By the time you read this, you’ll already know whether America’s federal government has suspended SNAP (“food stamp”) benefits, or whether President TACO has done what he regularly does, reversing himself at the last minute. This of course matters for millions of American families. But in the long term, I question whether the event itself matters more than the systematic weaknesses it exposes in the American economy.
Walmart, America’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, receives almost a quarter of all SNAP benefit spending, according to Axios. This reflects multiple factors: for instance, that Walmart exists in all fifty states and most territories. But it also reflects their decision to place themselves in chronically underserved neighborhoods and communities. Walmart has a near-monopoly stranglehold on many areas’ food supply, and they use it.
I can’t be the only news junkie who remembers the Great EBT bollix of 2013. I’ve already written about the event itself, and the moralistic outrage it precipitated online. The ways in which Walmart has no only gobbled up its captive market, but has become the necessary go-to for its market’s rush buying, reflects that America’s consumer economy is not free. The corporation has established permanent colonies in its market’s collective imagination.
This didn’t just happen. Informed critics have described how Walmart utilizes public subsidies to corner markets. Their government largesse often totals in the billions of dollars, and includes many of their own employees relying on SNAP benefits. This isn’t news; I discovered it in the 1990s. Economist John C. Médaille even asserts that even the interstate highway system functions as a subsidy, as Walmart’s just-in-time restocking method depends on reliable, wide roads.
Nominally, Walmart remains a private entity controlled by shareholders, mostly the Walton family. But its success has relied heavily on public-private partnerships and government welfare. Given this symbiosis, and the corporation’s ability to manipulate Defense Department levels of money, it bears asking when Walmart, and corporations of its size, stop being private companies, and become de facto shadow government bureaus.
Current events, however, reveal how precarious that market stranglehold really is. The threatened SNAP shutdown has caused fears of Walmart riots—not from the company itself, which rejects the rumors, but from ordinary customers repeating scuttlebutt online. If Walmart controls a neighborhood’s access to food, clothing, and domestic goods, then cutting off that access doesn’t just hurt the community. It also radicalizes its members to demand the goods hidden behind the wall.
Nor do I use the word “radicalize” lightly. The French Revolution happened amid a combination of massive imperial wealth, and unequal distribution, to the point where Jean Valjean’s loaf of bread has become iconic. Argentina came close to a populist revolution in 2001 because people couldn’t afford groceries, although groceries remained available. Argentina kept exporting food, especially beef, during its economic nadir; regular Argentinians just couldn’t afford it.
Appallingly similar conditions exist now. Elon Musk is currently tracking to become the world’s first trillionaire, money he can never possibly spend. Meanwhile, Walmart, as the largest SNAP vendor, has food available to sell, but SNAP recipients, most of whom are employed, simply can’t afford to buy it. If working-class Americans go hungry long enough, one wonders whether we might, for the first time since Bacon’s Rebellion, develop a sense of class solidarity.
Before continuing, I’ll acknowledge I’m slightly contradicting my past self. I recently made excuses for the influence which dollar stores have on America’s rural communities, saying that they create a nascent sense of economic self-determination. Of course, Dollar General has an almost Walmart-like grip on many communities, and they’re as vulnerable to a SNAP shutdown as any other monopolistic retailer.
Yet I stand by my prior opinion. I admitted that Dollar General is imperfect, and called it a transitional stage for rural economics. By teaching country dwellers that they, too, deserve nice things, I’d argue they also teach country dwellers to join forces to demand nice things. I still believe that’s true, and it encourages small town people, who often swallow a “rugged individualism” economic pill, to see their situation as collective, not atomized.
These events reveal that Walmart, Dollar General, and other near-monopolies rely upon government support on both the supply and the demand ends. A market economy in a massively technological society requires a stabilizing hand that remains responsive to the populace, not the plutocrats. We may reorganize that stabilizing hand, but if it does the job of a government, then that’s what it is. Modernity demands, not negates, a strong state.
No comments:
Post a Comment