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Wal-Mart relentlessly promotes the idea that organized labor generates almost all the negative publicity and opposition to the corporation, but federal hearings held in Kansas City this week demonstrated that a wide range of groups from across the political spectrum share concerns about the corporation’s threats to communities and democracy.

Outcry against Wal-Mart’s bid to enter the banking business led to the first-ever public hearings held by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for a banking application. Wal-Mart is asking the FDIC to let it follow a handful of other companies, including several automakers and the Target discount chain, in opening an industrial loan company (ILC). These ILCs—which allow the companies to process their own credit and debit card transactions—are exploiting a legal loophole in laws that otherwise limit commerce and banking corporations to operating in one realm or the other.

Little controversy accompanied FDIC approval for those other companies.

It’s different this time.

Average citizens weigh in on pending bank applications as often as Wal-Mart donates to charity without touting its generosity. Yet the agency has been flooded with thousands of letters (overwhelmingly negative) on the company’s bid to launch an ILC, and more than 90 percent speakers at the Kansas City hearings opposed granting Wal-Mart the permit. Testimony at an FDIC hearing held earlier this month in Washington D.C. (where I spoke on behalf of the American Independent Business Alliance) also was stacked against Wal-Mart’s application.

Tellingly, even Wal-Mart’s supporters at the Washington hearings (many of whom have received hefty amounts of cash from the corporation) assumed the world’s largest retailer will not stop at serving its internal operations, as its spokesperson promised, but rapidly will evolve into Wal-Bank.

Among the broad lineup of organizations that testified to the FDIC were many that never have uttered a word against Wal-Mart’s policies and practices. Even many staunch supporters of unfettered free markets realize Wal-Mart’s size alone demands special treatment and that existing laws are not up to the challenge presented by the company’s power. Indeed, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan—the current and past chairs of the Federal Reserve—have called for Congress to “review” the ILC loophole, and several states already are weighing bills to ban out-of-state ILCs in response to the Wal-Mart threat.

Naturally, Wal-Mart executives complain that it’s unfair for the Target Corporation to own a bank while they cannot, and they understandably are frustrated that Target largely escapes scrutiny for operating a business that emulates Wal-Mart in almost every manner. But just as many communities rightfully control big box stores more stringently than small businesses, Wal-Mart’s power demands we control it more stringently.

After eight years of helping communities and independent businesses organize against the threat of corporate chains, I don’t doubt the ability of well-run independent businesses to compete successfully against Wal-Mart or any other chain in a genuine market economy. But “free markets” in the U.S. exist only in economics textbooks. I’ve seen Wal-Mart’s economic clout translate into political dominance in towns throughout the country, undermining both market competition and democracy.

In this system of corporate/state capitalism, Wal-Mart has been extracting subsidies for hundreds of its facilities, including 90 percent of its distribution centers. Wal-Mart and other giant companies wield their uncontrolled size and power to distort free markets through these subsidies and by violating with near-impunity many laws theoretically protecting communities, workers and healthy living conditions.

In too many cases, America’s independent businesses are being out-lobbied, not out-competed, by Wal-Mart, and many other corporate chains.

Those who trust Wal-Mart will limit itself to a narrow range of banking activity misunderstand the nature of publicly-traded corporations, which by design are driven to grow perpetually. For a publicly-held company, there is no such thing as “big enough.”

Just as Wal-Mart constantly expands into new spheres of retail and services, so too it will seek to expand its reach in financial services. Given the current ease with which giant corporations convert monetary power into political power, why should we doubt it will succeed? Wal-Mart will not be content to continue leasing space to banks in its “supercenters” in exchange for a slice of the action when it can take the whole pie.

Wal-Mart naturally would use its bank to maximize shareholder profit, rather than serving the interests of communities in which it operates. And while many other banks are publicly-held companies, Wal-Mart’s size and scope again creates potential for harm that no other company is capable of inflicting.

If Wal-Mart is allowed to expand into finance, the company undoubtedly will use that power to eliminate ever more independent businesses, leaving many smaller communities frighteningly dependent on a single corporation. As one North Dakota banker previously asked the FDIC, will Wal-Bank lend you money to open or expand a competing hardware store, even if you have a sound business and marketing plan? Would you want to open your business’ books to Wal-Bank?

Size matters, and Wal-Mart’s necessitates clear and impermeable limits. The corporation’s bid to leap into the realm of banking should be stopped cold -- and that’s just a beginning.

Jeff Milchen is the co-founder of the American Independent Business Alliance, a non-profit organization helping communities form local Independent Business Alliances to sustain strong local economies based on independent, locally-owned businesses and prevent their displacement by corporate chains. AMIBA also counters entities like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spins the agenda of transnational corporations as benefiting small businesses.

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I share pieces that I read with this forum, it's part of my schtick here. If you don't like it, don't click on threads started by me.

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Personal choice, remember that?

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By the way, speak for you, not for "we."

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PeeWee,

You have some odd expectations since this is a board made available by a progressive talk radio host.

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... who very rarely share their own thoughsts and mostly hide behind the posts of professional writers

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Just wondering if you have any thoughts of your own?

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Clearly the Peester is mad about something else. If I were interested in this pecker contest he's trying to start I would compile a list of statements he's made which reveal the intellect of a five year old and the maturity of a new born.

However, I'll take the high road and transcend it as I know my contributions here are far more constructive than his.

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Keep sharing my friend. Your posts reveal more than you'll ever know.

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If we wanted to read this commondreams propaganda

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We Americans came not from a revolution but from an evolution.

That is in large part why our so-called revolution produced success while most throughout history did not. We came as much from the Magna Carta as from our own doings, as much from British common law and parliamentary development as from the Declaration of Independence and Continental Congress.

Unlike the true revolution on the other side of the Atlantic that led to Napoleon's dictatorship and strife and conflict all across Europe, our evolution founded the greatest country the world has ever seen. That was true in every element of power and in the uniqueness that makes us great, our constant striving for "a more perfect union" and, as we do so, our open arms for the other peoples of the world "yearning to be free."

As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.

Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration.

Moreover, fiscal profligacy of an order never seen before has brought America trade deficits that boggle the mind and a federal deficit that, when stripped of the gimmickry used to make it appear more tolerable, will leave every child and grandchild in this nation a debt that will weigh upon their generations like a ball and chain around every neck. Imagine owing $150,000 from the cradle. That is radical irresponsibility.

This administration has expanded government - creation of the Homeland Security Department alone puts it in the record books - and government intrusiveness. It has brought a new level of sleaze and corruption to Washington (difficult to do, to be sure). And it has done the impossible in war-waging: put in motion a conflict in Iraq that in terms of colossal incompetence, civilian and military, and unbridled arrogance portends to top the Vietnam era, a truly radical feat.

In Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We Fight, Richard Perle, head theoretician for the neo-Jacobins who masquerade under the title "neoconservatives," claims that America was changed forever by 9/11. He tells us that those attacks are responsible for all this radicalism. The Jacobins were members of a radical political club during the French Revolution that instituted brutal repression in what became known as the "reign of terror."

Mr. Perle says that we may think we can go back, but we cannot. "We are not the same people we were before," he says emphatically, as if he were our king. If he's correct, then our country is as spent as was Rome, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain and a host of other great powers before each toppled from the mountain.

Mr. Perle is not correct.

First, it was Mr. Perle and people such as he who put us where we are today, not the terrorists of 9/11. A somnolent Congress assisted - a Congress that, as Democratic Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia said as the Senate failed to debate in the run-up to the Iraq war, was "ominously, ominously, dreadfully silent."

Second, people such as Mr. Perle do not represent the bulk of Americans, who are anything but radical. Instead, they represent the Robespierres and Napoleons of this world, the neo-Jacobins of today. Robespierre was a leader of the reign of terror.

We can turn back; moreover, we must if the world is to continue on a trajectory of more freedom and more prosperity for increasing numbers of people. Without American leadership - the good America - the world cannot progress.

If we are in some way the indispensable nation that a few Americans have said we are, then that is why. And it is no arrogance of power to say it; rather, it is to admit abiding reverence for the way the world works.

Such awesome responsibility generates not the swaggering ineptitude of which we have witnessed so much of late, but the abject humility that should flood us when we confront such unprecedented responsibility. I imagine the feeling to be something akin to what Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower felt moments before the invasion of Normandy began June 6, 1944.

Congress can awaken and discover that the Constitution is correct, that Congress is in fact a separate and equal branch of government. The American people will find a way to deal with the remainder of the radicals, whether at the ballot box, in the courts or in the Senate.

We can halt the precipitate slide in our standing around the world, convince the majority of the Islamic world that we can and must co-exist - and eventually prosper together - and at the same time confront, confound and defeat the small element in Islam's midst that lives to murder innocents, Christian, Jew and Muslim alike.

All we need do, in reality, is return to our roots. Never in our almost 800-year history since the Magna Carta have we been radicals.

Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a visiting professor of government at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005.
Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun

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President George W. Bush had shown disdain and indifference for the US constitution by adopting an “astonishingly broad” view of presidential powers, a leading libertarian think-tank said on Monday.

The critique from the Cato Institute reflects growing criticism by conservatives about administration policy in areas such as the “war on terror” and undermining congressional power.

“The pattern that emerges is one of a ceaseless push for power, unchecked by either the courts or Congress, one in short of disdain for constitutional limits,” the report by legal scholars Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch concludes.

That view was echoed last week by former congressman Bob Barr, a Republican, who called on Congress to exercise “leadership by putting the constitution above party politics and insisting on the facts” in the debate over illegal domestic wiretapping of terrorist suspects.

On Thursday Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the judiciary committee, noted: “Institutionally, the presidency is walking all over Congress.”

Mr Healy and Mr Lynch argue that Mr Bush has also failed to protect the right to political free speech by approving a bill that eliminated “soft money” contributions to political parties. He had also cracked down on dissenters, with non-violent protesters being harassed by secret service agents whenever Mr Bush appears in public, it said.

The more serious charges concern Mr Bush’s actions in the “war on terror”. Citing a 1977 interview with President Richard Nixon, who said, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal”, the report argues that the administration’s public and private arguments for untrammelled executive power “comes perilously close to that view”.

The authors cite spying by the National Security Agency and the “torture memos”, produced by the Department of Justice to defend the authority of the president over interrogation techniques. “The constitution’s text will not support anything like the doctrine of presidential absolutism the administration flirts with in the torture memos.”

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How Powerful is the Small Business Community?

How powerful is the small business community? Just to give you an idea of impact the small business has, take a look at some of these facts.

Small Businesses in the U.S.:

- Represent 99.7 percent of all employers.
- Employ half of all private sector employees.
- Pay 45 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
- Generate 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually.
- Create more than 50 percent of non-farm private gross domestic product (GDP).
- Supplied 23 percent of the total value of federal prime contracts in FY 2004.
- Produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms. These patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.
- Are employers of 41 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer workers).
- Are 53 percent home-based and 3 percent franchises.
- Made up 97 percent of all identified exporters and produced 26 percent of the known export value in FY 2002.