Meet Moses of the Anti-Wal-Mart Movement

Bill Katovsky: Meet Moses of the Anti-Wal-Mart Movement:
Al Norman, a.k.a. "Mr. Sprawl-Busters" Bill Katovsky
Wed May 31, 5:45 AM ET



Small-town America is turning against America's largest retailer. Two weeks ago, the tiny California community of Hercules, which is located 25 miles northeast of San Francisco*, rejected Wal-Mart's bid to open a 100,000-square-foot store on specially zoned land.

Hercules, despite its name, has become yet another David in the localized battle against the commercial Goliath. Following the release of several anti-Wal-Mart film documentaries and books, concerned citizens are better educated that bigger is not necessarily better in their own backyard.

While Wal-Mart started out as a red-state retailer by adhering to founder Sam Walton's strategic vision of putting "good-sized discount stores into little one-horse towns which everybody else was ignoring," the chain now sees green in the more densely populated blue states. In California alone, it plans to build forty more Supercenters over the next four years. That pace represents nearly one new Supercenter going up each month.

Close to 7.5 cents of every retail dollar spent in this country is funneled into Wal-Mart's coffers. Its revenues constitute 2.5 percent of America's GNP. The retail chain helps drive the U.S. economy. In fact, Wal-Mart used to promote "Buy American!" in its advertising and sales promotions before switching over to "Always Low Prices." Then again, eighty percent of Wal-Mart's 6,000 suppliers and factories are located in China.

Despite Wal-Mart's reputation as a bellwether for national consumer-spending habits, it's also become an ever-increasing target of litigation, protests, and controversy. It's been a defendant in a number of class-action lawsuits, ranging from sexual discrimination to mistreatment of its underpaid, largely unskilled workforce.

Because Wal-Mart can't always shake off the negative publicity as the big-box bully from Bentonville, Arkansas, it recently hopped on the organic and eco-bandwagon. Cynics say this is just good business, and not at all reflective of a benevolent social conscience of a company which owns 5,350 stores worldwide.

On the political front, Wal-Mart gives more money to Republican candidates than any other company. According to Bloomberg News, "Wal-Mart's political action committee, the biggest company PAC, gave Republicans 81 percent of its $1.3 million in donations in the past two years."

"Quarantine Wal-Mart"

On June 2, Wal-Mart will come up against another foe. On this day, a National Day of Action called "Quarantine Wal-Mart" will be held at the same time that the CEO of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, is convening the company's annual shareholders meeting.

The organizers behind this grass-roots rebellion are Jobs With Justice and the Ruckus Society. According to the press release, "thousands of concerned citizens from the Bureau of Worker Health, dressed in hazmat suits, and armed with yellow caution tape, will be putting Wal-Mart locations across the country under quarantine."

The goal of this coordinated demonstration -- 25 locations have been chosen -- is to call public attention to the fact that "a majority of Wal-Mart employees have no healthcare while the healthcare options that Wal-Mart does provide are inadequate and full of hidden costs." Additional violations listed on the website are "poverty wages, devastation of local economies, union-busting, global exploitaton, and unshared profits."

Moses of the Anti-Wal-Mart Movement

The consumer backlash against big-box stores is a relatively new phenomenon.

The trend actually began with one man in the early '90s. Al Norman is the visionary patriarch of the anti-Wal-Mart movement.

In 1993, Wal-Mart wanted to open a new store in his hometown -- Greenfield, Massachusetts, which is a down-on-its-luck former tool-and-die factory town in the western part of the state. At first, Norman's reaction was, "Why? Who cares? It's just a place to get cheap underwear." But with his background in state and local politics as a media strategist, he decided to put his electoral savvy to use by spearheading a Greenfield zoning ballot initiative. And despite by being outspent by a factor of six, they shot down Wal-Mart. The press loved the story of the victorious underdog. It was one of the first times that a community successfully challenged Wal-Mart.

To this day, Greenfield is without a Wal-Mart. Norman plans to keep it that way.

He works out of his home in Greenfield, where he coordinates local opposition against Wal-Mart and other huge retail chains like Home Depot. His one-man lobbying enterprise goes by the name of Sprawl-Busters, and his website is an excellent online library; you can read about the nearly 300 communities which have stood up to the big chains. He is the author of Slam Dunking Wal-Mart! and The Case Against Wal-Mart. Forbes called him "Wal-Mart's #1 enemy.

I had interviewed Norman for my new book, Patriots Act: Voices of Dissent and the Risk of Speaking Out. Regrettably, my publisher, Lyons Press, yanked Norman's chapter only one week before the book was shipped off to the printer. Lyons wanted to stay on Wal-Mart's good side, because it publishes a wide range of books that it wanted the chain to carry. The publisher didn't want to risk a boycott of all its titles.

In many ways, I felt stung by the irony here. The author of an oral history about freedom of expression getting censored by his own publisher? But, at that late date, I meekly went along with the publisher's decision because I still wanted my book to get printed. By the way, Lyons Press's concern might have had legitimate merit. For example, Wal-Mart won't stock the national bestseller, Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book).

Speaking Out: The Lifeblood of Democracy

Here then, on the Huffington Post, are excerpts from the missing Al Norman chapter that had originally appeared in Patriots Act.

But first, I would like to address something critical about our political system. One should never underestimate the power of a single individual exercising his or her right to dissent in a democracy, even when that voice emerges from the most unlikely corner.

If you consider some of the voices in this country which are making a difference by constructively changing the tenor of the national debate, they're not coming from gutless politicians or the complacent mainstream media. It's coming from average Americans like Al Norman, music student Jean Rohe, who confronted Senator John McCain at the New School graduation ceremony during her commencement address, anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, or Marine Reserve Major Paul Hackett who returned from Iraq and decided to run for Congress as an anti-Bush fighting Democrat ("I called the president a sonofabitch," Hackett told me in his interview for Patriots Act, "and the media just went nuts. But I was willing to put my life on the line for him. And that's as good as it gets." )

These ordinary Americans are extraordinary examples of democracy in action, liberated from the money-sucking gravitational pull of special-interest politics. Our country is fortunate to have determined citizens like Al, Jean, Cindy, and Paul who emerge from anonymity and become catalysts for social, economic, and political change.

Their speaking out is a wake-up call. It's like a national alarm clock going off, dislodging us from our own political slumber. They are role models for others to follow. What is unleashed is a chain reaction of participatory democracy -- healthy, vital, and nourishing for the soul of our country.

Now, the interview...

Al Norman aka "Mr. Sprawl-Busters"

"We won that Greenfield vote in '93 by a very narrow margin. There were two ballot questions: we won one by about nine votes; for the second ballot question we won by about sixty votes. Wal-Mart put $35,000 into the fight. We raised about $6,000. Our ballot measure was unusual. In most communities, Wal-Mart would roll right in. There wouldn't be any opposition. So number one, it was a little unusual to have a small town fighting them. Number two, it was unusual to have a ballot question. Usually it's a zoning-board vote.

"At the time, there were only a handful of Wal-Marts in Massachusetts. In fact, we had to do research to find out who they were. The West Coast and East Coast were the last to be colonized by Wal-Mart. So we really didn't have much information about them. There was one Wal-Mart about twenty miles north of us in New Hampshire. I went up there just to do a little reconnaissance, to walk around the store. It was funny because I assumed they would be watching me like a hawk, knowing I was opposing them in a town twenty miles to the south. But of course, that was ridiculous. They wouldn't have known who I was and they probably couldn't have cared less. I bought a bag of popcorn, which is the only thing I've ever bought at a Wal-Mart, but the female cashier couldn't make correct change for me because her cash register was locked and she couldn't get access to it as a worker. Wal-Mart was afraid that workers would rip them off. She couldn't break my five. I found myself waiting for this woman to get permission to open up her cash register. I'm standing there with a five dollar bill and a bag of popcorn wanting to leave. Finally I just said, 'You take the popcorn. I'm leaving.'

"After we had this victory in Greenfield. my phone started ringing. Our victory was carried in The New York Times. I had a friend in Bangladesh who heard about it on CNN. It went around the world. People heard about this little town in New England that beat Wal-Mart. It was a national news story. Reporters wanted to know, 'How did you beat them? What did you do?'

"Since so many people were contacting me and asking me for advice and recommendations, I started publishing a newsletter called 'The Sprawl-Busters Alert.' This was '94, '95. I started meeting with people from various groups, like the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Commercial Workers Organizations contacted me. By 1997, my Sprawl-Busters.com website was up and running, and it became just an amazing tool both for importing and exporting information. I was able to search for articles on the Internet about Wal-Mart and Home Depot battles that otherwise I would never have learned about.

"I've been funding Sprawl-Busters myself. My day job is executive director of Mass Home Care, a network of thirty non-profit groups that help keep older people and the disabled living at home in the least restrictive environment. I've been their lobbyist and public policy person for the past twenty years. I just approached Sprawl-Busters as something I didn't want to think of as a job. I didn't want to structure it as a corporation. I just wanted it to be a grass-roots network that had an organic light to it and was not really bound up in conventional forms of doing business. Oh, when I travel, I don't pay out of my own pocket. If I go to Miami to battle Home Depot, I use the fee to pay for the cost of my overhead -- which is not great because this is a small operation.

"I generally speak with three different communities a day. The intensity has picked up in the last couple years. If I go to my e-mail in the evening I will probably get about five to six e-mail inquiries. Some of them might be duplicates from earlier towns. But there is usually one new community contacting me every evening."

Talking to the Wal

"A friend of mine made a film about two towns: Greenfield and Orange, Massachusetts, which has a Wal-Mart in the area. I helped him write it. It's called Talking to the Wal. It dealt with our Greenfield battle. The film covers a ten-year period. It shows Greenfield's experience and it then goes to Orange, which is 120 miles to the east. It shows jewelry and hardware stores which just went out of business, not just because Wal-Mart put them out of business but because there was no critical mass of business left in the downtown any more.

"One of the reasons downtowns have worked traditionally is that they were a cluster of businesses. You had the grocery store and the hardware store and the jewelry store and the gift store. And they all created some synergy with each other. They brought traffic downtown and people would travel from store to store. But this hardware store guy in Orange, for example, said, 'I looked out on the street and there were no other businesses to help me survive so I shut down.' He was willing to stay until the bitter end. But he had no customers left because there were no other collateral stores around.

"Interestingly, there are people in Greenfield who still want a Wal-Mart. Because in a low-income area, you're going to have plenty of people who feel like they have no option but to shop at Wal-Mart. In the late '90s, regional discount chains started to die off in New England because Wal-Mart shoppers put them under.

"The free market depends on a diversity of players of relatively equal power. We've always had to be on the lookout for large conglomerates taking over the marketplace -- whether it was railroads or oil companies or software companies. The same is true of the retail industry. On the macro level, people say that Wal-Mart only controls thirteen percent of the retail economy, which is pretty frightening.

"And in the meantime, Wal-Mart is draining the country's manufacturing capacity. Wal-Mart puts pressure on its vendors and manufacturers to provide cheaper and cheaper merchandise. This has forced those companies to look at ways to reduce labor costs, which has meant going to Mexico, the Caribbean, or Asia. American companies like Black & Decker or Fruit of the Loom or Rubbermaid or Levi Strauss don't make their products in America anymore. They have sourced them out to Asian sweatshops.

"Wal-Mart is now importing about $18 billion worth of Chinese goods a year. Seventy percent of the textiles that they sell in their store come from China. Wal-Mart is absolutely addicted to Chinese takeout. You don't hear Wal-Mart's flag-waving, bringing-it-home-to-the-USA sales pitch any more. China-Mart would be a more appropriate name for the company. Wal-Mart is responsible for about ten percent of our annual trade deficit with China."

"A Nation of Baggers and Clerks"

"Over the past few years, however, Wal-Mart has been eaten away at the edges. There are news stories of Wal-Mart workers suing them. Big class-action lawsuits on sex discrimination, gender discrimination, off-the-clock work. In other words, their own people are rebelling against them.

"I think Americans are starting to realize that this is a company that has misled Americans into believing that they represent prosperity and job growth, and in fact, it's just the opposite. They are not a form of economic development. They're a form of economic displacement.

"Wal-Mart creates a cycle of poverty in which there is a circular relationship between the people who work for Wal-Mart and the people who shop at Wal-Mart. So it's a loop.

"One of the black leaders in Inglewood, California, referred to Wal-Mart as a plantation. And yes, Wal-Mart has become emblematic of the plantation mentality in America where we are creating a part-time, low-wage, and low-benefits workforce.

"We are becoming a nation of baggers and clerks who lack job skills to make anything, who aren't particularly good at selling things, who are just used to put products on shelves and let consumers buy them. That is what we are preparing our teenagers and senior citizens to do. They fill that niche to become the stopgap lowest common denominator of employment in this country.

"These big chains are a chain of exploitation. Every link along the chain, someone is being exploited. From the sweatshops in China to the sales floors in America, every link is forged in exploitation.

"Additionally, the anti-trust legislation in this country has been immobilized by the large business interests. It's incredibly difficult. The Bush administration certainly benefited from contributions from Wal-Mart and Home Depot. That's why I tell people that all these battles are local. All zoning is local. That's where you can really make a difference. You can change your zoning codes. You can get better people elected. Get citizens' groups up and running to challenge them, to slow them down.

"Wal-Mart has had some pretty unpleasant things to say about me. They think I'm trying to make money off them, because they don't understand any other motivation except money. Which is why I borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde who said, 'A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.' That is Wal-Mart. They know the price of everything. But they have no sense of the value of anything. They have a very narrow culture. It is very much focused on money, on selling things and making profits.

"Wal-Mart's culture works because it convinces its long-term workers that they are getting somewhere in life. But half of these workers quit every year, which means every two years Wal-Mart has an entirely new work force. So that is the pattern. You have a lot of people who are marginally employed, yet Wal-Mart says something like, 'If Wal-Mart weren't around, these people wouldn't be working.'

"Sometimes the average wage in Wal-Mart is $9.50 per hour. Sometimes it's $10.00. It varies. A Supercenter is almost run like a military operation: very tightly controlled, with managers, assistant managers, and coaches. It's a very intimidating atmosphere. If workers are screwing up, they get coached. Comments get in their records so they really have to watch themselves very carefully. If there's anything so much as a breath about a union, they'll be out the door.

"They say that Wal-Mart has an open-door policy. It's true: if you open your mouth, you're out the door. One group of workers in Jacksonville, Texas, tried to set up a union at Wal-Mart. It was a group of meat cutters. When they passed the union, Wal-Mart shifted to pre-packaged meat and they didn't need the meat cutters any more."

How Free is the Free Market?

"Some of my critics say things like, 'You're trying to take away the people's right to shop.' I keep pointing out to them, 'I'm not telling you where to shop. I'm talking about land-use policy. You've got 3,500 Wal-Marts to shop at. I'm not telling you that you can't shop there. I'm saying that maybe stores that big and located on the edge of town are not good.' The critics then repeat a few stock phrases like, 'I have a right to shop anywhere I want. What's your problem with the free market?' I answer, 'My problem is I like it too much. Because I believe in competition. And Wal-Mart is not the beginning of competition. It's the end of competition.' People don't understand that. They think that the normal process of the free market is that some companies will get big and some companies will go out of business. But my point is that we should be concerned when we see thousands of businesses going under and the whole class of small merchants being decimated. Because those people are the backbone of the local economy and they are more productive. They hire more people per thousand dollars of sales. And they give more than money back to the local economy because they are not shipping it off to headquarters or for stockholders.

"We've been told that to be a good American you have to be a good consumer. That's sad. The old message was be a producer. Produce something for your economy. Now it's just buy something,. And what we are buying is foreign-made. But yeah, there is a certain intimidation about speaking out like I do. In the last couple of years, some people in my hometown have attacked me personally. I've been called an extremist in a newspaper column. One person compared me to a terrorist.

"The big empire Wal-Mart has yet to conquer is the international division. That is the one area that's going be the major source of growth. While Wal-Mart is not tapped out in America by any means, the unconquered territories internationally are unbelievable. Wal-Mart only has thirty-nine stores in China. China is going to be the big growth market over the next decade for Wal-Mart. It is American colonialism at its best, even though the Chinese are making products for us."

Being a Political Activist

"When people say to me, 'You should do this type of activism,' or 'You should do that type...' I usually find myself saying, 'Yeah. Do both. Do all of them.' I think it's great when schoolteachers and priests and middle-American people stand up in public hearings and say that they don't want a Wal-Mart in their community. I take the attitude that all of this activity is positive.

"I'm very much a believer in inside and outside politics. I've done a lot of inside playing. I've been involved in political campaigns. I've worked with state government people. All roads can lead to a higher level. My daughter was arrested in Oakland about two years ago. She was just standing on the street as part of a peace demonstration. I was proud of her. Oh, absolutely. Made me feel really good that she was out there, that she cared enough about the war in Iraq to be out there. I thought that was great. I wish more people would do that. All roads can lead to a higher level. We just have to make people aware of the harm that is being done in their name.

"We need to strip away the phony patriotism of Wal-Mart and Home Depot and these corporations. You know, when Wal-Mart said, 'Bringing it home to the U.S.,' they were talking about bringing China home. Because the only way to win is in the aisles. If we can keep people out of the aisles, Wal-Mart is finished. And that is obviously a statement. You have to educate people. You have to educate before you activate.

"Thematically for me, the story of my adult life -- whether it was opposing the Vietnam War, or fighting nuclear power plants in the '70s, or going against Wal-Mart -- has always been not to accept the explanation of the government and not to see yourself as a creature of your government. You need to ask important questions about what's really going on.

"Right after 9/11, one of the first things that President Bush said was,'We should all get back to our normal lives and go shopping.' You know, I'm thinking, 'Wait a minute. Is that the highest level of civic responsibility? To go to a mall?'

"We need to question how we use our land, how we grow our food, what our communities are going to look like to maintain their unique sense of place, and the sense of how people like to think about their hometowns as being special."


Correction: The distance is 25 miles, not 50. Back



Copyright © 2006 HuffingtonPost.com. All rights reserved. The information contained in Huffington Post commentary may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without prior written authority of huffingtonpost.com.


Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.