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Wal-Mart destroys. That’s the message at the heart of the documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. It’s rather simple. Wal-Mart destroys. That’s what it’s designed to do, and boy, it does it well. Wal-Mart is our Golem. Wal-Mart is the Godzilla of our market-driven creation, eating Tokyo after Tokyo after Tokyo. Only Wal-Mart ain’t no myth, and it ain’t no movie.

But this flick about Wal-Mart makes a new and well-defended argument against the behemoth. What is this larger claim? Wal-Mart is a form of what could be described as, in the film’s words, contemporary “plantation capitalism.” How so? Wal-Mart is all about profit at the expense of all parts of every kind of individual—shoppers, employees, widget-makers alike. Profit at the expense of small, long-lasting, family businesses. Profit at the expense of safety from crime (trust me: it’s in the movie, and it’s peel-your-eyelids-back messed up). Profit at the expense of the environment. Profit at the expense of drinking water. Profit at the expense of public education. For crying out loud, profit at the expense of fire departments. Profit at the expense of health and healthcare. Profit at the expense of various cultures. Profit at the expense of workers’ rights. Profit at the expense of the world economy. Profit at the expense of public funds.

Using data, shocking firsthand accounts by current and former employees, news reports, and absolutely heartbreaking interviews with private business owners, this film deftly argues that everything is expendable to Wal-Mart except for the exchange of money from your wallet to their registers, and it will do just about anything to make that exchange keep happening. Everything else, in the minds of everyone from the lower management (who are taught to spy on and scare potential union leaders, and who are taught to fudge hours so that people who’ve earned overtime don’t receive overtime) to the board members, everything else can, almost literally, go to hell.

At this point the movie takes a turn, and it shows how the people of Inglewood, California, when told by Wal-Mart that they could go to hell said, “Wait. No. You go to hell.” And then a list of city after city scrolls over the screen, each one a place that told Wal-Mart to do the same and won.

This is a movie about activism. This is a movie with a ray of hope. Since many local governments kowtow to Wal-Mart, we can’t trust elected officials to fight for us. We have to do it ourselves. We have almost no other choice. But that choice? It is simple and it is ours: we can choose to shop at Wal-Mart or we can choose not to shop at Wal-Mart. If we can start hacking away at the only thing that Wal-Mart cares about, then we can win. Only then. But then.

We can choose to put a scary parable to rest. We can choose to click off the monster picture before it ends badly for all the characters. Please take a look and choose for yourself:

First, here’s a little more about Food & Water Watch and why this guide is legit and significant. Food & Water Watch’s goal is to ensure that our food, water, and fish are “safe, accessible and sustainable.” Common sense policies designed for the public good, not for private gain, are at the heart of what drives this organization. It is interested not only in safety, but also in the economic viability of family farmers. To read more about them, click this sentence.

This year’s National Smart Seafood Guide will probably change the way you eat (in good ways, both for you and for small fisheries). To create the guide, Food & Water Watch “analyzed over 100 different fish and shellfish to create the only guide assessing not only the human health and environmental impacts of eating certain seafood, but also the socio-economic impacts on coastal and fishing communities.”

You can peruse the guide by fishing region or by general categories of fish.

But there’s an alarming section of the guide as well. Food & Water Watch calls this list “The Dirty Dozen,” and it includes seafood to be avoided completely because each of them fails multiple criteria used by the organization to evaluate fish.

Editor’s Note: This list is in alphabetical order. This is not a ranking.

• American eel (a.k.a. yellow or silver eel). Why? They are jacked to the max with concentrations of mercury and PCBs.
• Atlantic bluefin tuna. Why? They are chocked full of mercury and PCBs. They are overfished and are reaching levels that would categorize them as facing extinction. They are listed as “critically endangered.”
• Atlantic cod. Why? This is an incredibly overfished fish, and it appears on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. As if that wasn’t disconcerting enough, they are fished using bottom trawls, which can destroy seafloors for other animals.
• Atlantic flatfish (a.k.a. flounder, sole, halibut). Why? They are overfished beyond belief, and their fishing results in a high level of bycatch, despite efforts to reduce it.
• Atlantic and farmed salmon. Why? The farmed variety can have high levels of PCBs, pesticides, and antibiotics. The method of raising farmed salmon creates an environment where diseases can flow from the farm into the wild. Editor’s Note: Farmed salmon is usually labeled “Atlantic salmon.” Fishing wild Atlantic salmon in the U.S. is banned because the fish is facing extinction.
• Caviar. Why? Sturgeon, the fish responsible for the “highest quality” of caviar (I put that in quotes because I think it’s all pretty foul) are overfished because of their slow maturation and impressive lifespan (most will outlive you and me, that is, if we don’t make them extinct).
• Chilean sea bass. Why? Mercury, for one. Illegal fishing, for two. Fishing that has killed several species of endangered birds, for three.
• Imported catfish. Why? Because of how poorly regulated Southeast Asian fish is (both in terms of chemicals and antibiotics), and because the FDA only inspects less than two percent of imported fish.
• Imported King Crab. Why? This one is seriously messed up. Okay, so, even though many of these crabs live in U.S. waters, the U.S. imports a great deal of crab. Why? Get this…. Exporters will sell crab caught in the U.S. to other countries where it can fetch more money, and then we import cheaper crab. Much of this imported crab is caught illegally. (I wrote it before I’ll write it again: less than two percent of imported fish is inspected by the FDA.)
• Imported shrimp. Why? 90 percent of shrimp eaten in the U.S. (I should note that it is the most eaten seafood in the U.S.) is imported (there’s that pesky two percent inspected, again), and those countries exporting to us have poorly regulated working and production conditions.
• Orange roughy. Why? First, they can contain high levels of mercury. Second, they are overfished.
• Shark. Why? I feel like a broken record (or MP3): mercury levels in shark can pose a serious health risk.

Am I saying you shouldn’t eat fish? No. Is Food & Water Watch saying you shouldn’t eat fish? No. In fact, their guidebook will help you pick healthy, safe, and sustainable seafood.

Back in December of 2006, after we opened our P.O. Box in Model City, New York, we received our first piece of junk mail, the kind of junk mail that makes us believe in a god of irony (okay, we don’t actually believe in a god of irony, but, well, sometimes we find it difficult to rule it out): a circular from Wal-Mart. Not just any flyer, mind you. This one promised, amongst other things, “instant savings,” “the season’s best savings,” and “brilliant holiday savings.”

At Progressive Wednesday, we’re all about saving and even savings, but we’re also about taking action to protect our tax dollars, our families, our environment, our safety, and our small businesses. And we could use your help. It’s time to stop the Walton family from harming our country far, far, far more than it helps (since, you know, it essentially doesn’t help us at all). It’s time to downsize Wal-Mart.

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Make Progress:

• Watch
• Stop
• Write
• Donate & Replace
• Sign

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Watch:

To witness an even-handed and wonderfully heartbreaking documentary, check out the PBS Frontline flick Is Wal-Mart Good for America? by clicking here. It’s conveniently broken into five segments, so you don’t even need to watch the whole thing straight through. You can watch ten minutes, then fix a sandwich (we dig Monte Cristos, by the way). You can watch another ten minutes worth, and then buzz your grandma (she misses you and you never call). You get the picture.

While this film filled us with pit-bull rage, it also left us feeling empowered. We realized that we could change things in our own small ways, because, despite what Wal-Mart would like you to think, we aren’t actually a bunch of wishy-washy wimps when we come face-to-face with even the largest, richest, and arguably most despicable, American company.

After watching the film, maybe take the time to send an email from the Frontline page to three friends (the email link is on the far left margin of the page). You might indicate which section you thought was the most interesting, so that folks could just take a few minutes to educate themselves about Wal-Mart and the ways it harms America’s hard-working families.

You can always click the Share button at the bottom left-hand corner of this post and email from there.

There are even more videos you could tell your pals about from the folks at Wakeup Wal-Mart.

Why do you want you to watch these films? Why do we want you to get your friends to watch these films? Because, quite frankly, we want everyone to stop shopping there until Wal-Mart radically changes its ways.

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Stop:

We ain’t never claimed to be perfect, people (read all about it in our FAQ), and we’ll never do so. And we’ll admit it: we’ve shopped at Wal-Mart; we’ve shopped at Sam’s Club.

There are few powers our general citizenry possess to fight major conglomerations, at least not many that don’t involve our arrests. But there’s always the b-word, and we don’t mean bulldogs or bananas or bills or baklava; we mean boycott, baby, boy-cott.

So we’ll also promise this: barring a fluke of nature or tequila-induced drunkenness, we’ll never shop at any Wal-Mart owned company again. If you haven’t already, please consider joining us. There will be very few times where we beg at Progressive Wednesday. But we do beg of you: stop going there. Wal-Mart isn’t saving you money, both in the short term or the long term.

So quit cold turkey, because shopping in bulk does seem like some kind of addiction. And how many three-gallon tubs of mayo do we really need?

But here’s the deal–today, this Wednesday or whenever you’re reading this–try to convince one other person to stop. A little ways down this page, we’ll provide you with additional resources to educate yourself or educate this other person. Explain to them gently what you’ve learned and how disgusted you are with the company.

Or click the Share button at the bottom of this post, and email them this Wednesday’s info.

And now we’ve arrived at the big question: where should we shop instead? Well, we don’t exactly have the answer to that because we don’t know where you live. But here are three suggestions:

1. Whenever possible, buy American products.
2. Shop locally at privately owned businesses that care about the planet. You can always try the Yellow Pages online. (Remember: to cancel getting the hard copy just click this sentence.)
3. Only buy items of significance or necessity; stuff doesn’t make us happy. (If you’ve got to read it to believe it, check out this University of Colorado study or this CNN article.) Of course, Progressive Wednesday stuff will bring ebullient joy to your life whether you’re 9 or 99.

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Write:

We believe that one of the most powerful ways to make progress is to be the voice of progress and to state your case publicly. One of the most effective means of doing this is writing letters to the editor of your local newspaper. (For advice on writing letters to the editor, check out our brief tool or our full tool.) We’d like to encourage you to write one of two different letters.

1. If there’s a Wal-Mart in your area, we’d like you to consider writing a letter that tackles one of the following topics:

• Wal-Mart fails to be a good steward of the environment. The EPA has consistently fined Wal-Mart, including a 2004 penalty to the tune of $3.1 million for violating the Clean Water Act.
• Wal-Mart costs tax-payers billions of dollars in subsidies from state and local governments. And according to a recent study, “more than 90 percent of the company’s distribution centers have been subsidized.“
• Wal-Mart “bulldozes” local businesses. A recent decade-long Iowa State University study has shown that “some small towns lose up to 47% of their retail trade after ten years of Wal-Mart stores nearby.“
• Wal-Mart hurts hard-working families. Besides violating family leave laws and forcing employees to work off the clock, there’s this: in 2006 Wal-Mart was found liable of (of all things) meal break violations; the court ruling dictated that Wal-Mart had to fork over $172 million.
• Wal-Mart violates child-labor laws. In 2002, thanks to the 1,436 child labor infractions Wal-Mart committed in Maine alone, the Maine Department of Labor levied the largest fine in state history for violating child labor laws. And in 2005, the Department of Labor fined Wal-Mart because the company permitted teens to operate “hazardous equipment such as a chain saw, paper bailers and fork lifts.” (We know, we know: this sounds made up. Follow the link: it ain’t.)
• Wal-Mart, the largest corporation and private employer in the United States, knowingly hires illegal immigrants. Check it out for yourself.
• Wal-Mart does not view, treat, promote, or pay women as equals to men. Read about it by clicking this sentence.

We think these frames are strong as well, so feel free to use our language. You might ask readers why Wal-Mart is so morally irresponsible. You can find other talking points and info here and here and here and here. The thing is, you’re going to want to localize the problem of Wal-Mart in your area so you can better reach the audience. You might express concern that one of the problems you read about in the above links might happen in your area.

As we mention in our letters to the editor how-to tool, we recommend offering a solution. This solution might be urging folks to support local businesses and to stop shopping at Wal-Mart. You can probably come up with solutions of your own.

2. If there’s not a Wal-Mart in your area–after you thank your luckiest of stars–we’d like to suggest writing a letter expressing how grateful you are, and how much you’re hoping it will stay that way. You might want to pick one of the aforementioned topics to explain why you feel this way.

If you’re swamped and still want to yawp a bit to your community, there’s a simpler approach to writing a letter to your local newspaper’s editors. Wakeup Wal-Mart has a section of their webpage dedicated to just such writing. You choose the topic you’d like to address, select your state, click on your newspaper or newspapers, and then tweak your letter.

We applaud the ease of this, but find that more personalized letters have a better shot of getting published (though you could easily add some personal narrative to the form letter they’ve created). We also think it’s good to get into practice writing letters, as they play an integral role in making progress.

One last thing to keep in mind: the opinion section of a newspaper is actually the most read section of the newspaper. You read that right.

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Donate & Replace:

This act of progress is really pretty straight-forward. We’d like to suggest you donate just one thing (though a dozen would be even better) which you don’t need or don’t want or dig but want to update somehow, and, if you have to, replace it with something else used or something new.

This will achieve several aims. By helping others in poverty, you very well might help reduce the odds someone else will to go to Wal-Mart. And you’ll help another person in need. And you’ll help the economy by making a purchase. And you’ll help small businesses or blue-collar American workers or both when you replace the item or items with something not sold at Wal-Mart. And you can even get a tax break for your donation. It’s one of the gifts that keeps giving and giving and giving and….

Here’s how donations help Salvation Army. Here’s how to find a Salvation Army near you.

And what to buy? And where? You’ll find a few links and ideas in the Stop section of this Wednesday topic, but below you’ll find even more of our favorite progressive venders:

• Shop Union Made
• Pangea
• CD Baby
• Powell’s
• The Book Corner
• Etsy
• The Progressive Wednesday Store (Hint, hint.)

Editor’s Note: Think Target’s better? Maybe so. But we read that they recently donated over $150,000 to help support a candidate running for governor in Minnesota who has taken a strong stance against gay rights. (As an aside, Best Buy recently donated $100,000 to support the same regressive candidate.) What is Target doing to rectify this? Like cowards, they’re just shutting up.

Want to help make marriage equality for all a reality in a country who supposed ethos is to offer equal rights to all? Consider making even the smallest of donations to the Human Rights Campaign.

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Sign:

Talk about an easy way to make some progress: ask Wal-Mart to hold itself to moral responsibility. How? Sign this message to Wal-Mart, then print, sign, and send the letter to the C.E.O. of Wal-Mart.

You can also sign up for more information about Wal-Mart here.

You might also consider printing this letter, signing your Jane or John Hancock at the bottom, and sending it off to your local and state legislators. If they use the resources at Wal-Mart Watch, they’ll be better at waging a strong fight against this unethical company.

Your voice matters in a very real way. The goal is to reach a tipping point so that we can have more progress made.

File this one under “Art.”

As far as I’m concerned, MTV is a waste of electricity. I say this as someone who didn’t have cable growing up, and therefore, I say this as someone who would watch MTV until the wee hours when I was hanging out at TV-enhanced friends’ houses. I say this as someone who actually went to hear The Real World’s Judd Winick speak when I was a freshman at Ohio University. But nowadays, if I want to watch a music video, I can see them on demand, and I turn to YouTube, I turn to VEVO, I get recommendations from my friends on Facebook and Twitter. (By the way, you can follow us on Facebook here and on Twitter here.)

And now, thanks to HTML5, a “replacement” for Flash, we can have music videos in ways that traditional cable TV can’t, won’t, doesn’t, wouldn’t, etc.

This brings me to The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive film forged between writer/director Chris Milk and the baroque pop band Arcade Fire, who lend their song “We Used to Wait” to the project. The Wilderness Downtown also happened with help from Google, and the video is best experienced using Google Chrome, the company’s web browser.

Here’s how it works: preferably, you enter your childhood address when prompted, and the multimedia “event” will then include Google Street Views and Google Maps images of your house and neighborhood. The experience is stunning. Multiple windows will open, layered over the top of one another, and you might feel compelled to move them around. Don’t. The experience is supposed to look a little jagged, and the videos open, close, and move along with the music. Crank some external speakers or plug in some ear buds. The music is the heart of the matter here. One final thing: I’d close all programs save Chrome (which you can download here). This is a RAM-demanding creation; I’d give it all the juice it wants.

Even though I’m from the city of Niagara Falls (see our Wednesday, Reviving Niagara), I spent most of my youth in Ransomville, New York, population 1,488. We had one stop light, and, as best as I can figure, it was for decoration only. We didn’t have a high school. I think the fact that we had a post office was an act of federal philanthropy. The point is that the town is still incredibly remote, too remote for even the far-reaching arm of Google, so I ended up plugging in my current address instead. It was still fascinating.

This video… wait. Calling it a video is an insult. This is an interactive visual and musical and textual experience, and it is well worth the few minutes it’ll take to fire this baby up. It’s like seeing an art installation on your computer, designed for your computer.

For more information c/o Google, just click this sentence.

The video below will give you an inkling of what The Wilderness Downtown is like. Trust me: try it for yourself.

What is Earth Overshoot Day? If you guessed that it ain’t a good day (like September’s Punctuation Day and April’s National Honesty Day and November’s National Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day), well, then you’d be right on.

It is calculated by the Global Footprint Network. This organization figures out the amount of resources the planet creates and compares this data to the demand humans make. So they figure out “the amount it takes to produce all the living resources we consume and absorb our carbon dioxide emissions.” So Earth Overshoot Day (a concept that was devised by the New Economics Foundation) is the day when “the demand on ecological services begins to exceed the renewable supply.”

When was Earth Overshoot Day this year? August 21.

While the GFN seems passionate and detailed, they don’t really share their methodology. Nonetheless, they raise an interesting dilemma: we’re using more than we should be if we want the planet to, well, continue to sustain life. (In particular, I’m concerned about the planet sustaining my life. I mean, sustaining your life would be great, too, because without you I’d be pretty, I don’t know, I’d be pretty bored.)

They have a quiz you can take to determine your ecological footprint, and you can take it by clicking this sentence.

I took the quiz, and I was a little incredibly disturbed and, frankly, mortified. If everyone lived like me, which after taking this quiz I don’t recommend doing, if everyone lived like me, we’d need 4.8 planet earths to provide enough resources. It gets uglier. To support my lifestyle, it takes 21.1 global acres of the earth’s productive area. What is a global acre? I’m glad you asked. According to the Global Footprint Network:

A global acre is the unit we use to measure the productivity of an average acre of land. More specifically, it represents an aggregate, world-average productivity for all biologically productive land and water in a given year.

Ugh. I’m disgusting. No offense, but odds are that you’re a little disgusting, too.

Before you say, “Screw it, Matt–I’m buying a Hummer that runs on bald eagle skulls and the dreams of small children,” read a little more. We’ve covered, on multiple Wednesdays, ways we can reduce our impact on the planet. If we can keep it around a little longer, well, all the better. Sure, we might destroy ourselves eventually. But maybe we could make that eventually a little farther down the road. And maybe, just maybe, we won’t end ourselves after all.

Peruse, friends:

• I See Trees of Green
• The Grandeur of Earth Day
• Saving the Planet (from the Comfort of Our Homes)