Wal-Mart


Wal-Mart's Corporate Personhood

Louise,
Ayn Rand famously called her villains, "the people who never talk about what they are talking about."
At least the articles you presented were forthright about who they were. I checked their backtrail and thought they were very interesting.
However the article (first one) and what I read of the second seem to a bunch of stories written in the best English 101 tradition -- you know the section where the teacher shows you how to do slanted writing. That is the method where you don't actually say anything bad but you pick words that give that impression.
The parent source for the article on its Internet masthead proudly proclaims their liberal/progressive origins and viewpoint.
However they seem to be totally ignorant of the fact that the retail sector has a long history of having an individual retailer discover an improved retailing model. Then using that model his firm forces the older companies either adopt his model or go out of business.
Sears & Robuck, Woolworth, A&P, ect come to mind. I heard an accounting professor give an impromptu lecture one night detailing the many steps the retail trade had gone through over the years and the improvement in method each one represented.
Think about it, Louise, I'll bet you can remember large retail chains that went out of business because they didn't keep up. A new store came along with a new retailing model that suited your needs better, you lost interest in the old one, then one day you got reminded and realized the old guy was out of business.
The author's intent, insofar as he had an intent, seems to be a burning desire to stop the world so he can get off. That thought is tempting sometimes until you realize that is basically what brought the USSR down to oblivion. That is also Marx' mistake. He cursed the capitalist countries for their wasteful change not recognizing that he was witnessing the creative destruction that allowed for progress.
Even so I find a lot to feel sympathetic about toward the writer, you Louise, and all others of that persuasion. Creative destruction causes you to be forced into lifelong learning. You don't wake up in the same old world every morning. You have to modify your performance based on learning new and disturbing lessons. I truly feel for you. Learning is the hardest work there is. Forcing people to learn new ways is also the reason Fred Taylor was hated. That he had improved their lives immensely just wasn't enough to compensate for having to learn new ways.
But, I have no sympathy for the rigid mindset & living in a backward society that your desires would condemn us to.
The great art is still with us. We also have more time and money with which to enjoy it.
Ron

I see. "Rigid mindset" is very funny coming from you.

If the public factory schools are good enough for kids, then factory retail stores should be good enough for their graduates.

You are comical, Ron.

Louise,
Here is your "End of semester" quiz question. Distingush between freedom of choice in selecting a retail outlet in which to shop and deciding on compulsory public schooling. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Ron

Try considering all the shopping and employment choice Wal-Mart has eliminated.

Louise,
You ducked me the last time I asked you this question. Maybe you or someone would be pleased to respond now.
As a hypothetical -- There is an island where the natives living is made by the 20 males going daily to the ocean and fishing.
One day someone invents a way so that one man alone can catch enough fish for all to eat. The other 18 men are not needed.
There is no possibility of consuming or trading the excess fish.
Please analyze the economics of the result and include the "human factors."

This is a very realistic question as the equivalent occurs in our society everyday on an incremental basis.
Ron

Try peddling your quizzes in a car factory, where efficiency is considered supreme.

Louise,
It is a shame that you are incapable of analyzing the human factors of that situation as well as the economics. Yet you want us to accept your fiat judgements despite the your lack of thought. Shame on you. That is a very collectivist liberal position to take.
Ron

Shame on me? Well, tut tut, Ron, I must have done something to displease you, and that must be a grievous offense indeed.

Once again, you're attempting to play school master on the education forum for the purpose of bolstering your belief that efficiency is a greater good than more worthwhile things in life.

Of course, you refuse to recognize the destruction of LOCAL ECONOMIES that Wal-Mart inevitably brings, preferring instead to believe that bigness and cheap prices are synonymous with goodness or perhaps even the good life.

Louise,
You introduced a bunch of stuff that I never mentioned. I asked you to analyze what happened when one man could catch all the fish 20 men had caught previously. You have avoided answering a very simple question with all the desperation of a young man being escorted to the alter, at the point of a shotgun, to meet his bride. Why don't you just answer the question instead of talking phony balony good time rock and roll. I think it is because the answer destroys your fantasy ideology.
Ron

It's always interesting to me to see how you try to defend the very societal manifestations that public schooling made possible.

You don't have to be Amish to realize that globalization, sweatshop labor conditions, cheap and unsafe imports, and big box stores are abominations.

Louise,
"It's always interesting to me to see how you try to defend the very societal manifestations that public schooling made possible."
First, there were factories and mass unemployment long before the public school system. Factories were made possible by steam power beginning sometime in the 18th Century. Public shools began in the late 19th Century.
Second, if you will read the history of the first factories you will find they were one of the great mechanisms by which people rose from poverty. If you had spent years in that environment you would find that factory managers eliminate people at every opportunity because they would prefer to work with machines in many cases. One of the results of their aversion to people is that they rarely do a good job of training and organizing their workforce. That is exactly what Fred Taylor excelled at.
As to "You don't have to be Amish to realize that globalization, sweatshop labor conditions, cheap and unsafe imports, and big box stores are abominations."
Please quit trying to 'stop history.' Marx couldn't do it, trying to stop hisory contributed a great deal to bringing down the USSR. If you go back to of Great Depression -- 1929 you will find we got out of the depression only to have a Democrat/Republican congress using the Smoot-Harlety Bill (do I have that right?) to try and protect us by stopping history. That re-started the depression and really upset the apple cart.
Ron

John Taylor Gatto, from Breaking Out of the Trap, UHAE

Regard it this way: in our present system, those abstract bignesses are saddled with the endless responsibility of finding a place for hundreds of millions of people, and the even more daunting challenge of creating demand for products and services which, historically viewed, few of us need or want. Because of this anomaly, a Procrustean discipline emerges in which the entire population must continually be cut or stretched to fit the momentary convenience of the economy. This is a free market only in fantasy; it seems free because ceaseless behind-the-scenes efforts maintain the illusion, but its reality is much different. Prodigies of psychological and political insight and wisdom gathered painfully over the centuries are refined into principles, taught in elite colleges, and consecrated in the service of this colossal tour de force of appearances.

Let me illustrate. People love to work, but they must be convinced that work is a kind of curse, that they must arrange the maximum of leisure and labor-saving devices in their lives upon which belief many corporations depend; people love to invent solutions, to be resourceful, to make do with what they have, but resourcefulness and frugality are criminal behaviors to a mass production economy, such examples threaten to infect others with the same fatal sedition; similarly, people love to attach themselves to favored possessions, even to grow old and die with them, but such indulgence is dangerous lunacy in a machine economy whose costly tools are continually renewed by enormous borrowings; people like to stay put but must be convinced they lead pinched and barren existences without travel; people love to walk but the built world is now laid out so they have to drive. Worst of all are those who yearn for productive, independent livelihoods like the Amish have, and nearly all free Americans once had. If that vision spreads, a consumer economy is sunk. For all these and other reasons, the form of schooling we get is largely a kind of consumer and employee training. This isn’t just incidentally true. Common sense should tell you it’s necessarily so if the economy is to survive in any recognizable form.

Every principal institution in our culture is a partner with the particular form of corporatism which has began to dominate America at the end of WWII. Call it paternal corporatism, wise elites can be trained to provide for the rest of us, who will be kept as children. Unlike Plato’s Guardians whom they otherwise resemble, this meritorious elite is not kept poor but is guaranteed prosperity and status in exchange for its oversight. An essential feature of this kind of central management is that the population remain mystified, specialized dependent, and childish.

The school institution is clearly a key partner in this arrangement: it suppresses the productive impulse in favor of consumption; it redefines "work" as a job someone eventually gives you if you behave; it habituates a large clientele to sloth, envy, and boredom; and it accustoms individuals to think of themselves as members of a class with various distinguishing features. More than anything else, school is about class consciousness. In addition, it makes intellectual work and creative thinking appear like distasteful or difficult labor to most of us. None of this is done to oppress, but because the economy would dissolve into something else if those attitudes didn’t become ingrained in childhood.

We have evolved a subtly architected, delicately balanced command economy and class-based society upon which huge efforts are lavished to make it appear like something else. The illusion has been wearing thin for years; that’s a principal reason why so many people don’t bother to vote. In such a bargain, the quality of schooling is distinctly secondary; other values are uppermost. A great many children see through the fraud in elementary school but lack the language and education to come to proper terms with their feelings. In this system, a fraction of the kids are slowly over time let in on a part of this managerial reality because they are intended to eventually be made into Guardians themselves, or Guardian’s assistants.

As education, not schooling, develops, I believe there will be independent livelihoods again, based on creativity and innovation and invention, not the Frederick Taylor efficiency mantra that seems to have arrested your own understanding of history and historical development. How many independently educated young people, educated in homeschooling or unschooling families, do you think will be seeking work on factory assembly lines? I sometimes think you have not understood a word Gatto has written. Perhaps, as you spell illeterati illeterati, you are hoping that homeschoolers merely become good Latinists.

Also by John Taylor Gatto, from Breaking Out of the Trap, on Mudsill Theory:

It takes no great intellect to see that such a curriculum taught in today’s economic environment would directly attack the dominant economy. Not intentionally, but lack of malice would be poor compensation for those whose businesses would inevitably wither and die as the idea spread. How many microbreweries would it take to ruin Budweiser? How many solar cells and methane-gas home generators to bring Exxon to its knees? This is one reason, I think, that many alternative school ideas which work, and are cheap and easy to administer, fizzle rather than that catch fire in the public imagination. The incentive to support projects wholeheartedly when they would incidentally eliminate your livelihood, or indeed eliminate the familiar society and relationships you hold dear, just isn’t there. Nor is it easy to see how it could ever be.

Why would anyone who makes a living selling goods or services be enthusiastic about schools that teach "less is more"? Or teach that television, even PBS, alters the mind for the worse? When I see the dense concentration of big business names associated with school reform I get a little crazy, not because they are bad people—most are no worse than you are or I—but because humanity’s best interests and corporate interests cannot really ever be a good fit except by accident.

The souls of free and independent men and women are mutilated by the necessary soullessness of corporate organization and decision-making. Think of cigarettes as a classic case in point. The truth is that even if all corporate production were pure and faultless, it is still an excess of organization—where the few make decisions for the many—that is choking us to death. Strength, joy, wisdom are only available to those who produce their own lives; never to those who merely consume the production of others. Nothing good can come from inviting global corporations to design our schools, any more than leaving a hungry dog to guard ham sandwiches is a good way to protect lunch.

All training except the most basic either secures or disestablishes things as they are. The familiar government school curriculum represents enshrined mudsill theory telling us people would do nothing if they weren’t tricked, bribed, or intimidated, proving scientifically that workers are for the most part biologically incompetent, strung out along a bell curve. Mudsill theory has become institutionalized with buzzers, routines, standardized assessments, and terminal rankings interleaved with an interminable presentation of carrots and sticks, the positive and negative reinforcement schedules of behavioral psychology, screening children for a corporate order.

Mudsillism is deeply ingrained in the whole work/school/media constellation. Getting rid of it will be a devilish task with no painless transition formula. This is going to hurt when it happens. And it will happen. The current order is too far off the track of human nature, too dis-spirited, to survive. Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn’t an order into which we should be pushing kids as if such jobs there were the avenue to a good life.

At the heart of any school reforms that aren’t simply tuning the mudsill mechanism lie two beliefs: 1) That talent, intelligence, grace, and high accomplishment are within the reach of every kid, and 2) That we are better off working for ourselves than for a boss.3 But how on earth can you believe these things in the face of a century of institution-shaping/economy-shaping monopoly schooling which claims something different? Or in the face of a constant stream of media menace that jobs are vanishing, that the workplace demands more regulation and discipline, that "foreign competition" will bury us if we don’t comply with expert prescriptions in the years ahead? One powerful antidote to such propaganda comes from looking at evidence which contradicts official propaganda—like women who earn as much as doctors by selling shrimp from old white trucks parked beside the road, or thirteen-year-old boys who don’t have time to waste in school because they expect to be independent businessmen before most kids are out of college.

Louise,
Mr. Gatto is so right. I only wish you had the intellect to understand him.
For example, show me where Mr. Gatto was part of the oligarchy. It is difficult to expect you to make this distinction but Mr. Taylor belong to what is leaglly described as an industtrial servant. He did not own nor direct manufacturing firms. The oligarchy hired him not the other way round.
More importantly, I have previously stated there were limits to my admiration of Mr. Taylor. I believe I said I did not consider him the finished product. Naturally that went over your head.
Capitalism does not stand still. Mr. Taylor went to work in an industrial world that had concentrated on machines. They had done zilch with the human factors. The workers, whether you call them craftsmen or not had been left to their own devices. We have to thank goodness for such craftsman training as they had for management took no responsibility for training them. It was a disgrace.
Mr. Taylor studied and improved both the methods used and the workplace from the individual station to the entire plant. As a result the workers worked easier, produced more and made twice as much money. This was the middle of the Belle Epoch when wages and profits rose faster than at any time in history.
There was a fly in the ointment. This was also the period when the socialists and the labor unions were coming into their own. They could not have it said that a man hired by management had raised wages while reducing effort. So they lied in their teeth. The horror stories they make up are laughable. Those stories are idiotic in their obvious untruths.
Ron

Louise,
You have a second major blind spot in your attempt to analyze manufacturing.
Contrary to the implicit assumption you seem to make the world does not stand still. You cannot stop history.
The world that existed when Fredrick Winslow Taylor first reported for duty in that steel mill no longer exists -- neither in whole nor in part. The world, the nation, society has all changed. You cannot find factories or workers like that except in the Peoples Republic of China and possibly in India.
Today in the US we are going more and more to computer controlled machines. People are working on a replicator like in Star Trek and the possibilities are promising. It is predicted that in 15 years China will find its labor supply is a drag on the market.
Is that what the collectivists like yourself are afraid of. That brute labor will become obsolete? If so I think it is happening at a fearsome pace.
Ron

I've never known you to agree with Gatto about anything, from Frederick Taylor to foreign policy to "less is more."

But instead of stating your disagreements with him, you pretend you agree with him. And because I disagree with you, you claim I must be suffering from a intellectual deficit. Cute, Ron, very cute. And a very underhanded way to try to make whatever point you're trying to make, if you even know what that might be.

Louise,
You are saying you have tried to drive a wedge between Mr. Gatto and I by proving that I am not sincere in my admiraton for the man's scholarship. Yet, after all this time you have been totally unsuccessful and can't believe it is your own misunderstanding, or misstatement, of his position.
I want to say emphatically that when you quote Mr. Gatto and then give your interpretation of what you just quoted, your comments are totally off the mark.
Ron

The wedge is there. I had nothing to do with it.

And I forgot to add to the Frederick Taylor, foreign policy and "less is more" list your belief in the accuracy of the Bell Curve.

I think you're "totally off the mark," Ron. Further, I think Gatto would agree with me if he wasted his time reading this forum.

I've wasted enough time here for the month of May. Wishing you and all the workers here a very happy May Day.

Louise,
"And I forgot to add to the Frederick Taylor, foreign policy and "less is more" list your belief in the accuracy of the Bell Curve."
The Bell Curve is a mathematical tool like the Pareto Curve. I neither believe nor disbelive in it except as a useful mathematical tool.
Are some people less intelligent than others -- that seems obvious.
Besides eugenics seems more of a tool of the collectivist liberals than of we classical liberals.
Ron