Snow Crash Coming True Dept.: Wal- Mart to Become a Sovereign Nation???
from the New York Times

INGLEWOOD, Calif., April 2 - As Wal-Mart continues its march across the American landscape, this Los Angeles suburb of 112,000 people is the latest testing ground for the company's exercise of political and marketing muscle.

Inglewood voters go to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to turn over 60 acres of barren concrete adjacent to the Hollywood Park racetrack to Wal-Mart to create a megastore and a collection of chain shops and restaurants.

The ballot initiative is sponsored by Wal-Mart, which collected more than 10,000 signatures to put the question to voters after the Inglewood City Council blocked the proposed development last year, citing environmental, traffic, labor, public safety and economic concerns.

While Wal-Mart has turned to the ballot in a number of cities and towns to win the right to build its giant emporiums, the Inglewood initiative is significantly different. The proposal would essentially exempt Wal-Mart from all of Inglewood's planning, zoning and environmental regulations, creating a city-within-a-city subject only to its own rules. Wal-Mart has hired an advertising and public relations firm to market the initiative and is spending more than $1 million to support the measure, known as initiative 04-A.

As crazywriterinla will attest, Inglewood is not a very pretty place. It is most famous for LAX, the Great Western Forum and not much else. Although voters in this city are only voting to let Mega- Lo- Wal- Mart build a huge development which would "spruce up" the community, readers of Neal Stephenson's eerily prescient novel "Snow Crash" may be interested at the implications of allowing Wal- Mart to be exempted from Inglewood's laws. (For those athenaeumers who may not have read "Snow Crash" [and if you have not, please read it forthwith], this cyberpunk novel predicts a future where the government is pretty much nonexistent/ archaic and corporations are their own sovereign nations.) I will continue to follow the developments in this story as the Inglewood voters vote on what may turn out to be one of the most important ballot questions of the early 21st century.

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Stymied by Politicians, Wal-Mart Turns to Voters
By JOHN M. BRODER

INGLEWOOD, Calif., April 2 - As Wal-Mart continues its march across the American landscape, this Los Angeles suburb of 112,000 people is the latest testing ground for the company's exercise of political and marketing muscle.

Inglewood voters go to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to turn over 60 acres of barren concrete adjacent to the Hollywood Park racetrack to Wal-Mart to create a megastore and a collection of chain shops and restaurants.

The ballot initiative is sponsored by Wal-Mart, which collected more than 10,000 signatures to put the question to voters after the Inglewood City Council blocked the proposed development last year, citing environmental, traffic, labor, public safety and economic concerns.

While Wal-Mart has turned to the ballot in a number of cities and towns to win the right to build its giant emporiums, the Inglewood initiative is significantly different. The proposal would essentially exempt Wal-Mart from all of Inglewood's planning, zoning and environmental regulations, creating a city-within-a-city subject only to its own rules. Wal-Mart has hired an advertising and public relations firm to market the initiative and is spending more than $1 million to support the measure, known as initiative 04-A.

The company is blanketing the community, which is roughly half African-American and half Latino, with mailers and telephone calls and is broadcasting advertisements on television stations with black and Latino audiences.

Company officials say that Wal-Mart adopted this aggressive new tactic only after it became clear that Inglewood officials - backed by allies in organized labor, church groups and community organizations - would never approve the complex. Wal-Mart is strongly anti-union.

"We were told, basically, `Don't waste your time,' " said Peter Kanelos, the Southern California coordinator for Wal-Mart's community affairs division.

"But these groups are not representative of the community," he said. "Organized labor is attempting to bully Wal-Mart and its customers. If organized labor and those elected officials they put into power think they're going to attack Wal-Mart, then they better expect Wal-Mart to fight back."

The project's opponents say that Wal-Mart is the one doing the bullying. They noted that the company paid signature gatherers for the ballot initiative more than it pays its average clerk.

And they say that Inglewood will be a test case. If the initiative succeeds here, they say, it will become a model for Wal-Mart sovereignty across the nation and around the globe.

"This is the first time in the country they've tried to do something this extreme," said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, leader of the Coalition for a Better Inglewood, a group formed to fight the Wal-Mart project. "They are driving a Mack truck through California land use, planning and environmental law and trying to create a Wal-Mart government on this 60-acre site. If they succeed in doing this, it will be their blueprint."

Ms. Janis-Aparicio's coalition expects to spend about $35,000 to oppose the project. The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor will add about $125,000 and provide logistical aid in the form of phone banks and precinct walkers.

They are joined by many of the merchants along Inglewood's downtrodden Market Street, whose store windows display signs reading: "Save Our Community From Wal-Mart. No on 4A."

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has announced plans to build 40 supercenters in California over the next five years, combining its usual assortment of goods with a full line of groceries. California's grocery workers and supermarket chains are trying to slow or stop the company's expansion. They have enlisted the support of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Nation of Islam and a number of elected officials and community groups opposed to Wal-Mart's employment practices and its impact on local merchants.

Voters in San Marcos, in northern San Diego County, last month rebuffed Wal-Mart's effort to open a second store in the community. But citizens of Contra Costa County, in the San Francisco Bay area, voted by a large margin last month to repeal a council-passed ordinance banning construction of retail behemoths.

Wal-Mart's first California supercenter opened in La Quinta, a desert community about 100 miles east of Los Angeles. Two more are scheduled to open soon in the Palm Springs area.

The groups opposed to the Inglewood development have already gone to state court to try to block the project, but a judge ruled that any legal challenge would have to await the outcome of the April 6 vote. Ms. Janis-Aparicio said that if the measure is approved, the coalition will return to court immediately.

A December opinion from the state attorney general indicates that the opponents may be on solid ground.

The attorney general's letter to the Inglewood City Council states that while the initiative process may be used to adopt land-use and planning measures, the ballot cannot be used to usurp powers granted to elected bodies, like issuing building permits. The attorney general also said the initiative might be in conflict with state laws governing subdivisions and the environment.

The initiative, which can pass by a simple majority vote, includes a provision requiring a two-thirds vote of the public to alter any of the terms of the development project. The attorney general said that provision also appeared to conflict with state law.

Mr. Kanelos, the Wal-Mart official, said that the 71-page initiative spells out the project in minute detail, including building materials, traffic flows, landscaping and even plumbing fixtures. Each of these provisions "meets or exceeds every local and state building and environmental requirement," he said.

All four members of the Inglewood City Council oppose the project, along with the area's congresswoman and state assemblyman. One Inglewood council member, Curren D. Price Jr., who is a lawyer and expert on community development, said he had researched Wal-Mart's plans across the country and had not found a single instance in which the company sought such broad exemption from local control.

"That's what's so offensive," Mr. Price said.

"We're talking about 60 acres and an area covering 17 football fields and they don't want to have any give and take on how this thing rolls out," he said.

The only city official vocally supporting the project is the mayor, Roosevelt F. Dorn. He said the complex would bring more than 1,000 new permanent jobs, add $3 million to $5 million a year to the distressed city's tax base and provide a revenue stream to finance as much as $100 million in new bonds. "We're talking about a new police station, a new community and cultural center, a new park in District 4, upgrades for every park and recreation area in Inglewood," Mr. Dorn said. "As far as I'm concerned, it's a no-brainer."

David Karjanen, research coordinator at the Center on Policy Initiatives, a nonprofit group in San Diego that studies the impact of development on low- and moderate-income families, said he had studied Wal-Mart's efforts to win approval for projects across the nation and found the Inglewood case to be unique in the breadth of the exemption it would win from local land-use planning.

"If this succeeds in Inglewood, it will set a precedent and send a message to developers who have an unpalatable project," Dr. Karjanen said. "It will open the door for others, not just Wal-Mart, and we can expect to see this happen across California and elsewhere."

posted by santo26 | 11:06 AM