Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Bomb Your Local Walmart

There is no chance of winning the fight against the corporate machine by playing by the rules because the game itself is designed to assert the interests of corporations over those of human beings. 

Suppose, for example, that you wanted to remove an existing Walmart from your local neighborhood.  Walmarts are extremely difficult pests to exterminate once they have become established.  Because they are so effective at displacing their competition, they quickly become the only neighborhood source of many “essential” consumer products.  They also (marginally) employ a number of local people, which feeds the illusion that they are good for the local economy—despite the fact that the lion’s share of their take is siphoned away from the local economy and exported out of state, and the fact that their displaced competition represented more and better-paying local jobs.  Needless to say, you are not going to remove Walmart by circulating petitions and attending city counsel meetings.

Walmart is clearly not in your best interest—both as an individual human and as a public citizen.  But Walmart is a corporation, and is thus protected as a rightful being by the entire weight of the US legal system and the entire might of US law enforcement, and so unless you are a billionaire you have very little power that you can wield—if you play by the rules.

We need another term.  It’s not terrorism if the target of your violence is incapable of experiencing the human emotion of fear.  It’s not terrorism if you are trying to eliminate something that is itself a source of planet-wide terror.  Emancipationism?  Freedomism? 

Re-humanizationism?

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