When Giants Fall

SUBHEAD: If you think Walmart will survive what’s killing other retail generally, you’re wrong.

By James Kunstler on 22 May 2020 for Kunstler.com -
(https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/when-giants-fall/)


Image above: "Wal*Mart" pun art by Mark Tichenor. From (https://www.redhen.ca/mal_wart.htm).

It was only a few decades ago that Walmart entered the pantheon of American icons, joining motherhood, apple pie, and baseball on the highest tier of the altar.

The people were entranced by this behemoth cornucopia of unbelievably cheap stuff packaged in gargantuan quantities. It was something like their participation trophy for the sheer luck of being born in this exceptional land, or having valiantly clawed their way in from wretched places near and far — where, increasingly, the mighty stream of magically cheap stuff was manufactured.

The evolving psychology of Walmart-ism had a strangely self-destructive aura about it. Like cargo cultists waiting on a jungle mountaintop, small town Americans prayed and importuned the gods of commerce to bring them a Walmart.

Historians of the future, pan-frying ‘possum cutlets over their campfires, will marvel at the potency of their ancestors’ prayers.

Every little burg in the USA eventually saw a Walmart UFO land in the cornfield or cow-pasture on the edge of town. Like the space invaders of sci-fi filmdom, Walmart quickly killed off everything else of economic worth around it, and eventually the towns themselves.

And that was where things stood as the long emergency commenced in the winter of early 2020, along with the Covid-19 corona virus riding shotgun on the hearse-wagon it rolled in on.

We’re in a liminal, transitional moment of history, like beach-goers gawking at the glassy-green curve of a great wave in the throes of breaking. Such mesmerizing beauty!

Alas, most people can’t surf. It looks easy on TV, but you’d be surprised at the conditioning it takes, and Americans are way, way out of condition. (All those tattoos don’t give you an ounce of extra mojo.)

And so, in this liminal moment, the people still trudge dutifully to the Walmarts with their dwindling reserves of cash money to get stuff, going through all the devotions that we took for granted before the wave welled up and threatened to break over us.

Which is happening. Despite all the fake-heroic blather from the Federal Reserve, from Nancy Pelosi, from Mr. Trump and Mr. Mnuchin — from everybody in charge, to be really fair — and in the immortal words of another recent president — this sucker is going down. Specifically, what’s going down is the aggregate of transactions we call “the economy.”

Meanwhile, the people in charge struggle to prop up the mere financial indexes that supposedly represent economic activity, but more and more just look like a shadow play on the wall of some special slum where the street-corner economists peddle their crack. 

Eventually, the people don’t even have money for the crack, and to make matters worse, whatever money actually remains on the street is worthless.

The wave is breaking now, and a lot of things will be smashed under it — are getting smashed as you read. As in any extinction event, it will be the smaller organisms that survive and eventually thrive and that’s how it will go in the next edition of America, whether we remain states united or find ourselves organized differently.

Accordingly, the giants must fall. When the communities of America rebuild, it will be the thousands of small activities that matter, because they will entail the rebuilding of social capital as well as exchanges that amount to business. 

Social capital is exactly what Walmart and things like it killed in every community from sea to shining sea. People stopped doing business with their neighbors. It took a cataclysm for them to finally notice.

If you think Walmart will survive the same cataclysm that’s killing chain-store retail generally, you’re going to be disappointed.

Everything about it is over and done, including the Happy Motoring adjunct that allowed the cargo-cultists to haul their booty those many miles home. (And, ironically, it wasn’t the oil issue that determined this, but the end of the financing system that allowed Americans to buy their cars on installment loans, when it ran out of credit-worthy borrowers.)

Amazon will be the last giant standing perhaps, but it will go down, too, eventually, on its ridiculous business model, which depends utterly on a doomed trucking system. It will be like the last dinosaur roaring at the dimming sun — while the little proto-mammals skitter to their hidey-holes beneath it.

One thing remains constant: human beings are very adept and resourceful at supplying each other’s needs, which is what business amounts to. Young people, freed from the fate of becoming serfs to corporate giants, can start right now at least imagining what they can do to be useful to others in exchange for a livelihood.

The earnest and energetic will find a way to do that at a scale that makes sense when a new order emerges from the wreckage. After a while, it won’t matter much what any government thinks about it, either. 

Like all the other giants, it will fall, too.
.

Battle of the Behemoths

SUBHEAD: And the transition will get underway with a speed that will make your head spin.

By James Kunstler on 11 August 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/battle-of-the-behemoths/)


Image above: The ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ development process has begun for a 2020 release. From (http://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3427859/godzilla-vs-kong-development-process-begun-first-details/).

As the empire deliquesces into a fetid slurry of economic failure, we stand ankle deep in the rising swamp waters witnessing the futile battle of the giants, Walmart and Amazon.

Neil Howe, co-author of The Fourth Turning, wrote this week that “[t]he Amazon-Walmart rivalry will determine the future of retail.”

Well, it seems that way, perhaps, and I understand why a lot of people would imagine it, but I would draw some different conclusions. What we’re seeing is more like the battle between Godzilla and King Kong, two freaks of nature produced by a toxic culture, fixing to finish each other off.

The condition that will flavor events going forward is scale. Everything organized at the giant scale is going to fail. We have made all the systems of daily life too large and they will not function in the long emergency (and the fourth turning), an age characterized by universal contraction.

This is true of corporations, institutions, schools, hospitals, farms, governments, virtually all organized enterprise. Retail is currently just the most visible example at the moment, since it is a commercial battleground that doesn’t enjoy public subsidies.

The organisms on that field are exquisitely sensitive to economic reality, and the salient reality these days is the impoverishment of their customers, the former middle class.

This has been a sensational year for retail failure so far with a record number of brick-and-mortar store closings. But it is hardly due solely to Internet shopping. The nation was vastly over-stored by big chain operations.

Their replication was based on a suicidal business model that demanded constant expansion, and was nourished by a regime of ultra-low interest rates promulgated by the Federal Reserve (and its cheerleaders in the academic econ departments).

The goal of the business model was to enrich the executives and shareholders as rapidly as possible, not to build sustainable enterprise.

As the companies march off the cliff of bankruptcy, these individuals will be left with enormous fortunes — and the American landscape will be left with empty, flat-roofed, throwaway buildings unsuited to adaptive re-use. Eventually, the empty Walmarts will be among them.

Just about everybody yakking in the public arena assumes that commerce will just migrate to the web. Think again. What you’re seeing now is a very short term aberration, the terminal expression of the cheap oil economy that is fumbling to a close.

Apart from Amazon’s failure so far to ever show a corporate profit, Internet shopping requires every purchase to make a journey in a truck to the customer.

In theory, it might not seem all that different from the Monkey Ward model of a hundred years ago. But things have changed in this land.

We made the unfortunate decision to suburbanize the nation, and now we’re stuck with the results: a living arrangement that can’t be serviced or maintained going forward, a living arrangement with no future.

This includes the home delivery of every product under sun to every farflung housing subdivision from Rancho Cucamonga to Hackensack.

Of course, the Big Box model, like Walmart, has also recruited every householder in his or her SUV into the company’s distribution network, and that’s going to become a big problem, too, as the beleaguered middle-class finds itself incrementally foreclosed from Happy Motoring and sinking into conditions of overt peonage.

The actual destination of retail in America is to be severely downscaled and reorganized locally.

Main Street will be the new mall, and it will be a whole lot less glitzy than the failed gallerias of yore, but it will represent a range of activities that will put a lot of people back to work at the community level. It will necessarily entail the rebuilding of local and regional wholesale networks and means of distribution that don’t require trucking.

If you think we’re just going to switch the trucking industry over to electric vehicles or engines that run on bio-fuels, hydrogen, compressed air, or natural gas, you will be disappointed. Ain’t going to happen.

We’re going to have to come up with something else, starting with the basic idea of the walkable community. This implies that we’re going to have to revive the existing towns and small cities that fit that description.

And it also implies that a great deal of American suburbia will have to be abandoned. The capital will not be there to reform it.

In any case, commerce later on in this century is not going to be anything like the Blue Light Special orgy of recent decades. And the transition will get underway with a speed that will make your head spin.

.

World Logistic Center Warehouse

SUBHEAD: What was once orange groves is is becoming a 2,600 acre consumption machine polluting the land. 

By Emma Foehringer Mechant on 30 May 2017 for Grist-
(http://grist.org/justice/no-ones-breathing-easy-in-the-nations-new-megawarehouse-hub/)


Image above: Like the evolution of the Amazon "fulfillment centers" the World Logistic Center, by Highland Fairview, is evolving into 2,600 acre computer warehouse serviced by autonomous diesel trucks. Click to embiggen. From original article and (http://www.highlandfairview.com/wlc.html).

[IB Publisher's note: Not to worry. This phenomena will likely be a short lived one in the service of human beings. The economies of scale will be reversed as industrial collapse engulfs us, and we can go back to the land after looting these behemoths for scrap metal.]

Just a few decades ago, California’s Inland Empire billed itself as “the Orange Empire” for the citrus orchards that fueled its primary industry. Today, many of those groves are gone, and so is the nickname.

The landlocked region of 4 million people an hour east of Los Angeles now sprouts more enormous warehouses (a billion square feet of them) than fruit trees.

Forty percent of the nation’s consumer goods — iPhones, sneakers, and everything available from Amazon — spend time sitting on those warehouse shelves after coming off ships at nearby ports, awaiting delivery to stores and homes.

What was once a mostly rural region finds itself struggling with a high poverty rate and growing population. Residents are plagued by tremendous traffic and air pollution, which recently earned the region an “F” from the American Lung Association.

Those environmental and health concerns will get much worse, advocates say, if the city of Moreno Valley — a town of 200,000 located in the heart of the Inland Empire — builds the largest warehouse project anywhere in the country.

Tom Thornsley is a 60-year-old urban planner who moved to Moreno Valley in 1998, just as the rural-to-warehouse transformation was beginning.

He thought he had chosen wisely, settling in a gray, ranch-style home that sat near a wide-open space zoned for more homes, not warehouses. “I know better than to look at dirt and not check what it would be,” he says.

But after a developer proposed a project in 2012, city officials rezoned that dirt patch next to Thornsley’s house to make it home to one of the world’s largest warehouse complexes.
 
The World Logistics Center, planned by a company called Highland Fairview, would be the largest such facility in the country, covering 2,610 acres — the size of 700 football fields. It would be more than 25 times bigger than the largest warehouse in the United States, a 98-acre hangar operated in Washington by the airplane manufacturer Boeing.

As a planner, Thornsley doesn’t have a problem with industrial development. He’s worked on commercial buildings since 1989.

But the environmental costs of the World Logistics Center are too much for his community, he says, so he’s become a leader in the effort to stop it — an effort that might hinge on next month’s special city council election.


Moreno Valley residents voiced their opposition to the proposed World Logistics Center in May with this sign. The fields in the backgrounds are a portion of the WLC. Click to embiggen. Photo by Los Angeles Times. From (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-0928-world-logistics-center-20150928-story.html).

The World Logistics Center, which is now known locally by the acronym “WLC,” has turned Moreno Valley politics into a bloodsport. Community organizers and environmental groups have fought — in both city hall and the courtroom — to protect residents from the pollution it would cause and save protected species like peregrine falcons and California golden eagles that live in the nearby San Jacinto Wildlife Area.

Once built, warehouses don’t pollute the way that factories and power plants do. But a project the size of the WLC would be a magnet for truck traffic, spewing exhaust on 69,000 estimated daily vehicle* trips in and out of the complex.

In a struggling region, though, the lure of jobs has proven difficult to overcome, despite the public health and quality of life concerns.

“That’s why people are pressing so hard now,” Thornsley says, “to get somebody elected who’s not going to be, in essence, another developer’s puppet.”

Southern California’s two ports are among the deepest on the West Coast, allowing massive ships to dock at Los Angeles and Long Beach.

More than $360 billion worth of goods from production centers in the Asian Pacific were offloaded there in 2014. Warehouses originally crowded around the ports, until Los Angeles could no longer contain the growth.

Demand for more space at cheaper rates pushed development farther east, and the Inland Empire became the hidden purgatory between production and consumption. Only the Philadelphia area currently has more warehouse space, but projects like the WLC would leave that East Coast hub in the dust. Over the past five years, the logistics industry has delivered a quarter of the new jobs in the region.

But the economic boom carries a heavy environmental toll: Diesel trucks zip along the Inland Empire’s roads, carrying cargo to customers and piping particulates into the air. Winds rushing in from the ocean blow added pollution from L.A. and Orange County, which accumulates in the basin bounded to the north and east by mountains.

That makes the Inland Empire one of the unhealthiest places to live in the country. Air pollution leads to higher risk of heart disease, asthma, bronchitis, cancer, and more.

The South Coast Air Basin — which encompasses parts of Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino, and Los Angeles counties — exceeds federal and state requirements for lead and small particulate matter, which can lodge in the lungs.

San Bernardino and Riverside counties, which make up the Inland Empire, ranked first and second, respectively, among the top 25 most ozone-polluted counties in the American Lung Association’s 2016 air quality report.

Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color bear the brunt of this pollution, because they’re often situated near freeways or become sites for warehouses. Moreno Valley’s population is 18 percent African-American and about 54 percent Latino.

In a community where nearly 20 percent of people live in poverty, it’s easy for a big developer to gain support for a project like the World Logistics Center — especially with the promise of 20,000 permanent jobs and $2.5 billion a year added to the local economy.

But the downside includes 14,000 added diesel truck trips per day and a 44 percent increase in the city’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions.

Many warehouse jobs are also low wage, temporary, and unsafe. The facilities rack up a plethora of safety violations, according to California health and safety inspectors, and workers report high levels of injury and illness.

.

The National Blues

SUBHEAD: People in the new town square i.e. the Walmart, are prematurely old, fattened and sickened.

By James Kunstler on 28 April 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-national-blues/)


Image above: Walmart electric shopping carts lined up with the old, fat and sick. From (http://acidcow.com/pics/74507-walmart-shoppers-are-a-special-breed-of-people-27-pics.html).

While the news waves groan with stories about “America’s Opioid Epidemic” you may discern that there is little effort to actually understand what’s behind it, namely, the fact that life in the United States has become unspeakably depressing, empty, and purposeless for a large class of citizens.

I mean unspeakably literally. If you want evidence of our inability to construct a coherent story about what’s happening in this country, there it is.

I live in a corner of Flyover Red America where you can easily read these conditions on the landscape — the vacant Main Streets, especially after dark, the houses uncared for and decrepitating year by year, the derelict farms with barns falling down, harvesters rusting in the rain, and pastures overgrown with sumacs, the parasitical national chain stores like tumors at the edge of every town.

You can read it in the bodies of the people in the new town square, i.e. the Walmart: people prematurely old, fattened and sickened by bad food made to look and taste irresistible to con those sunk in despair, a deadly consolation for lives otherwise filled by empty hours, trash television, addictive computer games, and their own family melodramas concocted to give some narrative meaning to lives otherwise bereft of event or effort.

These are people who have suffered their economic and social roles in life to be stolen from them.

They do not work at things that matter. They have no prospects for a better life — and, anyway, the sheer notion of that has been reduced to absurd fantasies of Kardashian luxury, i.e. maximum comfort with no purpose other than to enable self-dramatization.

And nothing dramatizes a desperate life like a drug habit. It concentrates the mind, as Samuel Johnson once remarked, like waiting to be hanged.

On display in the news reports about the mystery of the opioid epidemic is America’s neurotic reliance on supposedly scientific “studies.”

Never before in history has a society studied so much and learned so little — which is what happens when you resort to scientizing things that are essentially matters of conduct. It rests on the fallacy that if you compile enough statistics about something, you can control it.

Opioid addiction is just another racket, a personal one, in a culture of racketeering that is edging toward truly epochal failure, for the simple reason that rackets are dishonest, and pervasive dishonesty is at odds with reality, and reality always has the final say.

The eerie thing about reading the landscape of despair is that you can see the ghosts of purpose and meaning in it.

Before 1970, there were at least five factories in my little town, all designed originally to run on the water power (or hydro-electric) of the Battenkill River, a tributary of the nearby Hudson.

The ruins of these enterprises are still there, the red brick walls with the roofs caved in, the twisted chain-link fence that no longer has anything to protect, the broken masonry mill-races.

The ghosts of commerce are also plainly visible in the bones of Main Street. These were businesses owned by people who lived in town, who employed other people who lived in town, who often bought and sold things grown or made in and around town.

Every level of this activity occupied people and gave purpose and meaning to their lives, even if the work associated with it was sometimes hard. Altogether, it formed a rich network of interdependence, of networked human lives and family histories.

What galls me is how casually the country accepts the forces that it has enabled to wreck these relationships. None of the news reports or “studies” done about opioid addiction will challenge or even mention the deadly logic of Walmart and operations like it that systematically destroyed local retail economies (and the lives entailed in them.)

The news media would have you believe that we still value “bargain shopping” above all other social dynamics. In the end, we don’t know what we’re talking about.

I’ve maintained for many years that it will probably require the collapse of the current arrangements for the nation to reacquire a reality-based sense of purpose and meaning. I’m kind of glad to see national chain retail failing, one less major bad thing in American life.

Trump was just a crude symptom of the sore-beset public’s longing for a new disposition of things. He’ll be swept away in the collapse of the rackets, including the real estate racket that he built his career on.

Once the collapse gets underway in earnest, starting with the most toxic racket of all, contemporary finance, there will be a lot to do.

The day may dawn in America when people are too busy to resort to opioids, and actually derive some satisfaction from the busy-ness that occupies them.

.

Scale Implosion

SUBHEAD: The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community

By James Kunstler on 18 February 2013 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/02/scale-implosion.html)


Image above: Suburban Blackhole mashup by Juan Wilson. From (http://www.urbanthinking.org/?cat=3&paged=2).

Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle.

The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won -- for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).

The chain stores won not only because they flung money around -- sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials -- but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry. The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be).

America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: people get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.

The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral.

In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.)

Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving.

Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy.

Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can't print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.

The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies.

At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population 2500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main Street.

The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over

What we're on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality.

The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy. I hope young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to work. It's already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture.

The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community.

On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. We can get that all back, but it won't be a bargain.

.

Walmart to sell unlabeled GMO Corn

SUBHEAD: Monsanto's Bt GMO corn to be sold at Wal-Mart with no indication it is a genetically modified organism.  

By Ethan Huff on 21 February 2012 for Natural News - 
(http://www.naturalnews.com/035029_GM_corn_Walmart_Monsanto.html)

 
Image above: Corporations are people too. Let's see if Texas will execute one of them. From (http://rogerhollander.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/i-refuse-to-believe-that-corporations-are-people-until-texas-executes-one/).

Most of the genetically-modified (GM) corn products forced on American consumers today are hidden in processed foods in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), corn oil, corn starch, and various other corn-based additives.

But soon to be available at a Walmart near you is Monsanto's Bt sweet corn, the agri-giant's first ever GM corn product made available to consumers as whole ears right on the cob in the produce section-- and like with all other GMOs, neither Walmart nor Monsanto has any intention of labeling this new "Frankencorn."

Monsanto first unveiled this new variety of GM sweet corn back in August, which rivals Syngenta's GM sweet corn that has already been on the market in limited form for the past ten years, claiming that it would be available to farmers for planting during Fall 2011.

Now, the corn appears set to make its debut in Walmart stores across the country as early as Summer 2012, unless massive public outcry is able to convince the multinational retailer to scrap the corn, or at least voluntarily label it. This disturbing development comes courtesy of both Food & Water Watch and Sum Of Us, which recently drew attention to the issue by creating petitions against Walmart's potential sale of the corn.

Though Monsanto's GM sweet corn contains three genetically-engineered (GE) traits that have never been used in food eaten directly by people, and that have never been properly tested, Walmart still intends to quietly stock its produce shelves with this phony corn in the very near future.

Whole Foods and Trader Joe's have rejected Monsanto's Bt corn, how about Wal-Mart? In a recent campaign alert (http://sumofus.org/campaigns/walmart-monsanto), Sum Of Us explains that immense consumer pressure has already resulted in commitments from Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe's, and General Mills not to use the new GM corn in any of their products.

But as of the announcement, Walmart has made no such commitment, presumably because of the company's close-knit relationship with Monsanto, a "match made in hell" that Food & Water Watch has humorously dubbed "Walsanto" (https://www.facebook.com/WalsantoWatch?sk=info). But there is still time to stop Walmart's stocking of Monsanto's latest GM poison which, if successful, has the potential to completely destroy the viability of the entire crop.

If Walmart rejects the GM corn, many others will likely follow, which will result in farmers refusing to plant it. It is a simple supply and demand situation, but one that is complicated by the fact that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refuses to mandate that any GMOs be labeled, which means millions of people consume them all the time without knowing it. This is why YOUR help is needed to spread the truth about both GM sweet corn and GMOs in general to your friends, family members, neighbors, and coworkers.

You can also sign this petition by April 1, 2012, asking Walmart not to stock Monsanto's GM sweet corn: http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org Sources for this article include: http://sumofus.org/campaigns/walmart-monsanto http://fooddemocracynow.org http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Public/BuyingNon-GMO/index.cfm

 .