living to everyone in the supply chain (including ourselves, as workers.) We no longer demand that decent living for everyone because we no longer identify with the workers. That is because the workers who produce the goods are no longer our neighbors but unknown foreigners in regions of which we are largely ignorant. How convenient for Walmart and the rest of the mega-retailers that mainstream American media long ago abandoned any real effort to inform us about the world around us.