[lbo-talk] decentralization, Whole Foods style

Hilary Russ hilarious4 at msn.com
Fri May 30 09:32:59 PDT 2003


RE: From: "Kelley"


> finally, the complaint--at least as shane initially advanced it--was the
> sad, but altogether mundane and ordinary, failure of people whose ideology
> enables them to see the "wholeness" and "connection" between dolphins,
> spotted owls, coffee bean farmers, the rainforest and their consumption
> habits and be willing to PAY MORE to ensure that they're treating the
earth
> and themselves well and not, in turn, be able to see the connection
between
> the people who mix up their soy-milk and raw cane sugar frappes and bag
> their organic tofu and themselves and, therefore, be willing to PAY MORE
to
> ensure that workers get a living wage--the same kind of living wage that
> enables many of the people who shop at places like WF to shop there in the
> first fucking place.

Exactly. Last night I met the poster-girl for this kind of world view, a very nice, sincere writer who was "so passionate" about organic food, farming, nature, and consumption, but "didn't like to be political about it." She knew the suicide rate among small farmers was very high, but attributed this to seasonal cycles and acts of nature (droughts, e.g.) rather than, say, the contributing fact that small farmers are totally underfunded by the federal government, which prefers to support gigantic corporate farms.

And Re: Wojtek: Lefty attacks on the retail outlets serving mainly urban, slightly
>"bohemian" markets, such as Starbucks or Whole Foods, belong to the same
>genre. Scratch the lefty veneer, and you find the old fashioned petit
>bourgeois, anti-urban, small town populism

If Starbucks critics were secretly so anti-urban, why so much community resistance to that and other new chain stores in Harlem? Because residents could read the writing on the wall. Move the yuppie stores in, make it harder for hood-based stores to survive. Yay rah if the new store employs a few people from that nabe. How many more will be displaced by the rent increases that follow? If anyone knows of a WF in a nabe that is NOT gentrified, let me know.

--Hilary



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