Dear Dirty America

Reports the LA Times:

Retail giant Wal-Mart said Saturday that it plans to open a market in a multi-story apartment building on the edge of L.A.’s Chinatown neighborhood, setting the stage for a major struggle with the city’s labor unions and advocacy groups.

Wal-Mart spokesman Steven Restivo said his company plans to open a 33,000-square-foot grocery store at the northwest corner of Cesar Chavez and Grand avenues, inside the ground floor of a residential complex for seniors.

The store would be roughly one-fifth the size of a typical Wal-Mart store and the first of the company’s so-called Neighborhood Markets to open in Los Angeles County, he said.

 …

James Elmendorf, the group’s deputy director, accused the company of providing low-quality, low-paying jobs and said his organization has already begun researching the history of the building where Wal-Mart plans to open the grocery store.

I can’t think of a more rotten idea than placing Walmart’s grocery store in Chinatown. Selling their budget trash in an area rich with culture and individuality. There should be no place for Walmart in a capitalist society, such as the one America likes to tout itself as having.

You know, a society where families run businesses to make livings. Businesses grow, hire other employees, pay them living wages (as opposed to those that don’t even reach the poverty level), and continue to produce quality products.

Not a society that supports corporations to eat up real estate and small businesses, and eventually swallow whole towns across the U.S. all in order to grow and satisfy the corporate America machine. A machine that forces manufacturers to hemorrhage U.S. jobs in exchange for slave labor overseas, in order to produce goods cheap enough to sell in big box stores like Walmart and Target.

If a wily Chinese dragon, blowing fire and roaring murder, manifests on Cesar Chavez and Grand avenues, and then devours the tidy Walmart market on the day it opens in Chinatown, we’ll have reason to believe in salvation and Good.

See, Walmart Executive Instructional Manual Calls Workers ‘Speaking Tools’