Wal-Mart and Racial Profiling

Not that im a big Wal-mart fan ordinarily, but sometimes someone has to stand up for the monolithic neo-industry. Firedoglake, a blog run by June Hamsher in Ore. was the first to publicize a mapping error on Wal-marts webstore where customers purchasing movies such as Charlie And the Chocolate Factory and Planet of the Apes DVD’s were being recommended other movies such as Martin Luther King/ I have a dream, assassination of MLK. And Unforgivable Blackness, The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

Both of these movies well worth watching, are good choices without Wal-mart saying I should watch them. I have to wonder how it was that people took planet of the apes as a sign of racially based profiling when both the Powder Puff Girls and Home Alone were linked with these films also.

I would be more worried about the homey’s getting upset at the obvious slander of their manhood by associating them with the Powder Puff Girls then by calling them homo erectus. Lets face it the Neanderthals at Wal-Mart wouldn’t understand evolution anymore than human rights if they were given a seminar by both Charles Darwin and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Their mapping had no intentions of offending paying customers because the bottom line at Wal-Mart is, and has always been profit before principle. How the first chance for Wal-Marts highly paid spin doctors to thwart a public backlash from this event, went by without a mightily worded statement is beyond me, but both have an extensive background in politics so maybe inside the government isn’t the only place nepotism abounds.

Even though Wal-Mart has a negative brand association someone must be going there as they continue to experience growth at a phenomenal rate. Arizona, last May, became embroiled in a bitter battle over an Advertisement, paid for by Wal-Mart, accusing certain zoning practices as akin to Nazi book burning, this is something tangible to be repulsed by, not by their corporate greed.

When a Corporation as large as Wal-Mart feels they are beyond social reproach for the things they say, then just as with the Administration that presides over the United States at this moment, they have lost touch with the consumers they have pledged to defend.

We should all be happy that privatized armies in America are illegal, otherwise we might be sending our children off to fight a minimum wage war with no health benefits.