How Wal-Mart, Google and Other Corporate Giants Are Trying to Trick Progressive Consumers

The signature phrase of America's booming good food movement has been expanded from "organic" to "local and sustainable."

Good! The phrase suggests great quality, strong environmental stewardship and a commitment to keeping our food dollars in the local economy. If you support the local-economies movement, as I do, no doubt you'll be thrilled to hear that a new, local food store is coming soon to your neighborhood. In fact, it's even named Neighborhood Market.

Only, it's not. It's a Wal-Mart. Yes, the $400-billion-a-year retail behemoth, with 2 million employees laboring in 8,500 stores spread around the globe, now is putting on a "local" mask. The giant is promising to buy 9 percent of the produce it'll sell from local farmers. Big whoopie. This means that 91 percent of the foodstuffs offered in its "Neighborhood" chain will come from Wayawayland. Wal-Mart is to local what near beer is to beer. Near beer is not beer ... and Wal-Mart is not local.

But even the 9 percent number is a deceit, for Wal-Mart says that it defines "local" as grown in the same state. Excuse me, but in California, Florida, Texas and other such sizable states, that can be a mighty long truck-haul away.

Republicans, Agribusiness & Wall Street Trying to Stop California from Reducing Greenhouse Gas Pollution

Darren Goode reported yesterday at The Hill's Energy Blog that, "California  has become the primary battleground for environmental activists this election cycle thanks to a ballot initiative that would stymie a first-in-the-nation cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

"The Proposition 23 measure would suspend California's global warming law - which calls for a reduction in emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020 - unless the state's unemployment rate drops below 5.5 percent. Currently, the state's unemployment rate is 12.4 percent, the third highest in the nation."

The Wall Street Journal editorial board indicated in today's paper that, "Proposition 23 is the number one national target of the green movement this election year. With the failure of cap and tax in Congress, the greens are trying to hold onto this remnant of their anticarbon crusade. Both sides are spending heavily, and the polls show a close vote."

The Journal editorial concluded by saying, "Proposition 23 faces an uphill fight against green moneyed interests, but its passage would give California a regulatory reprieve and save tens of thousands of jobs. If it fails, Nevadans and Chinese will rejoice."

The New York Times editorial board noted today that, "Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate - including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning - accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.

"The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy."

The Times added that, "Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they've disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line."