I've edited the Wal-Mart rant a bit. Sorry for all the typos, etc. in the earlier version. I was rushed and angry and it showed!

Did you hear? The Bush ubermachine has decided it's not in America's best interest for us to see Clark's testimony at the Hague. Isn't that sweet of them? We're so lucky our government cares so much. (via Writerrific)

The evidence mounts. We must stop Wal-Mart.

The first of three articles in the LA Times about the leviathan in our midst. Wal-Mart, that mecca of cheap products and groceries, the union-breaker, the slave-wager. The place so many of us go to buy what we want at the price we can't refuse. It's all there, they assure us, shiny and new and most of all CHEAP.

But nothing's really that cheap, is it? With every purchase, our hands are further covered in blood. A few low-priced examples from the article tell it all: Ragu tomato sauce for 89 cents, a computer for $498. Not mentioned, this season's hottest gift item: the camera-cell phone. We don't ask questions, we just buy (the patriotic good-deed of Christmas, CNN assures us.). That cheap Ragu means women and men in Baja picking tomatoes while planes fly over head and spray them with pesticides; that $498 computer means silicone mined by kids in horrific conditions. That cheap new super-cool cell phone? Contains cobalt, the new diamond of the African blood trade, not to mention electronic parts made by maquiladora workers for pennies.

We spend time each summer (and sometimes in the winter too) in San Quintin, Baja, a small coastal community about five hours south of the border. San Quintin, like most of Baja, is a desert landscape peppered with agaves and dead volcanoes. Dirt roads lead to the colonias from the dusty downtown, a collection of small shops and markets, a zocalo with a ratty gazebo and a few fish taco stands. The town runs into the next with no break in between, San Quintin and Lazaro Cardenas joined at the hip and basically indistinguishable from each other. To the south of town are the fields: acres and acres of tomato plants covered in black mesh tarp and strawberry fields divided by lines. Walking the lines are women and men, most from Oaxaca and other parts of southern (and indigenous) Mexico, their bodies covered head to toe with layers of clothing to protect them from the chemicals and the sun.

In the mid-nineties the tomato growers of Baja discovered a new irrigation technique and this combined with NAFTA has meant a booming business. Company representatives walk the streets of Oaxaca and Chiapas offering the poorest of Mexico a living wage and free transportation to Baja, just as Wal-Mart entices potential workers with friendly ad campaigns and the promise of good benefits. Neither delivers, of course. While Wal-Mart leaves more than half of its employees without health insurance, the fruit growers of Baja pay their workers next to nothing, leave them to live in clapboard shacks, and shower them with pesticides while they pick.

I remember going to the grocery store in San Quintin last summer. In front of me in line was a woman in her head-to-toe tomato picking outfit. It was a warm day, but she was wearing layer upon layer, at least three, and across her face was a handkerchief draped from beneath her eyes down to her chin. On her head, a straw hat. She looked no different from her Zapatista cousins in Chiapas, who cover their faces to protect their identities. (I'm sure the visual imagery is not lost on either her or her sisters: the farm workers and the indigenous rights fighters are no different, their struggles are the same. Her covered body, her covered face left nothing to the imagination: I'm the one, her clothing said, that's fed you. It's my handprints on your fruits. )

Because of NAFTA, the prices in grocery stores on both sides of the border are nearly the same. The woman in front of me paid 11 pesos (about $1) for a two liter bottle of soda, a price I've seen advertised in the Sunday paper by Wal-Mart and other large chains. The tomatoes for sale in the Baja store were not the pristine ones we see on our grocery shelves. They were the bruised and broken ones, the ones that were dropped or bumped or left too long on the vine; those not even good enough for Ragu. The picker in front of me had several in her basket. I imagine she would not be able to afford the ones she herself picked, those pretty ones reserved for stores up north.

And that's the irony of Wal-Mart, I suppose. The prices are low enough to allow the poor a slice of the "good life," but at the hidden, horrific cost of having to buy products made by those even poorer who live in other countries. (I know -- most of Wal-Mart's US customers are not the poorest of us -- they are a cross-section of the nation: the poor, the rich and everyone in between.) Now there are Wal-Marts in developing countries too. I wonder, where do the tomatoes sold in the Wal-Marts of Mexico and Brazil come from? Who's picking them?

(It's not just in Mexico, of course. I remember seeing a group of pickers bused to a Safeway in Naples, Florida to buy their groceries for the month. If they wanted an orange, one they may have picked the week before, they had to buy it at the Safeway just like everyone else. Suddenly "competition" and choice" lose their meaning when you see pickers having no choice at all and competition knocked out by the grower. I don't think the pickers were asked by their bosses whether they wanted to go to the Safeway or the Piggly Wiggly. The deal was made without their input, no doubt. On Saturday mornings the bus would come, take them to the market, and bring them back to their company-owned housing. And this is HERE, in our country, not way down south in those "other" countries.)

When people ask me why I buy organic, I tell them about that woman in Baja. Yes, organic produce and small farm-raised meat is good for me and the environment. That's obvious. But organics are also good for the pickers. Organic fruits and vegetables mean pickers who don't get sprayed. That's enough for me. Yes, they cost more. Am I rich? Do I make a lot of money? No. Can I afford an extra 20 cents a pound for my tomatoes? Yes. Can most Americans? Of course.

I don't know if it's possible to slow down our country's insatiable appetite for the newest, shiniest, cheapest. Perhaps if we can see ourselves as those women on the border asssembling our $40 DVD players, picking our $2/pound strawberries, or see ourselves as the young kids mining cobalt at gun point. Perhaps it will take an appeal to our better selves, that part of us that's not full of greed and run by gluttony, but instead driven by compassion. Perhaps.

I should say that this first LA Times article is not about the human costs in other countries, but rather the cost of union jobs here in the US. I personally don't see a separation between them. Both American union workers and Mexican farm/maquiladora workers are hurt by our insatiable appetite for cheap stuff. According to CNN, last Friday was Wal-Mart's best single day ever.

Wal-Mart, that most American of companies, made richer by our nation's favorite pastime, shopping. Newsworthy indeed.

The Wal-Mart story is related to Juarez, of course, and the town's countless murdered women. The maquiladoras that spit out cheap TVs and electronic goods for Wal-Mart and other discounters eats up young girls and leaves them dead in the desert. I've written about it in past posts here and here.