All to add to the money bins of the morbidly rich heirs of Sam Walton and fund the politicians they'll buy to fight local tax increases (to make up for the lost revenue from all those empty stores downtown) and, federally, to fund politicians who will defeat anti-monopoly efforts in Congress.
Once a single company or small group of companies represent the largest share of local revenue to a town, they can then use that economic power to further extract cash from the town by doing things like challenging their property taxes.
That's what's happening right now in Houghton, a little town of around 8,000 residents in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In 2004, according to reporting from Channel 6 News there, when Walmart wanted to expand, the city gave them everything they wanted:
"The city transferred the property to Walmart, created a public roadway, funded the relocation of utilities, and agreed to wetland mitigation work to help accommodate the expansion. In return, Walmart agreed to increase the taxable property value to $4,780,000, which allowed the city to justify these infrastructure investments."
Now Walmart's lawyers have come to town to demand that the bustling store pay much lower property taxes, at the same rate as the largely dead "dark stores" in downtown business districts and strip malls it has destroyed:
"The City of Houghton " is facing a potentially devastating property tax appeal by Walmart as the company uses a legal strategy called the 'dark store theory' to reduce its tax burden."
The city notes they're fighting a company worth a half-trillion dollars owned in large part by "the wealthiest family on the planet."
"According to the city, the global company seeks a lowered valuation on its local store, spurring a six-year retroactive $1.2 million refund and a reduction in future property taxes. " If Walmart wins the case, it will dramatically reduce future budgets to local K-12 schools, veterans' services, county medical care facilities, the local library and the City of Houghton."
Houghton has become an American sacrifice zone, another town thrown on the pyre of profits and efficiency regardless of the costs to anybody except the corporation itself and its owners.
But it's not just towns and cities being ravaged by this bizarre neoliberal economic and political religion that Reagan put into law and policy back in 1983.
Because American business is so efficient, every American family pays $5000 a year, on average,more than Canadian or European families do for almost everythingfrom cell phone and internet service to airfare and drugs.
In France, for example, high-speed broadband internet service can run as little as $15 a month and bundles -- for example, 2 cell phones with 2 different numbers, free unlimited international calling, no cellphone internet data caps, unlimited high-speed broadband into your home, and hundreds of cable TV channels -- are as little as $90 a month.
France enforces their anti-monopoly laws. That's not happening here, however, because back in 1983 President Reagan directed the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Department of Justice to stop enforcing American anti-monopoly laws that dated all the way back to the 1880s.
Mergers and acquisitions ("M&A") specialist banks on Wall Street worked with large corporations to buy up their medium-sized competitors, often by hostile takeover, radically shrinking the number of small- and medium-sized companies in America. It was the story of the Michael Douglas' "Greed is good!" movie Wall Street.
At first it seemed like a consumer bonanza: prices were falling all over the place through the late 1980s. Giant national chains competed with small locally-owned stores on America's Main Streets and malls. They initially offered lower prices -- made possible by their increased efficiency -- which local people loved.
Until they discovered those very scales of efficiency - only achievable by national buying power -- drove their smaller, locally-owned competitors out of business. Small town America began to die.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
