You know, Mitt Romney keeps paying a lot of lip service to small businesses in the US. He points out (correctly) that they are the engine that drives the economy, they’re the testament of the “American Dream,” and they are the essence of capitalism.I beg to differ. Small business capitalism is not Romney capitalism. Romney’s capitalism is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart swallows up the baker, the butcher, and the cheese maker. Wal-Mart pushes out the corner pharmacist, the little mid-block ophthalmologist, and the multi-generation hair salon. Wal-Mart does all of this in the name of capitalism. It chews up the little guy and spits him out, but only after extracting every last penny of profit that can be wrung out. But let’s not be too tough on Wal-Mart alone; after all, Wal-Mart is just a metaphor for all of the “Wal-Marts” of the world.
Wal-Mart traps people in a cycle of poverty by offering low skill-level, low education jobs that provide just enough to scrape by on. That means that Wal-Mart kills education and innovation, too. Desperate people can’t afford to go to school and build knowledge or learn new skills; they have to work right now, just to survive! Wal-Mart has created the job where an unfortunate and desperate high school dropout can find lifelong employment with the occasional job training session that re-educates the employee to care solely about the profits and gains for the company.
This “brain drain” isn’t happening in some distant land of China or India. It’s happening behind the cash registers of super-centers in almost every town in America.
And you know what? I really think that Mitt Romney’s empty gestures towards small business shows his lack of understanding how they used to thrive. Maybe the success of yesteryear’s small businesses wasn’t really capitalism … maybe it was something else.
When I think of small businesses in the U.S., I think of collectivism. The baker, the butcher, and the cheese maker are relied on by the same people doing business in their establishments. When the butcher loses business to Wal-Mart and closes shop, it means that the landlord is only collecting rent from the baker and the cheese maker. Guess what? Either their rent goes up or the landlord can’t make his mortgage payment. Somebody is going extinct. And then the next domino falls. And the whole lot of them can forget about getting a survival loan from the local credit union. Their assets are now “safely” nestled under the corporate umbrella of a mega-bank. Money is for the big guys on Wall St. where quid pro quo is the status quo.
If you think Romney’s government will be there to give a helping hand-up to the little guy then clearly you haven’t heard of the good Boy Scout, Paul Ryan. Atlas Shrugs – and so does Paul Ryan in indifference to the plight of the people. Even if we escape their evil, what help can come from a cash strapped government? Because the local beast – excuse me, government – has been successfully starved, it starts to cut services. The roads fall into disrepair, the lights go out. Local governments lost revenue, with no way of replacing it. Trying to extract taxes from Wal-Mart is like trying to pull teeth from a mule: it ain’t gonna happen. As the local government finally begins to crumble and fall, the surrounding community crumbles with it. People depending on their home’s value in retirement look in surprise when they see their main asset cut in half. There is no desirability in a neighborhood riddled with pot-holes or a school that cannot pay for basic school supplies and books or a park that remains perennially the color brown. Nobody wants to live there.
This is the end game of modern U.S. capitalism. Does Romney really care if your community crumbles? Doubtful. The rich can always bailout and go someplace else. They will simply create a new “American Dream” somewhere else … at least until that well runs dry. They’ve sold us out to the Wal-Marts, and in so doing, re-established the slave labor of the 1800s, albeit in China. Be warned, China. These are dream-breakers, not dream-makers you trifle with.
Communities rise together or fall together based on how hard the people who live there work together. It is a collective effort. Capitalism in the U.S. is a one way road. The Wal-Marts take the tax cuts, they take the profits, they demand the protection from the courts, the military, and the government. They take the skills, the technology, and the innovation. What they “give back” (as Republicans like to say) is debt, war, and minimum wage jobs. Talk about a one-sided relationship!
Collectivism – that mutual reliance and interdependence – is what made the U.S. great. Wal-Mart capitalism is what made the U.S. fall. So are we really going to fall again for the line that tax cuts for the owners of the Wal-Marts of the world will spontaneously create jobs? I hope not. It just makes a bigger Wal-Mart, a bigger, uglier, gray cinderblock akin to a black-hole. It sucks up everything around it and spits out nothing in return.
The U.S. can be fixed. It is not irretrievably broken. But the repairs start with doing away with Wal-Mart capitalism. It starts by rejecting Mitt Romney’s attempts at anthropomorphic behaviors – “corporations are people, my friend” – and his flimsy record of protecting middle class Americans. It starts by recognizing that we have a hole to climb out of. But our hole is no deeper than the myriad of holes that people around the globe for millennia have emerged from triumphantly. It only requires that we work together. It only requires collectivism.
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Photo credit : Gage Skidmore, cc
[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]http://IMPACTmagazine.us/wp-content/uploads/Mick-Kienan2.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]KIENAN MICK is a resident of the beautiful, lake filled Twin Cities. He has a degree in Economics from the University of Minnesota, and recently finished a MS in Applied Economics from the University of North Dakota. In his spare time, he enjoys amateur photography, nature hikes, and bird watching. His interests lie in “alternative” economic systems where the public, unions, and co-ops take a greater stake in our economy. He writes, “The idea is that when people are invested in their communities, they will invest wisely, with a long-term view towards sustainability for future generations.” [/author_info] [/author]