I have to credit Al Norman of Sprawl Busters for alerting me and countless others to a story that may have slid past us in the crunch of front page news, but has far reaching implications for us all.
We all know how Walmart has moved into offering deep discounts on a limited range of common medications.
Some may be aware that this move, and corresponding promotions by other big box retailers, has further marginalized smaller pharmacies to the brink of extinction, as drug companies make-up their Walmart losses in pricing applied only to the little guys.
With those dying independent pharmacies goes not only the traditional relationship of patient to trusted family pharmacist, but also some of the quality assurances that formed the basis for that trust.
You may recall a bizarre story a couple of years ago, of a couple of undocumented drivers in southern Utah ferrying discount drugs from Walmart store to Walmart store in open packages and an unsecured vehicle.
Anyway, having gutted U.S. manufacturing in order to provide cheaper and cheaper goods to an underemployed and undercompensated America; and having strip-mined the poor both as consumers and labor, Walmart then turned its attention to gas and groceries, two of the three essential categories beyond shelter that remain when all other spending must be curtailed.
Now Walmart is eyeing that third essential, healthcare.
Following the premature release of a 14-page request from Walmart to healthcare service and goods providers, seeking input to the planning of a major healthcare initiative, the company quickly back-pedaled:
Wal-Mart issued a statement Wednesday saying its request for partners to provide primary care services was "overwritten and incorrect." The firm is "not building a national, integrated low-cost primary health care platform," according to the statement by Dr. John Agwunobi, a senior vice president for health and wellness at the retailer.
Does Walmart not protest too full? Could anyone now doubt where this is heading?
10-21-11 Another Occupy Walmart demonstration; this time, in DC.
....................................................................................................
This is a story that is just beginning to unfold. Check this out! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well, it was inevitable. The Occupy Wall Street movement has found its logical extension in a new "Occupy Walmart" wave that has hit the internet with its own Facebook page; and even "Don't Occupy Walmart," which takes the same position, arguing only the name.
Go ahead...Google it. You know you want to.
Lots of folks seem to have had the same idea. Consumers must take the "Occupy Wall Street" movement to the well that feeds Wall Street; and what better place to start with than Walmart?
Walmart virtually defined the economic race to the bottom in America. Now that the retail predator has strip-mined American consumers to the breaking point and pock-marked the rural countryside with its behemoth supercenters, it finds its market here leveling off somewhat, and has turned its attention elsewhere.
Like a cancer that depends for its perpetuation on unlimited growth, the economic model that Walmart's practices have engendered in American business has finally metastasized to the brink of killing the host.
"Occupy Walmart" or "Don't Occupy Walmart," the message is the same. We have it within our power as consumers to stop enabling Wall Street greed machines by denying our business to the worst offenders, among which Walmart is still #1.
I have served as spokesperson for the group through much of the eight+ years in which we have been opposing the current JLD Properties St. Albans Walmart application.
Here follows our formal statement on the Supreme Court decision to uphold the permit:
The Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth are extremely disappointed by the decision of Vermont's Supreme Court with regard to the J.L.D. Properties Walmart permit application.
The decision indicates a disregard for citizen access within the local permit process, not to mention for the validity of that process itself.
The judges acknowledged the egregious nature of conflicts of interest that occurred in the local permit process, which is the only level at which ordinary citizens may participate without devoting considerable financial resources to the effort. By ruling that those conflicts of interest do not matter because of the "de novo" nature of the Environmental Court hearing, they are saying essentially that the local permit is meaningless.
We sincerely hope for the best possible outcome for our communities, and we trust that the careful scrutiny that we will apply to Mr. Davis' St. Albans Walmart, both during the construction phase and throughout its operation, will serve to ensure that this will be the most scrupulously operated Walmart store in history, and that none of the issues of traffic congestion, secondary growth, store closings and environmental degradation that we fear will be allowed to ensue.
There is so much more I'd like to say about this, but I'll reserve that for another time.
After eight years of controversy, appeals of the permit for a proposed Walmart at exit 20 of I-89 in St. Albans Town had a final half-hour of oral arguments before the Vermont Supreme Court this past Wednesday at the Vermont Law School in S. Royalton.
The room was packed with about a hundred spectators. As if to illustrate our claim that the local permit review process had been contaminated by conspicuous and persistent conflicts of interest, former Town Selectboard Chairman, Bill Nihan, took his seat in the front row, cheek-to-jowel with applicant Jeff Davis of JLD Properties, his attorney Stewart McConaughy, and project engineer Sam Ruggiano.
Mr. Nihan has been a consistent figure in Town government throughout the Walmart saga, even popping-up on the special "Ad-Hoc Committee" that was formed by the Northwest Regional Planning Commission, under pressure from the Town, to "reconsider" Davis' Walmart project after the usual NRPC Project Review Committee had rejected it. Not surprisingly, that "Ad-Hoc Committee," under the heavy thumb of Mr. Nihan and friends, returned a decision favorable to the project. But Mr. Nihan does not even play a minor role in our assertions of a tainted process.
In fact, the pattern of conflicts of interest throughout the process was so widespread and insidious that former VNRC attorney Jon Groveman was forced to narrowly focus on the most egregious examples (due to filing limits on the number of words in the written arguments.)
The abundant evidence of conflicts of interest that was included in the written arguments was not wasted on the Supreme Court justices who peppered attorneys from both sides with many questions on the issue. Everyone, even the attorney for JLD, seemed to finally agree upon the existence of those conflicts. What remained to be evaluated was the validity of the applicant's assertion that, since the Environmental Court hearing (the venue for our appeal of the Act 250 decision) was considered "de novo," meaning a new look at the evidence, contamination of the local permit process was unimportant.
As VNRC's Jared Margolis very ably argued, if the Supremes were to accept this view of the local permit process, it would send an appalling message that corruption could simply be overlooked; and it would have a "chilling effect" on concerned citizens' access to that process. If those citizens did not possess the financial means to appeal a local decision to the Environmental Court, they would simply be deprived of their right to a fair hearing.
If you've ever wondered what Republican reps from Franklin County do with their time in the Statehouse, your puzzling days are over! Judging soley from a resolution that recently came to my attention, it would seem that they pretty much concentrate on the work of getting themselves re-elected.
Now before I go any further with this, I am obliged to remind you that I am an active member of the Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth. We're the grassroots group that has, for almost eighteen years, diligently maintained opposition to the proposed location of what would be the state's largest Walmart on a tract of agricultural land, near the border of St. Albans Town.
Appearing in the Tuesday, January 18 Journal of the House, J.R.H. 7, the "Joint resolution in support of the construction of a Walmart store in St. Albans Town," must be a high priority for sponsoring representatives Dickinson (St. Albans Town), Branagan (Georgia), McAllister (Highgate), Pearce (Richford), Perley (Enosburg), Savage (Swanton)...and my own local rep and new next-door neighbor, Dustin Degree. With all the serious budgetary, healthcare, education, energy and infrastructure issues that the Legislature faces this term, the best use this bunch could find for their elected office was to advocate on behalf of an out-of-state retailer in a vainglorious attempt to...to do what exactly?
The issue of whether the store will or will not be permitted is currently under consideration by the Supreme Court of Vermont. No other official entity has any say in the matter at this point, so their resolution is utterly meaningless...just a red herring they can wave at their Walmart-deprived constituents come re-election time. "End the wait for Walmart" is a favorite Republican campaign theme in these parts. In a letter-to-the-editor a couple of years ago, Lynn Dickinson even went so far as to imply that electing her could somehow clear the way for Walmart! I remember responding that she should familiarize herself with the way the legal system works in this state.
To our Republican reps I have this piece of advice: If you have so much free time on your hands, when next the county is embroiled in a controversial permit debate that goes on for years, you mightshow up at one or two of the hearings before you start drafting resolutions on topics you know nothing about, as is evidenced by the text of your resolution, which shows a fundamental ignorance of the factual evidence and of how the project lines-up with the ten criteria of Act 250.
C'mon Franklin County Republicans, is this the best use you can make of your time in office?
How would you like it if the mayor of your town wrote a letter to the editor attacking you personally and revealing what he thought he had found about you by searching the voter registration list; something that was intended to discredit you but that was, in fact, not even true? It happened recently to me and I can tell you I'm more than a little annoyed. If not strictly illegal, I would think this conduct could be considered somewhat less than ethical, and lead one to seriously question the Mayor's suitability for public office.
It all began in the quiet little City of St. Albans when the Messenger published a story about the fact that the Vermont Natural Resource Council had filed a Notice of Appeal on behalf of the Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth (of which I am an active member) and Hudak Farm regarding a recent decision by the Environmental Court to uphold an Act 250 permit to locate the largest Walmart store in Vermont near Exit 20 of I-89 in the Town of St. Albans.
In the article, Mayor Manahan of St. Albans City expressed his consternation with the Appeal. Among his remarks:
They (the VNRC) haven't received the answer they want...They are trying to represent our downtown, but they're not trying to represent our downtown
First of all, full disclosure: I am an active member of the Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth (NWCRG), a local grassroots group that opposes the location of a big box Walmart store on a tract of farmland just north of Exit 20 of I-89 in St. Albans.
This effort is pretty well-known as the longest running battle in the U.S. against Walmart over a single tract of land, having begun in 1993 with the big box proposal of a previous developer for the same location. That earlier permit struggle had ended with the Supreme Court finding in favor of the opponents to the project. One might think that that would have been the end of it; and, we contend that, under the law governing "res judicata" or "settled" law, we should not have had to expend money and effort to fight the whole thing again. Be that as it may, the local and regional permit bodies chose to turn a blind eye to this fact and press forward with issuing new permits for what is essentially the same project.
The interests of the Vermont Natural Resource Council, NWCRG, Marie Frey and Hudak Farm are represented by Jon Groveman of the VNRC. This week, the VNRC issued a press release announcing the appeal. In an earlier Motion to amend the Environmental Court Decision by Judge Durkin to permit the project, the VNRC cited several important factual errors in the Decision with regard to the location of Hudak Farm, and a serious omission of evidence on the part of the applicant:
For example, the Court erred in initially finding that the Hudak Farm is located only in Swanton. In fact the Hudak Farm has 69 acres in the Town of St Albans. Although the Court later corrected the factual errors, the Court reached the flawed conclusion that the applicant Wal-Mart need not focus on the compatibility of the proposed Wal-Mart with the Hudak Farm. The Town of St Albans Subdivision Bylaws requires that an applicant prove that a project is compatible with adjacent uses - especially agriculture. The applicant did not analyze the compatibility of the proposed Wal-Mart with the adjacent Hudak Farm. The applicant has the burden of proof to satisfy the town bylaws.
"The Court has overlooked the obligation of the applicant to demonstrate that it will not jeopardize the existence of well-established local farm operations," according to VNRC's Deputy Director Steve Holmes.
We also contend that conflicts of interest exercised early in the permit process corrupted it sufficiently to influence the ultimate outcome.
Just in time for St. Patrick's day, there's a new player in the marketing trend that has notorious corporate offenders energetically painting themselves green in order to entice the growth sector represented by environmentally concerned consumers. Walmart, it seems, wants its piece of the green pie.
This trend toward "green-washing," has already seen some real whoppers (like the oxymoronic "clean coal") floated out there in its opening salvos. The marketing concept is simple: if you get ahead of your PR problem and re-brand your product or business model to sound environmentally responsible, there is a good chance that this new image will be accepted and reinforced by consumers before naysayer's can force them to learn the awful truth. Then it's game over because the marketplace has a notoriously short attention span for the onerous details.
Is Walmart getting a pass from much of the environmental community who should be giving it's green claims greater scrutiny?
In a new blog-post Stacy Mitchell (The Big Box Swindle), Senior Researcher for the New Rules Project scolds environmental groups for failing to take a closer look at Walmart's recent attempts to green-up their corporate image:
Christmas Eve brought good news to many concerned Franklin County residents, when it was announced in the St. Albans Messenger that Lowe's will not, after all, be seeking a permit to build in St. Albans. Being a member of the Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth, I can't help celebrating this as a victory for advocates of smart growth practices.
The merchandising giant had been seeking a preliminary decision from the St. Albans Town Development Review Board for a 122,000-sq. ft. retail facility to be located on open land behind the Price Chopper on Route 7 in St. Albans. The location of the project would have impacted both wetlands and prime agricultural soils. There were many reasons to challenge the project, including environmental and traffic issues, and the significant impact the store could reasonably be expected to have on the local economy where this retail sector's customers already had many local businesses supplying their needs.
Even though the project had already secured a stormwater permit from the Agency of Natural Resources, an earlier permit application had been withdrawn in 2004 because of a moratorium established by the Town, temporarily limiting new store construction to 50,000-sq. ft. per project. After that moratorium was ultimately lifted, Lowe's returned to the permit process, presenting economic arguments at a DRB hearing in September 2009. A second hearing to address traffic concerns was postponed several times before Thursday's announcement that the project had been cancelled entirely.
I am not without an axe to grind over Walmart's land use practices since I am an active member of the grassroots group Northwest Citizens For Responsible Growth; but the latest target of Walmart's greed-grab is taking place in cyber-space. As you have no doubt heard, Walmart.com is making a play to monopolize online booksales in a price war with Target and Amazon. It doesn't matter which behemoth wins the war, because it will be us, the readers and writers, who are the real losers.
In the 1970's, I worked for a time at two huge book retailers in Canada, "W.H. Smith & Sons," and "Classics." Classics died in its own grab for dominance, and W.H. Smith has been reduced to the newspaper stand from whence it came in England. Those were still pretty good years for publishing, with lots and lots of niche publishers and legions of independent book sellers. However narrow your audience, if the material was good, you could sooner or later find a publisher for it; and we, the reading public were all the richer for the bounty of small editions that were available to us. It was during the decades before Barnes and Noble went national that some of the greatest American literature found its way from obscurity into print.
At some point, someone in marketing heaven came up with the brilliant idea of planned "remainders." A "remainder" is a book that remains in stock after demand at retail has subsided. That book would normally be marked down in price and moved to a sale table. The idea of planned remainders was to deliberately print huge overstocks of a book in the first edition. That way, while the book was still "hot" a large number of copies could be sold at retail; but an even larger number would be expected to sell afterward at the slashed "sacrifice" price. This way far more copies would be sold and by cost-averaging, the expense of publishing, advertising and distributing the volume would be more than handsomely offset by the return. This practice inevitably became so common that we now have a situation where sale books sometimes seem to outnumber full priced ones at booksellers, and only the pound-foolish run out and buy a new release at the cover price.
It has been brought to my attention that perhaps I should precede this diary with the following disclaimer which I already inserted further into the text. I am an active and vocal member of the Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth, and have been for almost six years.
I think most readers may have heard that a proposal for the largest Walmart store in Vermont, to be located in St. Albans, has been wending its way through the permit system for a number of years, steadfastly opposed by several entities, including a lion-hearted band of Franklin County residents, The Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth, and the owners of Hudak Farm. They have been joined and supported in this historic challenge by the Vermont Natural Resource Council. What you may not know is that the St. Albans Walmart struggle represents the longest continuous opposition to a store on a single site. This dubious distinction came to light recently through the good offices of the Boston Globe who did a pretty fair job of chronicling the epic struggle to date. A smaller Walmart was first propsed for the site in 1993, but later denied an Act 250 permit by the Supreme Court of Vermont.
Some salient points that may have been buried in the length of the article bear repeating (after the fold)...
250-1
55-1
