Anti-corporate hysteria
Sebastion Mallably has a must read OpEd in today’s Washington Post. Mallaby explains that Democrats were not always anti-corporate. There was a time when things were different, and it was not that long ago:
To see the difference between then and now, just look at the Clintons. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hillary Clinton sat on Wal-Mart’s board; and when Sam Walton died in 1992, Bill Clinton lauded him as “a wonderful family man and one of the greatest citizens in the history of the state of Arkansas.'’ Campaigning in the New Hampshire primary that year, Bill Clinton came proudly to the rescue of a local company called American Brush Co. by helping it become a Wal-Mart supplier.
Times change. Last year Hillary Clinton returned a campaign contribution from Wal-Mart, even though she had no compunction in banking a check from Jerry Springer. The nation’s most successful retailer, which has seized the opportunities created by globalization to boost the buying power of ordinary Americans, is now seen as too toxic to touch. But a trash-talking TV host is acceptable.
The “Wake-up Walmart” crowd, explains Mallaby, is comprised mostly of political opportunists:
The truth is that none of these Democrats can resist dumb economic populism. Even though we are not in a recession, and even though the presidential primaries are more than a year away, the DLC crowd is pandering shamelessly to the left of the party — perhaps in the knowledge that the grocery workers union, which launched the anti-Wal-Mart campaign, is strong in the key state of Iowa.
For a party that needs the votes of Wal-Mart’s customers, this is a questionable strategy. But there is more than politics at stake. According to a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag, neither of whom received funding from Wal-Mart, big-box stores led by Wal-Mart reduce families’ food bills by one-fourth. Because Wal-Mart’s price-cutting also has a big impact on the non-food stuff it peddles, it saves U.S. consumers upward of $200 billion a year, making it a larger booster of family welfare than the federal government’s $33 billion food-stamp program.
How can centrist Democrats respond to that? By beating up Wal-Mart and forcing it to focus on public relations rather than opening new stores, Democrats are harming the poor Americans they claim to speak for.
Of course, liberals seem to be masters of this strategy. It was decades and decades that liberals in Washington hurt low-income Americans by subjecting them to the outdated, unpersonal and no-incentive laden Aid to Families and Dependent Children welfare program which was supposed to help these people. It took some clear thinking conservatives to come along and fix the problem.