What is it with the left and Wal*Mart? Hat to Tip to Carpe Diem for pointing us to this editorial in the Chicago Tribune:Wal-Mart wants to provide jobs to Chicago.
Ald. Howard Brookins wants Wal-Mart in his 21st Ward.
Yet the company and the alderman face huge resistance from the City Council to a proposal for a Wal-Mart Supercenter on the South Side, at 83rd Street and Stewart Avenue just west of the Dan Ryan.
What's there now? A vacant lot. A vacant lot where no one is working.
The article goes on to say that these jobs aren't going to be coming to Chicago because Wal-Mart doesn't provide Union jobs. 500 new jobs in the middles of a recession plus more jobs for the constructon and still no sale?
I'm sure ACORN will come to the rescue, organize the community and convince the city council to approve Wal-Mart's plans. Isn't that what community organizers do, help the community? NOT!
UPDATE #1
Dean found a 2006 George Will column on lefty hatred of Wal-Mart. I liberated the money quote below, to answer my own question.
Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce -- yes, announce -- that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.
This has a ring of familiarity to it. George Will had a piece 2 or 3 years ago about an attempt to open up a Wal-Mart in Chicago. It got shot down. Wal-Mart, instead, set up shop right outside city limits in the 'burbs and started interviewing for jobs. Thousands applied for about 500 jobs. Virtually all the applicants were Chicago residents.
ReplyDeleteThe whole anti-WalMart hysteria is strange.
ReplyDeleteDean, thanks for the link. I liberated the money quote from the George Will article and will update the entry.
ReplyDeleteI've always maintained that beyond the unionism thing, at the core of the hatred for Wal-Mart is a deep-seated disdain for the people that shop there and the consumer freedom that is wielded by them.
ReplyDeleteA libs idea of hell is being stuck inside a Wal-Mart during a Labor Day sale with the teeming masses.
"A libs idea of hell is being stuck inside a Wal-Mart during a Labor Day sale with the teeming masses."
ReplyDeleteGreat point. I think it also goes against the whole peasant open-air market motif they love so much.